“I can’t keep seeing myself
dead.” This was what the medic in Tim
O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things
They Carried, says when he has picked up the pieces and plugged up the
holes of too many bodies to count and he’s beginning to imagine his friends dead
and finally himself as nothing more than meat for jungle bugs. Brian, a student of mine is writing about
this book in a thesis that analyzes the ways writers use humor to cope with
horror. The book is very moving but not
funny … not to me. I feel like I have
just come through a struggle that for five years has felt like I was battling
for my own life. The battle ended with a
sabbatical during which I was using an academic project to free myself from
dependence on an abusive therapist, but he called every day and tried to insert
himself into every thought, every insight.
He even called himself the “midwife” of my project. Even though I was working well and keeping
him at bay, the nightmares worsened. I
could taste something rotting in my body.
The taste (or was it a smell?) worsened at night. I felt like I was dying inside. I tossed and turned, imagining the feeling of
being buried, in a casket, watching my funeral from a distance. The image of myself dead met me
everywhere. I concluded that I was
damned and that God was punishing me through my own body. I knew that whatever was causing these
thoughts had to stop. I knew that
somehow I had to get out, get free—of him.
The only way I could stop the thoughts was by working. Writing—about Shakespeare and the Bible—was
my way to hold onto my life. So I
understand what Rat Kiley, the medic, was going through when he said, “I can’t
keep seeing myself dead.” Rat shot
himself in the foot to get helicoptered out of the jungle to a hospital in Japan. “I thought I could be a good friend to you,”
said my abuser, who, at the end left me to live or die … alone. “No one gets out of these situations without
external help.” “He confabulated
everything, making himself your husband, father, even God, how could you have
chosen?” “But you were working yourself
free.” These are the things people
(counselors) say to me to help me live.
Jesus walked into the house where a young girl had died, “Get up,” he
said with authority; and she lived. For
years I’ve imagined myself as Jacob wrestling with the angel. Now that I am beginning to read the New
Testament, I am trailing Jesus, longing to touch the hem of his garment,
believing that with just one touch I, too, might live and stop seeing myself
dead.
The second time I saw S-----, I told him about the way my father died—in his sleep when “us
kids” (myself, three siblings, and our Florida
cousins) were in a rental cabin in the Adirondacks. We found him.
I touched death and drew my hand away quickly. Horror.
Liveliness gone. Dead. There was no more warmth in my life. Childhood ended when my mother came to pick
us up, pack up, and soldier on. We
carried away from that cabin more than clothes, towels, lamps, pots and
pans. No time to unpack the
emotions. No grieving and no depression
allowed on Mom’s watch. “This happens to
lots of other families.” Reality hit. I hated myself for the selfish thought, “how
will I go to college?” I told all of
this to S----- and cried. Years later,
he told me that the story of my early loss moved him because he, too, had lost
a parent early. His mother. He felt bonded to me. As the years went by, we often spoke about
the losses that bound us to each other.
I wrote him a letter once in which I tried to explore our different ways
of handling loss: I held mine close (to
the point of writing a dissertation about elegy and the female complaint) while
he ran from his loss (leaving Far Rockaway far behind). "I didn't know how sad I wanted to get," he said when I pressed him to explain why he had never helped me with my problems. He brushed them aside and redirected me to focus on him, "us," and our study of philosophy, literature, and finally, the Bible.
Reading scripture together, working
on a project with a completely engaged older man could not help but remind me
of those lost days when I suggested to my father that we build a greenhouse,
and we did it together, raising plants from cuttings in a little house (90
degrees in March, heated by a chicken brooder). Being with S----- was a fantastic way of
resurrecting the dead parts of my life:
he played my father—magically returned—and my husband full of desire for
me. “All kinds of feelings come up in
therapy. The patient transfers her
attachment from people in her life to the therapist, and those feelings should
get talked about.” S----- did not help
me talk about the holes in my life, he filled them with fictions and with
promises of an impossible future … because nothing is impossible with God. To disconnect was to suffer the loss of my
father all over again.
To succumb to him (as I did) was to lose myself, to die.
The war is over. But is war ever over? Do we ever forget the comrades we’ve
lost? My new therapist urges me to
grieve. She is different from my
mother. Tim O’Brien helps me to
understand how soldiers, whether or not they have been directly responsible for
death, absorb responsibility. Several
different men in his company believed they let his friend, Kiowa, sink into a
field of shit where he suffocated. They
didn’t do it but they did. In a similar
way, I assume blame for what happened. I
chose to go. I chose to let him use
me. I chose him over God. Even though people say that I could not
choose. Even though I was battling. Even though I was open about my
struggle. He was the therapist, and I
kept turning to him for help, but he never reached out a helping hand, only a
grasping violating one.
