End of the Year

When I opened this blog, I entitled it Desert Year, not Years.

Did I know, intuitively, that a year would be long enough? Did I hope for some kind of transformation; did I hope that in a year the desert would bloom again?

It's been a good place for me, this blog. Sometimes it's seemed like one long wail ~ against the loss of my beautiful child, against the disappearance of God, against the end of life as I knew it. Sometimes it's been a place in which to digest the trauma of suicide; to come to terms with one of, ironically, life's heaviest and loneliest experiences. Sometimes it's been a place of profoundly moving friendship, as other mothers have generously shared their own sorrows.

But I think it's run its course. I am, surprisingly to me, in a new place, something that's happened in just the last few days. In some ways a harder place ~ I think that I have found my way through an exterior shell of anger and pain and I am going to be left with a deep and pervasive sense of loss. There is not going to be anything to protect me from the reality that my beloved son is truly gone.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a talk by a 60-year-old man, and he mentioned having called his mother over the week-end. Such a casual remark is like a sharp stab into a tender spot for me; when I am 91, there will not be a 60-year-old Josh to give me a call. (Dear God, if I live to be 91, I will have spent 35 years without him, which is ten more than the short 25 we had. I am not hoping for 91.) Those are the moments, and they occur multiple times every day, with which I am going to have to contend without the protective veneer of the past fifteen-plus months.

But God is present to me again, in a way God has not been, and the air has cleared enough for me to recognize that the face of God has been present to me, albeit unrecognized by my grief-stricken heart, in the gifts of my family, of countless friends ~ some of whom I have known for years irl and some for only weeks online, and many in between ~ and most especially through the remarkable men who have persisted as my spiritual directors in incredibly patient and nonintrusive constancy.

I found the following a couple of days ago and posted it on my Advent blog, but I think it serves as a good ending to this one. Of course, total silence is beyond me, and I hope you'll still visit Search the Sea, where the journey will continue, sometimes no doubt loudly, but I think usually quite differently. This blog will stay up for awhile, at least until I decide what I want to do about it.

**********

The 14th century Dominican mystic, John Tauler, explains the gift of Zechariah's silence like this: “God cannot leave things empty; that would be to contradict his own nature and justice. Therefore, you must be silent. Then the Word of this birth can be spoken in you and you will be able to hear him. But be certain of this: if you try to speak then He must be silent. There is no better way of serving the Word than in being silent and listening. So if you come out of yourself completely, God will wholly enter in; to the degree you come out, to that degree will he enter, neither more nor less.”

Cemetery Yellow

You know, I used to walk in that cemetery three, four times a week.

I've been five times in the last fourteen months. Once with my family to choose the general location for the bench. Once with The Lovely Daughter to meet with The Monument Guy. Once with Musical Friend to visit her husband's place and our son's. And now twice, just to walk. I can stand it again.

Anniversary Day

The morning is sunny and clear and crisp as she wanders into the back of the church where she meets one of the priests who have been her mainstays for the past year. The two of them sit in one of the pews of the cavernous sanctuary and talk and pray for an hour. That makes how many hours in the company of Jesuits over the past few days? She has no idea where they have found the time and the patience to listen and listen, and read email after email, month after month. She is not asking.

She spends the day taking walks and reading her email and FB notes and listening to multiple versions of Hallelujah over and over again. Her brother calls, as he does every couple of days. Her father doesn't. At noon the regular mail arrives, bringing more cards and one of the most extraordinarily beautiful letters she has ever received. Blogging has its rewards.

It seems that candles are being lit all over the place. Her own candle is lit and re-lit, as she and her husband come and go during the day.

As the afternoon turns to evening, she and her family go down the hill to the university, where with about 30 friends they take a leisurely walk past places meaningful to her son. The auto and aviation museum where, impassioned about planes, he volunteered during the summer before high school. The Gehry building which had fascinated him. The university soccer field, emblematic of the many fields on which he played across several states and two countries. The art institute where he studied photography while he was in high school. She spends most of the walk deep in conversation with her son's lower el (1st-3rd grade) teacher. He clearly treasured that small boy, and is trying as hard as everyone else to put the pieces together.

They start back up the hill through Little Italy and spend the rest of the evening on the outdoor patio of one of the restaurants, tiny lights twinkling above them. Friends from 20-plus years of Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Friends and teachers from Montessori days. Grown children who, until last year, had spent nearly every Christmas together. It's interesting to see where the longest and strongest connections have been soldered together; they seem to have been borne out of the preschool and elementary school parenting and teaching years. Those magical times somehow created the possibility that adults and grown children might one day face down sorrow together.

The day is filled with love and compassion, friendship and presence. If only her son had remembered in those dark hours how filled with riches his life was.

Some of the Truth

Perseid Shower (NASA)

My life, the 56 years of it I have lived so far, has been book-ended by death. To lose your mother and year-old brother when you are seven, or four, as my other brother was: that teaches you certain things about life and death and about the universe we inhabit, which is elegant and beautiful, but also chaotic and savage. To lose your own child? After such knowledge, what forgiveness?* One cannot even figure out who to forgive. One wonders about the Perseids: a beautiful shower of stardust, or a sign of catastrophic eruption and disintegration? Both, I guess.

