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 Wild (2012)

  I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap. I called everyone who might know where my brother was. He was drinking a lot, some said. Yes, it was true, said others, he’d been hanging out with a girl from St. Cloud named Sue. At midnight the phone rang and I told him that this was it. I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. For the first time, I saw that he’d become a man and yet also I could see what a little boy he was. My little boy, the one I’d half mothered all of my life, having no choice but to help my mom all those times she’d been away at work. Karen and I were three years apart, but we’d been raised as if we were practically twins, the two of us equally in charge of Leif as kids. “I can’t do this,” he kept repeating through his tears. “I can’t live without Mom. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” “We have to,” I replied, though I couldn’t believe it myself. We lay together in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side, we drifted off to sleep. I woke a few hours later and, before waking Leif, fed the animals and loaded bags full of food we could eat during our vigil at the hospital. By eight o’clock we were on our way to Duluth, my brother driving our mother’s car too fast while U2’s Joshua Tree blasted out of the speakers. We listened intently to the music without talking, the low sun cutting brightly into the snow on the sides of the road. When we reached our mother’s room at the hospital, we saw a sign on her closed door instructing us to check in at the nurse’s station before entering. This was a new thing, but I assumed it was only a procedural matter. A nurse approached us in the hallway as we walked toward the station, and before I spoke she said, “We have ice on her eyes. She wanted to donate her corneas, so we need to keep the ice—” “What?” I said with such intensity that she jumped.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  By severe oppression under Trajan and Hadrian, the prohibition of circumcision, and the desecration of Jerusalem by the idolatry of the pagans, the Jews were provoked to a new and powerful insurrection (A.D. 132–135). A pseudo-Messiah, Bar-Cochba (son of the stars, Num. 24:17), afterwards called Bar-Cosiba (son of falsehood), put himself at the head of the rebels, and caused all the Christians who would not join him to be most cruelly murdered. But the false prophet was defeated by Hadrian’s general in 135, more than half a million of Jews were slaughtered after a desperate resistance, immense numbers sold into slavery, 985 villages and 50 fortresses levelled to the ground, nearly all Palestine laid waste, Jerusalem again destroyed, and a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, erected on its ruins, with an image of Jupiter and a temple of Venus. The coins of Aelia Capitolina bear the images of Jupiter Capitolinus, Bacchus, Serapis, Astarte. Thus the native soil of the venerable religion of the Old Testament was ploughed up, and idolatry planted on it. The Jews were forbidden to visit the holy spot of their former metropolis upon pain of death.18 Only on the anniversary of the destruction were they allowed to behold and bewail it from a distance. The prohibition was continued under Christian emperors to their disgrace. Julian the Apostate, from hatred of the Christians, allowed and encouraged them to rebuild the temple, but in vain. Jerome, who spent the rest of his life in monastic retirement at Bethlehem (d. 419), informs us in pathetic words that in his day old Jewish men and women, "in corporibus et in habitu suo iram a Domini demonstrantes," had to buy from the Roman watch the privilege of weeping and lamenting over the ruins from mount Olivet in sight of the cross, "ut qui quondam emerant sanguinem Christi, emant lacrymas suas, et ne fletus quidem i eis gratuitus sit."19 The same sad privilege the Jews now enjoy under Turkish rule, not only once a year, but every Friday beneath the very walls of the Temple, now replaced by the Mosque of Omar.20 The Talmud.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They walked together, and the world smiled to see it! They embraced on the street, and strangers were glad! While all the time I lived pale as a worm, cast out from pleasure, from comfort and ease.I rose from the bath, all heedless of the spilling water, and took up the photograph again; but this time I crushed it. I gave a cry, I paced the floor: but it was not with wretchedness that I paced, it was as if to try out new limbs, to feel my whole self shift and snap and tingle with life. I hauled open the window of my room, and leaned out into the dark - into the never-quite-dark of the London night, with its sounds and its scents that, for so long, I had been shut from. I thought, I will go out into the world again; I will go back into the city - they have kept me from it long enough!But oh! how terrible it was, making my way into the streets next morning - how busy I found them, how dirty and crowded and dazzling and loud! I had lived for a year and a half in London, and called it my own. But when I walked in it before, it was with Kitty or Walter; often, indeed, we had not walked at all, but taken carriages and cabs. Now, for all that I had borrowed a hat and a jacket of Mary’s to make me seemly, I felt as though I might as well be stumbling through Clerkenwell in no clothes at all. Part of it was my nervous fear that I would turn a corner and see a face I knew, a face to remind me of my old life, or - worst of all - Kitty’s face, tilted and smiling as she walked on Walter’s arm. This fear made me falter and flinch, and so I was jostled worse than ever, and had curses thrown at me. The curses seemed as sharp as nettle-stings, and set me trembling.Then again, I was stared at and called after - and twice or thrice seized and stroked and pinched - by men. This, too, had not happened in my old life; perhaps, indeed, if I had had a baby or a bundle on me now, and was walking purposefully or with my gaze fixed low, they might have let me pass untroubled. But, as I have said, I walked fitfully, blinking at the traffic about me; and such a girl, I suppose, is a kind of invitation to sport and dalliance ...The stares and the strokings affected me like the curses: they made me shake. I returned to Mrs Best’s and turned the key in my door; then I lay upon my rancid mattress and shivered and wept. I had thought myself brilliant with new life and promise, but the streets that I thought would welcome me had only cast me back into my former misery.

