I beg your indulgence for this posting, for in it I bare my soul more than is my wont. It may be more than you want to hear.
Some friends have asked me to write about myself more, as I did in my second posting, when I told of my religious upbringing, the failure of religion and God to succor me when my wife Helen died, and my eventual transition to atheism. At first I resisted further self-revelation, because I am by nature very private. Blogging has dragged me into the 21st century, though: everyone immediately seems to know where everyone else is and what they are doing and thinking. So I'll open myself up more, with trepidation.
Religion and God did fail me when Helen died. Writing and reading didn't. To help me assuage my grief, I started writing about my feelings. It was like confiding in a diary. Over a period of two years I found writing so therapeutic that my diary had grown into a full-blown memoir about Helen and me, starting with our births and progressing to the time of her death. The memoir is far too personal even for my new extroverted self to broadcast; there are only three copies, one for each of my children and one for me. Yet I believe some thoughts in it are worth sharing more broadly. I have done so with friends who were similarly bereaved, and they seemed to gain a measure of relief just by knowing that they were not alone.
While writing, I too sought to know that my pain wasn't unique, that I was part of the human condition, that others had felt as I did. I found relief from that sense of aloneness in literature, mostly poetry. There were always passages that expressed what I was thinking, but so much more beautifully than I could; so I used them as introductions to chapters and sections of the memoir. Perhaps their balm will soothe others as it did me.
Actually, I wrote the memoir's last chapter, "Facing Chaos," first, and I draw from that chapter today. When I wrote it, I was still deeply grieving. I began the chapter with a couplet that ever so succinctly captures how much at the mercy of chaos one feels at a loss of this magnitude.
I haven't shaken grief's rattle, yet it clatters.
I haven't rung sorrow's bell, though it tolls.
Ho Xuan Huong
18th century Vietnamese poet
More than anything, I found my sense of justice outraged. I could not rationalize what had befallen me, nor explain to myself why a good person like Helen had been taken so early, at only sixty-three. We were both heir, I felt, to all the caprice the universe could summon, in a way totally disconnected from how we had conducted ourselves as persons. Two prose passages written by a Roman Catholic priest examine these emotions.
The roots of grief arise from a wound deeper than the psychological or the cultural. It is at that level in ourselves where we decide what we can or cannot expect of life, what is just or unjust, what is the purpose and value of our existence.
Grief is a crying of the heart, and the human heart will resist being soothed by ideas and abstractions.
Lorenzo Albacete (1941- )
The second of these passages was particularly revealing to me, because at the nadir of my grief, when I was searching for understanding, my rabbi had tried to make intelligible to me her understanding of the twin aspects of God: The Creator Elohim, the amoral Deity of what is; and Adonai, the Lord of the world as it should be, of hope, compassion, ideals and forgiveness. We revere the first, we pray to the second. Adonai transforms the chaos of Elohim's creation into order and sanity. My heart resisted being soothed by such an abstraction. My brain thought these twin aspects of God to be so distinct as to be polytheistic, contradicting Judaism's very core tenet: God is One.
One of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, asks whether we can overcome our sense of injustice simply by resignation to chaos. She says no.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in
the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of
mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
I have always been a loner, not naturally gregarious. I'd fallen in love with Helen in part just because she so complemented my own introversion with her genuine love for and interest in people. But now, after 35 years with Helen, I was really alone and frightened. I needed reassurance that I could survive again as a loner.
Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?
Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.
John Keble (1792-1866)
Like others bereaved, I slowly moved through the stages of grief. Intense anguish fades. Still, for a long time I felt that I was surrounded by ghosts of Helen, for I seemed to see her when- ever I visited familiar places we had frequented, and the anguish returned like a stab.
Your eyes and the valley are memories.
Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl.
It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline.
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down.
And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Fourteen years have passed since Helen died. Time has worked its magic. I will never stop missing her, occasionally spiraling down into depression when thinking of her, but most of the time my memories of our life together are more joyful than sad. I am with Tennyson:
What use to brood? This life of mingled pains
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery.
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
I am resigned to the chaos of Elohim, forgoing Adonai, the God of what should be. Writing and reading continue to act as a balm, soothing me when the chaos I perceive threatens to overwhelm me. They often bring me the only equanimity that I can summon.