I didn’t post for over 2 weeks…

I got broke. Too many things piled on me, but mostly the death of my sister. So many people behaved badly, I got blocked up and so I broke. I need to grieve for Pamela.

I am not fixed, but will carry on now though not every day.

Another day…

I deliberately wanted a quiet day. To read, to nap, and to ignore the dull weather. I got two very pleasant phone calls which I really enjoyed.

It seems the lifting of further lockdown measures has brought my county and the neighbouring two to gridlock. What did they expect? It’s happened twice before so why would today be different?

As it rained in the night (although I don’t know how much) I only watered my hanging baskets, the fig tree and tomatoes. There are so many tomatoes. They should start ripening soon.

I am pleased with the soap holder I made from twine. It’s like a bag and gives the soap something to stop slipping out of ones hand. As I’m trying to be plastic free, I no longer buy bottles of shower gel etc. I get organic bars.

It has been obvious for a while that I am not over my sister’s death. So many negative things happened at that time. It stuffed everything up.

I have other emotional loose ends too. I’m in a weird sort of place.

Tired and strange…

Today I have been feeling not quite myself. Nothing specific, but it could be the humidity we’ve had for a few days.

My breathing is affected by humidity and tires me. I have spent time writing, talking with my cousin, daughter, and just left a zoom event held by The Poetry Society. I was late. This is happening quite often, I’m sad to say. Being late.

I had a nap earlier and whilst drifting into sleep it seemed I could feel the turning of the Earth. I haven’t felt this for years. It’s not just that I feel the Earth turning but today it was like I could feel myself suspended by gravity and a vacuum. This sensation goes back to nightmares I had early on with PTSD.

I slept for a round an hour or so and then did some things in the house and garden. I have finally been able to plant my hanging baskets but they need more soil, so are not hung yet.

The zoom meeting was very good, excellent in fact. I listened and did not comment. I was not on the agenda.

It’s good to be aware of one’s appearance on zoom. I remembered to reapply my lippy.

I’ve just watered the garden. The rose for my sister is in bloom. I have watched the bud for two weeks now. I sat and ate strawberries while I looked at it.

My strawberries are lush. So sweet and falling apart on biting. It is so satisfying to eat what one has grown.

I still need to cut away some tomato leaves. It will make the plants less heavy and more sun will reach the crop,

So now I am exhausted. I’m aware of discomfort but not pain. My ankle was very slightly puffy today but not painful, just reminding me it needs rest.

I’m going to have a glass of rose wine as there is no chocolate in the house. I hope to sleep well, despite the sultry evening.

I am a bit low. All my friends are back at work and though I’m used to that I haven’t seen them in ages.

I’m not going to change my behaviour now that lockdown is over. I’m going to wait.

Ireland won, and more on my journey…

I was very happy that Ireland won their opening game in the Six Nations. They won at home for the first time since the game at Croke Park, borrowed from the GAA. I remember that match. Not a dry eye in the stadium. It was such a shame that Ronan Gara refused to shake hands with royalty.

It would have been my sister Pamela’s birthday today. It’s a a strange thing to know it, and miss her. She should be here, laughing with me.

I am seeing spring is very much arriving in my garden. Green shoots are everywhere, buds and spring flowers. It gives me a good feeling. It’s a bit early for some things but with so much confusion in the weather I’ll take any joy on offer.

My writing is going well on medium. I enjoy it and I like reading the articles of others. It’s a stretching exercise, a growing edge, and I’m glad because I like personal growth. I don’t like to stand still.

The nerve in my left leg has continued to give some gip, but nothing like the pain I had previously. I’m grateful for this.

Happy adventures…

Today has been a happy day, or perhaps contented day is better.

I dealt with emails and invitations, and then contacted the gardener who is making alterations is my garden. He was caught up with his son, so I decided to grasp the time and visit my godmother.

I haven’t seen her for a while, for one reason or another. The bus journey is not long, but takes me to lanes that see more tractors than cars. I took the wrong turning to her house, a problem I have whether driving or on the bus. It is pleasant though, so I did not mind.

She did not know I was coming, as she naps every afternoon. I love her company because she is so positive and adores me. It’s lovely to be with people who think the world of you, isn’t it?

I often have no reason to visit, but I have been wanting to give her a book of poetry. She is one of my greatest fans, which is another lovely thing.

