Read an Excerpt
from pages 52-58
I walked into a store. The ordinariness of what I saw repelled me: people putting onions into baskets, squeezing melons, hoisting gallons of milk, clerks ringing up sales. "How are you today?" "Have a good day now." How could everybody be going about their ordinary business when these were no longer ordinary times? I went to my office and along the way saw the secretaries all at their desks and the students all in their seats and the teachers all at their podiums. Do you not know that he slipped and fell and that we sealed him in a box and covered it with dirt and that he can't get out?
I tried to jog and could not. It was too life-affirming. I rode along with friends to go swimming and found myself paralyzed. I tried music. But why is this music all so affirmative? Has it always been like that? Perhaps then a requiem, that glorious German Requiem of Brahms. I have to turn it off. There's too little brokenness in it. Is there no music that speaks of our terrible brokenness? That's not what I mean. I mean: Is there no music that fits our brokenness? The music that speaks about our brokenness is not itself broken. Is there no broken music?
There are those who plunge immediately back into work. I honor them. But I could not do it. And even if I could, I would not. Plunging back at once into the ordinary and the life-affirming could not be my way of honoring my son. It could not be my way of remembering him. It could not be my way of living with faith and authenticity in his absence.
***
I skimmed some books on grief. They offered ways of not looking death and pain in the face, ways of turning away from death out there to one's own inner "grief process" and then, on that, laying the heavy hand of rationality. I will not have it so. I will not look away. I will indeed remind myself that there's more to life than pain. I will accept joy. But I will not look away from Eric dead. Its demonic awfulness I will not ignore. I owe that—to him and to God.
***
Imagination and thought are out of phase. Sometimes it's as if he's not dead, just away. I see him. Then thought intervenes and says, "Remember, he's dead now." For twenty-five years I have been imagining what he's doing. That keeps on going. In me now there is this strange flux of spontaneously picturing him and then painfully reminding myself.
And not just picturing; also hearing. For weeks his boxes of books and clothes stood in the entry. I could not bear to move them. Finally, I began carrying them off to the garage. While carrying the fifth box or so I heard his cheerful voice, loud and clear, calling from the entry, "Hey Dad, I'm back."
His hair will always be red in my pictures of him. Only the living age.
***
I have been daily grateful for the friend who remarked that grief isolates. He did not mean only that I, grieving, am isolated from you, happy. He meant also that shared grief isolates the sharers from each other. Though united in that we are grieving, we grieve differently. As each death has its own character, so too each grief over a death has its own character—its own inscape. The dynamics of each person's sorrow must be allowed to work themselves out without judgment. I may find it strange that you should be tearful today but dry-eyed yesterday when my tears were yesterday. But my sorrow is not your sorrow.
There's something more: I must struggle so hard to regain life that I cannot reach out to you. Nor you to me. The one not grieving must touch us both. It's when people are happy that they say, "Let's get together."
***
What is it that makes the death of a child so indescribably painful? I buried my father and that was hard. But nothing at all like this. One expects to bury one's parents; one doesn't expect—not in our day and age—to bury one's children. The burial of one's child is a wrenching alteration of expectations.
But it's more than that. I feel the more but cannot speak it. A child comes into the world weak and vulnerable. From the first minutes of life, we protect it. It comes into the world without means of sustenance. Immediately we the parents give it of our own. It begins to display feelings and thoughts and choices of its own. We celebrate those and out of our own way of being-in-the-world try to shape and direct and guide them. We give of ourselves to the formation of this other, from helplessness to independence, trying our best to match our mode of giving to the maturing of the child—our giving maturing with the child's maturing. We take it on ourselves to stay with this helpless infant all the way so that it has a future, a future in which we can delight in its delight and sorrow in its sorrow. Our plans and hopes and fears are plans and hopes and fears for it. Along the way we experience the delights and disappointments of watching that future take shape, from babblings to oratory, from flounderings to climbing, from dependence to equality.
And now he's gone. That future which I embraced to myself has been destroyed. He slipped out of my arms. For twenty-five years I guarded and sustained and encouraged him with these hands of mine, helping him to grow and become a man of his own. Then he slipped out and was smashed.
