When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back Read online

  I’ve been crowned

  Queen of Grief

  Sorrow Mother

  My throne is the dark’s

  Deep funnel

  No one dare follow me

  Into the dim halls

  *

  The Visitors (2012) is a video installation by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It comprises nine separate films taken at Rokeby Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York, a beautiful run-down estate from 1815. The work documents the performance of a piece of music written and arranged by Davíð Þór Jónsson and Kjartansson. The title refers to the pop band ABBA’S final album, and the lyrics are based on a poem by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir.

  Kjartansson brought together seven friends, most of them musicians, from his hometown of Reykjavík. The musicians are filmed separately, so that each film—except for one—shows one of the participants in a different room of the house. When all the shots are combined, the performance emerges as a composed work, with both audio and visuals.

  I saw this piece with Carl at Luhring Augustine, a gallery in Chelsea, New York, in 2013. We both were moved by it. During the sixty-four-minute duration of the piece, we walked around the screens, listening and watching, continually finding new structures and stories. The piece can be experienced in vastly different ways depending on the order—whatever sequence people choose to watch the films in. One song plays over and over during the sixty-four minutes. There is something meditative about The Visitors. And deeply moving.

  A few days later, Carl went back to the gallery to see the piece again.

  Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir writes:

  A pink rose

  In the glittery frost

  A diamond heart

  And the orange red fire

  And she writes:

  You’ve taken me

  To the bitter end

  And she writes:

  There are stars exploding around us

  And there is nothing, nothing you can do

  *

  I wrote in my journal:

  March 10, 2016

  I visited the healer again today, and the healer received the “information” that Carl, at least in two previous lives, died young. She thinks it’s always been his soul’s plan. “He’s a soul who comes to help, and then leaves.” Does he leave when he thinks he’s not needed anymore? If so, then he’s made a mistake. He is needed. Last night I had to get out of bed and go into the living room. Wild sobbing. I sat naked in a chair in the dark, crying with the same force as in the car on the way to the National Hospital. Again that strange voice that pressed out of my body with great difficulty. I have been physically unwell lately. Extreme exhaustion, feverish, and today, a headache. I have an appointment with the cardiologist tomorrow. I’m suffering from a rapid and irregular pulse. Maybe it’s my metabolism. More likely, it’s from uneasiness and anxiety.

  Sorrow mother

  in your naked apparel

  the terrible skin

  fever sore

  strange

  can’t be in

  skin room

  light night

  life nothing

  A broken heart A heart,

  which is shattered

  The medical diagnosis:

  Takotsubo cardiomyopathy

  Takotsubo means octopus pot in Japanese

  “The heart looks like an octopus trap,

  whose form is like a slender-necked pot.

  In many cases, it is brought on by a state of sorrow.”

  It is a temporary condition.

  It can be life-threatening.

  In English, the condition is called broken heart syndrome.

  I think about you all the time and there are moments when I don’t think about you. it’s not a contradiction. I carry you with me always, including when for a moment or longer I’m not thinking about you. when I think of you with sorrow when I start thinking about what happened to you everything in my body sinks. it’s a feeling of heaviness from the cells in the body being forced down to the earth. this feeling doesn’t seem to change over time. I’m getting better at holding back the tears if I have to. I’m able to stop crying now for as long as one week. this is my record. I think about you all the time and I don’t think about you all the time I am able to forget and laugh and eat and sleep I’m capable of living I’m indomitable I carry you with me always. in this way nothing has changed

  C. S. Lewis writes:

  There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources.” People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and this “commonsense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

  *

  I often hear that voice: I have understood it: Carl is dead. That’s the way it is. Life goes on. And then two hours later I cry on the apricot marmalade, because I remember how much he loved orange marmalade, and because he received a jar of orange marmalade from my mother a week before his death. I found it in his kitchen, half-eaten, when we cleared out his apartment. The maelstrom, as Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking: a little scrap of memory leading you back to the past, the time before your sorrow. My version of the maelstrom always leads forward into sorrow. Apricot marmalade turns into orange marmalade, and the marmalade leaves a sticky trace that pulls everything with it. Sweet memories of Carl turn bitter and intolerable, because they lead forward to his death.