• From Wild (2012)

  I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran to my mother’s room, my brother right behind me. When I opened the door, Eddie stood and came for us with his arms outstretched, but I swerved away and dove for my mom. Her arms lay waxen at her sides, yellow and white and black and blue, the needles and tubes removed. Her eyes were covered by two surgical gloves packed with ice, their fat fingers lolling clownishly across her face. When I grabbed her, the gloves slid off. Bouncing onto the bed, then onto the floor. I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal. She’d been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more. I dreamed of her incessantly. In the dreams I was always with her when she died. It was me who would kill her. Again and again and again. She commanded me to do it, and each time I would get down on my knees and cry, begging her not to make me, but she would not relent, and each time, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard and poured gasoline over her head, then lit her on fire. I made her run down the dirt road that passed by the house we’d built and then ran her over with my truck. I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. I took a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it, slow and hard and sad. I forced her into a hole I’d dug and kicked dirt and stones on top of her and buried her alive. These dreams were not surreal. They took place in plain, ordinary light. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the umbrellas. I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away. Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

• From Bold Move

  So, I taught this trick to Filomena and Ted, and they were able to implement it successfully. Unfortunately, by the time we started to implement the opposite action plan for Filomena, her relationship with Ted was already fraying and, before long, Ted broke up with her. Filomena mentioned to me that she felt as if the damage to the relationship had been done and no matter how much she tried, Ted still felt wary around her. Filomena was devastated at first, often crying in my office and saying things like, “If I had just known this stuff earlier, I could have saved the relationship.” We talked a lot about the fact that our brains always want to make sense of things and come up with one conclusion or another to minimize dissonance, so it made sense that she wanted to blame herself. And she wasn’t wrong: I agreed with her that not knowing her avoidance pattern certainly made the relationship challenging. Yet I often remind my clients who find themselves in the midst of romantic turmoil that it really takes two to tango, and in this case, Ted inevitably had a role in the breakup as well. Filomena continued to work on opposite action when her fear of abandonment would arrive, including with her parents. And so it was with some delight that I recently received an email from Filomena, in which she wrote that she is now happily married with a newborn. From what she shared with me, her dating life was challenging for a while, but she was finally able to break her own avoidance pattern and came out the other side truly happy and (finally) comfortable in a romantic relationship. Oliver’s Opposite Action PlanAs for fiery Oliver, most of his reactions were triggered by feelings of anger, and he would go from zero to sixty in seconds before exploding. When it comes to anger, DBT teaches a clear plan of opposite action involving a few different methods. One method is the simplest: you can just avoid the person you are angry with until the anger passes. In other words, as soon as Oliver felt anger toward Martha for making a mistake at work, his opposite action would be to stay away from her—instead of engaging in a pointless and hurtful verbal attack—until he was no longer in amygdala hijack. Sometimes this is too hard for the client, and instead they could take a time-out, where they substitute “go shriek at so-and-so” with “take a walk around the block.” Whatever it is, I would recommend that you have a plan in place before you find yourself on the brink of exploding into anger.