When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back Page 5
Carl is always lucky.
*
You shouted: “I DOT DE PAUER!” meaning: I got the power. You were three years old and you walked in the green forest and cut down cow parsnip with a stick. You grew. You were invincible. You were strong. You climbed the highest trees, you walked on tightropes, you stood on your head, your handsprings were amazing. You could do anything with your body. You had no fear. You preferred squatting on chairs to sitting on them. When you got up, it was as if an invisible magnet were pulling you upward. You hopped down to the floor. Quick, confident. And there you stood. Straight, perfectly symmetrical. The same when you were grown up.
A perfect body.
An awareness of the body’s possibilities.
An awareness of space and time.
A natural ability to use and place the body in space and time.
To overestimate your own abilities
Your vaults were amazing
*
It’s raining when we arrive at 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. He’s not going to make it, they say, he’s not going to make it, says Martin, I am sitting there sobbing and holding Carl’s hand, and I stroke his cheek, and say, little friend, little friend, I love you. I understand nothing. There’s a cloth over his head. I can see his ears. They’re completely intact, so delicate and well-formed as usual, mussels, marzipan, they sit close to that lovely head. His beautiful ears cause my despair to grow, which cannot be contained, I have no words to describe the panic, the pain that makes my body stagger around the room, this ward, this antechamber, this waiting room to death’s chamber. His beautiful ears show no signs of an accident and death. A sheet covers his body. Various tubes and drips are attached to him. I can see the hair on his chest, which, like the ears, lies close to him, close to his skin, in perfect patterns, reminding me of the mussel shells, of flowers growing in the rain forest, of fern, ready to unfurl. The respirator breathes in, blows out, Carl’s chest fills and empties of air, Carl’s chest rises and falls with calm movements, as if he were sleeping so sweetly. Why doesn’t he have clothes on, I ask, why is he naked, why didn’t they dress him? What if he’s freezing now? And I notice a violent rage, I notice that I don’t think they’re taking good care of him, and then Martin says, Martin says:
He was naked when he jumped out of the window from the fifth floor.
Roubaud writes:
The scorching line of light terror written in light
stopped exactly
Where you turn black
*
Hans Christian Andersen writes in “The Story of a Mother”:
Then they went into Death’s great greenhouse, where flowers and trees were strangely intertwined. In one place delicate hyacinths were kept under glass bells, and around them great hardy peonies flourished. There were water plants too, some thriving where the stalks of others were choked by twisting water snakes, or gnawed away by black crayfish. Tall palm trees grew there, and plane trees, and oaks. There grew parsley and sweet-smelling thyme. Every tree or flower went by the name of one particular person, for each was the life of someone still living in China, in Greenland, or in some other part of the world. There were big trees stunted by the small pots which their roots filled to bursting, and elsewhere grew languid little flowers that came to nothing, for all the care that was lavished upon them, and for all the rich earth and the mossy carpet where they grew. The sad, blind mother bent over the tiniest plants and listened to the beat of their human hearts, and among so many millions she knew her own child’s heartbeat.
“This is it,” she cried, groping for a little blue crocus, which had wilted and dropped to one side.
And he writes:
Every human being, you know, has his tree or his flower of life
We planted a magnolia tree at your gravesite
And we built a wall with a ledge
And on the ledge we placed pots and vases
And we filled the pots and vases with plants
And we filled them with flowers and herbs
And we filled them with trees and bushes
And we planted the forest’s and spring’s growth
In the earth in front of the wall we planted
Ferns, violets, anemone
Lilies of the valley, woodruff
Sweet-scented spring forest, green
*
Your older brother got up and spoke at your funeral. He said:
When Carl was young, he was interested in the myths and fables from Ancient Greece. The stories absorbed him so much that he wanted to hear them again and again. Stories about Pegasus, Sisyphus, Hercules. When his other brothers and cousins got tired of listening, Carl would ask for one more story, which I was happy to tell. Carl and I were a lot alike in this way—we both had a great fascination for history, especially from antiquity. So, it’s ironic that the story of Carl’s life ends just like Aristotle’s description of how a tragedy is structured. This description comes from his work Poetics.
You choose a hero, someone you can identify with. A person, like anyone in the audience, with ordinary character traits and ordinary minor flaws, but who is one hair nobler, one hair better. That’s how Carl was to a large degree. I always felt that he was fairer, more embracing, more open than me. In many ways, a better person.
*
We put out a notebook at the dinner after the funeral.
