The Still Point Of The Turning World (13 page)

15

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

O
n a warm afternoon in April, I found myself kneeling in the garage, sorting through a black garbage bag stuffed with Ronan’s outgrown baby clothes. I had promised to give them away to a friend who had a friend who knew a friend who was raising a little boy on her own. I wanted to do this good deed; it made me feel good to think about trotting off to the post office with a taped-up box full of clothes for this woman I’d never meet, a boy I’d never know. But as I sorted through the onesies printed with dogs and dinosaurs and stars; a green onesie with “Organic Baby” printed over the outline of a leaf; a cream-colored onesie with “I Am a Magical Child” printed in cursive over a picture of a unicorn and a dragon; tie-dyed onesies with matching hats and missing socks; hand-me-down onesies; bear and lion and other jungle-animal onesies; jean jackets and OshKosh overalls and corduroy jeans and cargo pants (what does a baby do with pockets?); shirts that said “Doggone Fun” and “Surfer Baby” and “Handsome Like Daddy” and “There’s a Nap in my Future”; a pale yellow cotton one-piece with a collar and a fire engine stitched on with a door that actually opens and closes, real snaps at the neck, even a little fabric flap for the firehouse dog that wore a red hat (this last outfit belonged to my brother Andy), I closed the plastic bag and wept.

The weight of these things was too much. I felt as though I had just peered into the deep pit of a grave. I could picture Ronan in every little outgrown outfit: the skinny-legged, newly born, red-faced alien Ronan; the round bowling-ball face of five- and then six-month Ronan; the one-year-old Ronan with the light already fading, just a bit, from his eyes. The floppy toddler Ronan who was now double the size of these clothes and dying fast. I could not give them away. Not yet. I wanted them for myself, and I wanted back that innocent time when I thought I would watch my son grow up. I wanted to get in the bag and eat the clothes like some starving animal, some desperate creature. I scolded myself:
these are just things, nothing more.
Just objects, and, even more important, items other people needed. I still couldn’t do it. I closed up the bags and went inside. I thought of these lines from a 1913 letter by Marcel Proust:
We think we do not love our dead but that is because we do not remember them: suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears.

I suppose this was a sentimental moment. On a sympathy card there might be a bunny, or a lovely sunset, or the dark silhouette of a bird flying over a beach, a shiny horse running free, a hawk doing something symbolic. I didn’t like this moment with the clothes any more than I like sympathy cards or funerals, which so easily and lustily dip into sentimentality. I felt dangerous and churning because sentimentality masks a deep and terrible rage. Bunnies = rage. The murderous kind, the bite-your-lip-until-it-bleeds kind, the exhausting-but-too-manic-to-sleep kind. The only appropriate card for this moment, on my knees in the garage, was an empty one, maybe one that screams when you open it—one great, long keen. Some deep-noted dirge; some furious, melancholic song full of discord and drums. The responses I found most satisfying—like a bell ringing out the hour—after Ronan’s diagnosis were these:
I am so fucking angry; I am thinking of you with grief and rage; I don’t even know what to say I am so super fucking angry; it is so fucking unfair; I am sick to my stomach with sadness and anger; BLOODY UNFAIR!, I LOVE YOU and also WHAT THE FUCK? RAGE!

Sympathy cards are about as useless as candy cigarettes—just give me the real thing. I’d so much rather have an e-mail that says something brutal and terrible and true than a sympathy card that’s made of soft-to-the-touch-parchment, the edges gently serrated, decorated with loathsome, uniform birds (there is a sympathy card bird; it’s like clip art) flying peacefully into the distance and a super shitty rhyming poem inside. (I do not even dare type them here for fear of expanding their odious reach.)

On my knees in the garage I wanted this poem: “Matins,” by Louise Gluck:

You want to know how I spend my time?

I walk the front lawn, pretending

to be weeding. You ought to know

I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling

clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact

I’m looking for courage, for some evidence

my life will change, though

it takes forever, checking

each clump for the symbolic

leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already

the leaves are turning, always the sick trees

going first, the dying turning

brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform

their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?

As empty now as at the first note.

Or was the point always

to continue without a sign?