  *

  I BELIEVE IN NOTHING, NOT IN HEAVEN, HELL, GOD, HEALING, PAST LIVES, I SPIT ON ALL FOOLISH NOTIONS, I DON’T BELIEVE IN HADES, THE LAW OF KARMA, AFTERLIFE, TRANSMIGRATION, I SPIT ON ALL OF IT, I RAGE WITH THE DEEPEST CONTEMPT, I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE, ASTROLOGY, CONTACT WITH THE DEAD, GHOSTS, ANGELS, I VOMIT OVER ALL OF IT, I SCREAM FULL OF THE DEEPEST CONTEMPT, I SAY FUCK THAT SHIT, THERE’S ONLY LIFE AND DEATH, LIFE AND DEATH, I ONLY BELIEVE IN GENTLENESS, WHEN WE CARE FOR THE DEAD BODY, WHEN WE ARE FORCED TO PART WITH IT; THE COMMUNITY

  *

  At the end of September in 2015, I traveled around the U.S. alone. I was on a two-week book tour. I held it together, I managed, I willed myself. There was something freeing about always being on the move. It suited my state of being: constantly drifting forth, fluttering, departing, not belonging anywhere. The anonymity of being a traveler suited me, no one knew me, and no one knew of my grief. Like when I snuck out into the winter darkness to buy cigarettes after coming home from giving birth to Carl. This trip took place many months before I began to write a single word. When I got to Houston, my last stop before returning home, I visited the Rothko Chapel. It’s considered to be the artist’s most important work. He made all fourteen paintings, some huge and some triptychs, from 1964–67. The chapel was finished in 1971, the year after Rothko’s suicide. The building is octagonal and its form resembles a Greek cross. Viewed from the outside, it’s gray, closed off, and massive. Rothko’s paintings are black, matte black, violet-black, reddish-black, and were created using a special technique. For the black and reddish-black paintings, he first applied red pigment, and after that, seven different dark and black shades. They’re all mixed with raw egg, oil-based paint, turpentine, and resin. The blackish-violet paintings also have many layers of pigment, mixed with a warm rabbit-skin glue, which makes the layers of color transparent and light. Consequently, some areas of the paintings appear light gray and white. As the light changes during the course of the day, the appearance of the paintings keeps shifting.

  The chapel is exceptional because it isn’t associated with any specific religion. It’s for everyone, believers and nonbelievers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, Hindus, and so on—it’s for all people on earth. There’s nothing in the chapel except Rothko’s paintings and a few wooden benche
s placed around the room. In a side entrance, the sacred texts of different religions are set out on a table. Rothko was not religious. People come here to meditate, pray, grieve, relax. And they come to see Rothko’s work. I sat down on a bench and looked at the paintings. I sat there for two hours. After the first glance, shapes gradually began to emerge. I saw birds, the sea, fish. I saw skulls and faces. I saw trees and clouds. A long row of people bent over. And then I saw Carl. Half-turned away, his long hair down his back. I wanted to crawl into the painting to him. Then he disappeared, and I saw the moonlight, deer, and turtles. Giant flowers, their whiteness vibrating in the similarly vibrating darkness. I could not stop crying. But it was a welcomed crying after many weeks of suppression. It had been necessary to suppress my tears to do the book tour. I needed to cry. I got up and went out and started looking at the books that were set out. I picked up The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and opened it to a page at random and read the section, “The helplessness as you observe your living family.” It is about how the dead are unable to make contact with the living. I went out into the sunshine, out in the Texan heat, walking across the lawns, I cried and cried. I said to myself: Get a grip. Stop. Stop crying. You’ve got to give a reading tonight, you can’t show up with a tomato face and ugly swollen eyes. Stop. I was thinking maybe the figures that emerged from Rothko’s paintings reminded me of how one sees while hallucinating.

