And poor
C. quotes to me, ‘Do not mourn like those that have no hope.’ It astonishes me,
the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to
our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than
the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for
what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to
believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is
a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural
happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify
God and enjoy Him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within
her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be
written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees,
or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her
grandchild.
C.S.
Lewis, A Grief Observed
Something
happened yesterday that set me off again. It doesn’t really matter what it was,
only that I have been made aware, once again, that in a matter of minutes and
with little warning, I can be catapulted into a tailspin of the old aching,
with all the old symptoms. Early on, it happened in the J.C. Penney when we
were trying to find the men’s section to buy jeans for Robert and I turned the
corner, mid-sentence, to run smack into a rack of little boy suits.
It’s
like a good whack to the head. The best example I can think of is when Billy
Crystal is out shopping with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally and they run into
his ex (“6 years later, you find yourself singing Surrey with a Fringe on Top
in front of Ira!”).
Yesterday,
while in this state, Robert and I were shopping at the grocery store. It’s
always the most mundane places. Robert sent me to get a head of lettuce and he
walked away with the cart, and I picked one, then went on to find nail polish,
then a bottle of wine, and suddenly I couldn’t find him and I was rushing the
aisles searching. All the old feelings came back, the fear of being alone, the
fear of being left.
I have entered into this way of living where I need flowers and chocolates in the house, and I only drink evian. I don’t know how long this will last, but for now instead of feeling badly about it (when there are poor people who have no water, why must I demand evian?), I’m trying to just let myself be. If any of the flowers begin to die, they have to be removed immediately. I’m constantly watching, constantly tending to them. I’m picky about the music I listen to, and it seems to have more importance, more weight? I’m concerned about cleanliness. My OCD seems to be at its peak.
Everyone
keeps saying, “You’ll have another one.” But what about this one? What about
this one that I carried for four months and knew intimately, even more
intimately than my husband knew him, as my body started to grow? If you were
sitting beside your healthy child and someone said to you, “If you’d lost this
one, you could have tried again and gotten another,” how would that make you
feel? Would you have loved the other child any less? Of course not. But you
never would have seen this child grow into the person you see now, the person
you can’t imagine your life without. And heaven forbid, if you were put into
the position where you had to make the decision to stop the heartbeat of that
child? Could you imagine yourself sitting in a dark room where a needle is slowly
sunk into your belly and there is only silence because two technicians are
trying to locate the place in which to insert the poison?
I keep
thinking about the video I watched of Barbra Streisand singing “Happy Days are
Here Again,” and the entire time you can just see all the emotion on her face
and she’s crying, and you don’t really believe her. I feel like that’s me,
singing “Happy Days are Here Again,” but now I have this story, this thing I’m
lugging around, and have to release it every day, or I have to figure out how
to live with it, and I’m still trying to figure out which.
