But she really wasn’t speaking to me by then. Vanessa wasn’t speaking to Wen either. She’d hated my passion for him. I’d loved him like I’d never loved anyone; he’d reached a whole chamber of my heart I hadn’t known.
I’d been delirious with love; certain of love; convinced of love.
We’d moved into a yurt together the year Dad died, Wen and I. We tore down his old yurt; we’d bought a new one and furnished it with a proper stove, a stand-up fridge. “This is my dream,” Wen had told me. He’d put the yurt up, friends had helped; we’d planned to live in it forever, partners and co-conspirators. I’d loved the way the yurt felt like the house on the farm without the snakes, without all the uncertainty.
I’d seen them from the road in the two decades I’d lived in this western Wyoming valley, this flotilla of yurts out in the middle of the sagebrush in an old agricultural campground, overlooked by mountains and prayer flags. I’d wondered about the place; it seemed to me that once you were antisocial enough to live in a yurt park with a shared ablution block, you were probably too antisocial for communal living. Or maybe it would be like a village in Zambia, and there’d be all the usual backbiting, and someone would always be threatening to shove someone headfirst down the communal latrine, but it’d be a noisy, lively community. You’d never feel alone.
Wen had taken me to his yurt on our first date, and I’d fallen for it all—for him, for the place, for the idea of us—so completely I hadn’t really ever left. It was like camping, or being in the bush; the elements were in the yurt, around us, the sky an endless shimmering show. I was smitten with it all.
“You’ll hate it,” Mum had said. “You’re intolerant and bossy in small spaces.”
“I’ll love it,” I’d said. “It’ll be like boarding school, but without the rules.”
“There’s a way to move around a yurt meditatively,” Wen had told me, then he’d instructed me, and finally he’d begged; I moved like a tornado. He didn’t meditate, but he had meditated, and he liked it when other people meditated; he liked Buddhists and monks. He’d have preferred me with less energy, less grief and drama certainly.
We’d put up the new yurt on old fault lines, Wen and I, of course we had. There’s only so much any structure can absorb; we hadn’t accounted for my grief. I was so much; it was all too much. The insomnia, the weeping, the unaccountable rage that accompanies intense grief, the nights in front of the Fisher stove while a long Wyoming winter crackled outside, wolves howling; a yurt’s a small space. “I need more room for my own thoughts,” Wen had begged.
Cycles of grief scoured and scoured.
I bought a sheep wagon, a covered wagon with a bed and a small stove and I put it next to the yurt. I moved my grief and my early-morning writing in there, and still it wasn’t enough room for Wen to have a thought of his own. Finally, he’d had enough, he’d made it clear, for all these reasons, and more reasons.
Words are unstable and inadequate in any end.
I fled. I took what I could carry. There’d never been a partnership, it turned out. Or if there’d been a partnership, we tore it to pieces as if all that love had happened to other people in another time. Also, there’d been more anger than I’d expected. I’d cost Wen, he told me. My love had taken a heavy emotional toll on him. He’d been unable to work when he’d been with me.
“Know when to cut your losses,” Dad had always said.
But the end of Wen and me hadn’t felt merely like losses; it felt like the end, or at least the end of hope and love and youth. I’d expected to let those things go, just not now, all at once. This love had been, I’d thought, my last and lasting love, and cutting it had been so final, so brutal, so difficult to do; all that vanity and wounding that accompanies the end of love.
Still, it wasn’t something my children needed to see, my ruined relationship strewn across their lives. I tried to make it look less messy, more seamless, as if I were jumping not falling, flying not flailing. “You’re a survivor,” Wen wrote to me after I’d taken refuge with friends. We’d gone from love to this scoured wreckage in the same time it had taken us, in reverse, to fall in love. We couldn’t see each other; it was like we’d been shaken apart in an earthquake.
