The Effects of Death

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently got married to a remarkable man. We have dated for about two-and-a-half years, and during those years, the ride of life has been nothing but tumultuous. Part of what makes my husband so amazing is his steadfastness as life kept bucking me off its back. Just one of the difficult situations I lived with included my mom's diagnosis with stage IV endometrial cancer, the nine months of complications after the diagnosis, and her eventual death. My life had been changed, and I am forever deeper as a person because of what I experienced with her and with my father.

After my mom's death, I read numerous books on grieving, and I learned about the genre of death stories. I began to read them with my whole body, often sobbing deeply with empathy, sympathy, and grief of my own. At the age of 27, I understood what they were about. I understood the depths of the emotions and phrases used to describe the indescribable. The June 13 & 20, 2011, edition of The New Yorker includes an article by Aleksandar Hemon titled "The Aquarium" that describes the diagnosis, the the attempted treatment, and the eventual death of his ten-month-old daughter, Isabel. It is a moving account of what his family experienced, and I highly recommend the article for its story. In this posting, though, I want to highlight Hemon's really top-notch writing style with the phrases that so aptly described his points:

- ". . . [we] wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain."

- "We were far away from the world of farmers' markets and blueberries, where children were born and lived, and where grandmothers put granddaughters to sleep. I had never felt as close to another human being as I did that night to my wife."

- "But I'd been cursed with a compulsively catastrophic imagination, and had often involuntarily imagined the worst."

- "She has to construct imaginary narratives in order to try out the words that she suddenly possesses."

- "The words demanded the story."

- "The comfort of routines belonged to the world outside."

- "But we were far more comfortable with the people who were wise enough not to venture into verbal support . . ."

- "If there was a communication problem, it was that there were too many words, and they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted on others. . . . We instinctively protected our friends from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words had failed, because we knew that they didn't want us to learn the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure that they didn't want to know what we knew; we didn't want to know it, either."

- "There was no one else on the inside with us . . ."

- "The walls of the aquarium we were hanging in were made of other people's words."

- "I'd needed more lived. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums."

- "And now my memory collapses."

- "How do you step out of a moment like that?"

- "Carrying, like refugees, our large plastic bags full of things, we walked to the garage across the street, got into our car, and drove on the meaningless streets to my sister-in-law's apartment."

- " . . . [we] were left with oceans of love we could no longer dispense . . . ."

- "Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow."

- "Mingus is still going steadily about his alternative-existence business."

I particularly love the line about his memory collapsing --- it is so true. My memory indeed collapsed, but with lots of love and self-acceptance, it has struggled back to standing, just as I have. I cherish this article, and I hope the Hemon family can find peace.