"We must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance and sing a melancholy song."
Pablo Neruda
"We must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance and sing a melancholy song."
Pablo Neruda
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 00:12:00 -0800
My Dear -----,
I know we spoke for over an hour this evening, and to then write you again this evening must seem overkill. I trust you will forgive my verbosity both written and oral, but some of what has been running through my head this weekend seeks an outlet.
My mother has been much on my mind during the last couple of weeks. It is strange to actually say this, because I never do. My friends long ago stopped asking me about my mother out of courtesy and respect, and I was (and am) grateful for that. But tonight I have the need to speak to someone about it, and I am happy for your ear to do so. The events of this past weekend brings this up, and (you will most assuredly be upset to hear this) so did that Kevin Costner movie "Message in the Bottle" I saw today. Sometimes an event or memory slips me into a frame of mind which I had when I was eleven or twelve years old (when the safety of your mom was as sure a thing as exists in the world), and then with a shock I return to adult memory where I remember my mom is dead and gone forever -- to fully assimilate the fact that she is "dead" into your understanding. You think you have mourned a parent and accepted their loss, but then the enormity of their presence in your life - especially in your childhood, which you come to take for granted - reasserts itself and you are humbled again. The child is the father of the man, and to our parents we are somewhere always the scared child looking for guidance and love. And then they are no longer there.
Did I ever tell you what a miserable time it was right after my mother died? I look back at those months, and all I can think is that sometimes life just totally sucks and you need to sit with sadness until it passes -- as it will do if you are patient, I think. During the actual trauma of her dying and death (which took over a year) I was so busy being strong for my father and family that only later did I process the experience emotionally. So traumatized at the time, I was on autopilot for months afterwards. You can run, but ultimately you cannot hide: one need ride the wave of loss and sorrow until it crests and becomes something else. For the first time I really appreciate the loss a child suffers when their parent dies; as an adult you take the hit and keep going, but something in your life changes forever and it is sad when that happens to a child. A person would suddenly become very old for their years in such a case, I believe. Life is hard, life is tragic -- as too many learn at too young an age! I do recognize how very lucky I have been in so many ways: the quality of my parents, the advantages I had in my upbringing, that nobody got sick in my family sooner, my own good health, etc. But someone once told me a person takes death seriously only when one of their parents dies, and I think there is truth in that. To be young is to think oneself immortal, but to see someone so close die eradicates the myth of immortality forever! It is the custom that parents should die and that their children should bury them. Your parents die and then you realize you are next. Such is the wheel of life, the cycle of existence. I know this in my bones now.
I envy you when you speak about your grandparents in the present tense, and I feel the same about my students when they write about the trauma of watching their grandparents get sick and pass away. (Did I tell you that during his Bar Mitzvah one of my student's grandfather died in the synagogue?) My grandparents were already very old when I was a kid, and I never knew them much since we lived so far away from them. I did not feel terribly overwrought when they died, but I will never forget how torn up my mom and dad were, respectively. It was the first time I saw my dad cry like a baby. I was much younger than they were when my mother died, but my life situation is incomparable to theirs. It makes me think. The awful memory of my mom's fading and then passing is no longer so bitter but is bittersweet; and a sweet feeling comes over my heart when I think of my mom, her marriage, her life, and the job she did in raising me and my siblings. Life goes on, and we continue with our memories and regrets. It will not be too long before we also are dead.
I was a fun kid for my mom: we would dance around the house to Momma Cass music, as my mom loved playing and goofing around. Then I hit adolescence and was "too cool" to do that anymore and became a bit of a pain in the ass, as does every adolescent in their own uniquely obnoxious way. I thirsted for freedom and independence, pushing my mother away. In retrospect, I feel very bad about this; I wish I could have been a better son. I was always too serious, intense, and introspective; I would have myself been more fun and eclectic, as was she. I always thought she loved my brother more, since he was the black sheep of the family and I sort of saw that mothers loved them more than the responsible ones since the need of the screw-ups was greater. Still I remember leaving the Sheriff's Department and crying in her arms in frustration and loss: your mom is still your mom, even when you are 25 years old. I wonder what she was thinking of at that moment.
