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.