* * *
—
I BELIEVED THIS to be the greatest sadness of my life: My father’s death, my sister’s anger, my family’s silence, the end to the yurt, the end of my engagement to Wen, the end to the arrogance of my certainty, it all hurt. My father had been dead two and half years, and my life appeared to be racing away from me.
Dad had not left me with instructions for this; he’d loved my mother truly, without the need to possess her, or even to have her love in return. I’d said it and said it and said it to Wen and that had been my mistake, or one of my mistakes. Love isn’t a word, it’s a whole life.
I’d loved him so much I believed him to be the cure for my soul; and because of this, he was. We’d slept together under that yurt’s plexiglass dome, the sky skidding toward dawn above our heads, the dog sleeping at our feet, my youngest child asleep in a loft above our heads.
In my grief, I’d never been so happy.
But grief puts you to sleep for a hundred years; or pain blunts your awareness. Something happens when you lose too much too fast; you stop tracking. Dad died and I couldn’t write like I had; the old thoughts wouldn’t come, my words were bitter and angry and godforsaken. Then Wen and I ended, and it was as if unseen hands had pushed me down an icy slope, a slippery slide. I had to write; words were my self-arrest in every way. “I will write my way out of this”—I’d had that sign above my computer before. I wrote it out again, pinned it up above my desk.
I woke up at four to write. “No, it’s fine,” I lied to the kids. “I will be okay.” Fuller was in Argentina, his semester abroad. Sarah was writing for the local paper. Cecily was sailing through her first year of middle school. They hadn’t been as attached to Wen as I, obviously. “It’s for the best,” I pretended.
When you’re all the way down to the bone, Dad had said.
I patched together a routine so that Cecily wouldn’t notice a disruption to her schedule. Friends let me sleep on their floors and sofas and in their spare rooms; they gave me whole houses to live in. Dad would have said how lucky I was, but I kept thinking of my losses, my incomprehensible losses, I counted them all day and night. I carried them with me like millstones.
* * *
—
THAT SPRING WAS the saddest of my life.
How I longed for Wen, all the way into the start of a hot summer. Aries rising red and early in the east, dominating the skyline. I remember that; and trying to fall in love again too soon, I remember that. All through the noise of the breakup and the breakup’s aftermath I’d longed for Wen, and for solitude. I remember the moons of those months holding me; they were fat and silver.
I’d wept and wept, each moon.
Then Fuller had had a seizure in Argentina; he’d awoken to find himself in the ICU. Charlie, my ex-husband, and I bought air tickets the day of the incident. It was decided I would stay with our youngest and see her through the beginning of her summer holidays; he’d fly down. Fuller came home with him. He’d been funny and brave, Fuller, waking up in the emergency room in a strange country; no one speaking his language. “I’m literally naked and afraid,” he’d joked to me on the phone.
Oh, perspective!
“Just come home in one piece,” I’d begged.
He did; he’d been checked out at our local hospital, deemed fine. A week later, he died in his sleep. I knew he’d died the moment I saw the text from Charlie flash up on my phone, “Call me.” I knew then what had happened, because all parents carry that fear somewhere in their cells; my body knew before my ears would hear the words, our son had died.
Daughter of a ghost.
Mother of an ancestor.
Th
e son is dead. The sun would never rise again. Days would drag themselves from nights, but the sun wouldn’t erupt from the horizon and blaze a new day open.
I wouldn’t know warmth again.
Son, brother, grandson, activist, friend, scholar, athlete, reader, thinker, lover, and all of this by twenty-one; oh, my prodigious boy, where are you going so fast without your mother? We’d read poems about this when he was little, and books.
I had anticipated an apocalypse in our lifetime, at this rate. I had prepared the children for that; the dogs eating bloated bodies in the streets. But I hadn’t prepared my children, or myself, for this; that’s a cruelty beyond words.
Apocalypse, from the Greek apokalupsis, apokaluptein, to reveal things as they really are; everything was revealed, all my anger, my denial, my bargaining, my habits and practices and witchcraft and love.
