now that my heart is open, it can't be closed or broken
I was stirring something. Her voice struck me so intently I still don't remember what I stirred. CBC Radio rose from the background to rendering me incapable of registering anything else. My hand moved slower and slower until I just stood rapt at the stove, listening.
Listen first to her laugh. Then to her words, which yanked on me as the words of someone who knows sadness, yet sweetness.
As it turns out, Lhasa De Sela did indeed have intimacy with those two things, that exquisite pain. The beloved girl of Montreal died seventeen days ago, lost at my very age to breast cancer.
Do you ever see the face of a person that's died, or hear a voice, and feel it's just impossible and absurd and unbelievable that gone is gone? How can it be? She was here, a girl just like me. There she is, her imprint on video. Yet now, there's no other voice in the world that sounds like hers.
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Some Old Testament scholars, wrote Janel, define "lament" as the reaction to a belief-shattering experience. Bon's contemplations on this idea turned in the same direction as mine. In her comment she wrote my beliefs were vague enough so as to be enhanced rather than shattered by the experience. A void begs to be filled. That filling is my lament. I formed brand-new beliefs based on what I saw, felt, sensed in the NICU.
Does that mean I'm reconciled to what happens when we die? Good god, no. In the dedication to my book I had to find a tidy way of acknowledging that I have two boys but three, and it's a fantastical book about rampaging wood pirates, so I thought I'll just make up the truth and so I did.
For my three boys—one is all energy and marvel and curiosity, one is pure, sheer joy and wanderlust, and one lives high up in a blue sky, in a roofless, sheepskin-draped room with kind minstrels and acrobats that let him stay up late and eat chocolate by starlight.
I choose the bits and the pieces that muffle the ache. I try, so hard, to remember the presence in the room the day he died. Even if I don't understand our ends, I do my best to not lose the sensation of our means. It was with us, this energy, this palpable love. And when he stopped breathing, finally... that's the one moment that escapes words completely. Articulating the peace and the joy—of him, of the thing that took him—when I felt his weight lifted off my chest. I fumble with it. I stammer. I can never possibly.
What I heard on CBC yesterday in this ethereal, butterscotch voice was divine and sensible at the same time. It's the closest I've ever come to finding a shape for what I felt that day.
Because what I felt? It wasn't an ending. It made me wrack and sob because I couldn't go with him, but still. For him, it was another beginning.
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Boil some water. Make some tea. Sit down, and listen to Lhasa speak of her philosopher father and his storytelling of what happens when we die. And in your own way, send some love into the air for her. And then tell me: what do the words beginning and ending mean for you?
click to listen: Lhasa De Sela
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He has known his baby sister before even I knew her. He has surrounded me in the stars. These things are not stories I tell myself to make myself feel better. They are simply things I have come to know, but so often that knowing comes in flashes and snatches. It doesn't settle in and stay with me. So the ending is easier to remember than the beginning. Letting go was clearly a new beginning for him. It was one for me too, and like many beginnings it is rocky and tricky, a challenge full of new turns. So I stumble through and get a flash here and there of how my boy is doing. I am glad he no longer endures what he did in the hospital, but, still, still, I wish he were here. Love remains, but longing too.
Sara, yes. Exactly. Oh my goodness you just phrased that so well. Storytelling, I think, is just how we find the shape of the truths that we know. And for me, the book dedication became an exercise in figuring out how to acknowledge death without my son being nothing more than an ending, you know? It might not be my literal truth (as much as I'd like to think that wherever he is, there is chocolate) but it is absolutely what I believe: that there is magic and intention and purpose and ... just the sense that there is more than we can see.
Letting this truth breathe and exist when cynicism and despair constantly push up against it? That takes work, and I'm not always successful, but I keep trying.
SOON THIS SPACE WILL BE TOO SMALL
Soon this space will be too small
and I'll go outside
to the huge hillside
where the wild wilds blow
and the cold stars shine
I'll put my foot
on the living road
and be carried from here
to the heart of the world
I'll be strong as a ship
and wise as a whale
and I'll say three words
that will save us all
and I'll say three words
that will save us all
Soon this space will be too small
and I'll laugh so hard
that the walls cave in
Then I'll die three times
and be born again
in a little box
with a golden key
and a flying fish
will set me free
and I'll go outside
Soon this space will be too small
all my veins and bones
will be burnt to dust
you can throw me into
a black iron pot
and my dust will tell
what my flesh would not
Soon this space will be too small
and I'll go outside
and I'll go outside
Lhasa De Sela - 'Rising'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESwQYGvnJz4
like i said in commenting on the lament post, i did not experience my lament for Finn on the religious level. rather, it left me spiritually open, for a time, in a way i had not been in many years. and as i walk closely with someone else towards dying again, i feel traces of that opening again, that wonder, and i am in the strangest way grateful for the fearlessness the experience of mothering Finn through his death has left me with, in relation to all deaths...except those, i suppose, of my other children. those are doors i now keep slammed shut, hoping the angels pass over.
i realized after i finished commenting the other day what it was i couldn't put my finger ON, though - the lament that i DID experience for my son. it was not spiritual, but philosophical. and it ripped me open at the level of my fabric, and i am only beginning to sew myself together. but this death of my grandfather will not touch that: that, i think, is the difference. for me.
