Fern Hill in Winter - February 2011

Went to Fern Hill last night to see Orion hanging low in the night sky.  Visited Kitchell Snow's eagle along the way.  Lay in the deep untouched snow on Fern Hill and imagined that I could see the star formerly know as "Orion RA6h6m57.45s D17 10'11.32", which is now known as Hunter Pope.  Made a snow angel in the virgin snow.  Thought how I could not see Hunter's star, but still, it is there whether  I see it or not.  Lay for a long time enveloped in the cold snow until I was calm enough to return home.

Hunter riding Kitchell Snow's eagle.

At The Thunder of Thy Cataracts (Psalm 42:7) - February 2011

When deepness calls, I have longed to go,

     When clarity and calm quiet the heart

          And when ravaged by the mind's fierce fires.

A soft command, - not from hell's depths below...

     Deep, from deep, to deep calling, to part

          The soul from flesh, impels, me inspires

Toward the breath of mute and mystic death.

                           -      Alexandra Pope

No Balm In Gilead - January 2011

She longs in light and dark

For the pleasures of his presence.

In sun - or moon and stars -

Her heart grows wild with yearning

As longing moves on reminiscence.

The past, in partial pictures,

Flares, with sudden light, to mind.

Where once the slow, soft grief

 (her silent loneliness)

Was calm in caverns deep and blind

Now voices cry and cries

Ring out the pain of his going.

They shatter the treaty of silence.

They call out his name in vain,

And crumble the air with their moaning.

                                        

               -    Alexandra Pope

Stillness is Screaming - December 2010

It came to me in a flash today; “This isn’t over at all, surviving this, - I may not survive it yet.” It’s harder and harder to think. I can act outwardly with grace, but inwardly there is such horror and screaming. I don’t want to be here without him. The pull is stronger, the call more compelling. The moment I am still the storm begins. There is no center, no point of clarity and vision, - only this swirl of screaming. I keep moving, always moving; through space, through time, my mind always moving, because stillness is screaming.
It is harder and harder. And I have become desperate for distraction. I am starving for the lack of Hunter. Better not to exist than to continue without him, or better to fight my way to him, wherever he is. I don’t think I’ve allowed even myself to know how far gone I am. This separation is dangerous for me. The cost of functioning is this split: “To be here, I must not know myself.” So I am disintegrated, disintegrating. I am no longer whole. “Integritas, consonantia, claritas”: wholeness, harmony, radiance.
I am split, not whole. My sound is a scream. My radiance is a mask, not revealing, but concealing myself, - even from myself.

I am drowning in this fire
The flaming out of fierce desire
Born of grief and loss and love
This Phoenix will not rise above
The ashes of her own demise

I am not safe, to others or to myself. I am in flames. Why does it not consume me? I am willing…. – speak the word only.

Hunter, my Seeker, I seek you.

I Wake And Feel The Fell of Dark, Not Day - November 2010

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


This is my companion poem. Each morning I wake to the dark. What shocks me most is all that one is able to keep at a distance, at a "third remove" so as not to simply disintegrate. But there is such a price to pay for simple functionality. This "dark night of the soul" poem is one of Hopkins "terrible sonnets". There are two others that also breathe out the darkness within. They are my companions.

I memorized all three when I was in 10th grade, in Mrs. Hoyt's english class at Mounds View High School. We had to choose from among a group of poems for a writing project. "God's Grandeur" by Hopkins was among them. I remember the moment of reading it and the warmth of sudden illumination that spread within me, - a completely physical feeling. There is a joy that bubbles up from within when you find something that you, mysteriously, without knowing how or why, understand. I think that for some it can be found in a mathematical equation, a scientific proposition, or a logical puzzle. For me it is engendered by words put together in certain ways, the arrangement of certain sounds, and by movements following movements. Poetry, music and dance. It is the joy of comprehension, or maybe it is better to say apprehension. "Beauty is that, the apprehension of which, pleases." But it is not just that which is apprehended which pleases, it is the apprehension itself. The core of this experience is in the connections which are made. Through such experience we are able to feel "whole" within ourselves. "Whole" within by connecting with something completely "other." Again, 'only connect.'