Your twelve-year-old brother wrote:
You have always been my brother. You will always be with me. Your way. You always turned the worst situation into something good. Always thinking about others and curious. All that you were is what gets me through the hard times. You never got annoyed.
Your twelve-year-old sister wrote:
You are, always have been, and always will be the best brother in the world.
All
Always
Never
Are
Were
Have been
Will be
your older brother’s daughter is
named
after
you
Your way
*
Anne Carson’s Nox includes her translation of poem number 101 by the Roman poet Catullus. He lived around 84–54 BCE. About the translation, Anne Carson writes:
I have never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for a light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.
101)
Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed—
I arrive at these poor, brother, burials
so I could give you the last gift owed to death
and talk (why?) with mute ash.
Now that Fortune tore you from me, you
oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,
now still anyway this—what a distant mood of parents
handed down as the sad gift for burials—
accept! Soaked with tears of a brother
and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell.
Mallarmé writes:
(2
feel you
so strongly — and that you
are always
well with
us, father, mother,
free, eternal
child, and everywhere
at once —
———
and the underside
—I can
3)
say that because
I keep all my
pain for us —
—the pain of
not being — that
you do not know
—and that I
impose on myself
(cloistered, further-
more, outside of
4)
life where you
lead me
(having opened
for us a
world of death)
——
*
Sitting on the floor surrounded by your handwriting, I find a notebook where you have written:
Born of life
Died of life
the material substance’s strong vibrating and dynamic energy
*
We gathered close together around the coffin, holding each other’s hands. You lay there yellow and cold with your long blood-encrusted hair, bruised, broken. You had your green jacket on. We placed your guitar beside you, we placed letters and drawings, we placed your great-grandfather’s wedding ring and my gold ring, we placed a Greenlandic figurine of a man calmly looking out to sea, we placed a blossoming cherry branch, and a coin for the ferryman, we placed a photo of all of us taken one happy summer day; you’re standing in the foreground of the photo, tall and strong, and the image of that photo next to you, now dead, cold and yellow, is one I will never forget. In this trembling moment, life and death in one single image. And we placed oyster shells and beautiful stones and a piece of amber that you found a long time ago. We placed a little bag of pot. From one side of the coffin, your face looked haggard, almost demonic. From the other side, your face looked peaceful and soft, innocent, as when you were a little child, and that’s the face we remembered as you. But the other face was there, too. We stood in the chapel, we held each other’s hands, and we said good-bye. We said good-bye. We said: “Safe journey.”
You had your green jacket on
In this trembling moment, life and death are present in one single image
*
so intolerably wordless the unbearable silence that always will be silence always will be your absence it’s not possible to tell your story to describe you in writing you carried yourself in your living body it was the scent of your skin your hair the light touching your shoulder cheek the world-light the sun it was the light of your eyes in twilight your voice your sleep breath laughter it was your tears lips your graceful neck your hands resting on your lap everything you carried in your living body was you your body you no words can describe it and how I will be able to live with this always
*
Gilgamesh is more than four thousand years old, the earliest known surviving work of literature. Gilgamesh was the king of the city-state of Uruk in Mesopotamia—present-day Iraq—at around 2900 BCE. It is a story about friendship, love, life, and death. Gilgamesh loses his friend, the wild man Enkidu, and then drags himself, sick with grief, out into the world to beg Utnapishtim, who’s been given eternal life from the gods, to help him escape death. After enduring many hardships, he succeeds in finding Utnapishtim, but fails to acquire the gift of immortality.
Gilgamesh has immense power. The text has traveled through thousands of years, and it’s hard to fathom how it still carries so much clarity and strength. It’s blazed through time like a literary fireball, full of passion and desperation, bearing witness to the fact that as far back as four thousand years, people considered the pain of loss and death the hardest, most significant experience in a person’s life. Here Gilgamesh grieves over Enkidu at sunrise, the first day after his death:
O Enkidu, what is this sleep that has seized you,
that has darkened your face and stopped your breath?
But Enkidu did not answer. Gilgamesh
touched his heart, but it did not beat.
Then he veiled Enkidu’s face like a bride’s.
Like an eagle Gilgamesh circled around him,
he paced in front of him, back and forth,
like a lioness whose cubs are trapped in a pit,
he tore out clumps of his hair, tore off
his magnificent robes as though they were cursed.
And he continues:
the people of Uruk will mourn him, and when
he is gone, I will roam the wilderness
with matted hair, in a lion skin.