I have spent much of my lucid time this past year thinking about life and death, materiality and spirit, freedom and grace, unfreedom and evil. I think about how to go forward; I wonder what "going forward" means. The Gerstenbergers, whose story appears here, are marking the two-year anniversary of the loss of their beautiful 12-year-old Katie today. The Johnsons, here, are gathering tomorrow to celebrate the 30th birthday of their beautiful Joey, gone for fifteen months. Our Lovely Daughter turns 22 on Wednesday; her brothers' 25th birthday is September 1, and the anniversary of Chicago Son's death is the next day.

Twenty-five years ago I was a little more than 38 weeks pregnant with my boys. Thirty-eight is deemed full-term for twins, so the ensuing two weeks were full of consternation for my doctors. I spent most of my time either doing my whale act in the city pool or fending off telephone calls from concerned family, who had been primed for baby-arrival for at least a month. I'm sure that the Gerstenbergers and the Johnsons, and all the other families like ours, have similar memories, of a time of such happy anticipation that it seemed nothing could ever mar the joy. I grew up in such a family, a family shaken by the ever-present dichotomy of life, the great gift, and death, the relentless stalker.

That my mother should have died seems impossible. My mother was beautiful, and blonde, and could sing, and four people depended upon her for almost everything. That my brother should have died seems impossible. Such a deep gurgle of a laugh he had, a sound representative of the exuberance which filled our home. People who know about such things, people who do therapy or teach psychology for a living, have on occasion told me that I must have had a wonderful mother. They tell me that my own ability to create a loving home must have been nurtured in those few years in which she enveloped us in love and delight.** And it does seem, in fact, that we lived in simplicity and freedom** in those years, with sunlight streaming onto the hardwood floors of our country house and life uncomplicated by loss.

I wanted, so much, to provide such a life for my own children. I never expected to shelter them from all of life's challenges and hardships, but I wanted to protect them from the harsh reality of early death. My husband, whose parents and siblings are all alive, said to me after our son died, "I never had any idea what you were talking about." Who would want anyone to know, really? Because, after such knowledge . . . .


*T.S. Eliot, Gerontion (1920). **Joseph Brackett, Jr., Simple Gifts (1848).

France: Noelle!

I started a little series some posts back on our son's great gift of France to us via his 11th grade year spent there. If I can get some help from The Lovely Daughter later, I'll try to scan in some photos. In the meantime:

Of course, the rest of us went to France for Christmas. We spent the first few days in Rennes, where our son lived with his wonderful family: Marithe, his French mother, her friend, and her two sons, one a couple of years older and one a couple of years younger than Chicago Son. Marithe is a nursing home administrator and had to work on Christmas Day, but she welcomed us on Christmas Eve with an extraordinary meal that went on for hours. It was such a joyful and festive evening: reunited with our son after three months, meeting his family and enjoying an evening of food and wine and gifts Francais-style, all of us so delighted to meet one another and laughing over our limited communication capacities. Geoff, his mother's companion, and Thomas, the oldest son, were both excellent English speakers, and Chicago Son could manage quite well in French by that time, so all was not lost.

After a few days in Rennes, which gave us a chance to get to know Chicago Son's family and city a bit and visit the coast of Normandy, we headed for Paris. Three highlights of that trip:

Chartres, of course. Although we had rented a car to travel in Brittany, we took the train to Paris and then, still uncertain about our movements, took a day long bus tour to Chartres. Anyone who has read much of my other blog knows that I fell in love with the city as soon as we began to ride through its narrow streets and with the cathedral as soon as it loomed before us. I had a moment of apprehension ~ it was absolutely freezing in France that holiday season, with temperatures seldom out of the teens, and it suddenly occurred to me, sitting in the toasty coach-style tourist bus, that an 800-year-old building was unlikely to feature central heat. Sure enough ~ we spent a very cold few hours there, but they were enough to lure us back a few years later (in the summer!).

New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysees. I don't much care for crowds and you couldn't get me to Times Square on New Year's Eve for anything. I would have been happy with a tiny cafe in a deserted neighborhood. But everyone else wanted to go outwhere the action was that night and I figured, What are the chances of ever again celebrating New Year's in Paris? What incredible fun we had! I don't know how many hundreds of thousands (literally!) of people from all over the world crowd the Champs Elysees on New Year's Eve, many of them carrying freely-flowing champagne, but it was really, really, wonderful! (And very, very cold!) A bank of clouds settled in around the top of the Eiffel Tower at about 11:55, so we couldn't see the fireworks at midnight, but it didn't matter. It was completely exhilarating to be out partying with all those people who had found their way to such an extraordinary spot.

And a small memory, one of many. We stayed here, which has become our favorite Paris hotel. A couple of doors down is a creperie, and it took us about five seconds to discover its chocolate crepes, which became standard fare for us as we were left or returned from our various jaunts through Paris. When my husband and I were back two summers ago, we smiled immediately at the thought of our three teenaged children dashing out the door to the creperie window in the mornings.

