OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Atmospheric

November 3rd, 2006

Is there beauty in loss?

This week, my life it had been a film, would be one of those artful atmospheric things, lots of shadows and sepia tones and big clouds and a soundtrack that would be this Glassian single plaintive line over a low rumble.

I got to parent alone while the other parent in the house flew to Boston for a conference — he was gone the week before and will be gone again next week, which is manageable, the kids help with everything from taking out trash and making their own lunches to reading to each other and helping each other with homework, but it still requires management skills on my part that are just out of reach because I sleep badly, having a hard time dragging myself to bed and then waking up wide awake with every creak in our old house. Halloween brought about an intense bout of homesickness for Dallas because the older boys missed the friends they went trick-or-treating with last year, when their father was, coincidentally at another conference in Boston — and by the time I got them to a party thrown by the Suzuki teacher, home, fed dinner, cleaned up and ready to go out, it was 8:00 and most of the lights were out in most of the houses in our neighborhood — three people on our block answered the door. This isn’t the most child friendly neighborhood, it’s friendly, it just still feels, um transitional? Bitter disappointment. And I recognize that this is not going to leave scars even though I feel guilty and terrible about depriving them of something they wanted. In any case, I suspect I am ambivalent about the whole trick-or-treating thing because I have a huge aversion to asking for things.

Holding a sobbing ten-year-old in my arms and hearing how lonely he is for his friends he’s left behind somehow left me susceptible to all of the other dark-cloud linings to a holiday that isn’t so much about the candy, back to the death of my grandfather a few days before Halloween my senior year of high school and my father’s annual melancholy at the end of October. A year later, the loneliness I experienced my first year at college and knowing my father was having a hard time of it and making myself sick trying to use chocolate as a drug to make it not ache — that bizarre feeling of eating compulsively and not enjoying it but not being able to stop and how frightening that was. Another vivivd Halloween/Dia de los Muertos memory is of walking through a cemetery in Prague with my three week old son strapped to my chest, ten years ago, on November 1st, aware of the All-Saint’s Day and amazed that a nation of atheists turns out en masse annually to clean up the graves of their family members and feeling overpowered by all the hormones and being so far from the graves of anyone I loved and sad for those graves that had no one visiting them and mortally aware of my powerlessness that I had brought a life into this world and that it comes with no guarantees and suddenly I am more vulnerable to loss than I have ever been.

If my life were a film this week, it wouldn’t be bleak, exactly, though it would feature the grayness and rain we’ve been anticipating since moving to Portland, but it would also stop your heart with the beauty of wet sidewalks plastered with bright yellow leaves, raging against the grayness, going not gently, almost it seems a counterpoint to the cherry blossom as this Japanese metaphor for the transience of life and beauty. I know there’s a metaphor to be tortured here. It’s been a weepy week, feeling alien in this city, again, not unanticipated, and I’m pretty sure it will get better — it has every time we’ve moved before — but this nagging fear is “what if this time it doesn’t?” and somehow my mind piles up evidence of all the sad and lonely people I know. But there’s this perverse side of my delighting in the cathartic weeping and just in awe of the beauty of the cold, the wet, the grey, the dark and those bright yellow leaves.

Is loss beautiful? There are facile answers, about the romanticization and idealization of things we have lost — I could be as lonely in Dallas as I am here; this is always what I thought “the only good woman is a dead woman” meant. There is the release from worry and responsibility and that paring down to essentials. There is the realization that you have survived a loss you thought you couldn’t, being surprised at your own strength. All possibly beautiful but not what I mean.

Maybe it’s just ridiculous to use the same word to refer to my realization that my favorite ring has slipped off my finger, to my ten-year-old’s feeling he has no friends here, to what a friend who just lost custody of a niece she had been bringing up with her own children for more than a year is going through. There are losses you hardly notice and losses with such pervasive force that every ordinary ritual of daily life has lurking this enormous weight ready to come down crushingly on your chest so you cannot breathe. Losses that hit you as soon as you wake up and so you try to scurry back under a cover of dreams to escape them. I am not romanticizing these things, I don’t think puffy red eyes make me sexy, I don’t want to tart tragedy up as a melodrama — but what I am finding inspiring and sustaining and, yes, beautiful, is that we endure loss and cycle around and it becomes part of who we are and we do eventually laugh again.

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