by Gail Griffin
So the day before my fifty-eighth birthday finds me here, confronting the screen. I study the outline. I get out the index cards and lay them in order around the desk. I reread some of chapter 9, just to hear my own voice again, to reacclimate to the world I was creating in that other life, on the far side of the great divide. And then I start to select letters, to hit keys, to write about the impact of a horrific act of violence on a little academic community.
That first day I delete most of what I write. It feels like I’m working in a second language, one in which I’ve taken only the introductory class. It feels like I’ve been left with a vocabulary of about two hundred words. Just keep going. One word after another. Bird by fucking bird, as Anne Lamott says. Just keep making words.
*
I have always been drawn to the skeletal figures associated with the Day of the Dead. Something about their insouciance, their irony, appeals to me strongly. In the hideous ironies clamping down on my life now I sometimes hear rasping laughter—not my own but something laughing at me, or deep in me. The skeleton’s grin makes awful sense to me, the cackle at the far end of the scream.
One beastly afternoon when I am capable of leaving the house alone for longer than a few minutes, I head to the multiplex to see The Dark Knight. There, leering down at me through grimy greasepaint, is the strangest angel I could have been sent. His power is so unsettling that no one can look away that summer, least of all me. Heath Ledger, dead just this past January, has left a stunning avatar: a shattered, grimy visage, so ugly it is spectacularly beautiful. The traditional Joker makeup has melted into a smeared, sneering parody of itself. The totemic grin is not drawn onto the face but carved—which becomes a grim joke in itself as the Joker offers several different accounts of how it happened, each horrible, each undercutting the previous explanation. The swiping, obscene lizard tongue, the eyes rolling back, the flat, nasal midwestern voice quavering with a disturbing excitement. It only heightens the effect to recall periodically throughout the film that I am watching a dead man perform.
Alone with him in the air-conditioned dark, I am ravished. He is the face of my calamity, of whatever spirit presides over the world I now inhabit. He is the first thing the world has offered that has satisfied me, the first that embodies the noxious stew roiling in me. A brilliant hybrid of horror and absurdity, he is my memento mori in a greasy green-blond wig.
People are a little alarmed by how taken I am with this character. This is the film where I find my solace? But as the Joker himself puts it, “Whatever doesn’t kill you”—tongue swipe—“makes you stranger.”
Possibly I am becoming strange. Sometimes I feel the Joker’s merciless mask on my own face. I am tempted to draw the lipstick out past the edges of my mouth and stop washing my hair. Dramatic suffering, tales of horror, obscene and terrible losses—now they feel like home. In their shadows I feel less an anomaly. I am drawn to the dark not ghoulishly but as some kind of deep, even holy, recognition of the presence of the unholy in life, the ubiquity of outrageous suffering.
A story in the local paper catches my eye. It concerns Linda Chase of Jackson, Michigan, and her longtime companion, Charles Zigler: “Chase, 72, and Zigler lived together for 10 years. In December Zigler died in his sleep at age 67. Instead of letting go of her good friend though, Chase ended up keeping him in the chair in which he died.” They watched NASCAR together. “I didn’t want to be alone,” she says. “He was the only guy who was ever nice to me.” He could always make her laugh, she says. She kept him clean, she says; he didn’t smell. “It’s just that after so many bad things happen to you, I don’t know.”
I don’t either.
*
My mind is still a minefield. I move around it cautiously. I can acknowledge that Bob is dead, and I can feel the weight of grief. I can say to myself the facts of his death and even remember the officers using the word deceased. But my mind cannot go near the river. I veer away before I see the slipper under the big pine and know with utter certainty where I’ll see the other one. I start to approach the water itself, remembering how it felt, how cold and strong its current, and I pull myself away. These areas have a radioactive glow about them. Nearing them, I feel their pulsation. They are stronger than I am. But there is one forbidden place above all: the place where I imagine Bob falling, terrified, drowning. I pray (to what?) he had that heart attack, somehow lost consciousness before he hit the water, but I don’t allow myself to imagine this, or the alternatives. I take myself—consciously, intentionally—by the shoulders and steer myself away from these places. I keep myself within a small space surrounded by an electric fence, like a dog learning her limits.