We were so incredibly fortunate to have those ten days all together in France.

Some Moments Are Harder Than Others

I had a little Facebook note from a law school classmate today. We haven't talked in years and I debated for several days before responding to her friend request. One of the hardest things is trying to figure out how to deal with people who re-appear from a past that now seems like it must have been someone else's life. (And I don't mean the practice of law part.) But I finally friended her and sent a short note indicating that we had had a rough year. If she read my profile, she would find out that Chicago Son had died.

She sent back a note telling me about her grown children's multiple graduations (including one just out of law school and en route to an L.L.M.) and her and her husband's successful law practices and recent purchase of a home on The Great Lake to the North. As far as I can tell, the lone bump in the road has been their inability to sell their original home for the past year. She added that she hopes that things have turned around for us.

"Hope things have turned around." That's not, you know, a remotely applicable phrase. I suppose she imagines that someone has lost a job, or perhaps gotten really sick ~ situations that might, indeed, turn around. Or not. And I find that I have no desire at all to explain our move to a parallel universe.

Facebook can be a real PITA.

France: The Journey

Karen, who has recently lost a beautiful son, suggested that I write a bit about Chicago Son. Her idea is a timely one, as I am just approaching that place which some assured me I might find, the place in which the memories are occasionally and in some ways consoling. And I am in no frame of mind yet to address the issues raised by the Wedding Reception post and comments. So a little bit, here and there . . .

One of Chicago Son's best gifts to us was France and, even better, his French family. First, the journey there:

When he was in 10th grade, a team from School Year Abroard visited his school and he became entranced with the idea of spending the next year in France. He had been studying French since first grade, and the summer camp where he had by that time become an employee welcomes a large influx of international counselors every year, so he was well primed for adventure. His joy when the acceptance letter arrived in April ~ a couple of weeks after it had been expected, so we were on pins and needles with the waiting ~ was something to see. By the end of the summer he was packed, his suitcase containing a beautifully carved display box he had made for his soon-to-be French mother (I have one just like it), and off with his father to Providence, where my sister-in-law and her husband live. The plan was to make a college visit to Brown University, our alma mater, on September 11, 2001, and to fly out of Logan (the Boston airport) with the school group on September 12.

Needless to say in this blog, plans change.

Chicago Son and the Quiet Husband did make it to Providence, after a wide detour around New York City, and spent an eerily quiet September 12 on the Brown campus before returning home. No one knew what to do. There were four young people from his high school who had been on the first leg of journeys to France and Spain when the planes hit, and they all enrolled and tried to catch up in the classes that had begun two weeks earlier at their home school. Emails came from the SYA office almost daily as the organization scrambled to re-group.

And . . . about twelve days later, the same group of about 40 young people gathered at JFK and boarded an Air France plane to cross the Atlantic. That time, I was one of the drivers (we went with another dad and his son), the Quiet Husband having taken time off from work two weeks earlier. It was not easy, dropping our children off for an overseas flight and a year abroad less than two weeks after 9/11, but nearly every family did it. We did not want to let the evil and ugliness of terrorism cow us or deter our children from their eager embrace of the world and the variety of people and experiences it holds out to us.

Would I do it again? Would I not only permit, but encourage, a seventeen-year-old son to live away from us for a year, had I known that that he would be gone only a few years later? I like to think that I would. I like to think that I would still have urged him to reach for his life, to soak it all up, to immerse himself in the goodness and joy of this world, even if, and perhaps especially if, we had known. Because we never do know, not in any single second, what the next one will bring. Carpe Diem. Always.

The Wedding Reception

The wedding is much like one I had once imagined. Simple, elegant, a small crowd in a Catholic church. A quiet, self-possessed groom; family and friends here from Germany. A lovely and delicate bride; family and friends here from Korea.

The groom's grandmother approaches me at the reception. "I don't believe a word of it," she announces. "Ridiculous."

"Weddings?" I ask her. "You've given up on marriage?"

"No, no ~ weddings are fine. The religious stuff. It's absurd."

"Oh. I thought you were Catholic, too."

"Not me. None of that stuff for me. I can't believe that otherwise intelligent people buy into it." She squints up at me. "But I suppose you believe it, don't you?"

"Yes," I say.

"Does it help you; does it give you any comfort?"

"No," I say.

The real answer is actually much more complex. But this is a wedding reception.

"I don't know how you stand it," she says. "I suppose you have to."

I look at her and wonder if I am supposed to have some kind of answer. Some kind of satisfactory explanation of the universe. She has two daughters, six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. All well and happy. For the last two weeks, I have been watching her twin great-grandchildren, little towheads here from Germany for the month, playing in the back yard next door, where the groom and his sisters, one of them now the mother of the towheads, grew up. They look exactly like the little people who used to play in my yard. I don't think that I have any explanation of the universe, satisfactory or otherwise.

"I don't like the mushrooms and I don't like beef, so there's really nothing for me until dinner is served," she says. "I guess I'll get another drink."