Nine

Old griefs are strange things.
When grief is raw and bleeding it stops you like a bullet in the chest.

It usually knocks you off your feet. You're so shocked, so hurt, that you have to just lie there stunned while your mind and body explore the pain. It can take you weeks, months, sometime years to get back up. And when you do you often just crouch there with your eyes wide with the fear that the terrible blow will only strike you down again.

But when it doesn't, or after a "decent interval", you're expected to straighten up, to adjust your clothing to decently hide the wound and "carry on"; get back to life, work, get moving along.

And I should warn you that your children will have no pity for you. Children are merciless little monsters, having no feeling for pain other than their own, no patience with others' ancient griefs.

So those old wounds, those bygone griefs, come with you. Still there, the torn heart no longer open and bleeding, the tears no longer falling, but kept within you a frightful treasure, an unwanted secret, that rends you silently like a cancer, dark and deep within. In the rush to keep up with the living you lose the grace to mourn your dead.


And so it was this morning, the day that should have been your ninth birthday, my dear.

I didn't cry for you this morning

I couldn't even stop for more than a moment and think about you. I did post a little momento mori about you to my Facebook page, a very postmodern sort of cenotaph to your passing, but then I had to hurry and get your younger brother and sister off to school, and daycare, and the business of a busy day.

And then I had to get to myself work to afford them food and shelter and all their other wants, the LEGOs and the Barbies, the purple dresses and the six 8 boots. So you got lost, your special day almost forgotten.

And what seems even crueller is that so little of you remains. A handful of pictures, your ashes in the wooden matryoshka doll on the shelf, a tiny heartache in your mother's chest, the fullness of unshed tears in my eyes.

I'm sorry we can't have a happy birthday for you today, lovie. I'm sorry that you will never grow more than one day old. I can't be sorry for you, whose little life is now beyond all sorrow and hurt. But I'm sorry for your mother's pain, and my empty arms that a big, strong girl should be filling with life.And I always will be.

Bryn Rose Gellar 3/1/2002-3/2/2002

"The shadows fallen of years are nine.
Since heaven grew seven times more divine.
With thy soul entering, and the dearth.
Of souls on earth.
Grew sevenfold sadder, wanting one
Whose light of life, quenched here and done,
Burns there eternal as the sun."
~Swinburne

What Dreams May Come

from Brian Turner's wonderful "Phantom Noise":

Illumination Rounds

Will the girl find a bed among stones?
Will the fighter find a trench?
-Saadi YoussefParachute flares drift in the burn time
of dream, their canopies deployed
in the sky over our bed. My lover

sleeps as Iraqi translators shuffle
in through the doorway- visiting
as loved ones might visit a hospital room,
ill at ease, each of them holding
their sawn-off heads in hand.

Wordless, they wait for me
to dress in my desert fatigues,
my aid pouch with painkillers

of little help in sewing the larynx back,
though I try anyway, suture by suture.

-----------

She finds me at 3am shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig deep.
We need to help them, if only with a coffin.I say, and if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shock or recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could shovel
beside me, straining with the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then she'd begin to see them - the war dead -
how they stand under the lime trees and ash,
papyrus and stone in their hands.She stares at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
stays the shovel I hold, to say -
We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

Orphan out of Carolina

I wanted to point you to a very good essay about adoption.

I've followed Lorrie over at Clueless In Carolina for years. She's that rare blogging combination of thoughtfulness and literacy that makes for genuinely good reading. She's hit a rough patch lately, and I hope things look up for her, but she's still a good read.

And her latest post was about adoption - her own.

I blog about adoption quite a bit. I have to; when a quarter of your public is adopted it kinda gets in your face. So it was painful to read;

"Today I realized for the first time that there is an unbridgeable gap between an adopted child and a person who can pick up the phone and call the people who brought them into the world and point to the bed where they were conceived. "I dread Father's Day," I told Roger tearfully. "I've lost two fathers."

And realize that there's really nothing you can say beyond that.

You know our story; we lost a daughter. Lorrie lost a father. Twice. Which is more heartrending, to lose the future, or to lose the past? I don't think that grief bothers keeping score.

I once wrote something about the effects of grief, and said;

"I realize anew reading "We must never limit the universe." from my friend's blog that what this old grief scar does do IS limit my universe. I'm perfectly functional, but I've taken the big wound. I can't ever again KNOW that something good is on the way. Because it was once and what arrived was pain and loss and sorrow. And nothing I could do - and I once foolishly said that anything that wanted to hurt my family would have to kill me first - was enough to stop the awful emptiness that still exists, a tiny universe of nothing but Dark Matter, in the locked room at the top of the stairs in the back of my head."

And now Lorrie knows that she, too, has that locked room where she can climb the stairs, and stand in the doorway, and see the face of Loss and say, welcome, old friend, old enemy.

Have you come to stay with me for a while?

I think you can sum up the entire business by remembering that every adoption begins with tragedy.

We Americans are especially bad at tragedy. We're the ultimate shiny happy people, and in a lot of ways that's a good thing. But not here.

I wish I had some words of wisdom or consolation for Lorrie. I don't. Some things are just pure grief.

The loss of her fathers, like all losses, like all griefs, can be softened by time and distance. As they are for all of us; the grieving parents, the harrowed soldiers, the bereft adoptees.But they will always be there, waiting, at the top of the stairs, waiting patiently to ask us if we want to sit with them on the top step and remember all the pain and heartache of the end of our yesterdays, and our tomorrows.