Her cottage, which about four hundred years old, is on the estate that her nephew now owns, and just a bit further north is the estate of Antony Rockley (Lord) who is a really lovely man.

At the bottom of my godmother’s garden is the Beech tree I planted for my Dad. I tried to spot it from the lane, but failed as I’m not familiar with her garden’s gaps in the hedge. I will have a plaque made soon, to be visible on the lane side of the hedge.

We spent a couple of happy hours drinking tea and chatting, and talking about my Dad, whom she also adored (everyone loved my Dad), my English home town, where she has lived also.

When I left, I turned down the lane, although it’s name is road, and found myself in pitch-black. It was hard to avoid the ditches on either side, though I did, because otherwise I’d probably still be there. I took the correct fork in the road, and tried to stay in the middle. A runner frightened me as he overtook me. He was wearing a head torch which seemed to come out of nowhere.

The light pollution from where I live was shocking. I’ve not seen it so starkly in a long time. The bus came on time.

I was thrown back a couple of decades as there was a young guy sitting opposite who looked just like a boyfriend I had. I burnt my leg on his brother’s motorbike exhaust (skirts on motorbike are not recommended), and I used to change gear for him when we were out. Once we took my sister out, and she suddenly said, ‘I feel sick’. He said to hang on for a moment, but knowing my sister, I told him to stop at once. Too late. My sister had thrown up on the back of my seat. Thankfully, there was one of my sweaters in the boot, and a blanket. So I protected her modesty as she put on the sweater and then turned the blanket into a skirt.

I spoke on the phone to this ex relatively recently. He said I don’t laugh like I used too. Well, I laugh a lot.

I am finding the rain resistant jacket that Mike left behind very useful. It is lighter than my Dad’s which great for dog walking, but this reaches my knees, like Dad’s, and doesn’t get to too hot.

Writing Grief

Naja Marie Aidt’s new memoir, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back, translated from the original Danish by Denise Newman, begins with an epigraph from Rilke’s “The Tenth Elegy.” The lines are all about grief—“The new stars of the land of grief,” the first line tells us, “Slowly the lament names them.” The epigraph proceeds for a few lines, naming the different stars, before concluding, “But there, in the southern sky, pure as the lines / on the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling M / that stands for Mothers……—.” And so begins Aidt’s book, putting a specific form of grief on the mind and heart of the reader—that of a mother grieving her lost child.

On March 16, 2015, Aidt’s son Carl died. His death was an accident, self-inflicted while in the depths of a particularly dark mushroom-induced psychotic state. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back is Aidt’s reckoning with that death—with how it could have happened to the son that she knew, with why the police’s response to the emergency call of Carl’s friend was so slow, with how Carl could have jumped out of a window to his death but that death not have been suicide, and much more. It’s raw and angry as Aidt yearns for understanding, yearns for her son to not be dead.

As Aidt goes about the Herculean effort of wrestling with her son’s death, she utilizes a remarkable variety of forms; her grief is expressed not only through the substance of her words, but also through the structure of her text. The work includes passages from her diary composed in the years of Carl’s childhood; quotations from writers as varied as Anne Carson, Stéphane Mallarmé, and C. S. Lewis; passages that read like rants at death, at life, at what she’s having to live through (“DEATH WALKS BESIDE US IT IS REAL IT IS NOT CALLIGRAPHY NOT A FUCKING IMAGINED SUFFERING IT IS REAL,” reads one stream of consciousness passage); poems and journal entries pulled from Carl’s papers after his death; and more. All of it taken together leaves the reader with a real sense of the author’s lostness, her groundlessness, of what the death of one dearly loved leaves in its wake. A coherent form no longer seems reasonable, nor possible, in the book Aidt has constructed.

Indeed, Aidt actively wrestles on the page with the idea of making art out of her son’s death—an inherent contradiction in the book she has produced, which is an undoubtedly beautiful artistic achievement. “Beauty has abandoned my language,” she writes. “My language walks in mourning clothes. I’m completely indifferent.” Another passage, from a page-long rambling paragraph, aptly describes Aidt’s conundrum in the work she’s doing: “It’s not possible to write artistically about raw grief. No form fits. To write about actual nothingness, the absence of life. How? To write about the silent unknown that we are all going to meet, how? If you want to avoid sentimentality, the pain stops the sentence mid-sentence. Words sit inadequate and silly on the lines, the lines stop abruptly on their own.” The task Aidt has in front of her with this book is three-fold: to reckon with the death of her son on the page; to create a work of art out of the “inadequate and silly” words her grief produces; and to remain honest to her experience in doing so.

