When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back Read online

  Now you are here

  to guide me

  watching me through

  my own eyes.

  We are in each other

  *

  My first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1991. I wrote it when you were a baby. I wrote it as I nursed you, as I rocked you, as I got to know you, as you learned to crawl and walk. There’s a poem in the book in which I describe a dream I had when you were one year old. A dream about you. In this poem:

  I woke

  and the dream will not leave me

  my son is about to drown

  and I can’t save him

  his brand-new self

  soft as a bear’s snout

  sinks in the clear water

  Here was my anxiety over losing you. Here was the powerlessness—not being able to save you from death. An anxiety so overwhelming. The worst that could happen: that you’d vanish.

  When you were sixteen years old, I wrote two poems about death:

  When death takes something from you

  give it back

  give 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

  When death takes something from you

  give it back

  give back what you got

  from the dead one

  when you stood in the rain in the snow

  in the sun and he was alive

  and turned his face toward you

  as if wanting to ask something

  you no longer remember and he

  has also forgotten and it’s

  an eternity

  an eternity ago now

  You are the one hiding in the hood’s darkness. I thought intensely about you as I wrote those two poems. I saw you before me as I wrote them. I didn’t know why, I didn’t ask myself why, the poems came to me as something from you, something I could not understand. All I understood was that I obviously had written two poems about death, and that you in a way gave me the images—or that something associated with your being got me to write them. The sun, the rain, the snow. Your face turning questioningly toward mine.

  I read the two poems out loud at your funeral. I realized that as early as when you were one year old, I received a sign in my dream that you would vanish from me. As early as when you were sixteen years old, I saw you hiding in death’s dark hood. That I had already predicted the eternity that would replace your life, the eternity I now live with, and which you are absorbed by. Just as I dreamed that you fell and hurt yourself shortly before you fell to your death from the fifth floor.

  But images and signs cannot be interpreted before they’re played out in concrete events. You only understand them in retrospect. That’s why omens can only be expressed. As language, as poetry. It becomes an experience that belongs to the future, which can express, though it is not yet experienced in reality. That’s what poetry does sometimes. And it’s one of its most beautiful qualities. It’s also what makes poetry dangerous and portentous. The feeling of knowing something that you can’t understand yet or connect to anything in reality. As if poetry makes it possible to move freely in time, as if linear time is suspended while you write and a corner of the future becomes visible in a brief and mystical moment.

  But poems also say something about 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. This must not be destroyed by sorrow. It says in the poem, “give it back.” As if giving goes back and forth all the time. From the living to the living. From the dead to the living. And from the living to the dead. A circular movement, not linear.

  Even still, these poems fill me with rage and a violent hatred for the predictions they contain. It’s an impotent rage. A rage that reminds me of what I experienced as a child. Just as children do not understand the forces they’re up against (the adults and their incomprehensible actions and refusals), the bereaved do not understand death. But there’s nothing to do about it. You can rage as much as you want, nothing will ever come of it. The adults decide and death decides. You can’t escape the loss of love from the adults, from the dead. Hard and furious and despairing, children and the bereaved must struggle on through life, and hope that the love underlying the feeling of loss is larger than the loss itself, and that this love creates love and compassion.

  A heart, a rose, a winter day. A boy who drowns in the clear water.

  The world’s beauty and cruelty. Love’s power.

  *

  Joakim got up and spoke at the funeral. He continued:

  Carl had many great thoughts and ideas, but his greatest passion was for community. Since his death, I’ve been living with our little grieving group. The grieving group is together every single day; we live together, eat together, drink and smoke together. What’s completely absurd about the grieving group is that Carl’s own death had to happen to create this community he so ardently wished for. Family and friends have become melded together into a single organism, which Carl would be insanely happy to experience. He won’t get to. But we live on with his spirit, because he’s brought us together at this difficult time. And we should never lose track of this. Life is too short.

  The grieving group: everyone who loved you, who

  loves you.

  And those who love us.

  *

  We wish people still wore mourning armbands the first year.

  We wish people still wore black the first year.

  We wish our mark could be visible so that others could see our mark.

  We wish rituals still existed.

  So we make our own rituals.

  Our friends make rituals.

  So our friends eat with us every evening.

  So our friends call us every morning.

  So our friends take care of our children.

  So our friends sit with us the whole day, while nothing happens.

  So our friends keep us alive, while nothing happens.

  Only the burning pain happens.

  In the stopped time, burning pain.

  Our friends carefully wash the bloody wound.

  They ritually wash it every day

  Our invisible stigma.

  The community as something just as absolute as death.

  The community as the only possibility.