And this is why these "terrible sonnets" draw me back, again and again. They are about the agony we feel when we cannot connect. There is a kind of disintegration internally and we are left alone, isolated in the prison of ourselves. My cries, my 'dead letters' are sent to Hunter, "who lives, alas, away." This is not heresy. I do not deify Hunter. Hopkins understood it best. He writes in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"

... Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces

And Christ played in Hunter's features, lovely in limb, and oh, so beautiful, so astonishingly beautiful in his eyes. And this will be for all the hours, days and years to come... this terrible longing, for Hunter. For that particular, that exact set of patterns, that was Hunter. What Hopkins would call his "quidditas", his 'thisness' or 'whatness'. Again from "As Kingfishers Catch fire"

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."

And children struggle to become themselves. We all do, or if we don't, then we (and those around us) pay a horrible price for it. For the year before he died Hunter was struggling visibly with becoming himself. He waged a battle with anger, something that he had only rarely expressed before. He and Ramsay fought a great deal, and when Hunter would be in conflict with Ken, he would rage and swear and fight. There were morning battles before school where Hunter would wake up angry and would kick and shout and throw things, and when Ken would try to hold onto him, just to keep him from destroying things, Hunter would wiggle and squirm and fight, and no one, NO ONE, could have held on to him. And there was nothing that could stop him, no threat of punishment ("go ahead - I don't care"), no mode of reasoning. Nothing. Twice, when we were trying to simply keep him from destroying things, he called 911, to tell them we were hurting him. The worst thing about it was to see the storm raging in him, and not know how to calm him.

He was always so loving and tender after, almost flippant about what had happened (but really, he was embarrassed), refusing to talk about it, but showering us with sweetness to make up for it. But in November a year ago, he was raging at Molly while we were driving somewhere, and she began to cry. For all their years together, they almost never fought. They were so EASY together, so complimentary. And though Hunter could be moody and tough on Connor and Ramsay, he was almost never so with Molly. The day after Molly cried in the car, Hunter came to me and said "Mom, you know how you were talking about getting me a counselor to help me with my anger? Well, I want to go see someone now." I was surprised. He had refused any such help before. And he offered me the reason now. "I made Molly cry yesterday. I never ever want to make Molly cry again."

Hunter was learning to master himself, so as to become himself. And in his leaving us, has given us the reason for lifelong heartsoreness. So again, to Hopkins. "I am gall, I am heartburn" The bitter taste of loss. God's most deep decree? Having eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... 'you will surely die'. It is our embodiment that is both our joy and our deepest pain. What a strange endeavor... to join spirit with flesh. No wonder we are such mysteries to ourselves. "Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse, selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours." Being embodied seems like a handicap to the spirit. Not least of all because of the joys of incorporation. This is the great challenge, to master ourselves by reconciling spirit and body to each other. And now, I am like an infant all over again, helpless to comprehend the loss of Hunter. Celine wrote in 'Journey to the End of the Night': "perhaps that is what one is looking for, that and nothing more, - to feel the greatest pain there is to feel, so as to know oneself completely before death." Then I know myself. I am a helpless infant.

One thing that Hopkins spells out so clearly is that belief (faith, hope, whatever you will) does not give the believer any respite from pain. No one is immune from what is common to us all. And it hurts just as bad whatever your beliefs. When the doctor came to where I sat, a few feet from where Hunter lay, he knelt and spoke "we have done everything that can be done and it hasn't worked". I said "there must be something else to do". He said "There is nothing else to do." I said "Are you telling me that Hunter is dying?" He nodded, and it came to me suddenly "Are you telling me that Hunter is dead?"

When I could, I said "I made a bargain with God, do anything to me, but keep them safe" - an impossible bargain, I know. And all the nurses responded immediately, as if in chorus, "We all make that bargain with God". There it is. Jacob wrestled the Angel. So do we all.

I Think The Dear Are Tender - October 2010

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
My sweet boy laughs, delighting in what is.
If he but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
He makes space lonely with a lovely song.
He lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
He cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
He dances, and the ground bears him away.
He knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.