  When I got home, I saw that Carl had dog-eared that exact passage in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying when he plowed through it while staying with us in New York. “The helplessness as you observe your living family.” I was thinking that it’s we who are helpless, because we cannot hear our dead. I read, according to the book of death, you become part of the wind, after going through several stages of becoming a soul.

  Are you part of the wind?

  *

  It’s Carl.

  He’s fallen out of the window.

  It’s Carl, I’m crying and shouting to my mother and my eldest son, he’s fallen out of the window, he’s dead, we need to take a taxi, he said, we need to take a taxi, we need to go to the National Hospital. The phone slips out of my hand, I throw myself on the floor, and so does my eldest son. We howl like animals. My father, who had gone to bed a long time ago, is standing in the doorway. My mother must have told him that we need to go to the National Hospital. Let’s go, he says. My mother says: Remember your phone. We go out to the car, my mother, staggering, grips my hand. My eldest son stays home with his wife and daughter. We drive off. It’s midnight. I’m screaming in the back seat. I smoke a cigarette. My mother says, there, there, my sweetheart, oh, my little friend. My body lashes around the back seat. My brain is on fire. There are no other cars on the highway. My father drives too fast. It takes us an hour to get to Copenhagen. What? I’m thinking. What is this? What’s going on? It’s as if I’m dreaming. I’m freezing, shaking. It’s as if all the life is draining out of me. Then I begin screaming again as though it’s coming from a deep primitive state, it’s not my voice, and the voice I hear scares the hell out of me. The sound nearly can’t come out of me, I can hardly breathe. I’ve become someone else. And it’s raining when we get to the National Hospital, we take the elevator up to the tenth floor, I step out of the elevator and scream: Where’s my child, where’s my child? and my ex-husband, Martin, comes out of the waiting room and tries to calm me down, he’s mechanical and cold, I scream, where’s Carl? he takes hold of me, he holds me tightly, we walk down a hall, we go into an office, some nurses are sitting there, behind the office is a room, we go into that room, Carl is lying there, the first thing I notice is his eyes, they’re black-and-blue, violently swollen, two dark arches, his eyes are closed, his lips are slightly parted, and there’s a wheezing sound, it’s the respirator that is wheezing, it’s breathing for him.

  He’s alive.

  *

  Roubaud writes:

  This image again for the thousandth time. with the same insistence. can’t help replaying forever. with the same keen details. I don’t see them diminish.

  I wrote in my journal:

  January 12, 2016

  It’s gray today, there’s a hush in the living room. Death is something we now live with every day. I have no idea how I’ll be able to put all my energy once again into writing. It demands so much energy. So much presence, concentration, and energy. Beauty has abandoned my language. My language walks in mourning clothes. I’m completely indifferent.

  Roubaud writes:

  To cling to death as such, to recognize it as a real hunger, has meant admitting that there is in language, in all of its constructions, something over which I have no control.

  *

  I wrote in my journal:

  March 30, 1996, evening, bunk beds, Carl Emil, six years old, says:

  “The sun is a kind of star and the star, a kind of sun. But when you die, you can’t get human skin and human hair again.”

  I stroke his warm skin

  I have a thick lock of your hair in a white envelope. Some of it is stiff with dried blood. It was clipped before the coffin was closed. It still smells like you. I was afraid that it would rot, but the blood hasn’t rotted. I placed it in an envelope so that some air would get in. I divided your hair with your father. We’ve shared a lot in our lives—love, time, children, objects, a divorce. That we would share your hair was completely absurd. I divided it indifferently, crying, as though being whipped. Neither of us could bear the sight and smell of your hair. It was dead material even when it was growing from your scalp. Hair is dead cells. Now it seems alive. A part of you, a part of your body. It has the same bronze-gold color as always. It smells like the sea and honey and warm spices and a little bit metallic. I think it’s the blood that gives it the metallic scent. In Victorian times people made elaborate jewelry from the deceased’s hair.

