The Truth of It

I'm reading a book right now called The Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping with Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents, by Alexander Levy. In my family, we read books to figure things out. My father—a psychology professor, not a carpenter or contractor—built our house himself by, as he told me once, "reading a book about it." His philosophy was that you could pretty much learn anything you want to by reading books. When I was lamenting going to a state college because we couldn't afford anything better, his answer was, "You can learn whatever you want and need to anywhere that has a good library." So, in that tradition, when faced with incomprehensible thoughts, feelings, and even physical reactions to the death of my mother in April, I turn to books. This happens to be a pretty good one, written by a practicing psychologist who has lost both of his parents in recent years. Mostly what I'm learning so far is that I have no real control over how I react to this loss. No matter how many books I read! That's a hard one for me to accept, and it raises really interesting questions. (This is where my mind turns to scientific and philosophic curiosity to avoid feeling unorganizable pain.) Who am "I" if "I" have no control over my thoughts and feelings? What a strange and fascinating conundrum! Who is this person who lives in a continually running film loop of the last two weeks of my mother's life in the hospital in April while "I" go about my daily life in July? And who is the person going about daily life in July while "I" live in a continually running film loop of the last two weeks of my mother's life in April?

I find myself wanting to be in touch with people from my past, wanting to actually touch them, to physically connect with the Me I was when Mom was alive, I guess. Establish a continuous thread of identity. At Mom's memorial service, when I saw my foster sister, Anh, whom I hadn't seen in many years, when we hugged and I felt her living, breathing body sobbing against mine, I could feel the big hole where Mom used to be in our lives together. I need that physical reality of Mom's Gone-ness. My husband the theologian would say that I need to incarnate her death. That is the truth of it. And in doing that I will feel more incarnate myself in the world as it exists for me now. In this World-minus-Mom that I now live in, I feel ghostly. Shadowy. Living in coexistent, parallel, yet disconnected universes where a part of me deals with life today while another part is stuck at my mom's bedside in the Dansville hospital, holding her hand and watching her lips grow parched as she fights to hold on to this thing we know as Living that she loved for no particular reason except that she loved to be Alive. She wants me to be fully alive now, I know, to enjoy what she no longer can—not linger in the shadows of her dying days while Today slips by only half-lived.

A poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez comes to mind right now, a poem I understand—or, really, don't understand—in different ways each time I come back to it:

Yo no soy yo.
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo;
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces, olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
El que quedará en pie cuando yo muera.


As Robert Bly translates it:

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

That is the truth of it, I guess.