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  THE CONCEPTION OF GOD l8l tion that all who aresaved at all will enjoy an equal bliss. Purgatory was a great balancer and equalizer.) Finally, Christianity has taught that God allots suffering with wise and loving intent, tempering it according to our strength, relieving it in response to our prayer, and using it to chasten our pride, towin us from earthliness to himself, and to prepare us for heaven. This interpretation does notassert the justice of every suffering, taken by itself, but doesmaintainits loving intention. All these are powerful and comforting considerations. But they areshaken by the bulk of the unjust suffering in sight of the modern mind. These Christian ideas are largely true as long as welook at a normal village com- munity and its individuals and families. But they are jarred by mass disasters. The optimism of the age of rationalism wasshaken by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, when 30,000 people were killed together, just and unjust. TheWar has deeply affected the religious assurance of our own time, and will lessen itstill more when the ex- citement is over and theaftermath of innocent suffering becomes clear. But that impression of undeserved mass misery which the war has brought home tothe thought- less, has long been weighing on allwho understood the socialconditions ofour civilization. The sufferings of a single righteous mancould deeply move the psalmists or the poet of Job. To-day entire social classes sit inthe ashes and challenge the justice of the God who has af- flictedthem by fathering the present social system. The moral and religious problem of suffering has entered on a new stage with the awakening of the social conscious- ness and the spread of social knowledge.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Grief is its own form of prayer. It might have words, it might not. It might be expressed toward God, or it might simply be the overflow of a broken heart. God cares about our grief. He sees it and hears it, and He weeps with us. David wrote, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). God doesn’t wait for an invitation to draw close. Like a parent hearing the cry of a hurt child, He comes to us in our time of need. That is good because prayer can be difficult in times of grief. We might feel like God himself is to blame for our suffering, that He let us down instead of saving us. We can be so overwhelmed that we are hardly able to put words together. We often come to know God best in grief. The distractions and superficial things fade away, and we are left with the knowledge that God is real, and He is with us, and He cares. Nothing else makes sense, and we can’t even explain what we know about God. All we know is that His presence and peace fill our hearts, fill the room, fill our day. If you are going through something difficult and don’t feel like praying, that’s okay. Don’t put yourself under pressure to act spiritual or pretend to have faith. Your grief is a prayer, and your sorrow is a cry to God. Just let Him love you. Let Him bring you peace and comfort. It’s what He does best. PRAYER IS REST A third way that prayer puts us into the mystery of God is by bringing us to a place of rest. That might seem odd at first because “not knowing” seems like it should produce unease and anxiety, not rest. When we embrace the mystery of God, though, we discover the rest that comes from simply letting Him be God. Have you ever watched a movie with someone who can’t handle not knowing what is about to happen? Maybe it’s one of those movies where the screenwriter purposefully makes things confusing, and the loose ends don’t get tied up until the end. But your friend can’t appreciate that artistic choice, so they pepper you with questions throughout the movie. As if you know any better than they do about what is going on. Finally, you snarl semi-seriously, “Just be quiet and enjoy the movie. It’ll make sense later, I promise.”