By these measures, the book is a real success. Aidt’s willingness to wrestle with how inadequate and foolish her effort feels, and to leave that wrestling in the book, reinforces the reader’s sense of what Aidt is experiencing. She must pursue understanding; understanding is fleeting. She’s a writer, so one of the ways she can conceive of wrestling with the death of her son is through putting it down on the page; at the same time, the words feel foolish and inadequate. Nothing is sufficient.

The reader’s access to Aidt’s grief deepens through Aidt’s rejection of conventional notions of how text should be laid out on the page. The reader navigates variations of text formatting throughout the book—it’s aligned to the left in some places, and scattered throughout the page elsewhere. The size of the text varies, sometimes in coherent and traceable patterns, at other times seemingly at random. Italics and bold type are used generously throughout—discernibly in a few instances, elsewhere with no traceable intent. All of this textual experimentation cements the triumph of honesty and self-expression that this book becomes—the triumph of honesty in self-expression, complete and unmitigated. Aidt is writing what she will, in ways that feel appropriate to what’s being expressed. Her experience is unorderly; she has produced a text to match it. It’s a testament to Aidt’s translator and her editors at Coffee House Press that the finished version of this book feels essentially unedited.

Her formless work is generated from what feels like a formless life in the absence of Carl, in line with the effect Carl’s death has on her and her community of grievers—“We find ourselves in a futureless time,” she comments at one point. Time itself has lost its coherence; just as form, style, beauty in writing no longer feel tenable, so time has lost its sense of forward movement. “We sit around a kitchen table and survive second to second; we rarely get up. We’ve become rigid, while the spring light rises and falls in the sky outside: Now that you can no longer be in chronological time, neither can we.”

Even still, the reader is presented with a coherent narrative. Aidt employs a smart technique of telling the actual story of Carl’s death within the larger recounting of her grief, within the sensory depiction of that grief. Aidt tells the story in stops and starts, in italicized, set-apart paragraphs. Each paragraph tracks back a couple sentences prior to where the previous concluded, slightly retracing steps in the way, perhaps, that Aidt retells the story to herself—halting, repetitive, delaying the conclusion as long as she can.

As it happens, Aidt’s form-less, beauty-less language of grief is not the only thing that produces its own kind of beauty. Carl’s death itself brings beauty in the despair, and it’s a triumph of this book that Aidt’s recognition of this truth does not come off as trite. Coming as it does near the book’s conclusion, after the devastating majority of the book has imprinted itself on the reader’s mind, it feels surprising when she recognizes it, but not forced.

Aidt recounts two poems that she wrote while Carl was still living; his death was still in the unimaginable future. The first poem begins with the lines from which the book’s title is drawn:

When death takes something from you
give it back
give it back what you got
from the dead one
when he was alive
when he was your heart
give it back to a rose,
a continent, a winter day,
a boy regarding you
from the darkness of his hood.

“I thought intensely about you as I wrote those two poems. I saw you before me as I wrote them,” Aidt recalls. She goes on to consider the power of poetry, its role as the receptacle of omens felt but not understood—“It becomes an experience which belongs to the future, which can express, though it is not yet experienced in reality.” There’s another quality to poetry, though, that Aidt chooses to highlight: “But poems also say something about the giving back what the dead gave us when they were alive. That the dead’s being in a way still needs a place in life, and we should pass on the love they gave us. Here lies the hope. A hope that what you gave me will grow in others, if I am able to share it. And that my love is strengthened and made more beautiful because now it contains your love.” Aidt’s loss will never go away, but her hope, even in the midst of her pain, is that she can harness the love she received from her son. That good may come, even from this—a conclusion that feels trite in my writing, but earned and true within Aidt’s work.

Books change based on who is reading, though as a reader, the default I have to push against is to universalize my own sense of a book. This book, however, had me particularly conscious of my identity as a reader—namely, as one who has never experienced such grief, and never will experience this particular type. This, of course, deeply informs my reading experience. When I read this book, I see its structural and emotional intelligence and honesty, and recognize it as such. I imagine, for a mother reading this book—for one who knows the horror of which Aidt speaks – that this reads more like recollection.

Taken from Ploughshares the newsletter from Emerson College.

I feel this so much since my older sister’s pointless death almost a year ago. My dog, my best friend, died a week later.