  Hair: A filament structure that consists of a special form of keratin, which is formed by cell division, and keratinization of the cells in the lower section of the hair follicle. Hair follicles are formed in the fetus by a surplus of cells growing pin-shaped down into the skin and forming a follicle structure. After birth no more hair follicles are formed.

  Roubaud writes:

  I did not save you from the difficult night.

  *

  In June of 2015, your older brother digs four holes at my mother’s house. He plants the four apple trees from your burial in a square. He says, “If anyone had told me three months ago that I’d be constructing a memorial for my little brother, I would not in my wildest dreams have believed them.” It’s a bright summer day, and the work is heavier than the earth itself. Your big brother’s older daughter, three years old, waters with her little watering can when the work is completed. She says: Carl lives in heaven now, and we can’t visit him there.

  and we pull all the apples off the branches while they’re still small so

  the tree can grow strong, without the branches breaking

  and we scatter blood meal around the trees to keep the deer away from

  the saplings

  and we stand paralyzed gazing at the blooming trees in may

  and we’d do anything in the world to keep life in these trees

  we can’t bear it when plants and trees die

  we can’t bear the thought that our mistakes and inattentiveness can

  cause plants and trees to die

  In June of 2016, your father and I drive your older brother and his oldest daughter to a small ferry dock. They’re going to sail across the fjord. We stand and watch them sail away. We wave. We get back in the car. We speak about how it’s going. I say that I’ve felt so quiet and heavy for a long time. I say there’s nothing I want. I say, I’m still drinking too much. Your father says that he’s felt so quiet and heavy for a long time. He says there’s nothing he wants. He says he’s still taking tranquilizers. That’s how it goes after shock turns into silence. Into nothing. Into no-time. We’re happy that it affects us in the same
way. “Happy.” We both had thought that there was something wrong with us, that no one else experienced it like us. But we experience it in the same way. Like us.

  *

  I wrote in my journal:

  St. John, December 30, 2009

  Carl arrived from Denmark on the 22nd. We flew to St. Thomas on the 24th very early in the morning. Then took a boat here.

  We’re having a wonderful time. Salt Pond was especially beautiful, with its coral and sea plants extending all the way into the shallow water, so that Zakarias, who’s a cautious snorkeler, could admire the bright blue, purple, and orange fish, the sea stars and mustard corals. We had the beach to ourselves, and we climbed up to Ram’s Head, where slaves once fled, trying to swim to the British-owned islands, when England (before Denmark) abolished slavery. Cacti with red flowers were everywhere, countless butterflies, flowers, and bees. Today we walked in tropical rain in the forest—along the Reef Bay Trail on the island’s southern coast—and saw ruins of several old sugar plantations and a village that until the 1940s had been buried in the wilderness. We saw the slaves’ quarters and felt deep sorrow. Carl laid his hand on the uneven rubble and said: “Let’s take a minute of silence for those who suffered and died here.” All the paths in the area are made of volcanic rocks, which the slaves hauled and set in place. Halfway down the side of the mountain was a very spiritual place: a little fresh water lake with a waterfall, encircled by wild orchids. And along the cliffs that rise up around the lake are petroglyphs from around three thousand years ago, carved by the people who originally lived here, the Taíno tribe. The drawings reflect in the water, symbolizing the two worlds: the physical and the spiritual. But then Carl fell, he slid in the mud and cut his shin, the skin tore, blood poured out, and he got dizzy, was pale and in pain, and couldn’t even stand on his leg. What should we do? How would we get him up the mountain? What luck amid the unluckiness: a moment later a small group of people comes walking up the path, being led by a doctor! He examined Carl’s leg and said that it wasn’t broken or sprained. We put ice on it (from our lunch box). We said, “Carl, you’re always so lucky, what are the chances of a doctor arriving deep in the rain forest, just when you need help?”