• From Wild (2012)

  The last couple of days of her life, my mother was not so much high as down under. She was on a morphine drip by then, a clear bag of liquid flowing slowly down a tube that was taped to her wrist. When she woke, she’d say, “Oh, oh.” Or she’d let out a sad gulp of air. She’d look at me, and there would be a flash of love. Other times she’d roll back into sleep as if I were not there. Sometimes when my mother woke she did not know where she was. She demanded an enchilada and then some applesauce. She believed that all the animals she’d ever loved were in the room with her—and there had been a lot. She’d say, “That horse darn near stepped on me,” and look around for it accusingly, or her hands would move to stroke an invisible cat that lay at her hip. During this time I wanted my mother to say to me that I had been the best daughter in the world. I did not want to want this, but I did, inexplicably, as if I had a great fever that could be cooled only by those words. I went so far as to ask her directly, “Have I been the best daughter in the world?” She said yes, I had, of course. But this was not enough. I wanted those words to knit together in my mother’s mind and for them to be delivered, fresh, to me. I was ravenous for love. [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She didn’t have time to get skinny. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks. From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest too. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I’d catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon. “A room with a view!” my mother exclaimed, though she was too weak to rise and see the lake herself. And then more quietly she said: “All of my life I’ve waited for a room with a view.” She wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take her from the hospital and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had brought from home, one she’d sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing. “Get that out of here,” she growled savagely, and then kicked her legs like a swimmer to make it go away.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He hesitated ; I kicked at his ankle with my foot until he stepped away.‘You are not yourself, Nan -’‘Get out!’‘I am afraid to leave you -’‘Get out!’He flinched. ‘I shall go beyond the door - no further.’ Then he looked at Kitty, and when she nodded he left, closing the door behind him very gently.There was a silence, broken only by the sound of my ragged breathing, and Kitty’s gentle weeping: just so had I seen my sister weep, three days before. Nothing that Kitty ever did was good! she had said. I placed my cheek upon the counterpane where it covered Kitty’s thighs, and closed my eyes.‘You made me think he was your friend,’ I said. ‘And then you made me think he didn’t care for you, because of us.’‘I didn’t know what else to do. He was only my friend; and then, and then-’‘To think of you and him - for all that time -’‘It wasn’t what you think, before last night.’‘I don’t believe you.’‘Oh Nan, it’s true, I swear! Before last night - how could there have been anything? - before last night, there was only talk and - kisses.’Before last night ... Before last night I had been glad, beloved, content, secure: before last night I had known myself so full of love and desire I thought I should die of it! At Kitty’s words I saw that the pain of my love was not a tenth, not a hundredth, not a thousandth part of the pain I should suffer, at her hands, now.I opened my eyes. Kitty herself looked ill and frightened. I said, ‘And the - kisses: when did they start?’ But even as I asked it, I guessed the answer: ‘That night, at Deacon’s ...’She hesitated - then nodded; and I saw it all again, and understood it all: the awkwardness, the silences, the letters. I had pitied Walter - pitied him! When all the time it had been I who was the fool; when all the time they had been meeting, whispering together, caressing ...The thought was a torment to me. Walter was our friend - mine, as well as hers. I knew he loved her, but - he seemed so old, so uncle-ish, still. Could she ever, really, have brought herself to want to lie with him? It was as if I had caught her in bed with my own father!I began, once more, to weep. ‘How could you?’ I said through my tears: I sounded like a stage husband in some penny gaff. ‘How could you?’ Beneath the blankets I felt her squirm.‘I didn’t like to do it!’ she said miserably. ‘At times I could hardly bear it -’‘I thought you loved me! You said that you loved me!’‘I do love you!

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I looked at her, and at Cyril — at his flushed and sleeping face, with its delicate lashes and its jutting pink lip. I said, with a kind of creeping dread: ‘And then ... ?’She blinked. ‘And then - well, then she died. She was too slight, the confinement was a hard one; and she died. We couldn’t even find a midwife who would see to her, because she was unmarried - in the end we had to bring a woman in from Islington, someone who didn’t know us, and say that she was Ralph’s wife. The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn’t let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !”‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she’d begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn’t be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -’Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile.‘I wish I’d known,’ I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian’s death. There had been Florence’s strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother’s gentle forbearance, her friends’ concern.