I feel his presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
He moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

Theodore Roethke

- I've changed this poem in my head, revised for Hunter, rather than for Roethke's lady. I memorized this poem almost thirty years ago. The appeal of it then, as now, is primarily in the sounds the words make as you form them, whether silently or audibly. A string of words like "long sea chambers of the inner ear" evokes a chill from the base of my spine, radiating upwards and out from the top of my skull. For the particular arrangement of cells that I call myself, words arranged in such a way are more powerful even than music. (I suppose that this is a kind of heresy coming from a musician.) And then to wrestle meaning from the words.... it is a delight to me. A delight in the way that only art can be, where what is most beautiful is also utterly devastating.
If, like music, a poem could have a "key" that it is written in (or maybe a better way to say it would be a "tonality") then this poem is written in the key of "tender". I have had much time and reason to consider the tenderness of boys over the last fifteen years. Having three brothers, raising three sons, I have been keenly attuned to their vulnerability. Their tenderness has schooled me. I think that all boys are tender, and yet some boys are particularly tender. My brother Peter was so very tender. I always said that Peter was a lamb. He could be a wildman, but still he was a lamb. He radiated a gentleness and kindness and would enclose me in the most restorative bear hugs you could imagine. And he is gone from here eight years now. And in just the same way, Hunter was so very tender. A wildman too. And tender. And now they are both gone from here.
It is, even now, in 2009, hard for a boy to be tender. I saw so clearly in people's reactions to Hunter how they felt about their own tenderness. There were those who were harsh with Hunter. And I began to see how they had certain qualities in common. They were blustery men, with these gruff exteriors, but inside they had these very tender and loving hearts. I think they almost couldn't bear to see Hunter's tenderness. They wanted to "toughen him up" in some way. If he remained so tender, he would be crushed. But I had learned from growing up with my brother Peter the great value of male tenderness. Peter had struggled hard to find a way to live with his vulnerability, his gentleness. But he came to own it completely. He found a profession as an ICU nurse that allowed him to use these virtues in his work, and he was loved by all his patients and colleagues. And he still got to be a wildman, taking his sons motocrossing every weekend.
Hunter was so like Peter in these ways. My little tender wildman. Like Peter he was physically fearless. He would try any stunt, take any dare - impervious to bodily pain. And also like Peter he had these little anxieties, about germs and silent, insidious sickness, - things you couldn't grab hold of and wrestle with. It is not lost on me that both Peter and Hunter died because their hearts stopped. Peter's aorta ruptured. A virus (silent, insidious) weakened Hunter's heart until it stopped. These boys, with their enormous, tender, loving hearts, died because their hearts broke. I think that their hearts could not contain their spirits, and maybe, maybe it really is dangerous for a man to be so tender in this life. But there was no other way for them to be.
February 15, 2009, in a room in the ER at Boston Medical Center, Hunter is lying on a bed, and I am sitting in a chair beside him. He is tired and sick and hurting and restless and confused. The pain moves around from throat to chest to belly, rippling through him in uneven waves. We have been there since 7am and he is being treated for dehydration, having tested positive for Influenza B (a strain not covered in that seasons flu shot - not that it would have mattered in the end). I have my head resting next to his chest, slumped in my chair next to the gurney, trying to bring what comfort I can. He begins to speak sharply "Get away, I hate you." I look at him in surprise. He pulls me back to him, saying "not you." Then, again, "I hate you - go away", and even stronger "fuck you - I hate you". And I saw that he was talking to the sickness in him. When the waves of pain were strong he would rail against it, swearing at it, raging at it. And when he was calm, in between the waves, he asked me this question "Mom, is God punishing me for something I did?" Oh, Hunter.
I told him that such a thing could never be true. God was not like that. He does not punish. These things; sickness, disasters, tragedies, are not sent to us by a punitive God, or even as correctives. They are either consequences of the microscopic workings of the natural world that from our macroscopic point of view can only be seen as random, or they are the consequences of choices that have been made by persons, to which not even the most innocent (or guilty) among us are exempt. I gave him the only thought I have ever been able to hold on to when things matter enormously. "We don't have all the information and we are told to pray." He told me that his prayers weren't working. I said that sometimes the answer can be 'no', or more likely 'wait', and that sometimes we must just endure what is in front of us. He said "I can't endure this." He said this many times in the following hours. "I can't endure this." But he still fought it, raging against this virus, that we later learned had been sickening his heart for weeks. A virus which has no symptoms in the young, because they are so strong, and which is almost always fatal in children. How utterly and completely random a working of the natural world such a virus is.
In the weeks following people would ask "Why Hunter?" as if this were a real question. The only way to kindly expose this kind of question was to answer "Why any child? Should it have been someone else's child?" There is unimaginable loss and grief every day throughout this world. How should I be exempt? And I think of Madeliene L'Engle again "There is no such thing as security. Only a sense of security." Since Peter died I have not confused the two. I am constantly aware of my enormous good fortune in my family and my friends. It is possible to be full of gratitude and also full of grief.
Some theoretical physicists currently think that matter does not exist. Particles are useful in theory, but not necessary. What exists is only the wave function. "He moves as water moves, and comes to me, Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be." No one knows what "really is". But I think (feel) that this poem describes best what might be. "He knows the speech of light (there's that wave function again) and makes it plain, A lively thing can come to life again." "He dances and the ground bears him away"
I am so grateful for the tenderness of boys.

