Unfiltered
In the middle of the night, while everyone sleeps, I open my eyes, let his name roll off my tongue. I say it as the only witness, the one who was there and remembers, and in the night it is almost as if he exists, whole, alive, solid as anything and just as beautiful as life itself, as the pumping of one’s heart, the slow rise of breath, the way the blood flows from here to there, feeding us, keeping us going, warming our fingertips.
The name is smooth, small, round, cool. It is heavy and old. It is an afterthought, the only thing left, a placeholder, an artifact from another era.
When I opened the box, I took out the name, I polished it up, I held it close to my heart and warmed it against my skin, and I said: you are mine, nobody else’s and I am sorry for what I couldn’t do, for who I was, for my horrible timing. I am sorry that I was me and not someone else stronger, more loved and supported. It was our bad luck, your bad luck. Fate made it this way. I can't think of it any other way because I can't change it now, the build-up to the creation and destruction of life.
Last week, we got to the heart of it. Can you kill something with hate? Murder off a part of yourself, a part of someone else, with the intensity of negative emotion? Is it possible to be responsible for someone’s death through your hatred of them? The hatred of the innocent is a sad and evil thing. I was weak. I am so, so sorry. I think this is very important, the therapist said, this feeling that I killed with hate and the fact that I am having a very hard time forgiving myself for it and for what happened to me afterward, for my lonely struggles. She was right. The guilt permeates everything, leaves my closest relationships tinged with grey, fogged over, aching and heavy with my weakness.
I am sorry. I wish I hadn’t been left to carry the burden of what happened alone. I am not the only guilty party, but I was the one left holding the bag, and here I am, struggling to carry it, to lighten it with words and action and an attempt to keep my battered blackened heart open to love.
I hold him here and there, he is always with me in his cozy box, warm and close. After the house fills and then empties of family, I will open it again, give him the attention he needs and deserves.
I will not forget.
A dense little post, but necessary.
The full poem I mentioned in the post Collecting the shards:
Aubade
Take a streetcar to the water’s edge.
You’ll find an empty bench.
Go and sit on it.
Look out across the bay
water shimmering.
I do believe there is
there is an emptiness.
One can attain to it. -- Kevin Sheehan
... which I can now tie to a quote from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which we just read to the boy. This is from the point in the book shortly after Aslan is murdered: If you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you -- you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness.
It's grief. It's appropriate. But I have to return it to the box for a little while, keeping the box close to me, close to me and safe.
Image by Rust Morris.