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I still remember the counselor’s name. Dr. Akudagawa. I remember how I had to stay with friends of my parents when the three of them abandoned me for sessions. How my father never went into the basement. How she rarely came up. How my sister got closer and closer to the final act of leaving for college: exeunt daughter, stage left. How my father’s rage came to live in the house for good. How I would be what was left of her, when she gave me a piece of her hair as a keepsake. How my father’s eyes would turn. This is Not About my Sister THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT MY SISTER. BUT IF IT WERE, I’d tell you again that for two years before she could leave our Oedipal household she carried razor blades in her purse. I’d tell you how her colon was irrevocably messed up - how as a child I sat in the bathroom with her and held her hand every time she tried to poo. How she squeezed my little girl hand so tight I thought it might be crushed. Because it hurt that bad to shit. I’d tell you how she was born with a wandering eye, and what the Dr. who later delivered me wrote about what that might mean for infants like her - how to watch for it as a sign of danger in a child. How fathers or uncles or grandfathers might have had a hand in this particular kind of eye disorder - in certain sexual abuse cases - a penis coming too close to the still developing eyes of a child. I’d tell you how, in the end, my sister replaced my mother and father in my mind and heart, how we created a union of survival that means we are both still alive. If this book were about my sister, I’d tell you how she lived past daughter. And I’d show you a picture. A Simca station wagon. Maybe white. Maybe wood paneling. My father loved the Northwest. He loved to explore the mountains and rivers and lakes. He loved to fish and camp and hike. But his wife had a misshapen leg not good for walking and he had two daughters instead of sons, so his disappointment always came with us everywhere we went. We could never hike far enough. Never carry enough weight. Never go as deeply into the wilderness. We couldn’t fish right. We had to pee sitting down and we needed toilet paper. A crippled wife and two daughters. We couldn’t even breathe right. Ever. The Christmas I was four and my sister was 12 we drove and drove. From I-5 to Puyallup. Past Enumclaw. East on highway 7 to Elbe. Onto Highway 706 east through Ashford to Alexander’s. Then there is the entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park. I have driven it many times as an adult. That’s how I remember the path. Or so I tell myself.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me - there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory - but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear. AFTER THE STILLBIRTH, the words “born dead” lived in me for months and months. To the people around me I just looked … more sad than anyone could bear. People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us. They’d accidentally say stupid things to me, like “I’m sure you’ll have another soon,” or they would talk to me looking slightly over my head. Anything to avoid the sadness of my skin. One morning my sister heard me sobbing in the shower. She pulled the curtain back, looked at me holding my empty gutted belly, and stepped inside to embrace me. Fully clothed. We stayed like that for about 20 minutes I think. Possibly the most tender thing anyone has ever done for me in my entire life. I WAS BORN cesarean. Because one of my mother’s legs was six inches shorter than the other, her hips were tilted. Gravely. Doctors told her she could not have children. I don’t know whether to admire the ferocity of her will for deciding to have my sister and me, or to wonder what kind of woman would risk killing her own infants - heads crushed by the tilted pelvis - before they could be born. My mother never believed she was “crippled.” My mother brought my sister and me into the world of my father. When the conventional doctors voiced their medical concerns to my mother, she went to another kind of doctor. An obstetrician/gynecologist who practiced alternative approaches to health. Dr. David Cheek was best known for his work using hypnosis on patients using their fingers to tell him the subconscious causes of emotional or physical illness. The process is called “ideomotor.” Particular fingers are designated (by the doctor or the patient) “yes,” “no,” and “don’t want to answer.” When the doctor asks the hypnotized patient questions the relevant finger lifts in response - even when the patient consciously thinks otherwise, or has no conscious awareness of the answer.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A PERSON FROM SEEING them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain. I swam, once, with Ken Kesey. In a man-made reservoir up near Fall Creek. Puffy with drink, his bulk rounded and bulged around his former reputation. It was night swimming. Five people, I think. Totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high. The moon kept coming in and out of focus as the clouds moved around. And the water was warm yet, so it must have been late summer, but in my mind it has the crisp clarity of fall for some reason. If it had been fall we would have frozen our tits off. So sometime in late summer less than a decade before he died, we entered the waters. Man-made reservoirs smell like dirt and concrete mixed with algae. I dove down into the black and opened my eyes. Looking into lake water at night is like looking into deep space while drunk. Black, and blurry. I resurfaced and strong-armed into a glide, went down, came up again, then took a look back, and saw his unmistakable head and burled broad shoulders. “Goddamn girl, what are you, some kind of mermaid?” he said. Spitting a stream of water. Yeah. In the black reservoir water we swam around each other looking at the sky, treading water, floating on our backs and letting our feet break the surface. Sometimes Kesey’s belly rose up like an island. We shot the shit, mostly he told stories … That’s a bald faced lie. Just now I made it sound like we casually shot the shit out there, but really my brain was as numb as a wad of cotton and I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, so I just let him talk and I don’t even remember what he said because my head was expanding and contracting like an idiot’s. And he wasn’t really in the water with me. He was on the shore. But then he must have said something from somewhere that penetrated, because I opened my mouth, and it was nothing nothing nothing words until it wasn’t nothing anymore, and I was listing all the horrible things people had said to me since my baby died. Things like: “You know, it’s probably better that she died before you got to know her.” Or: “ Well what you really want in your 20s is the freedom to party.” Or my personal favorite, from my father’s sister, fascist catholic: “The saddest part is that she’ll go to hell, isn’t it, since she wasn’t baptized.”