They Say That Time Assuages - Sept. 2010

They say that time assuages

Time never did assuage

An actual suffering strengthens

As sinew do, with age

Time is a test of trouble

But not it's remedy

If such it prove, it prove too

There was no malady

Emily Dickinson

At night, when everyone else is sleeping, and I am lying awake, unable to sleep, and unable to think and unable to remember, I go through my catalogue of memorized poems and "work" on them. I parse out their meter, rhyme scheme, meaning - and use thinking about them to keep myself from thinking. If I search through my memories, or allow the longing for Hunter to speak itself in my mind, then I am done for. There will be no sleep, only this stretching out of time, and a kick in my gut of what I can only describe as 'horror'. It is a feeling so physical, and so utter and the pain that follows is also so physical and utter that I feel I have to STOP. My head and body ache, like a full body migraine - one part wanting the memories and images of my boy, and the other part in such sharp pain that everything closes down. And so I abandon the attempt again.

Time is always on my mind. What does it mean to be 'in time'? Does time exist? Or is it a construct for finite minds? "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." What does it mean to be 'outside time'? And is that where Hunter is? I spend all my time reading about quantum mechanics and it's implications from the viewpoint of various physicists. I read about Godel and the idea of a "World Without Time", about mysticism and mathematics - "The Loom of God". And what it really comes down to is this "I want my boy back." And I agree with Emily, time never did assuage. I can't bear to hear people talk about time and it's healing properties. Time cannot heal. Only 'outside time' can heal. Because the only healing to be had is in connection. "Only connect." And he is not here. He is outside time.

When people speak of healing I think they mean that the pain will become bearable. But the word 'healing' is so deceptive. It is not like a cut where the skin will knit back together, or a rash that some salve can heal. This is loss, - it is an amputation. The site of the wound may heal, but the limb will always be missing.

Also, what would it mean to "heal" from the loss of one's own child? His cells are still in my body, from before his birth. They were so hard won, these children. Twenty years earlier and I never would have had them. I used to say "They will never wonder if they were wanted. I have the medical records to prove it." And the misery and sickness of the pregnancies. And the worry, wondering if Molly would even be born alive, with a tumor on her lung. And at every roadblock, we had the best possible outcome. They were all born healthy, and Hunter was even born feet first. He loved how that distinguished him from his siblings. I would tell him the story how after Molly was born, he turned in the womb so that he was breach, but the doctor simply said "No problem! He's the 2nd twin", reaching his hand to pull Hunter out by his feet. It was the only birth that brought absolutely no pain, and still all the joy.

More than twenty years ago I went to visit Madeleine L'Engle at St. John the Divine, where she was a librarian, in New York. I lived close by and having read all her books, I took a very deep breath and wrote to her to ask for a visit. It was the most casual thing for her. She was as kind as you would think from her books. But I was still nervous and overly self-conscious and, knowing that her husband had recently died, I said something stupid about death - as if it were a kind of philosophical problem that didn't really exist. She smiled at me sweetly, (like an indulgent grandmother I suppose) and said "Oh, no. Death is terrible. Death is horrible." And I understood. Right then, I understood that God hates death. But mostly I remember her calmly smiling at me as she said it. The smile was, in a way, an invitation to wrestle with the hard stuff, - not pass over it with platitudes, or philosophy, or sloppy thinking, - or wishful thinking for that matter. Just like Emily in this poem. Time never did assuage. And I will always want my boy back

To blog or not to blog?

Might as well. Though it feels funny to me. Why would anyone care to read what I am thinking about? But then, why do I like reading other blogs? And the comments that follow... I like reading those as well. Still, it feels like self-aggrandizement. As if I think too highly of myself. Oooohhh. Maybe I do! Well, then. Reason enough for a blog. Nothing like the comments section to school me further in humility. Ok. I'll do it!