And Bon, it's the same for me, though some people read me as speaking of religion. I'm not... not literally, I guess. My religion is philosophy. It doesn't have a building or a book attached to it - at least not yet. It's just that openness, that lens. And grasping for it like a starving thing. xo
"These things are not stories I tell myself to make myself feel better. They are simply things I have come to know, but so often that knowing comes in flashes and snatches. It doesn't settle in and stay with me." sara
Thank you for these. They really mean something to me today.
I don't pretend to know what losing a child is like, and hope to never have to learn. Please know however that your stories and histories break my heart every time and yet these same stories somehow instill me with confidence that life does indeed go on and that people can find the will to live through situations that seem impossible. And that this can be done with grace...even through tears and anger.
The thing with loss..in general...is that it creates holes that are hard to fill...I'm not sure they ever get re-mended, but this space does go a long way towards finding the right fabric to begin the process. I always come away from this space feeling just a little more whole than I was prior to visiting.
Thank you for creating this space...I hope to never be a part of this community...but I am glad it exists and draw strength and grace from those who are in it.
I adore Lhasa's story. It's a beautiful thought, beautifully expressed.
I am an atheist, I don't consider myself to be spiritual, I don't feel that Iris has a presence beyond the memories of the people she touched. My grief is not so raw as it once was, so I can't rely on that to summon her to me, so I write and make and read aloud so that she will continue to be. And others honour her in their own way too and in some way that truly is enough for me. I don't feel like that's a limiting thought. I feel that's an immense thing, to be remembered here, in the now.
I grieve in silence, in anonymity, for the son I lost. Thank you for giving me a quiet space to reflect.
I have always felt this way - that birth must be like death to a baby in the womb. I think of twins, like yours Kate, and wonder about that process: how to one twin, it must seem as if suddenly their sibling is being pulled into an abyss and then they are gone. GONE. There one moment and then GONE. Surely, it must be death to them, no? Gone to where? What a mystery. And then, minutes later, they too are experiencing birth/death.
The link to birth/death is one of the many reasons I hold the process so sacredly, and in the moment that I - out on outside - witness birth, I am awed and humbled that this being has come across the threshold of some kind of certain death. It is a simultaneous moment of mourning and joy.
And so I believe that we too must obviously be born somewhere into death. I have no clue where. But what a journey it must be.
Love,
Leigh
Almost a year and a half since that ending/beginning, I'm not exactly sure of this place where I find myself now. The ending of it feels far away already. The beginning feels far too. Right now is just right now, present. Sometimes it feels anticlimactic, foreign. I have moments of feeling that connection, but they are fleeting.
I too formed brand new beliefs from what I experienced in 2 months with her in the NICU. Now that it's far from that time, I'm trying to tap into what I knew so deeply and completely then and in the months immediately following. Lately my brain gets in the way.
it is hard because i never met tuesday, nor her mama yet, but there she is, captured in posts and beauty smiling out of every ounce of her. i do not know why this little girl struck me so to the core...much like your writing does.
beginnings and ends...i do not know exactly what they mean to me at this moment, but this post meant so much. thank you.
How I love knowing that I'm not alone in collecting songs for the ever-growing soundtrack to my daughter's life. (Thank you, Kate, for bringing Lhasa's voice and spirit forth.)
And I noticed your acknowledgement as soon as I opened your book. It brought me to tears. I treasured your hopes and I hope that Sarah peeks in on the fun at least once in a while. I have a feeling she is there with toeshoes on.
I love Lhasa de Sela's voice. I love her singing. It has meant so much to me, so many times.
She was so young. She protected and guarded her gift. I think that's hard for us who wanted so much more of her. Yet, I admire it. There has to be some explanation for the wonder of her singing.
It is hard to think of such beings as those we love as transient creatures, gone without a trace in the future. I guess if time is an illusion they exist perpetually in the present. But for me, that's not good enough. I want them for all time.
But mostly I don't want separation. I have to see them again. That's all I think. I have to see them again. It simply cannot be that I won't see them again.
The whole show is more that worth listening to, but the storytelling about her father is approximately 2/3rds of the way through, or just past halfway. It's the only continuous talking in the show, I believe, so if you want to skip through you should be able to find it pretty quickly.
Hope that works for you.