Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  257Lecture 26—The Rival Gods of the Cold War õWithin this bloc, the experience of Christians varied from nation to nation. This lecture will focus on just one of the Soviet satellite states: Poland. By looking at Poland, we can see how religious faith—in this case, Catholicism—served as a powerful counter-force against the collectivist and atheist ideology of 20 th -century Communist regimes. õKarol Wojtyla—who as Pope John Paul II would become the first pope from the Slavic world—was born in 1920 in a town about 30 miles southwest of Kraków. His father was a retired military officer. His mother, a schoolteacher who was chronically ill, died when he was a boy. So did his older brother, a doctor who caught scarlet fever from his patients. õWojtyla was a good student, and in 1938 went to university to study philosophy and Polish language. He also dabbled in theater and was known for his acting talent. But then World War II intervened, and the Germans marched into Poland. Wojtyla was shipped off to manual labor in a quarry and, later, a chemical factory. Most of his professors died in a concentration camp. His father died of a heart attack in 1941. õDuring these years, when he was basically alone in the world and just trying to survive the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla felt himself called to the priesthood. And though the Nazis had tried to shut down all religious schools, in 1942 he enrolled in an underground seminary. õBy the time Wojtyla was ordained in 1946, he was an orphan who had worked as essentially a slave laborer under a totalitarian regime. At seminary he threw himself into the study of philosophy, so even as a young priest he was equipped to understand the existential clash of the Cold War both at an intellectual level and, more importantly, with deep human empathy. õThe Catholic Church sent him to Rome to earn a doctorate at a pontifical university. In the years that followed he served as a parish priest in various Polish towns and taught ethics at Jagiellonian University. He worked his way up the ranks of the hierarchy, was appointed bishop in 1958, and played a major part in Vatican II.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, the young protagonist, Franck, witnesses an older man, Michel, drowning his boyfriend in a lake that serves as a local cruising spot. Shortly thereafter, he begins an affair with Michel. After the boyfriend’s body is found, the gay community that exists along the shore is shaken, thrown into emotional turmoil while simultaneously maintaining its collective routines. As an enterprising inspector begins to sniff around for answers, Franck finds himself lying for his new lover and trying to get closer to him. Franck’s decision to stay with the handsome, magnetic murderer is only a few notches exaggerated from a pretty relatable problem: an inability to find logical footing when you’re being knocked around by waves of lust, love, loneliness. Michel does not have the campy fabulousness of so many queer villains, and is in many ways far more sinister. He is attractive, charismatic, and morally empty. We are given almost no clues about his backstory, his murderous motivations. There is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen, their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. It tells a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter. As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough. Toward the end of Stranger by the Lake, the police inspector confronts Franck as he leaves the beach for the day. Franck is, literally, trapped in the beam of the officer’s headlights, and as the conversation progresses the metaphor is sharpened even more. “Don’t you find it odd we’ve only just found the body, and two days later everyone’s back cruising like nothing happened?” the officer asks him. Later in this scene, Franck will be visibly overcome with grief as the officer asks him to have compassion for the dead man, begs him to have a sense of self-preservation.13 But even in his grief, he is clear-eyed. “We can’t stop living,” he says.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The day after the woman from the Dream House breaks up with you for the second time, Nick calls you. He sounds jolly on the phone, explains that he’s coming through town on business, and could he swing by for a quick visit? You say sure, then hang up, then immediately begin scolding yourself. Not only are you not out to a man who thinks highly of Bill O’Reilly, but you’re a mess. You haven’t showered in days. You run around trying to throw yourself together, and an hour later you see his huge car chugging down the street. He gets out, waves to you, and starts up your sidewalk. He is a few feet away when you start sniffling uncontrollably. His face expands with concern. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Uncle Nick,” you say, “I am a lesbian, and my girlfriend just broke up with me.” Then the wrecking ball goes clear through the dam, and you begin to bawl. “Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way.” Everyone’s heart does not break in the same way, but you know what he means. You both go inside and sit down on the couch. For the next hour, he tells you stories about his various breakups—he’s been married three times—and gives you advice. “Join a club,” he says. “Take up a new hobby. What about boating? Do you like boating?” You laugh, and for the first time in what feels like a year, you smile. Dream House as MemoryYou spend the month after the breakup doing unofficial CrossFit with your friend Christa, who is brilliant and kind and pushes you. “You’re a natural athlete!” she says admiringly over and over again, and it is hilarious because you are so fat and the furthest possible thing from a natural athlete, but the year’s events have given you uncanny focus, and it’s true that you have been improving: you can now lightly jog a mile without stopping and deadlift two hundred pounds. One day, as you drag your aching body to the locker room, you see that you have nine missed calls. They are all from her, the woman from the Dream House, and there are voicemails to match. Suddenly the phone goes off again, vibrating like a maniacal insect, and you almost drop it on the floor. You sprint out to the parking lot. The whole drive home the phone is ringing, ringing. You run into the house where John is reading, and show him the phone.