How to speak meaningfully about any of this? When my Mom died... . it was like the universe spoke to me everywhere I turned. She was gone and yet I saw her everywhere. Inflected through the poetry of my own heart.... and sinew; She was there is my own sense of beauty and goodness and justice. Now that my Dad is gone it is just this ever-expanding distance.... I feel like I am hurtling through time and space--the distance between us grows deeper each day. I don't know why these experiences of loss are so different.
In my dreams my Dad would come to me and tell me that I needed to fix the house. A few nights ago I had a dream so overwhelming real of meeting my Dad in the living room of the house in Buckley that it cast a glow over my entire day.
Our love was a love of few words and little philosophy. It is hard to imagine what it means to go on without his body, without his voice....
It is hard to know how to go on without the little everyday sacraments he was always providing. In my cupboard I still have a "just add water" Mocha that he bought me a month before he died. He knew I didn't like the instant Maxwell House coffee he made every morning and he wanted to find something that I would like....
Indeed, when he came to our house the Christmas before last he bought us a new coffee makersbecause ours had gone caput. I still have one brown mug left that he bought me three Christmases ago. I don't know if I should use this mug or put it away. What will I do when the coffee maker he bought breaks down? It is a stunning thought!
(I can imagine that there are poets who are skillful enough to help me understand what it will mean when that little electric heart in my kitchen stops beating. For now, I cannot bear the thought.)
For most of my life, I have tried to live into my Mom's world--it was a world of words (I didn't understand), her almost mystical depths of illness and brilliance. Certainly her world was resistant to me; I cannot encompass what her life meant--and yet, I could gesture towards a meaning. And now, here I stand-- trying to comprehend the world my Dad loved-- and it remains a bit out of my reach. What meaning is this? Meaning that is caught up in rightly placed nails, in webs of loves spoken through anxiety, in a joyful over-acceptance of the physical, and practical, and day-to-day.
I suppose it might all boil down to this: when I was a baby it was my Father who would wake in the middle of the night to feed me. My Mom had told him about her post-partum psychosis (with previous pregnancies) and so my Dad took up the long and lonely task of comforting me in the middle of the night. I only learned this when I was in college and it helped to explain a theretofore unexplainable mystery. I noticed when I doodled--in the margins of my notebook--or wherever--that I would mindlessly write "Jodie is a good, good girl." This was the cause of a kind of fervent sheepishness for me. That is... until, just after Johanna was born. When my Dad first met Johanna he took her into his arm and began to sing to her: "Johanna is a good, good girl; good good girl; good good girl; Johanna is a good good girl" (to the tune of Mary had a little Lamb.)
So here was the source of the words that lie deepest in my sub-conscious.
How do we cope with the loss of the ground of our being? Not the ultimate ground, but certainly the proximate one?
There are only so many ways to speak about our lives--say that it is a journey and that we must leave behind our fellow travelers on the way. Say that it is a trial... Say that this sojourn doesn't count in the ultimate scheme of things. And yet, there simply aren't words powerful enough to encapsulate what one life means to another. ... and certainly words cannot describe what it means for one life to be held and sustained in its first darknesses by another. Word simply fail us.
This silence. This silence that renders me speechless-- speaks --I suppose-- to that love that I can't name because it precedes me--forming my form, identifying my identity. It is no wonder that in grieving its loss that I feel like I just might be undone.