When Gilgamesh at last meets Utnapishtim, he says:
I have wandered the world, climbed the most treacherous
mountains, crossed deserts, sailed the vast ocean,
and sweet sleep has rarely softened my face.
I have worn myself out through ceaseless striving,
I have filled my muscles with pain and anguish.
And what in the end have I achieved?
And Utnapishtim answers by telling him the meaning of death:
But man’s life is short, at any moment
it can be snapped, like a reed in a canebrake.
The handsome young man, the lovely young woman—
in their prime, death comes and drags them away.
Though no one has seen death’s face or heard
death’s voice, suddenly, savagely, death
destroys us, all of us, old or young.
And yet we build houses, make contracts, brothers
divide their inheritance, conflicts occur—
as though this human life lasted forever.
The river rises, flows over its banks
and carries us all away, like mayflies
floating downstream: they stare at the sun,
then all at once there is nothing.
*
The last text you wrote to me:
I’m coming over for dinner on Sunday, big Madda! I can’t wait to see you!
That was Wednesday, March 11, 2015, three days before that gruesome night. The day I flew from New York to Copenhagen with a little bag containing a few books and clothes for four days. I landed on Thursday morning. I was supposed to fly back home on Monday. Monday, the 16th of March.
Madda: patois for mother
*
The respirator breathes in, blows out, Carl’s chest fills and empties of air, Carl’s chest rises and falls with calm movements, as if he were sleeping so sweetly. Why doesn’t he have clothes on, I ask, why is he naked, why didn’t they dress him? What if he’s freezing? And I notice a violent rage, I notice that I don’t think they’re taking good care of him, and then Martin says, Martin says: He was naked when he jumped out of the fifth-floor window. I look at Martin, the fear exploding in my head, and ask: What are you saying? Did he try to commit suicide? I can hear that I’m shouting.
No, says Martin. No. He and N took mushrooms. Then he turns away.
I don’t understand a thing, I rush out into the waiting room where Carl’s friend N is sitting with his face buried in his hands, bent over, and I see N’s girlfriend and my sister, and I see my mother and father and my brother-in-law, and my sister embraces me, crying, and I crouch down in front of N, I say: What happened, tell me everything, tell me the truth, you have to promise me to tell the whole truth, you can’t leave anything out. And N is ashen, he says: We took some mushrooms late in the afternoon, mushrooms that we bought on the internet and grew in a closet, and at first I had a bad trip and felt that I couldn’t see or hear, I only saw darkness and demons, Carl calmed me down, sat with me, and when it was starting to pass, it hit Carl, but just before the bad trip hit Carl, he was going on about his love for me, saying that he desired me, and that maybe he was a homosexual, and I said: Let’s talk about it in the morning, when we’re clear in our heads, and then I went and lay down on Joakim’s bed, because I was afraid of my own, it’s a
loft bed, I didn’t dare climb up there, and then Carl took a shower, and it was like he was in the shower for several hours, but it probably wasn’t several hours, and then, and then, then Carl came walking very quickly and stark naked through the apartment, he walked into his room and lay down on his bed, and then, then I knew something was wrong, because Carl would never walk stark naked through the apartment, and I asked him: Are you okay? And Carl said no, and I went over to him, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I went over to him, and he was thrashing around on the bed, pulling at his skin and hair, and grinding his teeth, he was tearing into his skin and his hair as if he couldn’t be in his own body, and he said that I didn’t understand anything, that there wasn’t a day tomorrow, that it was like the end of the world, and he didn’t recognize me, his eyes were coal-black, and he didn’t look like himself, he looked frightening, and I got really scared, and it was like he couldn’t see me at all, like he was seeing visions, he saw something I couldn’t see, then suddenly he sprang out of bed and began walking back and forth, back and forth, and he was looking over at the window, and I tried to calm him down, I said lie down and go to sleep, it’ll pass while you’re sleeping, but he kept saying that I was trying to foist something on him, that I was selling him false ideas, that I didn’t understand anything, then he grabbed me, he grabbed me hard by my arms, and his hands moved up toward my neck, and I was so afraid, I tore myself loose, I ran out the back door in my socks, I didn’t dare use the front door, I was worried that he’d follow me, or that it might make him even more crazy. I ran out the back door, and called the police from the back stairs, I said: My friend and I are on mushrooms, I’m afraid that he’s going to murder me or jump out the window, you need to get over here right away.