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Unexpected Kindness You have this really Republican uncle, Nick. Like, really, really Republican. Ann Coulter books on his coffee table, Fox News spewing technicolor paranoia into his living room, and a huge collection of guns that he insists on showing you because he knows it makes you uncomfortable. (You’ve never been able to explain to him the utter terror you felt the only time you shot a gun: an older guy you were crushing on took you out to a range and you both used a Glock to send old hard drives spinning to the dirt. You tried it because he’d said, “Most women are too small and slight to deal with this kind of kickback, but you’re strong and solid, so here you go.” You took the gun— because you were flattered by this assessment, because you wanted to sleep with him, because feminism—but then regretted it immediately. You were terrified; you felt like the gun was going to explode in your hand, kill both of you, and afterward you swore you’d never pick one up again. For a long time, that hunk of metal sat on your windowsill, sunlight streaming through the bullet hole. But when you moved you threw it away.) Nick lives in Wisconsin, and being in the Midwest you see him from time to time. You like him, despite yourself. He might represent everything you loathe, politically speaking, but he’s a giant teddy bear and he always calls you his “favorite Democrat,” even though you haven’t identified that way since college. The day after the woman from the Dream House breaks up with you for the second time, Nick calls you. He sounds jolly on the phone, explains that he’s coming through town on business, and could he swing by for a quick visit? You say sure, then hang up, then immediately begin scolding yourself. Not only are you not out to a man who thinks highly of Bill O’Reilly, but you’re a mess. You haven’t showered in days. You run around trying to throw yourself together, and an hour later you see his huge car chugging down the street. He gets out, waves to you, and starts up your sidewalk. He is a few feet away when you start sniffling uncontrollably. His face expands with concern. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Uncle Nick,” you say, “I am a lesbian, and my girlfriend just broke up with me.” Then the wrecking ball goes clear through the dam, and you begin to bawl. “Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way.” Everyone’s heart does not break in the same way, but you know what he means. You both go inside and sit down on the couch. For the next hour, he tells you stories about his various breakups—he’s been married three times—and gives you advice. “Join a club,” he says. “Take up a new hobby. What about boating? Do you like boating?” You laugh, and for the first time in what feels like a year, you smile.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  This intensity of emotion will fade, but each time we are reminded of the person we have lost, a small portion of that intensity will return. If we consider death as the crossing of a threshold that terrifies us in general, the experiences enumerated above are intimations of our own death in smaller doses. Separating from people we know, traveling in a strange land, clearly entering some new phase of life, all involve changes that cause us to look back at the past as if a part of us has died. In such moments, and during the more intense forms of grief from actual deaths, we notice a heightening of the senses and a deepening of our emotions. Thoughts of a different order come to us. We are more attentive. We can say that our experience of life is qualitatively different and charged, as if we temporarily became someone else. Of course, this alteration in our thinking, feeling, and senses will be strongest if we ourselves survive a brush with death. Nothing seems the same after such an experience. Let us call this the paradoxical death effect —these moments and encounters have the paradoxical result of making us feel more awake and alive. We can explain the paradoxical effect in the following way. For us humans, death is a source not only of fear but also of awkwardness. We are the only animal truly conscious of our impending mortality. In general, we owe our power as a species to our ability to think and reflect. But in this particular case, our thinking brings us nothing but misery. All we can see is the physical pain involved in dying, the separation from loved ones, and the uncertainty as to when such a moment might arrive. We do what we can to avoid the thought, to distract ourselves from the reality, but the awareness of death lies in the back of our minds and can never be completely shaken. Feeling the unconscious impulse to somehow soften the blow of our awareness, our earliest ancestors created a world of spirits, gods, and some concept of the afterlife. The belief in the afterlife helped mitigate the fear of death and even give it some appealing aspects. It could not eliminate the anxiety of separating from loved ones or lessen the physical pain involved, but it offered a profound psychological compensation for the anxieties we seemingly cannot shake. This effect was fortified by all of the elaborate and pleasing rituals that surrounded the passage to death. In the world today, our growing reasoning powers and knowledge of science have only made our awkwardness worse. Many of us can no longer believe in the concept of the afterlife with any conviction, but we are left with no compensations, with only the stark reality confronting us. We might try to put a brave face on this, to pretend we can accept this reality as adults, but we cannot erase our elemental fears so easily.