And five days later cold
It started with Maggie May's post on how one could possibly cope with losing a child. Or maybe it started before then, in my first grief at nine over the death of my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline Sheba, or the demise of acrobatic Regis, whose neutering stitches became infected, or the abrupt disappearance of Hector, my future ex-stepfather's dog who had to be put to sleep because of his epileptic fits.
The themes of death and grief and how we cope with them have been on my mind, simmering under the surface. I watched Kevin fade away in puffs of canistered oxygen and piped-in morphine. I've had my own sad mourning story, the first line written in the Little House when I became responsible for someone else's death, when what was left of my childhood was stomped into flatness.
So when I just started writing without a plot in mind for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at what was coming out of my fingertips.
If I say anymore, I might just stop writing. I seem to be on a roll and I don't want it to stop. And I can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead Boys out of my head. She wrote it after her 11-year-old son was killed in a car accident. She had to go on living, because it was her only real choice.
An excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt
One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.
Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.
I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And five days later cold.
Image from Celestial Dome.