My love deeper than any ocean, I’d told him.
Limitless, to the sky and moon and other universes beyond imagination, my love.
My love more than myself, of course more than myself.
Fuller died free, in his own bed. He’d died painlessly, without foreknowledge. His father had been the first to find him; that’s a dark privilege not often granted. He’d lived twenty-one full years, without undue harassment.
He’d been lucky, and we’d been lucky too.
But you can’t tell yourself what your mind refuses to believe.
I knew the sound that was coming from my mouth as I ran toward his; I recognized the pleading. How I would come to know the sound of a wolf howling, the baying of my sorrow. It was the sound of every mother separated from every child for all time and in all places. It was the sound my own life made as it came out of my mouth.
I went with him, naturally, to his death.
I’d made that promise to him at his birth. “I’ll love you forever, and in all ways,” I’d told him over and over. “I’ll always be there, always.” He’d been a gentle son, the easiest child, the beloved middle; he was a given, a certainty. “A keeper,” my ex-father-in-law had observed at the time, by which he’d meant male issue, thank God.
Cycles can be invisible; they can overlap.
Charlie had wanted to name our son for himself, for his family, for my father, and for our family. I can see now, it’s an inheritor’s thing to do, three names on one child, straddling all those generations and continents. Charles Fuller Ross, but we called him Fuller. “Fi,” he’d named himself when he was too little to wrap his mouth around the difficulty of his name. Fi, I’d called him after that, it had suited him.
Semper Fi.
I know this now.
When he died, there was an immediate pain so terrible, it had no color; it went beyond white, beyond sparkles. And even then, as that pain swept over me, I knew it wasn’t the real pain; it was only the shock before the real pain. I knew too, my pain would be the precise size of the love I had for my son; it would have no end, it would have no shape, it would shape me.
I’d become it; I’d have to learn to cope with it, to face this difficult music, and dance. “Fi,” I told him, collapsing next to his body, my fingers going to the bruises on his face from the seizure, oh the instinct to remove pain is eternal. “I’m here.” How terrible; the impossibility of time, plodding over us, unstoppable, dreadful thieving. I no longer needed to imagine grief upon grief. And still I couldn’t comprehend how a body can withstand losing so much at once, and more with each step.
What grief.
I’ve thought since then, but I haven’t done this alone. Friends flocked and descended. Friends surrounded me, moved for me. They held me and breathed for me.
I’m grieving one good son once.
I’m not being forced to break stone while grieving; or to fear my own death; or to fear the death of my daughters, although I do, or wonder incessantly of their whereabouts, although I do. And still you can’t begin to believe the power of a mother’s grief, I couldn’t believe it, it staggered me, myself.
You can’t imagine the drenching of tears, for a start. Or you can, but you’d never go inside the agony of it unforced, it’s too much. It’s why every thoughtless violent thing has ever happened, because none of us want to imagine parents grieving children, over and over.
What love; love upon love.
I ran my fingers through Fi’s auburn hair, breathed in the last of his scent; how I’d loved this boy, how he’d loved life. “I love you. Forgive me. Thank you.” Over and over I said the words to his impossibly still body; so perfect, so young and strong and necessary. At last, by evening, the coroner insisted, the police insisted, the doctors insisted, he be taken.
And then we’d held our two daughters, Charlie and I.
Oh, our inconsolable souls.
Fi died under a waning crescent moon two years, ten months, and four days after my father had died under a blood moon. I befriended that moon; I stare into her face, nightly I implore her, “Take me with you, somehow.”
And yet leave me too; spare me, for my daughters, until they’re able to dispense of a mother.
Tear me to pieces, please, and spread me among my children.
Bury me with my boy; please, dear God, fall upon us from above, and bury us all.
* * *
* * *
—
WHEN YOU’RE ALL THE WAY down to the bone, Dad had said.