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The little gray-eyed girls paddle and laugh. She pushes a spray of water into her sister’s face and her sister pushes one back. Their hair is shining against their heads. In the dimness of the hospital room, my aunt smokes and thinks. She doesn’t see their father next to the bed, or old Aunt Grace piddling around with the flower arrangements. She sees only the still form on the bed, the half-open mouth, the coppery wig. She yawns. Wendell’s stomach is out to here, she remembers, any day now. That’s one piece of good news. My mother sleeps silently while my aunt thinks. As the invisible hands tend to her, she dives and comes up, breaks free of the water. A few feet over a fish leaps again, high in the air. Her arms move lazily back and forth, holding her up, and as she watches, the fish is transformed. High above the water, it rises like a silver baton, presses itself against the blue August sky, and refuses to drop back down. Behind the Screen [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] I ’m looking at the backs of all their heads. They’re sitting on lawn chairs in the dusk and so am I, only their lawn chairs are on the lawn while mine is on the enclosed back porch. I have to look at the backs of their heads through the screen. We’re waiting for the fireworks to begin. My sister is wearing shorts, a midriff top, and all manner of jewelry — a pop-bead necklace, a Timex wristwatch, a mood ring, and a charm bracelet that makes a busy metallic rustle every time she moves her arm, which she does frequently. On the charm bracelet, between a high-stepping majorette and a sewing machine with movable parts, is a little silver book that opens like a locket to display The Teen Commandments. Engraved in infinitesimal letters: Don’t let your parents down, they brought you up; Choose a date who would make a good mate; and the famous At the first moment turn away from unclean thinking — at the first moment . It has such an urgent tone it forces you to think uncleanly. Right now my sister is sitting in a lawn chair waiting for it to get dark. Every few minutes she raises and lowers her right arm so the charm bracelet, which I covet, clanks up to her elbow and then slides slowly and sensuously back down to her wrist. She doesn’t bother turning around to see how I take this. She knows it’s killing me. They won’t let me off the porch because I’m having an allergy attack. A low whistling sound emanates from my chest whenever I breathe. I can put a little or a lot of force behind it, depending on my mood. I’m allergic to ragweed and thistles and marigolds and dandelions and daisies, so we’re all used to me being stuck on the porch while everyone else is having fun.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Modern Art That winter you go to the Brooklyn Museum, to an exhibition called Hide/Seek . You’re in duress, in the city against your will. You did not want to go to New York, even for a few days, but she insisted. You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief. Inside, you wander ahead of her, far ahead so you don’t have to feel her presence weighing on you like a pillow on the face. You find Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres, a Cuban American artist. When you first see the installation—a pile of candy wrapped in multicolored cellophane, tucked in a corner—you almost laugh. It is so strangely out of place in this space. But when you get closer and read the description, you understand: it is the weight of the artist’s late lover as he began to die of AIDS. Viewers should take a piece of candy, the description says, and at some point it will be replenished. Someone has been replenishing the lost ones since 1991. In 1991 you were five. You didn’t know you were queer. You were living in a Pennsylvania suburb and you didn’t know what AIDS was. You were muttering stories to yourself. You were resentful of your little brother and had newly welcomed a baby sister, of whom you were also resentful. You were so afraid of balloons you invented a device made of a soda bottle and straw that would keep the latex bladder from being sucked into your lungs. You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel. You were young. You didn’t know your mind could be a boon and a prison both; that someone could take its power and turn it against you. In the new days of 2012, as you stand in front of the pile of candy you feel a direct line to its hopelessness, rage, grief. You read the placard. “An act of communion.” You pick up one, spin the sweet from its wrapper, and put it in your mouth. At that moment, she appears next to you . “What are you doing?” she hisses. You gesture to the sign, the explanation. She doesn’t look. She gets so close to you it’s like she’s going to kiss your ear, except she’s berating you under her breath, a steady stream of rage and profanity that would be indistinguishable from sweet nothings to a nearby stranger. You can’t look at her. You can’t look away from Ross, who is also Untitled, who is also dead, who will also always be alive, immortal. You suck and suck and suck on the candy, which you’re realizing has no identifiable flavor beyond its sugar, and she’s still telling you you’re the worst, you’re worse than the worst, she can’t believe she brought you here. (This exhibit? This museum? This city? Her bed? You’ll never know.) The candy goes from pebble to ice chip, and then it’s gone—one more step toward Ross’s disintegration. One more step toward resurrection.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as the Pool of Tears You talk on the phone, but soon she stops picking up, stops responding to your texts. “If you don’t want me to worry,” you tell her when she finally answers, “if you want me to feel safe, you’re not doing a very good job.” Your body feels huge, swollen, as though it is pressed into the room’s corners and your limbs are growing out of the windows. “I don’t care,” she says, so softly that you know it’s true. “Are you still seeing her?” you ask. You cry and cry. 40 You cry into your phone, flood it with saltwater. It stops working. 