There are things that one knows about one’s self, and things that one doesn’t. I know, for example, that words make me happy and that I love my children and that I can, when I try, be very funny, and that I am introverted (yes, really) and that I am good at philosophy and at making soup and that I love the smell of lilacs. I know, too, that I am prone to anxiety and depression, but that I am able to cope with these with the help of the love and support of my family and by writing and with a certain quantity of pharmaceuticals. What I don’t know is how big a role my proneness to anxiety and depression plays on the stage of my psyche – whether it is a starring role or a bit part, whether its strutting and fretting defines the production in some critical way or is just a nuance, just theatrical flair – and whether, or the extent to which, it shapes who I am. What I also don’t know: how much it effects how my children regard me, and how they will remember me.

My paternal grandmother was, to use the vernacular, crazy. To the best of my knowledge, she was never diagnosed with a specific mental condition, but according to my parents, she was bonkers. My use of words like ‘crazy’ and ‘bonkers’ is inappropriate, I know, and a practice that I deplore in others, but ‘crazy’ was how I understood her, my Dad’s mother, as I was growing up. I never met her – my mother told me, later, that she had been terrified to let her babies, us, within ten feet of her – and my parents were, of course, very careful in the language that they used to describe her to me when I was growing up, but I’d gotten bits and pieces of the story by eavesdropping and asking annoying questions – Dad had been afraid of her, Dad had left home very young to get away from her, she’d died when she set her own house on fire – I understood, I read through the lines. She had been crazy.

Later, when I became aware of my father’s own struggles with mental illness, my understanding of my grandmother became more complicated. Throughout my teens, Dad had what were at the time called ‘nervous breakdowns,’ and it seemed to me that those breakdowns of nerve, those collapses into nervousness, were very probably my grandmother’s fault. Dad had demons – to use the language of our church – and all I knew of his demons were that they had something to do with his childhood, with his mother, and so I blamed her. I blamed her for the fact that he had breakdowns; I blamed her for the fact that he would go sit in the garage and weep (which terrified me all the way down to my bones, such that they would ache with my fear); I blamed her for the fact that his voice would break when I would ask him about his childhood and he would say, I’d really rather not talk about it, sweetie; it’s not a happy story. I blamed her for the fact that he didn’t have a happy story.

I don’t blame her anymore; I know more of the story now, and although it is a truly hair-raising story, I know that it’s a story of mental illness. But in a way that knowledge has made it worse: she wasn’t a monster, she was a woman with an illness, but that illness is something that she might have passed on to her son. That she might have passed on to me. That I might pass on to my children. This terrifies me.

This terrifies me, not only because I fear for my own mental stability – if this is genetic, is it beyond my control? am I genetically fated to be crazy? (the research calls this ‘self-guilt’) – and for that of my children – are they genetically fated to be crazy? – but because it colors my memory of my father, who, although he struggled with anxiety and depression and, really, just a whole lot of sadness, was a light in my life and a source of great joy to me. He was gentle and kind and wise and although I always knew that he held a very great grief in the deepest part of his heart, I also always knew that that grief was overpowered by love. But when I dwell in anxiety about my own mental state – my own griefs, my own fears – and the genetic heritage of this state, I lose this part of him; my memory of him becomes achromatic, desaturated, a fog of gray and sad. I hate this. And I fear that my children will inherit it, that they will someday fret over their mental wellness and that this fretting will cast a pall over the memories of their childhood and that they will see me that way, in a fog of gray and sad.

I hate this, I hate this.

I fight this.

I fight this by fighting my battle with anxiety and depression, and by endeavoring to fight it out of their view, but I worry about this, about this concealment of the gray and the fog and the sad. My paternal grandmother lurks in my memory like a shadow, a sinister one, and she does so because I did not know her and did not know her story and by the time I learned her story, and my father’s story of her, she had already settled into her spectral shape. The details, now that I know them, are secondary; brushstrokes of oils over an image whose paint has already set. My father never explained to me why he struggled, beyond the barest sketch, and so I just colored in between the lines, and sometimes over them, and I worry whether my children will do this, too, that if I conceal my own story, or keep it deliberately vague, they too will fill in the outlines of that story with their own colors, or uncolors, achromatic grays and blacks, and regard me through that fog.