  *

  Later, I learn to be alone. Later, I want to be alone. When I’m alone, I watch TV series all day. Or I wander aimlessly around the city, the park, around and around, nothing I see makes an impression on me, nothing I see gladdens me. I see a tree, a person, I confirm: a tree, a person. Nothing penetrates, nothing leaves an impression on me, nothing interests me. My doctor says I need to make an appointment with her. I don’t. She calls again, repeating that I need to make an appointment. So I do. When I walk in the door, she says: You know, the worst thing a person can experience is losing a child. I start to laugh. She tells me to drink less, but don’t stop now. If you want, she says, I can give you pills to take instead. I tell her that I don’t want her pills. I say that I’m completely indifferent to my drinking. My doctor says: You should make an appointment with a grief counselor. I don’t. She calls again, repeating that I need to make an appointment with a grief counselor. So I take the subway over to the grief counselor. Three times I take the subway over to the grief counselor. It makes no difference. She asks me to fill out a questionnaire. She reads my answers and says that I don’t suffer from “complicated grief.” She says: Your grief is normal. The questionnaire seems very American to me. Later, I begin to box. Three times a week I go boxing. I hit hard
, and I kick hard. I refine my technique. I become better at boxing than I’ve ever been before. My body becomes strong. A strong sheath around the unknown, terrifying uncertainty that is now me.

  Denise Riley writes:

  It’s not the same “I” who lives in her altered sense of no-time, but a reshaped person. And I don’t know how she’ll turn out. If writing had once been a modest work of shaping and correcting, now all your small mastery has been smashed by the fact of your child’s death.

  *

  I wrote in my journal:

  February 28, 2016

  The first real spring day. I recognize the sharp light as something brutal, raw, and unmerciful. When we dragged ourselves around the streets in the days after your death with the slowness of old men, walking feebly, cursing spring, hating it with every fiber in our bodies, it was nauseating and intolerable to see all the young happy people. We bit our lips until they bled. Our jaws were hard as stone from rage and horror. I think of you with enormous love. Soon I’ll begin to write a book. Yesterday your father wrote to me. He wrote: I am in complete darkness.

  Mallarmé writes:

  no more life for

     —

  me

   and I feel

  I am lying in the grave

  beside you.

  *

  I wrote in my journal:

  March 1, 2016

  Now it’s March. The first day of the month you vanished.

  On December 7, 2010, you wrote to me:

  Dear Mom, Why don’t we Skype or talk in some other way? I miss you so much and cannot wait until the eighteenth.

  December 18 arrived and you traveled to see us. You were only eighteen when we moved to Brooklyn with your two younger brothers. You didn’t want to come. You had just graduated from high school, you wanted to go off and travel, you wanted to make it on your own. You were proud, grown up.

  So often I’ve regretted that we didn’t insist on you coming with us. Later you came and lived with us for nearly two years. That precious time. The time we had together. The time you had. Your life.

  How one learns to put a value on what’s lamented: the all-too-short life.

  Every visit, when you reluctantly faced returning to Denmark, you’d cry all the way to the airport.

  The last time you traveled home, a few days after New Year’s in 2015, you told me that you had learned how to deal with saying good-bye. You no longer cried all the way to the airport. We waved as you drove away in the taxi. We stood out in the street waving until we couldn’t see the car anymore.

  Every time I take the elevator up to our apartment, the little ding at every floor reminds me of the last time you came to visit us. I stood in the doorway and heard you coming up. I was so impatient. I couldn’t wait to see you. Ding. Ding. It took forever. Then I saw your shining smile, and the joy bubbled up in me. There you were.

  Today I began to write. I’ve named the file Carl’s Book. I’ve written a little more than a page.

  *

  Those dim and blurry weeks.

  I stick close to my beloved.

  His warm hands.

  His voice, his being.

  Hands, voice, being.

  The only thing my body acknowledges as

  familiar, safe.

  The only thing.

  Him.

  The only one.

  My love.

  Is just as big as my sorrow.

  All the evenings we sat in a dark corner close together on a crate and a rickety chair talking and drinking wine. You and I. You and I in the sorrow-corner. We didn’t turn on the lights. We wanted to sit in a humble place in the house, surrounded by old patio furniture, bags of withered leaves, we wanted the darkness. We cried, we talked about our Carl. We talked about the other children, we talked about our lives. We talked about what had changed our lives. We held each other’s hands. This is how we got through that first year. I listened to your breathing.

  I breathe with you.

  You breathe with me.

  *

  It’s September 22, 2016, and I write:

  In that stopped time, in this new time, in that time, consisting of the only moment that exists right now, no plans for the future can be made. None. Nearly one and a half years have passed. It is no time. No time.

  When you can’t make plans, you can’t envision the future. Or anything else. When imagination is not a possibility, you cannot write. To write is to imagine. To write is also to move through time, via writing. To create time. Present, past, future. To write fiction is to invent images and structures, events and emotions in time. Arranged in time. With time as a factor, the compositional force. Time links everything that’s imagined. But now it’s not possible. It’s not possible for me to write about anything other than this no-time. It’s impossible for me to imagine myself writing in the future. Where there used to be ideas for writing about this or that in the future, now there is only silence. There is no movement. There is only deathly silence. We share the deathly silence with our dead. This is how we end up in the same place as the dead. We are here. But we are also with the dead. It’s not difficult at all. It happens completely by itself.