41 So she breaks up with you over Skype instead. Her face is pinched and regretful. “I still want to be your friend,” she says. When it is over, you stare at your dark, dead phone; a rectangle of black glass. It grows in your hand, larger and larger, and you discover that, instead, you are shrinking. By the time the realization hits you, you are three feet tall. One foot. Six inches. And then, up to your chin in saltwater. You wonder if you have somehow fallen into the sea. “And in that case,” you think, “no one will come and get me.” You soon make out, though, that you are in the pool of tears that you had wept when you were nine feet high. 42 “I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” you say as you swim about, trying to find your way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.” 40 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C482, Taboo: weeping. 41 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C967, Valuable object turns to worthless, for breaking taboo. 42 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type A1012.1, Flood from tears.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through. Friday afternoon seminar, everyone is glazed over, listening as someone explains something unexplainable at the head of the long table. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the chairman, Dwight, is sitting in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns and walks back up the stairs and enters the meeting room again. Chris Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head. There is a loud popping sound and then blue smoke. Shan gets the second bullet in the forehead, the lenses of his glasses shatter. More smoke and the room rings with the popping. Bob Smith tries to crawl beneath the table. Gang Lu takes two steps, holds his arms straight out, and levels the gun with both hands. Bob looks up. The third bullet in the right hand, the fourth in the chest. Smoke. Elbows and legs, people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room. Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, dispelling spent cartridges and loading new ones. From the doorway of Dwight’s office: the fifth bullet in the head, the sixth strays, the seventh also in the head. A slumping. More smoke and ringing. Through the cloud an image comes forward — Bob Smith, hit in the chest, hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouched over Bob, loosening his clothes, talking to him. From where he lies, Bob can see his best friend still sitting upright in a chair, head thrown back at an unnatural angle. Everything is broken and red. The two young scientists leave the room at gunpoint. Bob closes his eyes. The eighth and ninth bullets in his head. As Bob dies, Chris Goertz’s body settles in his chair, a long sigh escapes his throat. Reload. Two more for Chris, one for Shan. Exit the building, cross two streets, run across the green, into building number two and upstairs. The administrator, Anne Cleary, is summoned from her office by the receptionist. She speaks to him for a few seconds, he produces the gun and shoots her in the face. The receptionist, a young student working as a temp, is just beginning to stand when he shoots her in the mouth. He dispels the spent cartridges in the stairwell, loads new ones. Reaches the top of the steps, looks around. Is disoriented suddenly. The ringing and the smoke and the dissatisfaction of not checking all the names off the list. A slamming and a running sound, the shout of police. He walks into an empty classroom, takes off his coat, folds it carefully and puts it over the back of the chair. Checks his watch; twelve minutes since it began.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “It wasn’t our fault he moved,” Wendell had explained, right before being swatted in the funeral-home foyer. Our grandfather had looked like a big, dead doll in a satin doll bed. We couldn’t stop staring, and then suddenly, simultaneously, got spooked and ran out of the room, squealing and holding on to each other. We stayed in the foyer for the rest of the night, greeting people and taking turns sliding the rug across the glossy floor. We were a mess by the end of the evening. Our dads have to sit in a special row of men. They’re going to carry the casket to the graveyard. We file past them without looking, and the music gets louder. The casket sits like an open suitcase up front. After we sit down in our wooden folding chairs all we can see is a nose and some glasses. That’s our grandpa up there, he won’t be hollering at us ever again for chewing on the collars of our dresses or for throwing hangers out the upstairs window. He won’t be calling us giggleboxes anymore. He doesn’t even know we’re all sitting here, listening to the music and the whispers. He is in our hearts now, which makes us feel uncomfortable. Wendell and I were separated as a precautionary measure; I can just see the tips of her black shoes. They have bows on them and mine have buckles. She is swinging hers a little bit so I start to swing mine a little bit too. This is how you get into trouble, so I quit after a minute and so does she. Pretty soon the music stops and my mother starts crying into her Kleenex. My aunt’s chin turns into a walnut, and then she’s crying too. Their dad is dead. Wendell puts her shoe on the back of the chair in front of her and slides it slowly down until it’s resting on the floor again. I do the same thing. We’re not being ornery, though. A lady starts singing a song and you can hear her breath. I can see only one inch of her face because she’s standing in front of the dads. It’s a song from Sunday school but she’s singing it slower than we do and she’s not making the hand motions. I do the hand motions myself, very small, barely moving, while she sings. Wendell’s mom leans over and tells me something. She wants me to sit on her lap. She has a nickname for me that nobody else calls me. She calls me Jody and everyone else calls me Jo. She’s not crying anymore, and her arms are holding me on her lap, against her good blue dress. It’s too tight in the armpits but you can’t tell from looking. My mom’s got Wendell. After a while everyone starts crying, except Uncle Evan, my grandma’s brother who always spits into a coffee cup and leaves it on the table for someone else to clean up.