So what do I do? Do I reach for as much honesty as I think that they can handle, even now, when they are so young? I discuss grief with Emilia – it is necessary to discuss grief with her, when it keeps so close to us – and she has learned, already, that there are different kinds of sad and different kinds of worry and that not all of these, perhaps not any of these, are ‘bad,’ but do I – can I – extend that discussion to those times when Mommy has a headache / Mommy is tired and break for her that code that conceals the truth of Mommy is anxious / Mommy is sad? Or do I wait until she – until they – are older, and then explain in more detail this experience, this thing that I struggle with, this thing that may or may not have anything to do with the thing that my dad struggled with, with the thing that my grandmother struggled with, with those things that are not monsters, not necessarily, not if you drag them out of the closet and sit with them in the light?

(Thank you to award-winning author Linda Gray Sexton for sponsoring this series, which is inspired by her memoir Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. I was selected for this sponsorship by Clever Girls Collective which endorses Blog With Integrity. To learn more about Linda Gray Sexton and her writing, please visit her website.)

It was just one night, and one night, measured against the course of a lifetime, doesn’t seem all that significant. But it was a dark night, and I have never been able to shed the weight of the memory of it. I have never been able to put it, as they say, in perspective. I never will.

Jasper was not quite six months old. I had not slept in weeks. I lay awake as he stirred and fussed, bracing myself for the moment when I would have to rouse myself fully to nurse him or change him or soothe him. The darkness that night seemed particularly black, the kind of black that has a density, a weight. To say that it felt like it was closing in would be to use a trope that gets overused when writers are trying to describe dark nights and oppressive fear, but in this case it was true. The darkness was closing in on me like a heavy fog, like an army of ghosts, like a slick of oil, like night made solid and sinister. I couldn’t breathe. Jasper continued to fuss. I fought the dark.

I fought the dark. I think that I won. Even at the time, I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure.

Later, when I wrote about what happened, I couched it in the most delicate of terms. “I was groggy,” I said. “… (I was) confused, disoriented, as I held my squirming baby in my arms:”

He fussed, breathing heavily through a stuffy nose, truffling for the breast and then pushing it away. He squirmed and kicked and protested and snuffled and grabbed and pushed and with every kick, every push of his fierce little legs and arms I struggled toward wakefulness, needing to be awake, needing my strength and my composure but wanting oh so badly to just let the darkness overtake me and to slide back into oblivion. But he wouldn’t let me, he was too uncomfortable, poor thing, hungry and snuffly and demanding, he would not let me let me go and he would not let this be easy and in a flash, in one moment, I felt the frustration course through me like a current and there it was, for a split-second – a split-second and an eternity all at once – ANGER – sharp and hot and as I felt the tears prick my eyes and a sob burble in my throat I was overwhelmed by the brief flash of an urge to just drop the baby, just drop him to the mattress and throw myself off the bed and stomp away into the night.

I didn’t have an urge to drop the baby. I had an urge to throw him. And then to throw myself, right out the window. It was an fleeting urge, one that passed, as I said, in a split-second, but it also felt like an eternity, an eternity during which I was not in my right mind, and completely aware of not being in my right mind, and completely helpless to do anything about it. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. It was the moment about which I feel the most – the most everlasting – shame. In that moment, I was – or almost was – one of those mothers, those mothers that you read about, the Andrea Yateses, the horrible, terrible mothers who put their children in the car and drive it straight into the lake. I was a bad mother. I was a bad mother, the worst mother, the most horrifyingly terrible mother possible.

I sought help from a psychiatrist, but I downplayed the grimmer details. I am not a bad mother, I told myself. She will think that I’m a bad mother. I’m not a bad mother. Am I a bad mother? I denied parts of my own story. I denied having wanted to harm myself. She read me the referral report – reports intrusive thoughts… wanted to harm baby… – and I recoiled. It hadn’t been exactly like that. It was more abstract than that. I hadn’t been in my right mind. I hadn’t been in my right mind. But of course, that was why I was there, wasn’t it? In a psychiatrist’s office? I hadn’t been – I wasn’t – in my right mind.

Of course I wasn’t. I was depressed. I was suffering from postpartum depression, acute postpartum depression, acute postpartum depression bordering on postpartum psychosis. But even knowing that – even having a very firm grasp of that, having struggled with it for nearly three years; even having written at length about that – I was still ashamed. So ashamed, that I only went back the psychiatrist once after that. I took the prescriptions – leaving them unfilled, because I was still nursing, and shouldn’t a good mother continue to nurse her baby, regardless of her mental state? – and left after the second visit and never went back.

