When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back Read online

  *

  We’re sitting on the floor, holding each other’s hands. We’re writing on the back of an envelope. We write:

  WHAT INJURIES?

  WHAT EXAMINATIONS?

  WHY IS HE HOOKED UP TO A RESPIRATOR—

  IS IT ONLY BECAUSE OF THE DONOR TRANSPLANT

  WE WANT TO TALK

  BROKEN BACK OR NECK?

  ARE HIS ORGANS “CRUSHED”?

  THE BRAIN

  FUNCTIONING

  KIDNEYS

  LIVER

  WHEN

  *

  We’re sitting together around a table in a kitchen with a female undertaker. There are many of us, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, and now apparently the undertaker is here, and once in a while a baby screams and, once in a while, laughs with excitement, while the undertaker tries to explain what we need to consider; she tries to explain what’s going to happen. We can’t understand. We write down notes on a piece of paper. We write:

  SEE HIM?

  CHAPEL?

  WHAT CLOTHES WILL HE WEAR? (COLLECT THEM, WHO?)

  XL COFFIN, HE’S TOO TALL

  DISCOUNT?

  WHERE? (CEMETERY)

  And the baby laughs. The baby throws a ball up in the air and laughs.

  *

  Denise Riley writes:

  I never abandoned him in his life, and I’ve no intention of starting now, “just because he’s dead.” What kind of a reason would that be? I tried always to be there for him, solidly. And I shall continue to be. (The logic of this conviction: in order to be there, I too have died.)

  A vicarious death. If a sheet of blackness fell on him, it has fallen on me too. As if I also know that blankness after his loss of consciousness.

  This state is physically raw, and has nothing whatever to do with thinking sad thoughts or with “mourning.” It thuds into you. Inexorable carnal knowledge.

  *

  I wrote in my journal:

  January 27, 2016

  I can’t remember the last time I saw Carl. Was it last year on January 24? Was it in February? Was I also in Denmark last February? I think so. But I can’t manage to read the emails we wrote to each other to find out. The sun beats down and melts the snow. This morning I received two photos from the stonemason of the plaque. It’ll be put up tomorrow. The butterfly is beautiful. There’s space on the wall for many more plaques, my own for instance. I sat down and cried. To see his name in glittering gold on the cold marble plaque that looks like skin. Gray skin with black veins. Dead skin. To see his name. And the dates, the numbers of the years, the first, which is wonderful, and the last, so terrible that words can’t reach it. I’m about to burst from rage and despair. Feelings are no help. This plaque seals the grave. Now he’s part of eternity.

  *

  Butterfly, gold on marble skin, Mnemosyne.

  Mnemosyne, found all over Europe, but was also a Greek goddess.

  Goddess of memory, and the Muses’ mother, but also a river.

  The river of forgetfulness in Hades is Lethe, drink from it, you forget everything.

  Everything you have suffered and learned in life on earth vanishes. Vanishes, and then you wander around senselessly before rebirth.

  The rebirth that is avoided when you drink from Mnemosyne.

  Mnemosyne gives you omniscience, insight into everything.

  Everything you will remember, understand, from your life, and then you can rest.

  Rest and enjoy Elysium’s green fields of eternity.

  we gave you a coin for the ferryman

  we don’t believe in anything

  and yet we gave you the coin

  you live in your name

  *

  I should have told you about the fine little gold plaque from 300–200 BCE, found in 1969 in the ancient city of Hipponion near Monteleone di Calabria, now called Vibo Valentia. I should have told you about Orpheus’s mystery cult and other cults that promised a happy afterlife for the initiated. I should have told you that Orpheus was the son of Calliope, muse of song and poetry. I should have told you that he invented the lyre. I should have told you that the little gold plaque might have a connection to the mystery cult. I should have told you about the inscription on the gold plaque. I should have taken you with me to the Museo Archeologico Statale Vito Capialbi so you could’ve seen it with your own eyes. You should have imbibed its message. You should have read:

  This is Mnemosyne’s work. When you are about to go off

  to Hades’s well-built home, there’s a spring to the right,

  by which stands a white cypress.

  There the dead souls go to refresh themselves.

  Don’t go near that spring!

  Beyond it you’ll find fresh water flowing in

  from Mnemosyne’s pool. The guardians stand over it.

  With their penetrating minds, they will ask

  What are you seeking in Hades’s murky shade?

  Say: “I am a child of the earth and star-studded sky.

  I am parched with thirst and about to perish, so give me swiftly

  fresh water to drink from Mnemosyne’s pool.”

  And indeed they will speak with

  the Queen of the Underworld,

  and they will give you water to drink from Mnemosyne’s pool.

  And after, you will go on the sacred way where all the other

  initiates and famed bacchants wander.