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them. . . . One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it. One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves . . . [a] dysentery tank in which the remains of a child floated.1 This account is shocking, horrible, and tragic. But why? Because people shouldn’t eat worms? Because people shouldn’t make piles of corpses? We answer yes to these questions because no one should be forced to live in conditions such as those at Bergen-Belsen. And yet we intuitively understand that the wrong being done to these prisoners—these people—was much more significant than just the physical conditions forced upon them. A concentration camp is designed to strip people of their humanity. It’s anti-human. And in the scriptures, anything that’s anti-human is anti-God. Genesis begins with God creating the world and then creating people “in his own image.”2 The Hebrew word for image here is tselem, and it has a specific cultural meaning.3 The stories of Genesis originated in ancient Near Eastern culture, where a king was said to rule in the image of a particular god. The famous King Tut is an Egyptian example of this. His full name was Tutankhamen, which is translated “the living image of [the god] Amon.” The king was seen as the embodiment of a particular god on earth. If you wanted to see what that god was like, you looked at that god’s king. The writer of Genesis makes it clear that in all of creation there is something different about humans.4 They aren’t God, and they aren’t going to become God, but in some distinct, intentional way, something of God has been placed in them. We reflect what God is like and who God is. A divine spark resides in every single human being.5 Everybody, everywhere. Bearers of the divine image.6

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  There is absolute silence, the clank and squeak of the hospital giving way for a moment as an angel passes over, wings beating. The instant passes and the hospital resumes itself, a cart bumps, a nurse calls out loudly, rudely, somewhere down the hall. In the room Coke seethes as I pour it into a glass. Where did you girls go? Why did both of you need to go at once, leaving me here by myself? I get a picture of her long ago, shopping, eating lunch in the mezzanine at McCabe’s, picking out school clothes. Tall and thin in a beautiful suit; lemon meringue pie and coffee. The slide changes and the tufted ears of tiny Mr. Larson click into view. Why did both of you have to go at once? I rise to the occasion. Now-now, I point out, it’s awful close to Christmas to be asking those kinds of questions. Her eyes move past me, over my head, and I feel suddenly the tepid breath of Barnelle. He’s a swashbuckler today, actually wearing one of those head things, like a doctor in the movies. It is a flat metallic disk connected to a band and he lifts it off and shoves it into the pocket of his suitcoat. The hair over the top of his head is a delicate auburn doily. He pats it down, using the palm of his hand, pushing the tattered strands back in place, willing them to stay there. He’s wearing a plastic Santa Claus face on his lapel. He smiles at her, he has always acted as though he loves her and regrets this. He acknowledges me with a tilt of the head, some kind of invisible language that works, lifts her wrist and counts the pulse, corpuscles stepping through from her hand to her arm, one by one, like soldiers heading back to camp. He finishes and says Hello, girls in a sweet, cheerful voice and then pulls the string on his Santa Claus. The nose lights up and beams across the bedcovers. Barnelle is sending us a signal, Santa’s nose twinkling like Mars. It’s four o’clock and I’m ready to do something else for a while. My legs want to walk, my eyes keep finding the window. “I saw Barn-door,” Linda announces. She is back, ready for her shift, standing in the doorway with snow melting on her coat collar. “He was climbing into his gold-plated Cadillac, hightailing it home.” Linda hates Barnelle with a rare enthusiasm, able to tick off his crimes on the fingers of both hands. She passes the plate where the rejected Christmas cookies used to be. “God, you’ll eat anything,” she remarks cheerfully. She’s leaving tracks all over the clean floor, in meandering circles. She’s been wrapping Christmas presents for her kids, I know, and her eyes look better. She crinkles them at me sympathetically. “Was Barn-door open?” she asks. This is rhetorical. Over on the bed the gray eyes are closed.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Each time this happens I stand her up, dry her off, put fresh blankets underneath her, carry the peed-on blankets down to the basement, stuff them into the washer and then into the dryer. By the time I bring them back upstairs they are needed again. The first few times this happened I found the dog trying to stand up, gazing with frantic concern at her own rear. I praised her and patted her head and gave her treats until she settled down. Now I know whenever it happens because I hear her tail thumping against the floor in anticipation of reward. In retraining her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load after load of laundry strangely satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog. I’m fine about the vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom. For now the boxes and the phone calls persuade me that things could turn around at any moment. The boxes are filled with thirteen years of his pack-rattedness: statistics textbooks that still harbor an air of desperation, smarmy suitcoats from the Goodwill, various old Halloween masks and one giant black papier-mâché thing that was supposed to be Elvis’s hair but didn’t turn out. A collection of ancient Rolling Stones T-shirts. You know he’s turning over a new leaf when he leaves the Rolling Stones behind. What I can’t take are the squirrels. They come alive at night, throwing terrible parties in the spare bedroom, making thumps and crashes. Occasionally a high-pitched squeal is heard amid bumps and the sound of scrabbling toenails. taken to sleeping downstairs, on the blue vinyl dog couch, the sheets slipping off, my skin stuck to the cushions. This is an affront to two of the dogs, who know the couch belongs to them; as soon as I settle in they creep up and find their places between my knees and elbows. I’m on the couch because the dog on the blanket gets worried at night. During the day she sleeps the catnappy sleep of the elderly, but when it gets dark her eyes open and she is agitated, trying to stand whenever I leave the room, settling down only when I’m next to her. We are in this together, the dying game, and I read for hours in the evening, one foot on her back, getting up only to open a new can of beer or take peed-on blankets to the basement. At some point I stretch out on the vinyl couch and close my eyes, one hand hanging down, touching her side. By morning the dog-arm has become a nerveless club that doesn’t come around until noon. My friends think I’m nuts. One night, for hours, the dog won’t lie down, stands braced on her rickety legs in the middle of the living room, looking at me and slowly wagging her tail.