I didn’t have any more psychotic episodes. I continued to write about my struggle, which allowed me to gain – again, for lack of a better word – perspective on it, and which ensured that, in addition to my anxious husband, there was an army of sympathetic supporters – you, all of you – keeping an eye on me. But I still struggled with the shame and I tempered my stories, omitting the more depressing or frightening details of my experience; I hid my shame, I denied my shame. And I never went back to the psychiatrist. I was too ashamed. I was too afraid of talking, out loud, about whether or not I was a bad mother.

Even though I knew – even though I know – in my right mind – that I am not a bad mother, still… I came too close to being one of those mothers. I came too close.

And therein lays the problem. We still slip too easily into thinking of those mothers as those mothers, as bad mothers, as the worst kinds of mothers, as other. These are mothers who have fought depression and lost. These are mothers who didn’t have support. These are mothers who might have had support, but were too ashamed to ask for it. These are mothers who get described, in articles like this one posted today at AOL, as ‘psychopaths’ and ‘cold-blooded criminals.’ Bad mothers. The worst mothers. Mothers whose path, but for the grace of God and Ativan and the Internet, any one of us might have taken. I might have taken.

We have an emotional investment in characterizing these mothers as bad, as other. We want to keep our distance. We want there to be a clearly recognizable line between the mom who struggles and the mom who harms. We do not want to say, there but for the grace of God go we. We want to say, we could not possibly go there. That is a place to which we will not, can not, could not go. But in saying so, we put ourselves, and our children, at risk. In saying so, we create monsters, and in creating monsters – creatures that lurk in a netherworld that is foreign to us, closed to us – we shame, and in shaming, we close off the possibility of understanding, and of battling, the darkness that produces these so-called monsters, these so-called monsters (these monsters who are not monsters, who are not monsters; repeat, repeat, repeat) who might – but for the grace of God, but for the grace of good psychiatric care, but for the grace of community support – be us.

This is not to say that every mother who harms her child is struggling with postpartum depression, or any kind of perinatal mood disorder or non-perinatal mood disorder or depression or mental illness. This is not to say that there is no such thing as abusive mothers. This is not to say that there is no such thing – no such person – as a really bad mother. It is to say that blanket characterizations of mothers who harm their children as cold-blooded and shameful and bad – as does the horrifying, appalling article posted at AOL – can have a terribly – possibly deadly – effect on women struggling with the darkness, inasmuch at these deepen and perpetuate the shame associated with that darkness. A mom that is ashamed of what she is going through – a mom who fears being labeled ‘bad’ because she is battling darkness at a time when she is supposed to be – supposed to be! – dancing in the light – is a mom who might not admit to what she is going through, a mom who might not seek help, a mom who might not get help.

A mom who might find herself, in the dark of night, battling a demon that she cannot fight on her own, and lose.

*Apparently, AOL has edited some of the original comments out of the article. That there was such an article in the first place, one that focused entirely on one ‘expert’s’ claim that mothers who harm their children are all cold-blooded criminals, is still evidence of the deeper problem that I’m speaking about here. (See also Katherine Stone’s excellent post on the subject, in which she cites some of the original remarks.)

I was scared to come back to the Internet this week. I was scared, because I thought that I couldn’t come back unless I explained why I’d had to take a break, and explaining why I’d had to take a break was something that I did not want to do, because it was just too complicated and messy and because it seemed that explaining the complicatedness and messiness would have to involve talking about all the things that I didn’t want to talk about, and the desire to not talk about those things was why I had to take a break in the first place, so.

But then it occurred to me that I don’t have to talk about anything that I don’t want to talk about. This, theoretically, makes things easier, or would make things easier, if it weren’t for the fact that there is a part of me that wants to talk about all the difficult things, the better to purge them, the better to work them out, which really just brings me back to square one, which is really more like an octagon or some other shape with way more sides than I can count. And so I am left with this: I do not want to write about the difficult things, I do not want to not write about the difficult things, and I do not want to not write at all.

So.

Do I set aside the difficult things, and try to devote my writing energies to all things positive and lighthearted and nice? Do I want that? Would I even know how to do that?

I don’t know. I do know, however, that naked astronauts are funny, and funny is close to lighthearted, and that’s a start:

(That is a naked astronaut. According to the artist, “he is in space, naked. Those are his underpants beside him. He took them off so that he could be naked, because he likes being naked. He’s smiling because he’s happy.” And, because I know that you were wondering, yes: “that’s his penis. Because he’s naked. In space.” )

(So. Now you know: space causes shrinkage.)