I never speak about my mother to anyone nowadays, like I said. But ironically I think about her often. God knows I had my issues with my mom, and in many ways we spoke dissimilar languages and saw the world differently. But I look back with more distance on my mom's character and life and only have more respect for her. She lived a full marriage, raised three children very well, and never stopped growing spiritually or emotionally. With more experience, I see how many people cannot say so much! I look back at the totality of her life and make certain judgments from an adult perspective about what she did. She was a mother, a wife, and lived selflessly for her children. She was not perfect, but she did the best she could and brought up her children and loved her husband. I have such a new respect for that! That is really where the future of humanity lies, in selfless fathers and mothers united in happy marriages. Would that I could say as much when it comes time for me to die! I think my path lies elsewhere.
I remember one morning about ten years ago at the beach (my family often went to the beach before school to read poetry) when my mom read a poem by Rilke and then cried and spoke at length about how much life really was worth living: she was communicating her metaphysical understanding that despite everything, she was happy to be a sojourner here in the world -- and although I was a bit confused and embarrassed at the time, I never forgot what she said. I think about that a lot.
I wished my mother had come to accept her death in the time when she was rapidly failing. She fought it to the very end, and never really made her peace with it. She never stopped raging at the dying of the light, even when the opposite course of action would have been better by far. Not that I see it happening to me for many, many years... but I hope to make a good death when that time comes for me. Death being such an important, penultimate part of life, I hope to do it well. Do it with dignity and grace. It is a bit scary, though.
You have me thinking that maybe I have some terrible lack of taste in having enjoyed this Kevin Costner movie about a love letter in a bottle sent out to sea! Let me defend myself in saying I was never too taken in by the romance, but I did enjoy the beautiful shots of the ocean and the mists and the silences portrayed around characters who have known loss. There were some gorgeous shots of the Maine coastline, and I caught myself thinking that maybe I have seriously misjudged the beauty of your ocean on the East Coast. The sea there seems more quiescent and capricious -- gentle surf giving way to winter storms and hurricanes! -- and it seems to harbor gentle tides and precious island inlets unknown to the more regularly aggressively Pacific Ocean.
Don't confuse me for that San Francisco college student who wrote you all sorts of depressing stuff and ended up dragging you down. The last thing I want to be is that to you! I am generally happy in my life right now -- after much work and searching, I might add; but I also have the need to share and you are the person now with whom I feel most comfortable doing so. I feel my mom's presence acutely most Friday evenings for some reason just as I am sitting down to eat. (Now when my mother appears in my mind, I no longer see her face macerated by cancer as it was at the end -- I see her as radiant and vibrant as she was in better times! The better times, after all, were by far the more numerous!) It is hard to explain, but I treasure these private moments with my mom. When I think about her it brings me pain, but the pain is bittersweet -- mixed with and mixed with pleasure and even happiness. This is not necessarily a bad feeling - or maybe the sadness and the happiness are all mixed up. If I had to choose between feeling the pain of her loss and being forced to live without her memory (and so forgetting her), I would much, much prefer the pain! Sometimes there are pains which hurt good, if you will forgive the flagrant solecism. I would a thousand times feel pain to feeling nothing at all; and when you feel nothing you are truly in a bad way, in my opinion. Life is real, life is serious -- as my father often intones.
What do you do? Do you give the pain its moment, endure it with the help of your friends, and then let it pass? Do you add the good times and joyful moments to the mix and then marinade the bad times with memories of the good? Does this result in a meal which is well worth sitting down to enjoy? It is a bit of a fruit salad, with a sour and sorrowful bite here and there but when eaten whole tasting delightful? Are there experiences which change you? Do the surrounding silences come to be more appealing over the years? Is this why I find myself spending less and less time with my friends? The progression to me seems natural. My friends mean no less to me, after all, but the silences become indispensable.
I will now have to explain to myself why I have spent a bleary hour writing you this when I have three formal observations pending -- one in only two days! Now I will be up until two in the morning getting my work done! Perhaps stress brings out everything a bit more, eh? It is strange but soothing to share with someone this way: there is both privacy and participation, the gift of intimacy and interiority (which is everything). "To understand poetry," wrote the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca who was the subject of that movie you hated which we saw together in Westwood, "we need four white walls and a silence where the poet's voice can weep and sing." Lorca's assertion is, in my opinion, why poetry is the most lyrical and lordly of the arts! To live without poetry is, in my opinion, to live blindly like an earthworm hugging the ground: we never pause to raise our heads, we never hear the music passing through our lives. This is not living.
At any rate, I will feel better tomorrow morning having written you. This letter and your phone call go a long way in ameliorating a Valentine's Day weekend which otherwise left much to be desired. Y por eso estoy muy agradecido, bonita.
Sin mas por el momento, me despido de tí...
Un Beso Desde Lejos,
Richard
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