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I realize it took quite a bit of courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who think he’s the Antichrist. The dogs are crowded against him on the couch and he’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. He’s here to help me get through this. Me. He knows how awful this must be. Awful. He knows how I felt about Chris. Past tense. I have to put my hands over my face for a minute. We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me. When he looks over at me, it’s with an expression I’ve seen before. It’s the way he looks at the dog on the blanket. I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and stars and stars. The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside where the heat is. The house is empty and dim, full of dogs and cigarette butts. The collie has peed again. The television is flickering Special Report across the screen and I turn it off before the pictures appear. I bring blankets up, fresh and warm from the dryer. After all the commotion the living room feels cavernous and dead. A branch scrapes against the house and for a brief instant I feel a surge of hope. They might have come back. And I stand at the foot of the stairs staring up into the darkness, listening for the sounds of their little squirrel feet. Silence. No matter how much you miss them. They never come back once they’re gone. I wake her up three times between midnight and dawn. She doesn’t usually sleep this soundly but all the chaos and company in the house tonight have made her more tired than usual. The Lab wakes and drowsily begins licking her lower region. She stops and stares at me, trying to make out my face in the dark, then gives up and sleeps. The brown dog is flat on her back with her paws limp, wedged between me and the back of the couch. I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see when dawn starts to arrive. For now there are still planets and stars. Above the black branches of a maple is the dog star, Sirius, my personal favorite. The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon. When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently with my dog-arm. She rises slowly, faltering, and stands over me in the darkness. My peer, my colleague.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “I remember everything: the ring of the phone downstairs, my chenille bathrobe with rows of small pink and white tufts, the flopping of my fleece slippers as I went down the steps to the alcove next to the kitchen where the telephone hung on the wall, the wooden banister so smooth to my hand. I remember thinking that the wood had been worn smooth by all the Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates before me. And then that man’s voice, that stranger trying to be kind as he told me that Allen was dead. I sat for hours staring out the beveled glass of the alcove window. I can still see the rainbow-colored mounds of sooty snow in the side yard.” Countless times during therapy we were to return to the dream of the two texts and the meaning of The Death of Innocence. The loss of her brother marked her for life. Death exploded her innocence forever. Gone were the myths of childhood: justice, predictability, a benevolent deity, a natural order of things, protecting parents, the safety of home. Alone and unshielded against the capriciousness of existence, Irene struggled to attain safety. Allen might have survived, she believed, if he had had the right emergency medical treatment. Medicine beckoned—it offered the only hope of mastery over death, and at Allen’s funeral she suddenly decided to apply to medical school and become a surgeon. Another decision Irene made in the wake of Allen’s death was to have enormous implications for our work in therapy. “I figured out a way to avoid ever getting hurt again: I would never again have such a loss if I never let anyone matter to me.” “How did that decision play out in your life?” “For the next ten years I made no attachments, took no chances. I knew a lot of men, but I broke things off quickly—before they got serious and before I felt anything.” “But then something changed. You married. How did that come about?” “I’ve known Jack since the fourth grade and somehow had always thought he would be the one. Even when he disappeared from my life and married someone else, I knew he’d be back. My brother knew and respected him. I guess you could say my brother anointed Jack.” “So Allen’s approval of Jack permitted you to take the risk of marrying?” “It wasn’t that simple. It took a long, long time, and even then I refused to marry Jack until he promised not to die young on me.” I appreciated Irene’s irony and looked up with a grin to gather in her smile in return. But there was no smile. Irene was not being ironic; she was stone serious.