Why didn’t that poem, that little missile of grief, come printed in a card? I’d happily weep over it or frame it or burn it up in some meaningful ritual fire
.
When I opened the pastel envelopes and saw the birds and the sunsets and the birds scrolling into the gentle sunset, cards sent for Ronan, for me, I chucked them straight away. I didn’t even look to see who sent them and I didn’t care if this was cruel. “They’re trying to be nice,” my mom told me. I did not care. The era of being nice was over.

Would I feel so unaccountably devastated about giving away outgrown baby clothes if Ronan were not dying? I knew plenty of moms who had blubbered as they sorted through baby clothes, even if their child was a teenager, sulking grumpily in his man cave and playing video games and trying to watch porn or smoke pot when his parents weren’t paying attention. And yes, they were just clothes, but just as the body carries physical and psychic weight, so do things: a favorite shirt of the beloved, obvious objects like wedding rings, but also random things given and received: a map my best friend Emily made for me ten years ago showing me the way from the train station to her house in South London; the lyrics of a song written on a napkin that I sang at her wedding; my “Duke” sweatshirt that I stole from someone’s brother in high school and wore superstitiously for four years during finals in college; a creamy flowered blouse that reminded me of France and a steamy night spent making out in a Strasbourg car park with that blouse in a pretty ball on the floor of my date’s Peugeot. Mini menorahs and cigarette holders were found in the corners of tenements and are on display now under glass at the Tenement Museum in New York City, precious items that were tucked into underwear or satchels or shoes and that crossed continents and made it through the gauntlet of checkers at Ellis Island (early, less technologically advanced versions of today’s snarky TSA agents) to be found, decades later, abandoned, in a corner. And things mattered more then, too, because people had fewer of them.

Things are charged, hierophanic; we believe, often unconsciously, that they act as gateways to the person who once inhabited them, that they are doors to worlds, portals to stories we intuit even if we don’t know the narrative for certain or for sure. I have a cheap dress—blue polyester with red and white piping on the bottom and the sleeves—that puts me chain-smoking in Geneva on a blazing hot spring morning, the view across the garden thick with pink blossoms. My Dr. Martens boots were my Ireland boots, trekking boots; I literally wore them out—after one year the soles were finished. When my mom was given her mother’s old cameo necklace from a cousin, she said “Oh,” almost mutely, amazed, her eyes filling as she turned the necklace over in her hands like a piece of delicate lace. I saw her seeing it on her mother’s throat, her mother who had been dead for forty years and had been given this piece of jewelry, now falling apart, by an old boyfriend who was not my mother’s father, who was also dead. Things matter, things endure when people and relationships do not.
Things: simply lasting, then / failing to last: water, a blue heron’s / eye, and the light passing / between them: into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
(Jane Kenyon’s “Things”)

Things, things, things. I have always been a collector of things. A windy Wyoming storage room packed floor to ceiling with books, a box full of artificial legs, old cotton cloth Esprit bags full of scattered photos from junior high, me sitting in clumps of girls at pizza parties and sleepovers, sticking out my chest in an effort to look busty and gregarious. (I was flat-chested and miserable.) At least ten jewelry boxes stuffed with cheap and ruined jewelry, rhinestones and crystals and rusty charms shaped like tigers and elephants. Boxes of letters and three boxes of all the cards I got as a kid when I was in the hospital. A box of prom dresses and bridesmaids’ dresses, more boxes full of journals and math workbooks and yearbooks and notes that I passed and that were passed to me in junior high and high school. Someday, when my parents move out of their house and clean out their basement for good, I’ll have to reckon with my pack-rat self. But not yet.

After Ronan’s diagnosis I began collecting things for Ronan and arranging them on what I called “the magic shelf,” just above his crib. A shrine box, a tiny unicorn ornament, a statue of Saint Anthony with a child on his hip, a friend’s sister’s rosary, wooden train cars that spell RONAN in red and blue and green, a pocket-sized Buddha statue, rocks and seashells from Provincetown and Maine, Day of the Dead figurines. I tried to carry the magic with me as well: around my neck a silk cord swinging with my box of holy dirt from Chimayó, my Buddha, my Santa Niño charm. Tucked in the drawer of my bedside table was a Ziploc bag full of Ronan’s hair—tiny red-gold curls and wisps—from his first haircut. After Ronan died I imagined gathering up the contents of his magic shelf into a bag that I could wear around my neck or my waist and tear and claw at, like a homemade garment of mourning.