After probing my wounds with my new
therapist last week, on the drive home to Flint my mind drifted back 36 years. I was in
the car, riding shotgun. Pop was driving
through the village of Warrensburg. We were headed back
to Indian Lake where he would die that night—just
hours away. I remembered vividly the
black thunder clouds over the mountains.
I remember the chill that comes before a summer storm. From the backseat, my little cousin, David,
asked me why I didn’t go to my Junior Prom, and my father, who understood my
shyness, reached over and squeezed my knee.
He had just taken me back to Glens
Falls to have my nose cauterized because it had been bleeding for days. Driving north to Flint, I marveled at how vivid the sights and
feelings from the last bit of time I would ever spend with him still were. That sky was the last evening sky my father
would ever see. The night of August 18,
1980, it poured all night. We were stuck
in the cabin (no late night fishing off the dock), and he talked to neighbors about
his recent (minor) heart attack and, unbeknownst to me said (I learned later)
that he was ready to die … that he had raised four good kids. I had had insomnia all week. This was my first experience with sleeplessness which has become chronic. The night he died, although I had not slept in five nights, I
lay awake in the loft of Camp
Mary listening to rain fall on the tin roof. I heard Pop fiddle with the stove somewhere
around 4:00 and imagined him in the kitchen of the cabin, the ash on his
cigarette glowing in the dark. The next
morning, the coroner said he probably died around 5:00, which would have been
just when I fell asleep. I’m not aware
of feeling guilty, but perhaps the guilt is too deeply buried. What I think about is that I felt the coming
storm—lay in wait for it, bled beforehand—but was helpless to do anything about
it.
For years I knew that there was something
very wrong about the relationship with S-----, but I couldn’t do anything to
save my soul and myself. I had thoughts
of death. I considered taking my life. I imagined myself damned in hell. But I kept dutifully writing him letters and
kept reluctantly making the drive to East
Lansing. Long
ago in graduate school, I had an Irish classmate. We agonized about boyfriends and oral exams
over beers in the Irish pubs of Brighton,
surrounded by very drunk and rowdy guys who painted houses for a living and did
other hard labor. “You have an amazing
survival instinct,” she told me once. I
caught the echo when my new counselor said, “You are a survivor.” What triggered my survival instinct that got
me out of hell (I hope) was S----’s carelessness. In a phone conversation after his wife had
discovered some emails and determined to put an end to what she concluded was
an “emotional affair,” he told me that he would be devoted to my memory and
compared himself to Joe DiMaggio, who took flowers to Marilyn Monroe’s grave
five years after her suicide. That remark told me that, on some level, I had become his mother, and he wished I would just
die. The impact of that bullet, made me
realize that, more than wanting him as a friend, more than anything else, I
wanted to live.
I asked him to mail back some
special things that I gave him: a
picture of me as a child, a wooden pen box from Kazakhstan, a silver filigree
pointer for reading the Torah, a patchwork quilt, and a framed postcard of the
Tent City (circa 1915) at Far Rockaway Beach.
Seeing the returned postcard hurt most of all. It was something like a relic or the sign of
my absolute devotion. I’d fallen in love
with the idea of him and with the sound and smells of his seaside home. “Just a finger of sand at the edge of Brooklyn,” where he was taught by Irish nuns, where he
found a rowboat in the reeds, where he loved a girl across the street, where he
swam across the channel, where his mother got sick. When he saw her in the hospital for the last
time, she came down to the lobby looking tired.
She died. He did not seem to know
exactly what killed her. But he went to
the synagogue three times each day. It was the right thing to do.
“… no matter where I wandered
off
the chart
I still would love to
find again
that
lost locality
Where I might catch once
more
a
Sunday subway for
some
Far Rockaway
of
the heart.”
I made pilgrimages to Far Rockaway
four times! The first time I went was
when my sister got married. I’d ask S-----
to try to draw a map of the world he inhabited at seven years old. Holding tight to that map as I climbed off
the train at the end of the line, I emerged into sunlight. I felt like Gilgamesh who after an endless
journey through dark mountains enters the garden of the gods. It was magical. When I found the postcard on ebay I was even
more charmed. The idea of a makeshift
life on the beach, living in tents, like Israelites in the wilderness
struck me as a beautifully impossible fulfillment of all my erotic and
transcendent yearnings. The tent
symbolized sacred, moveable, space made in-between two people bound by
countless silken ties of love and thought.