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I Momma and the Meaning of Life Dusk. Perhaps I am dying. Sinister shapes surround my bed: cardiac monitors, oxygen canisters, dripping intravenous bottles, coils of plastic tubing— the entrails of death. Closing my lids, I glide into darkness. But then, springing from my bed, I dart out of the hospital room smack into the bright, sunlit Glen Echo Amusement Park, where, in decades past, I spent many summer Sundays. I hear carousel music. I breathe in the moist, caramelized fragrance of sticky popcorn and apples. And I walk straight ahead —not hesitating at the Polar Bear Frozen Custard stand or the double-dip roller coaster or the Ferris wheel—to take my place in the ticket line for the House of Horrors. My fare paid, I wait as the next cart swivels around the corner and clanks to a halt in front of me. After stepping in and pulling down the guard rail to lock myself snugly into place, I take one last look about me—and there, in the midst of a small group of onlookers, I see her. I wave with both arms and call, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Momma! Momma!” Just then the cart lurches forward and strikes the double doors, which swing open to reveal a black gaping maw. I lean back as far as I can and, before being swallowed by the darkness, call again, “Momma! How’d I do, Momma? How’d I do?” Even as I lift my head from the pillow and try to shake off the dream, the words clot in my throat: “How’d I do, Momma? Momma, how’d I do?” But Momma is six feet under. Stone-cold dead for ten years now in a plain pine casket in an Anacostia cemetery outside Washington, D.C. What is left of her? Only bones, I guess. No doubt the microbes have polished off every scrap of flesh. Maybe some strands of thin gray hair remain—maybe some glistening streaks of cartilage cling to the ends of larger bones, the femur and the tibia. And oh yes, the ring. Nestled somewhere in bone dust must be the thin silver filigree wedding ring my father bought on Hester Street shortly after they arrived in New York, steerage class, from the Russian shtetl half a world away. Yes, long gone. Ten years. Croaked and decayed. Nothing but hair, cartilage, bones, a silver filigree wedding ring. And her image lurking in my memories and dreams. Why do I wave to Momma in my dream? I stopped waving years ago. How many? Maybe decades. Perhaps it was that afternoon over half a century ago, when I was eight and she took me to the Sylvan, the neighborhood movie theater around the corner from my father’s store.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Carol fixes her shirt, lights one cigarette off another, and I wave good-bye to them from the alley behind my house. Through the bushes, up the back walk, still humming. In the kitchen, two cookies and a long drink of water, up the stairs and into the bedroom. Across the hall my parents sleep peacefully behind their closed door, innocent as children. On the way back from Florida I drive a hundred miles out of my way in order to visit my mother’s grave. Small Illinois town where she grew up; the gas station, body shop, and ice cream parlor are owned by my uncles, on the edge of town a small barren cemetery is full of my dead relatives. My mother’s tombstone is dark granite, on either side of it are pink geraniums, planted by my father. In front, beneath her name, is a coffee can full of wildflowers withering in the sun. Someone has been here before me, an aunt probably, driving past on her way into town from one of the nearby farms. The withering flowers prompt a maudlin scene in which I am both the actor and the audience. A red-tailed hawk circles overhead, a tractor chugs by on the highway, holding up a line of cars. A daughter weeps in the afternoon sunlight, a mother remains silent beneath a load of dirt. Hours later my street appears in front of me, a tall catalpa tree, a child’s scooter, and then the driveway where the husband stands, just off his bike, home from work. “Hi,” he says cordially, putting an arm across my shoulders. And then, “I have a meeting tonight.” His hand looks as white as paste next to my Florida arm. Inside, he goes into the study and closes the door. I hear the long beep of the answering machine as he listens to the messages and then erases them. In bed that night I remain stationary as he toils in the darkness. Afterward, there is silence and the sound of breathing. Next to the bed, my big collie whines in her sleep. Finally, he says quietly, with something in his voice I don’t recognize, “It’s good you’re back.” Tick, tock. Breathe in, breathe out. There is no mercy at this hour of the night, and my own voice sounds strange in the darkness. I’m not , is what I tell him. He rolls over and puts his face in the pillow. Everywhere you turn these days there’s someone crying. Billboards, fence posts, and cows go by at seventy miles an hour, a van honks as we pass it and someone gives us the finger in a friendly manner. We’re caravaning our way to the rock quarries for a swimming party. Three cars and two vans are full of people and beer; I’m riding on back of a motorcycle, driven by my unofficial date, a charming madman named Wally.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I stop at a department store and join the current of tinkling people, Christmas shoppers. Music rains down and a clerk comes forward to ask if she can help. She has lost the heel to one pump and is trying to compensate by walking on tiptoe with that foot. She leads me to lingerie and begins thumbing patiently through nightgowns on a rack, showing me things. I tell her that it needs to be worn beneath a blouse. This confuses her and she thinks wearily for a second, one finger to her lip, one heel up in thin air. She produces an expensive long-underwear shirt made of raw silk, a tiny pink satin flower on the scooped neckline. I buy it even though I’m not sure anymore why I’m here, what I’m doing. I decide I might as well go back, only two days left. I run into Barnelle in the main lobby, he’s got his small son with him. I feel bad that he can’t get any rest, can’t be left alone for five minutes. He speaks frankly to me while his son attempts to tie his shoes together. He says quite honestly that he has gotten very attached to her and I say I have too, actually. He hugs me then, hard, his arms like a big pair of forceps. He lets go and one hand scans his head, searching out the wandering hairs, laying them flat. I’ve seen him on a bench before, reading X rays and shaking his head, biting his nails. He bends down now and unties the laces before he takes a step, his son disappointed but philosophical. There