(Ba dum dum.)

(No, really. It’s an actual holiday. You should probably take the day off.)

(I’m taking the day off. I’m actually going to take a couple of days off. I need a little break from the Internet. My heart is heavy and my head is full and I just don’t know how to put it into words. I don’t know if I can put it into words. If I should. So. I need a few days. That’s all.)

I am struggling to remind myself that it is spring. I can smell it in the warm rain and hear it in the call of the robins plucking earthworms from my garden and see it in the green shoots pushing their way up out of the earth, but I am having trouble feeling it.

My husband tells me that he worries about me, and I tell him that there is a difference between the oppressive dark that settles upon one in a depression, and unhappiness, generally. I can be depressed, I tell him, and not be, strictly speaking, sad, or unhappy. I tell him that there is a difference between the dark clouds of depression, which settle upon the horizon of my psyche and linger there, casting shadows, and the rain that comes with sadness, that comes in short or long bursts, that falls lightly or heavily, that pelts my heart and dampens my spirit. And unhappiness, I say, is another thing entirely. I might be depressed, I said. I also might be sad, because the sadness – the sadness related to grief, the sadness related to dread and worry – it comes and it goes and it doesn’t announce itself. But I am not unhappy, in any meaningful sense. I don’t think. I can still smile. I still laugh. It’s just that, sometimes, I am overcome by the dark.

He is not convinced of these distinctions. He tells me to go for a walk. “Take a hike?” I joke (see? I can joke.) He doesn’t laugh. “Just, get outside, go to the cafe, do something that has nothing to do with your work or with being a mom or running errands. Just get out in the air.”

I consider the possibility. It’s raining, but rain doesn’t bother me. I grew up in the rain, without umbrellas, because you don’t need umbrellas when the rain is constant, when it is more like an ongoing drizzle, a fine mist that keeps the cherry blossoms pink. When the rain is not so much rain as it is an ever-gathering damp that makes everything smell salty and earthy and fresh.

But I have work to do, and this rain, this rain that is not a delicate mist, that does not give the cherry blossoms their fine sheen – that is, if there were cherry blossoms; there are not yet any cherry blossoms here, nor magnolias, nor forsythia and such – is a heavy rain, and I should have to put on my boots. And, I have work to do. The work of words, the work of ideas, work that, some days – like these days, when those words are applied to parsing darkness – does nothing to disperse the clouds.

Maybe I will go for that walk.

This image pretty much sums up how I’m feeling these days:

Smashed Kitteh, Found Curbside On George Street One Early Spring Morning (mixed media, 2010, artist unknown)

I don’t whether it’s the shattered glass, the intimations of alcohol dependency, the desecrative wad of gum stuck to the frame, or the fact that someone had a framed picture of a kitten in a highball glass that somehow got smashed and then dispatched to the curbside to be collected as trash that makes this image so, I don’t know, sad, but the details are, I think, beside the point. I am neither a kitten nor alcohol dependent, nor do I have a wad of gum stuck to any part of me, but I can still identify with the feelings of misplacedness, of lostness, of existential confusion, and these are the feelings with which I imagine that kitten – stuffed in a highball glass and left alone at the curb – is struggling, if that kitten had feelings, which it doesn’t, because that poster is almost certainly circa 80′s, which means that that kitten is dead.

Tuesday is shaping up to be a really cheerful day.

******

(I’m okay, just feeling kind of dark. Existential confusion can do that to you.)

(Am maybe going to crawl back under the covers. With a cupcake. And a Siamese cat. A live one.)

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt.

I didn’t contemplate suicide when my dad died, but I did contemplate death, closely and more personally than I had ever contemplated it before. As I flew home to deal with his death – as I struggled with finding myself, suddenly, living the nightmare that had haunted my childhood (because this is the horror of losing a parent: you become a child again, and that child’s worst fear comes true, and her source of comfort is gone and she becomes lost and it is the stuff of nightmares and it is bad) – I thought, more than once, I could die now. This plane could plummet to the ground and I could die and it would not be a terrible thing, because at least then I would know, I would go to where he had gone and I would know.

I was aware that this thought was disturbed, that it was wrong, that I did not want to die, but in those moments – and, truthfully, in some moments since – I thought – I have thought – of death differently; I have thought of it more intimately; it has something to do with me, now, and I cannot turn away from it, and if it ever came too close… I don’t know that I would run so fast to escape it.