  I pray that you’ve found Mnemosyne’s clear water so that you may be freed from having to return to this world, this wheel that people are forced to run around on, this noisy stage, this aimless place of desire and greed, meaninglessness and repression, violence, and the endless repetition of folly and stupidity, naiveté and gruesomeness. Generation after generation. May you not be reborn, may you not have to start over with empty shining eyes, learning everything all over, only to die again.

  and still I don’t believe in anything

  Inger Christensen writes:

  Is this flickering of wings only a shoal

  of light particles, a quirk of perception?

  Is it the dreamed summer hour of my childhood

  shattered as by lightning lost in time?

  No, this is the angel of light, who can paint

  himself as dark mnemosyne Apollo,

  as copper, hawk moth, tiger swallowtail.

  *

  Roubaud writes:

  Your name’s an irreducible trace. There is no possible negation of your name.

  whenever I see or think your name, you exist.

  And Roubaud writes:

  When your death is done. and it will be done because it speaks. when your death is done. and it will be done. like any death. like anything.

  When your death is done. I shall be dead.

  Always is done, when the ones you love die.

  As long as they live, you are loved.

  As long as you are loved, you exist.

  Community in death.

  We are alone in our bodies.

  *

  Most of what I read about raw grief and lamentation is fragmentary. It’s chaotic, not artistic. Often the writer doesn’t have the strength to use capital letters after periods. Often the writer doesn’t have the strength to complete the fragment. It can’t be completed. The writing stays open and pours this inability out through everything that can’t be expressed. A hole in which death vibrates. 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 language that’s always followed me and been my life, can’t do anything. The language gasps, falls to the ground, flat and useless. Language’s mourning clothes are ugly and stinky. To comprehend the incomprehensible is not linguistic. This recognition is a wounded animal, the living wounded fle
sh that does not understand why it fell and can’t get up, and it’s a distant hollow whistling in a deep darkness, which you can’t decode. I stick with death, because nothing else is possible. I stick with death, because it’s my child’s reality. He is in that reality—death is the reality. Those are the conditions. I have to accept that I will never see him again, and I have to accept that I must live with that acknowledgment so that it doesn’t kill me. The unfinished and imperfect is the nature of grief. The leaps, unpredictable. The poet, who lies there like a wounded animal listening to the distant hollow whistling. The poet, whose language turns ugly and stinky in an unflattering way. The poet, who cannot get up by means of her writing, her language, who hates her writing, her language, hates and detests it. The poet, who, within a second, realizes that writing and language mean nothing facing death. Facing the absolute, nothing gives meaning. That shock. That veil, that’s pulled away from your eyes: What once meant everything, means nothing.

  Nothing. Meaning.

  Roubaud writes:

  I face words with discontent

  For a long time I couldn’t go near them

  Now, I hear, and spew them out.

  And he writes:

  I could not speak for nearly thirty months.

  *

  I look for you and I do not find you.

  Never.

  It’s not possible.

  You are gone.

  All the conceptions are pure desperation, delusion, and masquerade.

  To understand, I need to sink myself down into the silence, the nothingness.

  The dense darkness.

  Remain there, lingering, so that it penetrates all my cells.

  So I can carry it with me.

  Mallarmé writes:

   no – I will not

  give up

   nothingness

  ___

   father — — — I

  feel nothingness

   invade me

  Roubaud writes about the dead beloved:

  You move, you breathe.

  But the silence is absolute.