are Christmas presents waiting at home. The room is darkening, Linda is asleep in the chair, knees drawn up like a shield, hands circling her stockinged feet. I can’t tell what’s happening on the bed until I turn on the light. Her eyes are opened wide, frightened, helpless. You left me, you girls, and here I am in the dark! Darkness has a personality now, a power. I understand this very well, quilted satin pressing down in the velvet blackness, brushing the nose, the face. I turn on all the lights but Linda continues to sleep soundly until I bump her chair with my foot. She stretches her legs out and groans, gives me a dirty look, and I give her one back. I hold two fingers up to remind her of how much longer she needs to keep this up, to pay attention. She holds up one finger, guess which one, to remind me of who’s the oldest, who’s the boss. I would love more than anything to slap her. I go to the cafeteria for a strawberry shake instead, which I can eat in front of her. On the way back up I land in an elevator with ten Christmas carolers.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  He will go through two more rooms, down a set of stairs to a place where she lies. While we linger, rubbing our hands and whispering to each other, the grandson who is minding us watches the wall and chews gum. At this moment we don’t know that downstairs he is working magic, that he will present to us a woman who looks rested. That’s how I will get to see her last, in her pale gray wool suit and pink blouse, her glasses resting on her nose as though she’s just dropped off for a minute; her cheeks will be okay again. The clothes will fit perfectly, as though she hadn’t lost a pound. Before the crowd arrives, when it’s just me and my sister and an aunt, he will reach in his pocket and bring forth the bottle of pins, half gone. Her hands are the only wrong thing. They look strange to me and I can’t figure out why until Linda picks up my hand and shows me: Her wedding ring is on my finger; I forgot she gave it to me. The hands begin to look more normal to me now, and the silence of the room gives way to the breathing of the sisters, the coldness of the kissed hands, and the empty air that says You girls, you girls. Out There It isn’t even eight A.M. and I’m hot. My rear end is welded to the seat just like it was yesterday. I’m fifty miles from the motel and about a thousand and a half from home, in a little white Mazda with 140,000 miles on it and no rust. I’m all alone in Alabama, with only a cooler and a tape deck for company. It’s already in the high 80s. Yesterday, coming up from the keys through Florida, I had a day-long anxiety attack that I decided last night was really heat prostration. I was a cinder with a brain; I was actually whimpering. I kept thinking I saw alligators at the edge of the highway. There were about four hundred exploded armadillos, too, but I got used to them. They were real, and real dead. The alligators weren’t real or dead, but they may have been after me. I’m running away from running away from home. I bolted four weeks ago, leaving my husband to tend the dogs and tool around town on his bicycle. He doesn’t love me anymore, it’s both trite and true. He does love himself, though. He’s begun wearing cologne and staring into the mirror for long minutes, trying out smiles. He’s become a politician. After thirteen years he came to realize that the more successful he got, the less he loved me. That’s how he put it, late one night. He won that screaming match. He said, gently and sadly, “I feel sort of embarrassed of you.” I said, “Of what? The way I look?

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I tell Stella what I’ve told many people who are cherished spouses but famished lovers: “You know he loves you; you’ve never doubted that; and that’s why you’ve stayed all these years. What hurts so much is that you’ve never felt wanted by him. You feel that it’s all on you to make it happen, and indeed it is. You’ve forfeited sensual complicity for emotional security. It’s a cruel bargain.” Like a glacier suddenly melting, tears roll down Stella’s face. They speak volumes about the longing and rejection she’s lived with for so long. It’s virtually impossible not to take such repeated denial personally, to see it as proof that one is undesirable, and to slip into self-doubt. To James I say, “Love and desire are not the same. Cozy is not the same as sexy. Your wife knows you love her. What she wants is to feel desired by you. She wants to know your hunger, to taste the delicate flavors of your craving, and to see it as a match for her own. Your inability to let go, to surrender to your own hedonistic designs, is infuriating to her. Your passivity is irritating, and your considerateness is the opposite of her fantasy of unrestrained rapture. Your lustiness would be an open endorsement for her own ardor. It’s hard to let go with someone who doesn’t.” The masturbation experiment was only a partial success—it went so-so, as these things sometimes do, but there was no dramatic transformation. James’s self-consciousness got the better of him. He had always marshaled masturbation as a private pleasure, and he had no desire to share it. But what happened a few days later was a real turning point. James and Stella had a row. She was upset, convinced that things would never change. His first impulse was to hold her, but he was afraid it wasn’t what she wanted. She seemed so angry with him. But he pushed through his awkwardness and held her anyway. Though she wasn’t responsive at first, he maintained his embrace. In the past, James had always retreated, focusing solely on her cues for readiness. He was organized by her. This time, he made his own choice, laid claim to his own feelings, and was surprisingly aroused. He rubbed her back, and she began to calm down. She knew he was there, and that he could contain her. He could withstand her intensity. One intensity dominoed another, and this led to what they both recounted separately as “wonderful lovemaking.” Theirs wasn’t an ecstatic fulfillment; rather, they reveled in a quiet passion, the simple understanding of two bodies reunited after a long absence.