I’m not suicidal. I can’t stress that enough. My life has been challenging of late, but I still love that life. It is possible to be sad, to be overcome by grief, and to still appreciate joy. I still appreciate joy. My life is filled with joy. But contemplation of death, in light of death, is not necessarily a rejection of life – sometimes, it’s just a yearning for what has been lost, an aching temptation to push aside the curtain to see what’s on the other side, so that one can know, one can see for one’s self, that it’s all okay over there, that it’s good, that it’s somewhere we might want to be. Because how else can we tolerate the loss, without clinging to a belief – no matter how tenuous – that what – who – we have lost has not disappeared but gone somewhere good, somewhere better, somewhere we might go, too. Will go, someday.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size…

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

– Emily Dickinson, I measure every Grief I meet.

It does hurt to live, sometimes, when you’ve lost someone you love, someone you needed, someone who was a permanent fixture in your life, someone who you’ve never lived without, someone who was ever-present, eternal, always. It hurts to live because your life becomes suddenly different; the landscape changes so that you no longer quite recognize it; you move forward, disoriented, motion-sick. It doesn’t mean that you give up on life. It does mean that you live in a different relationship with life.

This is complicated for me, because I was convinced, for some time after my father died, that he had committed suicide. When I got the phone call, when I got the news, when I collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath, clutching at my shattered heart, this was my thought: why, Daddy, why? He had come close to suicide many times in the past, but he had promised me that he wouldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bear to hurt us that deeply, and although I believed him, when I got the news of his death, I was convinced: he’d decided that he couldn’t go on, he was in too much pain, it hurt too much to live. And so I spent many hours, many days, trying to reconcile my heart to this, to his pain, to his choice, and I got to a place where I thought that I could understand his choice, and his death having been a choice, something that he wanted, became something that was a source of some comfort.

It was determined, some months later, that he hadn’t taken his own life, but by that point I had come to that conclusion on my own, simply by sorting through the mess of his death and the disorder of his life and by asking painful questions of the people who had found him (had he fallen? where? how? did it seem sudden? oh, my heart) and, of course, by the undiscovery of a note. He would have surely written a note. He had, in fact, written such a note, which I found among his things, but it was from years ago, from a time when I hadn’t even known he was depressed, from a time before he made promises like, I won’t take my own life, sweetheart.

It hurt him to live, but live he did, until he didn’t, and in the aftermath of realizing that he had not taken his own life I was left to figure out how I felt about the fact that his death had not been his choice, that he might not have wanted it, that he might have, in his last moments, been anxious and afraid and worried that I would think that he had taken his own life. It felt bad. Ironic, that. Painful, that.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Beyond this, anyway: that when I read that Alexander McQueen had taken his own life, and that he had been grievously bereaved, gutted over the death of his mother, I thought, oh, I know, and I thought, people will say that this is strange and twisted and extreme and maybe it is those things but maybe, also, it’s not. From where I’m standing, it’s not. It’s just where someone might land when it hurts to live. It’s terrible that it ends, in his case, in another death; terrible, terrible. But such terribleness is not necessarily madness.

It’s just grief. The worst grief. Rest in peace, sad boy.

(Closing comments, again, again. I’m so sorry, I keep doing this – it’s not that I don’t love our discussions – it’s just that, I’m still sick, and this is too heavy.)

My husband had a vasectomy last year. There was a lot of discussion around it – another baby would not have been unwelcome, and so I wasn’t eager to close off the possibility – but we both knew that it would be madness for me to risk repeating the more or less pretty awfully terrible anxieties and stresses and mental and physical health concerns that I endured in my pregnancy and delivery and post-partum experience with Jasper. “You can’t go through that again,” my husband said, repeatedly, last spring. “We can’t go through that again.

He was right, of course. The pregnancy with Jasper wreaked havoc on my mind and body, as did his birth, as did the post-partum aftermath of that pregnancy and birth. In many ways, I’m still recovering. But still, I have moments in which the loss of the possibility of another pregnancy, another birth, another baby weighs so heavily upon me that it’s difficult to breath, in which the closing off of that future feels a little bit like heartbreak.