*
One bright day I am out in the front yard, pulling weeds, when Con appears. We have worked together for thirty years. His wife’s memorial service was the same day as Bob’s. He has walked over from his house, several blocks away, though he is not in full health himself and is stricken by Marion’s death. He is the kind of man, theirs the kind of long marriage, where the woman’s death somehow drains the color from the man. Yet he wears his sorrow gently, the grief of an old man who accepts his lot. I envy him. He says how sorry he is for me; I say the same for him. “Oh,” he says, “but Marion lived a good long life and we had a long time together. What’s happened to you is terribly unfair.” We sit together for a while in that truth, in the sun on my front steps.
Zaide and John show up at my back door with two large planters full of flowers, the only ones I will have this summer. This inaugurates a tradition of almost weekly dinners at their home. When I break down, Zaide silently comes behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders as if she’s holding me to the earth. John takes my hand and says the Holy Spirit is with me.
“But I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit!” I wail.
Without a beat, he says, “The Holy Spirit doesn’t care!”
And through my sobs, I am laughing.
I have never accepted so much from others, never had to. Despair reduces me to some common denominator, sometimes uncomfortably so. As Lear says of Poor Tom, I am “the thing itself: unaccommodated [wo]man . . . a poor bare, forked animal.” I feel abject, abashed before people’s kindness, as before cosmic cruelty. I ponder the word: kind-ness. I remember learning in my college Shakespeare course that in the sixteenth century, it retained some of its original sense: being of one’s kind, being of the same ilk. To be kind was to be kin, to behave with another person as if you were related. Sometimes, in the presence of this kindness, I feel the dreadful isolation draw back from me for a moment, and I am almost human.
*
“The worst,” says Diane. “We’ve been through the worst.”
Our friendship is old, riddled with uncanny parallels. The latest is this “worst,” two distinct nightmares ravaging the first decade of the new century. Hers is a child who is a severe addict, in whose ongoing life she can never fully believe. Mine is a husband of four months who disappeared into a river. Hers is the zombie nightmare that drags on, refusing to die. Mine is the sharp, stunning explosion, brief and so horrible wakefulness can’t shake it.
“No,” I whisper, weeping. “Not the worst. Darfur is the worst.”
In Darfur, in western Sudan, women in a refugee camp have a daily choice: they can walk to get firewood and water, but if they do, they will be attacked and raped by the government-sponsored marauders known as Janjaweed. The sole third option is to die.
To suffer in a world of suffering. If only you could take your place among the sufferers and find solace there, but you don’t, necessarily, or not for a very long time. You also don’t back humbly away from the vast suffering you see and say, “My pain is nothing to this.” Because your pain isn’t nothing to anything. Unfortunately, what you often do is weigh, measure, compare. It’s senseless but unavoidable. Perhaps on some level it’s the mind’s struggle to integrate the enormity it has experienced into some larger scheme. You hear of a calamity and think, “That’s worse than m
ine” or “That’s not as bad as mine.” You meet a fellow sufferer and wonder how his heart compares to yours. You do this for a long time, possibly forever.
The Widows’ Club clusters around me sometimes, trying to initiate me. The women who say, “I lost my Gary last year. Cancer. We were married forty-three years”—I want to slap them. It’s all I can do to be civil, commiserate nicely. In my head, I’m raging. You had him how long? And cancer, so you knew it was coming? And you’re seventy-eight? Bitch, please! A young friend loses her mother and I’m torn between putting my arms around her and folding them across my chest. Parents, yes: they die. I’ve lost several. You’re supposed to bury your parents. It’s how life works, at best. This hardening of the heart shames me, and worries me too: will the calcification set in for good? What is becoming of me?