Before I unpacked the box of
returned tokens, I bought I bottle of wine to dull the pain. It was working. I couldn’t look long at the postcard which
once reeked of meaning. Now it was just
ephemera. Gaudy colors on cheap
paper. Its living soul had dribbled
away. But I remembered that I had taped
a quotation from Romeo and Juliet to the back of the postcard. The line (still there in my handwriting) was Juliet's, spoken when she wakes
up in the tomb after drinking the sleeping draught that makes her appear to be
dead. “I do remember well where I should
be, / And there I am.” When I selected
that quote, I was really in love and committed to my pact with the
impossible. I never thought of Juliet as
naïve; she was rock solid, real, pure, and took a courageous leap of
faith. Wide open and vulnerable—so many
things could go wrong (and they do)—she trusts.
So did I. When I gave him that
card and inscribed the lines on the back side, I really believed that I would land in
soft sand after my leap. Things went
wrong.
Now I wonder if, in choosing that
line, I was prophetic. The night Juliet
drank the drug, she was full of anxiety and thought she might die. The next morning, her nurse and family all
believed she was really dead. But she
came through an experience that is only like
death to LIFE. She WAKES in the tomb: it
is the faithless Romeo, the Romeo moved more by his own fantasies and fears
than by the lively and loving Juliet, who is dead and can no longer feel the
brush of parted lips. My lips are still
warm. And I pray God will put a new song in my mouth and give me the courage to sing it. My body will not be a sheath for Romeo’s dagger nor will I be any man’s
dead mother or play Marilyn Monroe to his Joe DiMaggio.
As I finish this blog, I see, more
clearly than ever before, the dangers of loving literature. I believe that fiction can be used to deepen
our relationship to real life, but it must not become more important than life. Literary characters can seem deeper and more
beautiful than human beings. We can know them in ways we
often cannot know the people in our lives, and, as a result, they seduce
us. S----- turned me into Ruth (renaming
me for the character in the biblical book).
Ruth is a loyal daughter and a lively redeemer whose redemption begins
with surviving loss—the death of her husband and the bereavement of Naomi. Ruth is a Moabite, and the women of Moab are, to
the Israelites, whores capable of luring chosen men into the worship of idols. But Ruth proves that the “other”
is really the face of God and a force of God in the world. Ruth teaches me many things, not least of all that I am Mary Jo
and neither Ruth nor Juliet. I am Mary
Jo—daughter of Joseph. Mary Jo, who
worked with Joseph every summer to plant and tend the garden surrounding the
statue of Mary at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Queensbury, New York. Papa was a Lutheran, but he knew, without
ever spelling it out, that it was more important to be in church—even a
Catholic church—and to put his arm around the daughter next to him in the
pew. Being in the presence of God is
what matters—in a church or in a garden.
It doesn’t matter if you fall asleep and even snore during the homily. It doesn’t matter if the sun is hot and the
weeding interminable. What matters is
being with God and with one another in His dazzling theater for worldlings,
reading His book all around us. Even in
thrall to a false god, I never lost my love of His book.
Mary Jo,. This is sad and hopeful and beautiful!
ReplyDeleteMary Jo,. This is sad and hopeful and beautiful!
ReplyDeleteThe word "survivor" is one I am very wary of, especially coming from a therapist. But you are indeed a survivor. You give the phrase "living in hell" new meaning.
ReplyDeleteI hate to say it but, well first of all, humans aren't really designed for modern society, referring especially but not exclusively to capitalism and American capitalism but don't get me started. So we are all damaged to one degree or another, especially if you happened to be female or some form of minority. I am not entirely aware of where I was going with this but I did very much feel, until I got to the end where perhaps I change my mind, that God seemed to be both part of the problem and part of the solution, so that maybe God had to be cancelled our of the equation altogether.
You make this all so real and frightening, even if we don't completely understand everything. I did wonder how, besides the literal coming storm, how you knew the figurative storm was coming. Was it hearing part of your father's conversation with the neighbor?
You are careful to hide the abusive therapist's name, but you do spell it out toward the end.
This does feel like I have violated your privacy. But that is what great writing can do. I, too, expose my secrets in my completed novel, although not so ruthlessly. At the risk of being utterly selfish or even callous, I more than ever want you to be read my novel, as a paid editor or whatever. After all, your house is in my novel, although I relocate it. Weird that it takes place in 1981 too.
Just one more thing. The "This happens to lots of other families" quote bothered me especially. For some reason. Why do troubled people go into psychiatry? Btw the protagonist of my novelwho, I literally destroy along with his hospital, is the protagonist of my novel.