It’s a visceral, irrational thing, this feeling – a little bit like thwarted puppy love, like an unrequited crush – I know that I don’t need to have this desire fulfilled, I know that it’s probably better for me to not have this desire fulfilled, I know that the reasonable thing, the rational thing, is to reject this desire and put it in its place, but that knowledge is powerless, in those moments when that knowledge doesn’t stop the desire from pulsing and aching and drowning out everything but the want.

(I think about what we would name this child, I ruminate over whether Emilia and Jasper would prefer a little brother or a little sister or whether they’d care, I push aside the anxieties around another difficult pregnancy and birth and think about that feeling of fullness, I think about how we’d need a new vehicle, perhaps a new house, and then I think about how we couldn’t really afford it, anyway, and about how hard the depression was, this time around, and, really, we had a vasectomy, so it’s moot, this issue, and it’s all for the best anyway.)

And I have another moment, and I think: Beatrice. Oliver. Olivia. Alice. Theo. And my heart flutters, a little sadly.)

I don’t know whether, in those moments – and they are only ever just moments, sometimes protracted, sometimes not – what I’m yearning for is another baby, or just for the possibility of another baby, for fertility and promise and the experience of knowing that my body can do this, that it can grow and nourish and bring forth and nourish new life. I don’t know. I do know that when I look at my children I feel grateful and whole; I look at them and I don’t feel any lack, I don’t feel that anything’s missing, I know that we are complete as a family and that everything about us is good.

But then I have these moments, these utterly destabilizing moments of want and I’m confused. Just, confused.

Does this ever happen to you? How do you make it stop? Do you want make it stop? Or do you just keep your running list of baby names and make it a little game make-believe where you pretend that you have infinite abilities of baby-making and infinite resources for baby-sustaining and you can have as many or as a few babies as you like and you never wreck your body and you never get depressed and your boobs are glorious, resilient fonts of nurturing liquid gold that never ache or scab and you just get to live out the fantasy of motherhood as it never, ever is and then you have a shot of vodka? Or what?

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

And so I flail about, telling myself stories about ghosts and angels and the afterlife. I struggle to grasp onto my old modes of faith, to the articles of certainty – that there is a heaven, that there are angels, that after death the soul takes flight to a world that is – invisible? eternal? – and thereupon arriving is assured of bliss – that carried me through the deaths of grandparents, acquaintances, beloved pets. I read The Shack while I was at my mom’s last week and found myself unmoved, unconvinced: why should I put in stock in some stranger’s account of his weekend with the Holy Trinity, of the reassurances he received from God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that his dead daughter was fine, just fine,  more than fine, happy, blessed, romping through eternity with Jesus at her side! Why should I be, how could I be, comforted by this when I had no such assurances about my father? What did the experience of the narrator have to do with me? If God invited me to a cottage for the weekend and fed me good food and showed me my Dad communing with Jesus in fields of wildflowers, then sure I’d feel better. Wouldn’t we all? It would be so easy, then.

The point of faith is that we don’t have such assurances. The point of faith is that we believe without such assurances. I know this. I know this.

But I don’t know where my faith is. I want so desperately to find it. I want so desperately to believe, to know, that death is not the end, that it’s not final, that it – my relationship with my father – is not over. We weren’t finished. I didn’t get to say goodbye. There were more conversations to have, more hugs to exchange, more love to express. We weren’t done. He can’t be just gone. He can’t be. He can’t be.

I find myself, too many nights, too many days, reeling from the shock of the realization that he is gone, doubling over, falling to my knees, pressing my fists to my eyes to push back the tears. And invariably, as I reel and fall and struggle, I find myself telling myself that it – this, all this – just isn’t. It just isn’t. It’s not the end. It can’t be. And so I return to the old stories, the articles of faith that used to provide comfort, that could provide comfort still, if I could hold onto them the way that I used to. I tell myself that he must be somewhere. But where? Someone said to me, some months ago, that he’d gone to a better place, and I wanted to grab them by the collar and shake them and make them tell me, where? Where? How do you know? Do you know? Tell me!

I knew that they didn’t know. I was angry that they didn’t know. I am angry that I don’t know. I want so badly to know.

I read an exchange the other day between Jean Vanier and a Canadian writer, about death. Vanier wrote about how he felt when a beloved friend died, how he waited to hear from her, how he waited for some ghostly visit or dream message. “I had hoped that (she) might find a way of communicating with me,” he said. She didn’t. “All I can do,” he concluded, “is trust that she is well.” I too had hoped that my dad might find some way of communicating with me. I tell myself that he might have (I have stories; I am not ready to share them); I look for his messages everywhere, I look so closely that I worry I will miss them for looking. I look so closely, because I don’t quite – I don’t yet? – have the faith that would allow me to just trust.