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I had a few other encounters with her. We exchanged two letters about sexuality. I talked to her on the phone once when I thought I might be in love with a transsexual person. That’s it. And this. She read my writing and said: “You should keep doing it. Not everyone should. You should.” Kathy died in 1997 of breast cancer. Kesey died in 2001 of liver cancer. Sometimes in my head she is the good mother. He’s the good father. Me swimming in words. IV. Resuscitations A Drowning Scene MY SECOND HUSBAND WAS A CHARISMATIC NARCISSISTIC tender hearted frighteningly attractive artistic drunk. With hella black curls of hair traveling halfway down his back. And black eyes. It seemed. And a tiny zipper scar across his left wrist. My break up with Devin - poet, divine one - it took 11 years. Goddamn it. I took an informal poll of all the incredibly intelligent, intriguing, beautiful women I currently know on the question of why we find ourselves driven like moths to fire toward men who fuck us up. They said things like: “Because in loving his darkness I found my own.” Or “I learned from an early age that if it feels bad, it’s good, and if it feels good, you are bad.” Then there was the ever popular “Between slut and saint I choose slut.” And this one’s a classic of course: “Bad boys are more interesting than good ones. If you can survive it. And I still feel that way.” Also: “Suffering makes a stronger bond than love,” and “I’d rather feel alive and die than feel dead and live.” This one nearly made me cry: “He made me feel like someone somebody would risk something to choose.” But the one I personally identified with the most was, “He celebrated a death drive with me.” The first night I slept with Devin we consumed 25 bottles of Guinness and two jumbo bottles of wine. I barely remember the actual sex but I remember exactly what we drank. We listened to Jim Morrison all night in his bedroom. Strange Days and LA Woman until it felt like it was in our skin. When I woke up the next morning and looked at the desk across from the bed I saw as many bottles as I was old. I laughed and burped and went back to sleep, Devin’s arm pinning me to the bed. I didn’t feel anything about myself. It was everything to be filled with such nothing. I first met Devin at the orientation meeting for new graduate students at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It was my second year, his first.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Before he was a soldier he was an artist. Sometimes, when we were alone, I would ask my mother questions about my father when they first met. She would nearly always go into the spare bedroom, pull a shoebox down from the closet, sit down next to me, and unfold a piece of drawing paper. On the paper was a redbird. A beautifully drawn - I mean artistically stunning redbird. She would smile, and keep her eyes down, and say in her soft southern drawl almost in the voice of a girl, “Your father won an art prize for this drawing.” In the same box, she would unfold a yellowed scatter of pages filled with beautiful handwriting. “I won a prize for this story.” And then she would carefully fold it all back up, put it back in the box, return it to the closet. When I hold photos of the two of them in my hands my heart aches. My father looking all James Dean with his rolled at the cuff denims and his white muscle tee with cigarettes tucked in the sleeve and his mirror sunglasses. My mother in her 50s dresses with wide skirts and her hair tied back, her lips that were red as a coca-cola can looking black in the black and white photos. They were gorgeous. Hollywood. She was smiling. He looked like someone a woman would fall in love with. There is another photo of him sitting at a picnic table. He has khaki pants on and a white shirt. The way he is sitting? His crossed legs and bad posture and long fingers running through his thick hair? His other hand wrapped around his neck so that his elbow folds softly in? He has the body language of an artist. I know. I married three in a row. Before my father was an artist he was an athlete. I know how to tell this story. I know how to story over things.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Balthazar at this moment is saying: ‘Your father said: “I cannot bear to watch it, and I do not know what to do. It is like watching a small child skipping near a powerful piece of unprotected machinery.”‘ Tears came into Clea’s eyes and slowly vanished again as she sipped her drink. ‘It is over’ she said, turning her back upon the subject and upon Balthazar in one and the same motion. She turned her sullen mouth now to the discussion of meaningless matters with Count Banubula, who bowed and swung as gallantly as Scobie’s green parrot ducking on its perch. She was pleased to see that her beauty had a direct, clearly discernible effect upon him, like a shower of golden arrows. Presently, Justine herself passed again, and in passing caught Clea’s wrist. ‘How is it?’ said Clea, in the manner of one who asks after a sick child. Justine gave the shadow of a grimace and whispered dramatically: ‘Oh, Clea — it is very bad. What a terrible mistake. Nessim is wonderful — I should never have done it. I am followed everywhere.’ They stared at each other sympathetically for a long moment. It was their first encounter for some time. (That afternoon, Pursewarden had written : ‘A few hasty and not entirely unloving words from my sickbed about this evening.’ He was not in bed but sitting at a café on the sea-front, smiling as he wrote.) Messages spoken and unspoken, crossing and interlacing, carrying the currents of our lives, the fears, dissimulations, the griefs. Justine was speaking now about her marriage which still exhibited to the outer world a clearness of shape and context — the plaster cast of a perfection which I myself had envied when first I met them both. ‘The marriage of true minds’ I thought; but where is the ‘magnificent two-headed animal’ to be found? When she first became aware of the terrible jealousy of Nessim, the jealousy of the spiritually impotent man, she had been appalled and terrified. She had fallen by mistake into a trap. (All this, like the fever-chart of a striken patient, Clea watched, purely out of friendship, with no desire to renew the love she felt for this dispersed unself-comprehending Jewess.)

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I looked at him hard. Sometimes - I couldn’t help it - I wondered if the other guy was in there somewhere. Some people will know what I mean. There were moments when he looked more knowing than he should. In those moments I almost … I almost wanted him back. My father was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. My father was an artist. My father loved art, and nature, and the life of the mind. He gave me those things. He was talking about the story “The Chronology of Water” I’d written. In it, there is a father who abuses his children and then loses his memory. A father whose daughter pulls him out of the sea. A swimmer’s story. “I like it. It’s a very good story.” “Thank you,” I said, knowing not to say more. “Not very flattering of me though.” I smiled and looked down and crossed my arms over my chest. “Fair enough. You know, I won a prize for that story. I got to go to New York.” “Isn’t that something,” he said, and whistled, and looked out at the trees. That’s the only thing we ever said to each other about anything that had happened. A father. A daughter. Recollected. I have an image of him from that time. He appears in a film short Andy made based on the same short story. My father agreed to let us film him for it. In the segment in which he appears, the film is black and white. You cannot tell from looking at him that he has lost his wits or memory. You cannot tell from looking at the square jaw and broad shoulders and intense stare that he abused his wife and daughters. You cannot tell he was an award winning architect, and before that, he had the tender hands of an artist. You cannot tell he is anything but a man who looks intense on film. I’m in the film too. In the segment in which I appear, the film is black and white. I am walking out into the ocean of the Oregon Coast. In November. I walk in waist high, and then I dive into the oncoming waves, and I swim. How I swim. My father died less than two years after my mother. His ashes were in a plastic bag about the size of a loaf of wonder bread. The ashes were white. I went to the funeral home to get them, but that’s not all I got. I had asked for his pacemaker and defibrillator. The two mechanical things attached to his heart that had kept him alive after he drowned. How strange they looked, without a body. Eventually Andy helped me smash them on the garage floor with a mallet.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  My mother was his caretaker in Florida until she got cancer and died. So in 2001 there he was, all alone in a house he barely recognized, facing the prospect of the State taking ownership of him and depositing him in a nursing home for the rest of his life. Have you ever visited nursing homes in Gainesville, Florida? I have. Let me put it this way. Walking in the door of one brings a disgust to your throat like someone grabbed it. They smell like urine and dead skin and Lysol. The creatures tooling around in wheelchairs or “walking” down halls look befuddled. Like hunched over zombies. In the dining room women whose hair and lipstick are not on straight and men who’ve wet themselves shove pureed gruel in their mouths. But what makes them particularly hideous in a Floridian sense is the heat. The humidity. The air conditioning that doesn’t work quite right. The mold on the walls here and there. Cockroaches. Sometimes the old meat sacks sagging toward death in their beds are restrained. Whoever I am, I am not a woman who could leave someone to rot in a place like that. Even him. The grief I carried about my mother’s death lodged in me like a baseball I’d swallowed whole. Inside my treehouse sanctuary with Andy and Miles, every night I would dream about her. Every morning I would wake up feeling vaguely like I had been crying. But something