  *

  It’s nearly six, Monday morning, Monday, March 16, 2015, and I think: I can’t give his heart away, I can’t bury him without his heart, we cannot make him heartless. I’m crying, the most lonely, inarticulate kind of crying, when I force myself to take a shower. I step into the shower stall, stand in the shower thinking about his last gruesome shower, the shower he took while he was having a psychotic episode, that shower he came out of naked and delusional, that shower leading to his final action. I can’t take a shower, I will never take a shower again, the water feels like needles against my skin, shards of broken glass, torture. I look at myself in the mirror, look at my breasts, look at my stomach, I see the scar from the cesarean, and I beat my breasts, my stomach, beating uncontrollably, this useless body, which will always be marked by his birth, I hate my body with intensity, and I want it dead, I want to find its vanishing point, I can’t stop hitting myself, and I’m roaring, my sister comes in and says: Put your clothes on, we’re going, she looks at me with wild eyes, she says, come on, do it, laying her hand on my shoulder, and I do it, I do as I’m told, mechanically, I put on clean clothes, I go into the kitchen, I drink coffee, I smoke, we can’t stop shaking, we call a taxi, my sister and I go down the stairs of the building where all of our children have grown up, where I once lived above her, and the sight of the stairs makes me sick, Carl ran here once, happy, little, big, a graduate, with his brothers and cousins, this building, the closest I have to a home in Denmark, this place, the longest he lived anywhere in his life, we go down the stairs, we get in the car, we see nothing, everything is flickering, and seems to belong to another world, we do not want to see it, we hold each other’s hands, arrive, take the elevator up to the tenth floor, and we go in to see Carl, who looks worse than yesterday, more yellow, more waxy, the nurse says he hasn’t had any reflexes during the night, I touch his arm, his hand, his cheek, I look at his mouth, half-open with those familiar teeth, the soft lips, a mouth looking like at any moment it’ll smile, speak, it’s unbearable to be next to him, crying, we walk into the waiting room. And the nurse’s tenderness, her warmth, she gives us dignified care the entire time, she gets us through the hours like a goddess, the hours, the hours, and then my husband and my two youngest sons are suddenly standing there before us, brought from the airport by my husband’s brother, their faces look exceedingly old, my twelve-year-old son looks exceedingly old, his body is having difficulty standing upright, and we hug each other hard, and they go in to see Carl, but Johan cannot, Johan sits on a chair, paralyzed, silent, no expression, I cannot reach him, he has disappeared, his face is a gray mask, he’s turned to stone, the others go in to see Carl, and we look at each other with wide, panicked eyes, and death is in our eyes, the horror, we cannot make contact, we sit in the waiting room, and after a while people begin to arrive, filling the waiting room, there aren’t enough chairs, we are thirty people, we are forty people, I don’t know how many people we are, and the whole time some go in to see Carl, and the whole time some come out, looking more dissolved, gray, like strangers, lifeless. As if death has crept into their faces, marked and aged them, sometimes I can’t recognize them, my friends, my family, I look at their faces, and they turn into a flickering in the grayness, this is how grief materializes, this is how grief looks. Martin and I say to the doctor that we will donate his kidneys and pancreas and the lung that works, and we say: We will not donate his heart. We sign some papers, we stand out in the hall with the doctor, we understand nothing. Then a trauma psychologist enters the waiting room, he says that everyone who is not Carl’s parents and siblings should leave, but Martin says no, everyone should stay, these are Carl’s people, and the trauma psychologist doesn’t know what he should do, but then he says, fine, if that’s what you want, and he then talks to us about what we can expect to experience now, how everything will feel unreal for a very long time, how we won’t be able to do very much, and that’s okay, it’s just the way it is, and then he suggests that we describe how we got the message about the accident and how we’re related to Carl, and we do that, it takes a long time, he says that we shouldn’t “seek treatment” for at least a half a year. The brain needs permission to process first, the human brain is able to come far by itself, he says, but N, who’s already visited the psychiatric emergency room, needs treatment, he says, because he witnessed the accident, he saw and heard the fall, he’ll need help, but everyone else, he says, you will be haunted by flashbacks, and that’s all right, it’s completely normal, it’s the way the brain gets used to what’s happened, and the trauma psychologist leaves, and we stare at each other with our terrified eyes, and then the doctor comes and says, it’s not long until Carl will be declared brain dead and so it’s time to say good-bye, he says, if you want to go in and say good-bye to Carl, do it now, who’ll go in first? And no one gets up, no one can manage that good-bye, but then my youngest son gets up, Zakarias, twelve years old, he gets up and says he will. And he looks at Johan and says: Come on, and Johan, who has not yet gone in to see Carl, gets up reluctantly, he couldn’t manage it, he could not, but now he gets up, and the two of them go to see Carl, holding each other close, they walk the short distance down the hall and go into Carl’s room, and it is the longest distance ever, the most preposterous walk, and only two or three of us are allowed to be in the room at a time, and then it’s my turn, I cry and cry, Johan and Zakarias are sitting next to him, still and completely silent, they’ve put on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and it’s playing on a loop, Carl loved that song, it was the last song on Marley’s last album, the last album he recorded before he died of cancer, “won’t you help to sing / these songs of freedom / ’cause all I ever have / redemption songs.” It’s just Marley’s voice and Marley’s guitar, like a psalm, my sons with bowed heads, I look at Carl diminishing, his disappearing body, his missing consciousness, he looks almost like a corpse now, but the
respirator still wheezes, pulling air into him, blowing it out, the chest heaves and lowers mechanically, it’s unbearable, I hold his hand, but I can’t manage it, I run out, I run down the hall and fall into the arms of the first person I meet, I am dizzy, and I sob in the person’s embrace, what should we do, what should we do, there’s nothing we can do, but we still have to wait.

  *

  When your younger brother turned thirteen, he wrote many poems about your death. In his last poem he wrote:

  To thank the birds for chirping

  the trees for blooming.

  To grow with the trees

  to sing with the birds.

  I am resilient as roots.

  I am strong as wind.

  You taught me to live

  when you were still here.