I careened around the city this afternoon, finished teaching for the day and drove to get a shot in my aching knee, sat in rows of cars on the way there and on the way back, listened to endless radio and the hoarse, cracked voice of a father of a slaughtered child from Sandy Hook who gave me advice on what to do how to help. I stopped at a Chinese restaurant on my way home and sat at a tiny table in the window, the sun so warm on my face. I ordered a scallion pancake and dipped it in plum sauce with my fingers. I ate crispy sesame shrimp and barely steamed broccoli with a bit of brown rice while reading a worn library edition of a 1949 memoir written by a woman who, after nearly three decades as a nun, emerged from a convent into the London of World War II.
I’m mourning my mother with tears behind my face, it feels like, as I careen here and there. I feel them pricking there and let them leak. I keep repeating the opening words of Camus’ L’Etranger. They sound in my head a dumb reminder. Aujourd-hui, ma mere est morte. The tears are not just for my mother and my loss or my sisters and their loss or my father and his loss but for all the loss and grief and sorrow and stupidity of this terrible country. The dead bodies of children keep piling up. Our loss. It’s difficult to bear. I do not believe in a god with specific plans or mysterious ways. I am not sure, even, of a place beyond this one, the one of fire and earth and water and air. I have no idea whether it’d be easier to be so, to have faith in that god, that other place, or more terrible because of that certainty. I’ve written that before. Over and over.
The dead bodies of children keep piling up. Over and over.
As a small child, I lay on my back in the grass and looked up at the clouds. I imagined flower as cloud and cloud as flower. I’d watch the flowers float by and pick a cloud, weave a few into a chain and put it on my head. I imagined myself the dream of God. I was living a dream.
It feels now as if we are living a kind of nightmare, a crude satire. I am not hopeless, but this is a terrible country. Broken and without grace.
My kid today saw the flags at half-mast in various places again and said out loud why don't we just leave them there. This is what we are. I don't know how to change it. Holding you, and so many, in my heart right now 💙
My dear friend Kate, who died last fall, used to tell me--during my worst times--Weebles wobble but they don't fall down (your wonderful fortune cookie fortune). I wish for you the wobble and the not falling, the grieving but not the despair, peace wherever your heart can find it, even if only in the clouds. Much love to you, my dear friend Elizabeth.