else wedged itself between me and my new life. A word. Father. The man I’d pulled from the sea and breathed life into. The man without memory. And so I saved his life a second time, or Andy did, in act of unmitigated compassion and heroism. He flew to Florida to get my father. Then they rode a plane all the way to Oregon together. Briefly they were detained at the airport security arch because my father would not let go of the faux metal box containing my mother’s ashes. He sat in his wheelchair and gripped them and shook his head no. Finally they let an old man through with what was left of his wife. When Andy brought my father back to me I felt cleaved between two Lidias. A daughter, a tormented and damaged girl. And a woman, a mother, a writer whose life had just been born. Andy and I found an assisted living facility about 20 minutes away from our sanctuary in the Bull Run Wilderness. The rooms were more like apartments than dungeons. His apartment had a giant window through which you could see fir trees and maple and alder - the Northwest. It was something I could give him that didn’t hurt.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  After months of collecting, when your house is full and swollen, when you begin to experience contractions and dilation, after you check the color of the too red blood, after you use a timepiece to record the seconds, minutes, after you begin to regulate your breathing and abandon your thinking to the story you have been told about this, and, after your baby is born dead in the morning - which you cannot find in the story you were told - after you think of the words “born” and “dead” next to one another, turn to the rocks. Turn to the rocks and hear seas echoed from as far away as the Ukraine. Smell kelp and taste salt; feel that underwater animals have brushed near you. Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you. Lie all the baby clothes that have been given to you as scripts or gifts on the floor in lines. Sit with the tiny clothes and your rocks and think of nothing at all. Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on. You will see you have an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath the one you’ ve been told. Circular and image bound. Something near tragic, near unbearable, but contained by your irreducible imagination -who would have thought of it but you - your ability to metamorphose like organic material in contact with changing elements. The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands. On Sound and Speech IN MY HOUSE ONE OF THE CORNERS OF THE LIVING room was called the crybaby corner. When you cried, you had to go stand there facing the corner. The principle was one of shame. My sister tells me that when she was sent to the crybaby corner she would cease crying almost immediately. I can picture her leaving the wall with a face as stoic as a nun’s. Almost like an adult.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  So I told her. And begged her. She whipped my breasts. She whipped my stomach. My hipbones. Late into the day. I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing. Oh how I cried. The crying of something leaving a body. And then she whipped me red where my shame had been born and where my child had died, and I spread my legs as far as I could to take it. Even my spine ached. Afterwards she would cradle me in her arms and sing to me. And bathe me in a bubble bath. And dress me in soft cotton. And bring me dinner in bed with wine. Only then would we make love. Then sleep. Ten years to bring a self back. In between seeing her I swam in the U of O pool. I swam in the literature of the English Department. In water and words and bodies. My safe word was “Belle.” But I never used it. My Mother Demonology IN THE END, THE BOOKS I LOVED THE MOST IN GRADUATE school were the deviant ones. The underbelly of literature. George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper and William Burroughs. Which makes it easier to understand how I found a literary foremother in Kathy Acker. So if you’ve never read Kathy Acker’s books, then you don’t know how often fathers rape their daughters. Without artifice or affect. Without any literary strategy to lyricise or symbolize or otherwise disguise. A father will show up on a page and rape his daughter, and the daughter will be the one narrating, and she will not be in any kind of victim position you’ve ever imagined. You’ll be reading going, mother of god, that’s some horrific shit, but the daughter won’t be. The daughter narrating the rape by her father will be extremely articulate even if coarse, and the narration will be the jumping off point for radical adventures of a girl child or robot woman or she-pirate. Her rage will drive her. The transgression will write her very body. When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought. When I read Kathy Acker’s books, and particularly any section in which fathers sexually molested or raped or dominated or humiliated or shamed or abused daughters, all I went was yes. I did not feel shocked. I did not feel appalled. I felt … present.