Maybe he’d seen this moment, or moments like it; the end of the world is the end of the world, after all. He’d been here himself; his family had banished him from their lives, he’d taken his children to the grave without them, he’d buried his son with his own hands in the cemetery in Salisbury.
There was nothing to be done, except what was being done.
Friends moved me into a condo, they painted it, fixed shelves in rooms, hung curtains, fixed drywall and windows. There’d been drug addicts in the condo before I’d moved in. The neighbors wondered if I too were a drug addict, the noise for a start. The people coming and going all hours, with casserole dishes?
My friends brought meals, and poured me baths. They did laundry, and made gallons of South African tea for me. I cried for my mother, any mother, and for my sister, any sister. I roared and roared into the dark for my son, and when the silence of his nonreply grew deafening, I howled in protest. I missed Wen. My friends slept on the floor, they took turns passing out on my sofa; friends lay on the bath mat while I wept and wept in the tub. Friends crawled into bed, one on each side of me, and held me.
My logical blood never left me; I never left me, although the impulse was strong.
And I grieved bodily. I grieved the space where, in my mind’s calculation, Vanessa should be and Mum should be and Wen should be. Most of all I grieved the space where my son should be. The basic aggression of wanting things to be different is separation from God; by another name, it’s hell, but you can’t always see it when you’re in it. For a start, it’s a long way down.
I made a bed on the porch, and Sarah nested there; she didn’t sleep, she scanned the world restlessly for her beloved brother. Her grief was terrible to witness. But then she started to write, and watching her take the impossible step from a life in death to a life with death, I started to write too. We got up. We got up and paid attention to the sisters and mothers and families whose loss was more senseless than ours, and learned from them how to grieve fruitfully.
We got up at four.
We rescued a puppy for Cecily; I’d learned some indelible lessons from Mum. “Moss,” Cecily named him, smitten. “Do you think Fi sent him?”
Moss is white with a black heart-shape on his face; he has big puppy paws and hazel eyes. At four months, he flops across our laps like overcooked linguine, he drapes himself on the bed in the best position for a tummy rub; he knows nothing of our grief.
“I’m almost certain Fi did,” I said.
Two mon
ths after Fi died, I dragged the sheep wagon out to the Wind River Mountains and parked it beside a brook overhung with pine trees; there were cliffs that reminded me of Zimbabwean kopjes, you’d expect a leopard to come out of the shadows, but it doesn’t. I build a fire in the little stove, keep it going most of the day, and every day I do the same thing; I sit in silence at the foot of the mountains until I am no longer there.
Or I am everywhere, in all things, dissolved in my own salty tears; worn out by my yearning. I am nothing, and everything; I am the wind, and the water, the fire, the metal. Fi is those things too. For the hours and hours each day I am still, observing every creak, aware of each breath, I can feel whole again, almost; or the wrenching apartness is less terrifying when I know the result is that I’m becoming him in my silence.
I’m becoming him, my beloved dead; I listen for him always.
And in an effort to hear him, I forgive and forgive; grief makes a miser of your emotions, it makes of you the most attentive listener, it makes of you a supplicant. In the end, grief makes of you its humble servant.
Take everything of me, for one glimpse of him.
I have no room for anything else. I can’t see my daughters, I can’t see myself. I’ve disappeared, I am disappearing; I am eaten up by grief. The weight slides off my bones. My love for this dead boy threatens to swallow me completely until one day I allow it to, and on that day I can say the words out loud, “Fi is dead.”
I am nowhere now, and it’s a start.
When you’re lost, go downhill until you find a river.
I’d seen that text; opened the car door and run downhill, lost. There’s no easy way to get comfortable with being lost, loss. How my father had done it, I think I know, but God knows where he’d found the strength.
When I come home from the Wind River Mountains, windburned, sunburned, tattered, I put a note on the door to remind the girls and myself to put one foot in front of the other anyway. Our footsteps are lonely, singular; they are without voices, like the sound of pigeon wings, or like fat raindrops on a tin roof.
Travel Light, Move Fast Page 20