M.E. Breen

A short and sweet review by Susan Faust in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

My dad died on November 21 last year. I thought I would grieve again with some particular intensity on November 21 this year, and not until then. Instead it’s October, and I’m sad all the time. There’s a voice in my head that sounds like it’s coming from someone dressed in a neat black suit. She keeps saying, It’s too early. If you start now, then what? How long do you expect to carry on like this?

My whole life, I have wanted the calendar to tell me what to do. But the calendar has nothing to do with how someone dies, so why should it have anything to do with grief? I didn’t know my father was dying last October. I don’t know if my father knew he was dying. I don’t know if he was dying. I don’t understand how the body dies, or how to interpret frailty. Is weakness the symptom of any number of illnesses or conditions that you can recover from, or is it the sign that there can be no recovery? Can it be one and then suddenly become the other? Was there a particular moment on a particular day, October 1 or October 29 or November 6 or November 20 when it became true that my dad was dying in a way it hadn’t been true the moment before? It may seem strange to harp on this, but it matters to me. I want to have a date other than the date he died that means something. Not the day it happened to us, but the day we knew.

From A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, 1964:

‘He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead . . .
But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her tenaciousness ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

I had one of those nights so full of dreaming I seemed to live in two worlds at once. To move between them I only had to close my eyes or open them. I wasn’t sleeping, but off visiting, and the places I visited were horrible, but when I woke up I still felt as though I’d woken up in the wrong world. My mood and my talents felt better suited to a world of stuck elevators and crumbling labyrinthine apartment buildings and cats in danger.  I still feel that way, even after eating a bagel with cream cheese.

I won’t say too much more about my dreams. A friend made me laugh the other day by pointing out that the world’s most boring conversation would be between the person talking about his novel and the person talking about her therapy, and that we were in fact having that conversation. Or the other way around. Anyway, the fog has mostly burned off by now and there’s nothing outside that should make me feel so haunted and cowed, and nothing inside, either, but a bunch of sleeping carnivores who dream only of victory. Still, I’ve spent most of the day so far looking for something that captures the dread mixed with dorkiness that is so often the residue of dreams. (The imperiled cats were wearing high heels. I was wearing a pink satin dress.)

I read some Sappho, but turns out she is not remotely dorky. I read Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions and found the perfect thing, except also not dorky and possibly requiring permissions.  I read the Swedish folk tale Nail Soup, which almost cheered me up, and the Grimm’s story Jorinda and Joringel, which creeped me out and cheered me up. And then I found him. Say what you will, I will always love him. Here you go.

Spring and Death

I had a dream. A wondrous thing:
It seem’d an evening in the Spring:
–A little sickness in the air
From too much fragrance everywhere: –
As I walk’d a stilly wood,
Sudden, Death before me stood:
In a hollow lush and damp,
He seem’d a dismal mirky stamp
On the flowers that were seen
His charnelhouse-grate ribs between,
And with coffin-black he barr’d the green.
‘Death,’ said I, ‘what do you here
At this Spring season of the year?’
‘I mark the flowers ere the prime
Which I may tell at Autumn-time.’
Ere I had further question made
Death was vanish’d from the glade.
Then I saw that he had bound
Many trees and flowers round
With a subtle web of black,
And that such a sable track
Lay along the grasses green
From the spot where he had been.
But the Spring-tide pass’d the same;
Summer was as full of flame;
Autumn-time no earlier came.
And the flowers that he had tied,
As I mark’d not always died
Sooner than their mates; and yet
Their fall was fuller of regret:
It seem’d so hard and dismal thing,
Death, to mark them in the Spring.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

And, ok, here’s the poem from Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions by Maurice Manning. I hope it’s ok to reproduce it. I love this poem. I love this whole book, which really is a book, as in a story or a novel, not only a collection of poems.

Raptor

The mother lets loose a lead sigh, Lord Ham
Ercy is it ever hot in that kitchen! and the family
bows to bless the food and the gentle hands
that prepared it. Everything could suddenly
turn harmonious, but Booth cracks one eyelid
and sneaks a peek at Mad Daddy, staring at a wild-
life watercolor of a hawk perched on a fencepost,
pecking through a fresh kill. Three feathered
strains of beauty fly circles in the boy’s heart.
One, the image of the hawk itself, a red-tailed
parcel of perfect pitch. Two, the smell
of the father pretending to be
a steel-eyed radius. Three, a terrible
Presence flapping around the room.

A friend just wrote me in full meltdown mode because she’s been working the 4:00pm to 2:00am hospital shift for two weeks straight. Of all the daily rituals such a schedule might disturb — sleep and regular meals among them — the one she’s most upset about is missing her running group.

She recently moved to a new town for this job (apparently the hospital is unswayed by her sweet, lost, newbie air and wants her in charge of everything, all the time), and the running group has become her way of being among people without having to act like she’s trying to be among people. We’ve all moved to a new place and at least thought about meeting people at the local pub or coffee shop, but what are you doing there but lurking and drinking and passively hoping someone interesting will approach, and aware the whole time that if someone does approach it will be creepy, so what do you even want, poor thing, shaking with caffeine and desperate to pee but afraid of leaving your laptop with one of these strangers? No, it’s much better to join a running group. First of all, you’re running! Zoom! (For my friend, it really is zoom! For me, more like, zuh, zuh, zuh, oom? But this is not about my fitness.) Anyway, you’re running, your feet are moving, you’re going places, and whether these other people in shorts are going anywhere is up to them. It’s the opposite of waiting for something to happen to you.

And here I think I arrive at my point. For most of my life I’ve been convinced that the only things really worth much were the things other people, or collections of people, as in institutions, conferred on you. You worked, and waited, and looked serene, and felt virtuous, if a little anxious, and eventually someone came by with a wreath and put it on your head. Status wreath! To pursue something in an active way, to appear to want it, was totally embarrassing. This isn’t to say I didn’t believe you should be ambitious, but I did think ambition was something you dealt with on your own, quietly, as you would a love of cookies.

Ok, I want this thing, and I may even get if for myself, because it’s really not so bad, but it’s nothing to shout about, either, and maybe I’ll even eat the cookie out of the little opaque paper bag, so maybe it looks like an oatcake.

All this, of course, suggests a pathetic, if generic, preoccupation with what other people observe about us. Do I really think someone is looking at my bag from the coffee shop and caring what’s in it? You – oat eater! Capital! Well played! I guess I do imagine people care, except that imagines a whole Being John Malkovich scenario, with frown-faced, knitting-navel-to-spine-excellent-posture-having, cookie-deploring ME everywhere.

But I digress! What I’ve discovered is how liberating and terrifying it is to realize that no one cares about what happens with your cookie or your career or your dog or that gray hair sticking straight up from the middle of your part as much as you do, which mean, yes, you have to pick up the phone. You have to find out what’s up, and suggest things, and offer to do things, and be an instigator, not just a responder, however lovely and nuanced and carefully calibrated your response, however perfectly you got it. Because you also have to go get it. Baby, you have to set the world on fire. Baby, you have to go running.

I’m reading from Darkwood and talking about villains at The Reading Bug, a new independent children’s bookstore in San Carlos, CA this Sunday 9/27 at 3:00. Come on over!

Here are the details: http://www.thereadingbug.com/event/create-villain-author-me-breen