Things matter, things count. The Swiss sweep the homes of their citizens each year and count bullets to be sure the weapons haven’t been fired by any members of the peaceful, civilian army; the neutral moderators of the neutral army take out the neutral bullets and hold the neutral bits of steel in their clean, neutral hands. In 1994 a piece of a Viking ship was found near my apartment building in Dublin, which meant one less crane would be obscuring the skyline as the archaeologists arrived with their books and enthusiasm, their shovels and special tools. There’s a pool of dark, cool water in a well in Dublin Castle that has been sitting there since AD years were in the single digits. In one legendary story, Mary Shelley kept her husband’s dehydrated heart—then just a handful of powdery dust—inside a copy of one of his poems. In Victorian times you didn’t send a letter to your beloved through the post, you sent a lock of your snipped hair, like a pressed flower or a leaf plucked from a tree. Things make people—and memories—accessible, digestible, permanent feeling, like some kind of marking, like a portable, off-body tattoo.

Things. We adorn, we bedeck, we festoon. We search and select gifts for our beloved.
I saw this and thought of you.
A ring from Paris, a scarf from Wisconsin, a hand-knit sweater with your name on a tag stitched inside, a tattoo sleeve stretching from shoulder to wrist. A clutch of coins from countries you’ve visited, currency that’s useless in your own country that you can chuck into a big plastic bin for charity in airports in Madrid, London, Berlin. Marks, shekels, pounds, euros, francs, pence, lire, Canadian dollars.

When I saw a mother walking on the arroyo path in Santa Fe with a baby in the front pack, I thought,
She’s what, maybe eleven pounds
?
I guessed that the premature nine-month-old twin girl in Ronan’s swimming class weighed about seven pounds. The woman who sat next to me during a turbulent plane ride in the 1990s, back when flying absolutely terrified me, said, “It’s virtually impossible for these planes to fall out of the sky. They weigh too much to fall.” (Too big to fail!) An artificial leg weighs between ten or fifteen pounds; an artificial foot weighs about four or five; the “model” legs (like model homes) that are lined up along the walls of a prosthetist’s office are often lighter, the ones that hang from straps and pulleys in the back rooms, the ones for real people, are the weight they should be and of course these weights range—they are as individual as the people who wear them. When I was eighteen, I weighed 95 pounds; when I was breast-feeding Ronan, I weighed 110 pounds; in Geneva I weighed 132 pounds. Ronan weighed 6.5 pounds when he was born, and doubled his weight within the first three weeks of life. At eighteen months he weighed 24 pounds and I weighed 116 pounds. A bag of outgrown baby clothes weighs 5.4 pounds. Grief weighs nothing, but you still have to drag it around.

Ronan, where are you going?
Literally beyond me.
Will I see you again? When did you begin?
Was I asleep in the Brentwood studio, late-night traffic still a low and steady hum a few blocks away on Wilshire Boulevard, the ocean sloshing back and forth against the beach less than a mile away? Was I writing at the Novel Café in Venice, California, batting flies away from my
huevos
salsa verde? Oh, where are you going?
Will I be walking down the street someday and recognize your multicolored, thick-lashed eyes in the pale face of another little boy? Will I catch the edge of your mellow sweetness in a neighbor’s dog that nuzzles my hand in the street? If science tells us that energy never stops completely but is endlessly recycled, does this mean that Buddhist notions about reincarnation and the transmigration of souls have some truth to them and that death is just a gateway to a new experience? Or is energy tightly packed up in the Christian heaven, itself a kind of holy clearinghouse for souls or energy bodies roaming free, released from the bonds of physical impediment? Both concepts require that some element of that person is sustained, endlessly protected, and in some sense living on—the essence, the soul, something. And I also thought about karma, this notion that each of us must live out old stories that are unknown to or at least well hidden from us in this current existence, which seemed both unfair as well as an inadequate way of explaining the unfairness of life.