I find unhealthy solace in a catastrophe worse than mine. It makes me feel less obtrusive, less freakish. In the sharpest of ironies, Bob gave me Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for our final Christmas, a week before we married. Now I think back on it. Yes, I decide, that was worse—losing a husband and a daughter in one year. Then I wonder: Would it be worse to watch your husband collapse at the dinner table or to run screaming through the dark praying he’s not in the river and knowing he is? It amounts to something like the medieval considerations of angels on pinheads, but it’s almost compulsive. I am trying to place myself in the ranks of the bereft. I am trying to find my place in the columns of losers and lamenters. I am trying to make my disaster human by working it into the endless tale of human horror. In some strange way, this is part of approaching the land of the living.
*
In September, as school starts, I reenter my life with some surprise that it’s still there. I walk around it, doing what I’m supposed to be doing, trudging through my days or floating through the hours like a ghost. I cry so readily, so frequently, that I must be on guard. I am, in Colm Tóibín’s words, “wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted, and all of it oddly pointless and confusing.”
Grief is not pure; it’s not just pain. This grief, my peculiar animal, streaked as it is with trauma and rage, has mass and weight, as I learn from my constant exhaustion. Like much grief, it is curdled with guilt: in one of the forbidden places in my mind dwell all the ways Bob’s death was my fault, and all the ways I might have saved him. I creep to the edge of that place and back off.
Finally, grief takes the form of a water table: ordinary life is a ground I walk, beneath which the groundwater level is so high that my footprints immediately fill. I feel myself living on a vulnerable surface above a flood that constantly threatens to rise and drown me.
At work I worry about the short-term memory lapses I’m experiencing and also about how easily I tire. By midafternoon I am exhausted. But I am glad to be back, glad the terrible summer is over, glad to find myself capable of presence with my students. I am grateful that this work still matters. Though the entire campus knows what’s happened to me, mostly no one speaks about it.
At the end of the first session of one of my courses, a student I don’t know waits to ask me a question. She sits down beside me. She is slim with long blond hair, and the open kindness in her face strikes me. Her voice is gentle. I answer her query, she thanks me, and then she leans in and says quietly, “Also, Dr. Griffin? I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for your loss.” Instantly the exhausted phrase is newborn from her throat.
My eyes fill as I thank her. Her name, she has told me, is Sara, but as I put my arms around her, the word that comes to me is grace.
*
I spend Election Day ferrying students to and from the polling place assigned to our campus. The ones without cars tend to be the younger students, the first-years, voting for the first time. Their excitement about casting votes for Obama ripples the air in my car.
That night I watch the returns. I think how pleased Bob would be—he decided for Obama last January when I was still with Hillary. I think how my mother would have been gaga for Obama, for all the right and wrong reasons. At 11:00 NBC calls it; seconds later the phone rings. It’s Zaide, calling from Democratic headquarters downtown, and we shout and cry into our phones. I watch the crowds in Chicago, Jesse Jackson’s face convulsed in tears, the Obamas walking out under the lights, and I am sobbing. Although I am crying for my beloveds who cannot see this, my tears also have a component of joy, of futurity, of hope.
*
I am still wrestling with Yahweh when I chance to read about Oya, a Yoruba orisha. Weirdly, she is associated with a river—the Niger, the great river of West Africa. She is known as goddess of storms; the tornado is her whirling skirt. But in a larger sense, she presides over change and transition, passages from one state to another. She is celebrated as the spirit of clearing-the-way, just as the tornado whips through a ponderous hot afternoon, sweeping worlds away, ushering in clear, cool air. Beautifully, terribly. Oya’s home place is cemeteries, where she clears the way for the living to cross through the doorway of the grave to what lies beyond.