  It’s possible to live in that deathly silent moment. It’s possible to function. It’s possible to do the most necessary thing, to ensure your own and your children’s survival. It’s possible to earn a living, buy groceries, cook dinner, do the laundry. It’s possible to laugh. It’s possible to have a nice time. The shock no longer controls every single moment we experience. There are many things that now seem completely meaningless. There are many things we avoid. Parties. Small talk. Projects that before we’d take on because “that’s what you do” or because it’s good for your “career,” “networking,” a “future life,” projects that might be “exciting,” we now say a flat-out no to. We cannot do those kinds of projects. Our refusal is not dramatic or sad or in any way emotional. It is not painful. With a quiet mind, hushed and white, we now say no.

  *

  I find a note you wrote in 2014 about Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. The piece is from 1936. It circles around the same melody. First it climbs and then it falls, as though the melody were running up and down stairs. Like a bow, an arch. Then a long pause. Then back to the melody, which finally stops, and fades out in one long tone. Barber’s use of time in this piece is what gives it its character. Throughout, he manipulates the base rhythm by changing the tempo, for example: 4/2, 5/2, 6/2, and 3/2. The tempo is subtly raised and lowered. The simple base melody, the repeated figures and patterns, change imperceptibly. I listen to the piece. I think about how you experienced the music. I think about how in poetry we also use figures, finding a path through the material, by using figures, we find the delicate balance between different levels and tones, which form the entire work. You write:

  Adagio for Strings. Process:

  Death, rebirth

  To overcome an obstacle

  Life’s path — childhood

  To transcend from one state to another

  Love

  On the beach after the accident

  The new world’s beauty

  *

  I think about my children every day. I have always thought about my children every day. Because one of them is dead, it does not mean that I think about him less often. Rather, it feels even more pressing to think about him. It feels urgent to turn myself toward where he is. In no-time. That is, toward death. I mean, in the opposite direction from where my other children exist: in chronological time.

  I don’t differentiate between my children. I love them all equally. To have several children gives an automatic experience of democratic love. Because one of my children is dead, it doesn’t mean that I give up that democratic love. My love is the same. My love will always be the same.

  I think about my dead child; his time and his life are folded into me. I gave birth to him. I must hold his death. I will continue to fight like a lioness for him. No one should wr
ong him. No one should forget him. Not as long as I am alive. I still protect him, I know him just as well as I know my living children.

  It’s a physical feeling:

  He is inside me.

  He is inside my body.

  I bear his spirit in my body.

  I bear him again inside my body.

  As when he was in my womb.

  But now I bear his entire life.

  I bear your entire life.

  *

  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 falls 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 that person’s embrace, what should we do, what should we do, there’s nothing we can do, but we still have to wait. We wait, we wait, they wheel Carl down to test if he can be declared brain dead now, outside the sun is shining, we go down and buy coffee in the cafeteria, we sit outside in the sun, several people arrive, friends, colleagues, we drink coffee, we close our eyes, letting the sun shine on us, almost a moment of relief, conversation, short laughter, how is it possible to laugh? We go back up again, sit in the waiting room, the doctor comes in, he looks stressed, is everyone here now? he asks, no, we’re missing Martin, where’s Martin? he’s still outside, go down and find him, says the doctor, and someone goes to find Martin, it takes an eternity, he had to move his car, something about parking, finally he comes, now we’re all here, a very large group, the doctor comes in again, he stands up, he says: At 3:45 p.m. Carl Emil Heurlin Aidt was declared brain dead. The doctor has tears in his eyes. I am terribly sorry, he says, and I begin to scream, hoarse and uncontrollably, I cry, everything goes to pieces in that moment, someone is holding me, I’ve stood up and am about to fall over, everything goes to pieces, and they’ve rolled Carl away and now he’s waiting for surgery, many are crying, Martin’s face is completely white and frozen, my husband’s face cracks, my mother’s, my sister’s, my children’s, everything goes to pieces, as if until now there had been hope, but we knew there was never any hope, and yet there’s a difference between him breathing and someone now about to turn the respirator off, so immense, so banally immense, it’s the difference between living and dying, and the doctor calls Martin and me out into the hall again, I’d like to ask you, he says, if maybe you’d consider also donating some of his skin? Maybe his knees? And I say: His knees? Will you cut off his knees? Will you flay the skin off him? And the doctor says no, we won’t cut off his knees, we won’t flay his skin, and the doctor smiles, we’ll just take the meniscus from the knees and a little skin to the burn unit, and Martin and I say no, we will not donate his skin and knees, you may not take any more from his body, okay, says the doctor, that’s fine, we don’t need any skin at the moment, and then he goes, and we return to the waiting room, there’s nothing more we can do here, Carl will be operated on, and then they will turn off the respirator, and then he’ll lie there all night alone in what they call the “six-hour room,” his dead body will lie alone in a dark room all night, and it makes me sick to think about it, I want to be with him, we want to be with him, but we can’t, we’re not allowed to, because tomorrow he’ll be taken to the Forensic Institute, where he’ll have an autopsy, but first he’ll be cut open so they can remove his organs, then he’ll be patched up, then he’ll be cut open again for the autopsy, and patched up again, this body, my child’s body, has to be exposed to so much, so much violence, his body, which is already completely wrecked, will be again and again wrecked even more, we gather our things and go, we go, we leave the hospital, we’re a large group of people, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, we go out into the sunshine, we leave Carl.