I don’t know what such faith would look like, exactly. I look to the Bible, I look to the poets. I look to Socrates, who insisted that death should never be feared or mourned, because the soul’s release from the body is a liberation for which it -  if it loves wisdom, if it yearns for the goods that the body and the material world, the cave, cannot provide – strives. Socrates would tell me that I shouldn’t be looking for faith, I should be looking for understanding. But my head is muddled because I am distracted by my heart, my aching heart, and at the moment I can see no more light in wisdom than I can in my Children’s Illustrated Bible and my dog-eared copy of The Little Prince.

I think, part of the problem is, I do believe; there’s a way of looking at what I’ve called my denial and seeing it as faith, as a fervent attachment to the belief that this – life, physical existence, the here-and-now – is not it, that this cannot be it, that death is not an eternal nothing, consignment to dust and nothing more. But the skeptic in me tells me that that – that attachment to belief – is just magical thinking, wishful thinking, and for the life of me I can’t tease these apart or bring them together, my insistence upon rational explanation and my desire to be comforted by faith.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. I hate not knowing.

I’ve decided that the only way to confront this is to really, meaningfully explore faith. I’ve explored – I continue to explore – reason; I spent the better part of my adult life plugging away at the study of philosophy, battering back faith with books. Now I want to let down my guard and see if I can find faith again – it doesn’t matter where – and, if I can find it, see if we have anything in common. Part of this undertaking is banal, and biasedly so: I simply want to find some reassurance about death. I want – I actively want, even though I know that I might not find this, that it might not be possible to find this, that my comfort will derive from something other than this – to be reassured that, as Jean Vanier quotes Rabindranath Tagore, ‘death is not the lamp that goes out, but the coming of dawn.’ This desire is so ordinary, so expected, so given. But sometimes the greatest journeys begin as excursions toward and through the ordinary, as expeditions in search of received truths. Maybe. I don’t know.

I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I’m kind of giving in to the flailing. This will serve me ill, or well. We’ll see.

*deepbreath*

Do you believe in life after death? In anything after death? In some movement of the soul beyond the body, some extension of the spirit beyond the material? And whatever you believe, do you believe it fervently? Or cautiously? Or with with many heavy grains of salt or whatever seasoning it is that tempers flights of fancy, if that is indeed what these are? It’s okay if you don’t believe; I’m interested to hear it. But I also really want to hear if you do. I need to hear if you do. I’ve been afraid to ask. But I want to know.

*apologies to Rilke.

I wanted this year to start with laughter and smiles and cookies and fizzy soda. I didn’t want confetti and champagne and fireworks and streamers – I just wanted smiling. I just wanted this year to start happy.

I’m still trying to find the happy. Yes, my heart lifts when I hug my children and my lips curve when they giggle but the last week of last year and the first week of this year have been covered in a thick blanket of fever and snot and heartache and it’s been hard to find the laughter. And although Nyquil takes the edge off the fever and snot, there aren’t sufficient meds for heartache, Ativan and Xanax notwithstanding. Last week was much, much harder than I thought it would be – doing the final clean-up of my dad’s place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was, in hindsight, less than ideal timing. Coping with the heart-punches of the holidays was difficult enough without throwing myself into the line of fire of the gut-kicks and soul-wedgies that came with seeing the last of his things carted away, his home wiped clean of his presence.

I feel like I’m grieving anew. And I feel like I’m grieving out of pace with how I should, out of pace with what is expected. Which shouldn’t matter, but it does, because I have to account for myself, I have work to do, I have responsibilities, and there’s a limit to how much space I can carve out for these depressions before the voices – mine, others – say, isn’t that enough? Get on with your life.

There’s a limit to how much I can say about all this – how much dark poetry I can attempt to wring from all this – before it gets old and tiresome and done. I know that grief doesn’t follow a schedule, but I also know that one shouldn’t dwell in grief indefinitely. There’s time for grief, and there’s time for letting go of grief, and I simply don’t know the measure between these.

Maybe it’s just the fever. Maybe I’ll feel better once the fog lifts and I feel strong again.

Or maybe Emilia just needs to keep adding to her Blair SnowWitch Project in the backyard until I get spooked out of my malaise. That could work, too.