Sometimes, fleetingly, I feel something like that clearing effect. My gutted world feels like a big house that has been radically blown clean. So much is beyond my control that I keep giving up, opening my hands, releasing things, letting go. So little matters that what does matter stands out clearly. So much is fearfully difficult and I am so diminished that I do what is doable and easy and I abandon guilt about my limitations, because that’s too much to carry. I care less than ever in my life about being good and living up to something. Dilemmas resolve quickly. Priorities arrange themselves effortlessly. The heart speaks with unusual clarity. Though living is immeasurably harder, life seems simpler.
I am nervous in crowds now, and made anxious by noise, so I pursue solitude and silence. I experience a new level of intolerance for confusion, obfuscation, bureaucracy, bullshit, but a new tolerance for many human foibles. Also, I now have the psychic version of Superman’s X-ray vision: I can see straight through bluster and aggression to the fear and vulnerability cowering behind them. Everybody is Poor Tom, a lone suffering bastard, and if they aren’t, I haven’t got time for them. I am drawn to suffering like birds to my feeder: I crave the company of the grievers. I must be among my own. I need to stand on the ground where compassion arises. Otherwise, I am alone again on that terrible shore.
*
“The deepening of the heart,” says Mark Doty, “the work of soul-making goes on, I think, as the world hammers us, as we forge ourselves in response to its heats and powers. The whirlwind pours over and through us, above and beyond human purpose; death’s deep in the structure of things, and we didn’t put it there.”
Recently someone asked me, fear vying with hope in her eyes, whether some new knowledge of myself had come out of my catastrophe. She was nearly begging me to assure her that there was some kind of redemption. I don’t remember what I said. I should have said, “There is the deepening of the heart.” And it comes through the ongoing making of us, the heat, the hammer, the forge.
Emily Dickinson uses the same metaphor in the wondrous poem that begins, “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” It ends this way:
Least Village has its Blacksmith
Whose Anvil’s even ring
Stands symbol for the finer Forge
That soundless tugs—within—
Refining these impatient Ores
With Hammer, and with Blaze
Until the Designated Light
Repudiate the Forge— (#365)
I have always thought of this as one her many poems about the creative process itself. It now seems to me to subsume that story in a larger one—Doty’s story about the way we are created and re-created, blasted, melted down, hammered, and forged not into some final shape but continuously, all our lives. If I project my earlier reading against this later one, I can contemplate the relation between the processes of living and of creation in a context of damage, violence, the fierce white heat blanching its subjec
t into malleability.
It starts to seem to me that life comes down to a terrible challenge: to participate in the creation, to accept the new form you are taking, even when it is the product of a nightmarish violation. To suffer the deepening of the heart that comes only from profound wounding, vivid ore.
*
In the spring, as the first anniversary approaches, I teach Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I herd the students away from Christian symbolism toward something much more interesting: the Mariner’s curse, compulsive narration. As he wanders the world, he is periodically possessed and overcome by his outrageous experience:
. . . at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
He must disgorge his story to chosen strangers, after which he is left free—but only until his tale rises again, like magma, demanding utterance. On to the next hapless auditor.
I can’t bear to tell the story of that night, and I can’t bear not to. To tell it takes me so close to the river’s edge that my stomach churns and clenches; not to tell it is to stand in a cocoon of silence, watching the world sail away. I tell it to establish who I am now: the person to whom this occurred, the one who has lived, is always living, through this; the person who has this memory in her head, and this great rift across her life. And I tell it to bring it indoors, into the realm of language and experience where it can begin to work its way into my story, my being. As long as it remains in the hallucinatory realm, so do I. Yet telling it will always feel perilous, vertiginous, as if I am about to drop into my own maelstrom.
The hapless Guest—drawn off-course on his way to a wedding as I was yanked off-planet on my way from a wedding—is said to wake the next day “a sadder but a wiser man.” But sadness seems an odd response to the outlandish story. And what wisdom could he possibly have taken from it? Certainly not the tidy morsel offered by the Mariner: