On Death, Holidays, and the Work of the Subconscious

I've just realized I've always had a Lazarus-rising-from-the-dead way of thinking about the people I've lost. When I was young, I knew a boy who died when he was very little (Marco), and his funeral was the first I'd ever been to. I remember thinking, at his visitation or whatever it's called when you're in a little room with the body and people don't speak, that I could will him to life and kept energetically thinking, "now, Marco!" and again and again, and I probably felt very sad and confused when my mental willing didn't yield any results. He didn't sit up. He was just still, and I can barely see him now when I try to think of him twenty years later.  I remember him on a rocking chair. I remember his mother and his sisters, who reached out to our family when my little sister died at the age of 15 less than a year ago.

I don't know if I've accepted it yet: I dreamt last night that we were in a European-seeming place with my mom, lots of bustling behind us like a market square. I said, "Hey Tori,  there's  a cool show tonight; let's go!" And she said yeah and was lit up about it. My mom said Tori couldn't go, though. She was too worried about her. And Tori and I looked at each other, and we both knew why my mom was worried. It was because Tori had tried to kill herself. But I urged my mom to let Tori come with me. We still had her, and I wanted her to do things we liked together.

And my dream was about done there. I awoke and felt like it was true for awhile. In my dream, knowing Tori had attempted suicide but was still with us was something my family worked with and truly, I know my family all desires this and would love to be able to work with that  issue to this day. I think all of my dreams of her share this quality. We can still save her. She has come back to us. In my dreams, I don't have to reconcile Tori being suicidal and her being gone forever at the same time. There's a gap for someone to try to save her between those two critical periods, and that's all I want or can even dream of wanting 

The holiday season will be rough on me and my family. We've always spent the evening of Christmas Eve together, because when Tori was little and believed in Santa, we liked clinging onto that innocence and being enthusiastic about it. When she stopped believing in Santa, Jessica and I would still spend the night together because we couldn't break it to our parents that their youngest child's rose-colored glasses had finally been shelved. My stepdad recorded every Christmas since Tori was born. This will be our first year in 15 to shelve the recorder.

I don't know how we will get through the season, but we will.

This Christmas, please everyone, just love without limit those close to you. Let them know your world means more and is happier and lovelier with them in it. They may need to hear it, but you definitely need to say it. All the time. To everyone you love.

And talk to young people about suicide. It shouldn't be so taboo that I can't even discuss it with my sister in the alternate reality where she still exists. But it is, and I'd like to change that one day.

tori III

At her funeral, her basketball coach delivered a eulogy. 

He spoke of one of her most memorable plays.  He mentioned the school they were playing, and how Tori's defense had been an asset to them in this game.  In the play he most remembered of her, Victoria had taken a hard charge from a girl.  When she got up and was back on the sidelines, he said he high-fived her and said, "Great work, Tori, taking that charge, wow."

If I hadn't watched that very play he described, I had most certainly seen her do this before.  She was so small to me, but she just stood there, feet planted as another girl ran at her full speed to attempt a layup.  As we witnessed the impact on the bleachers, our family took a collective breath inward, my mom gasping the loudest.  She hated this type of defensive strategy. My mom couldn't bear to see how beat up Tori would get during those games.  Victoria broke her nose once during a basketball game.  She had battle wounds I couldn't comprehend. I'd never broken a bone in my life, and Tori was always bruised, blistered, beaten. I wasn't a good athlete, because more than I wanted a point or my coach's approval, I wanted to remain in tact, pain-free, unbroken.

I asked my sister and brother-in-law, in my parents' kitchen the night after it happened, should we have known, watching her play basketball? remember how she was always willing to get hurt? to take pain in those games like it was nothing? I just thought she was so tough.

Days after I learned that Victoria had stepped in front of a train, after her funeral and burial, I would recall the coach's eulogy, his memory of Victoria taking that charge, and I would remember her flying from the impact, her crumpled against the gym wall...

The charges she took in basketball gained a haunting symbolism. 

On Suicide

I doubt I'll ever write about Middlesex, so I must apologize if anyone was actually anticipating that review.  It's a great book, though and worth a read. 

This post will be about a book I've been infatuated with since I first read it in grad school. 

I've since read The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham at least a half dozen times since reading it in 2011 for Professor Bonnie Friedman's creative non-fiction class at UNT.  I loved the organization of the book, although there were several people in the class who found it "gimmicky."  I think everyone had to admit it was at least a very ambitious way to tell her story, but to better illustrate the way the book works, here's a shot of the first page of the table of contents of The Suicide Index:

I suppose what turned some people off about it was that some of the names of the titles were probably altered in a way to create a better narrative flow.  Since the writer chose to index her ideas on suicide and since an index is arranged alphabetically, there is something inherently violated in any attempt to impose your own order on these things.  Whatever, I say.  It's different, it's cool, and it works for me.  I will say there were a couple of times I thought the titles weren't as closely related to their content as I would have liked, but I forgave these little missteps (I guess you could call them), because I also found Wickersham a damn fine writer. 

Because I've read this book so many times, it is also probably the most annotated book I own.  Not always insightful, the annotations at least speak to how compelling I find Wickersham as a narrator.  Exhibit A:

I still find that chapter fucking great and also: illustrative of how her organizational scheme works as a narrative tool.  This "chapter" comes early on in the book, and it follows one of the longer chapters in Wickersham's book.  It carries a really impactful punch.  Stunning in its brevity, completely reliant on its title for context, it shocks you out of the lull of a narrative. It reminds you that you are reading something entirely atypical.  It still makes me inhale sharply when I read it.

Rereading this book recently was an entirely different experience from the previous times, however.  It was more personal this time. My little sister died by suicide on March 20th.  The journey since then has, as one can imagine, been awful, of the worst kind of variety.  Reading this book was something I wanted to do soon after.  I think I waited about a month before opening it up.  But I thought about Wickersham's story a lot in that month before reading it.  In a way, it kept me company as I went down the same path Wickersham did.  The path nobody ever thinks they will take.

I related to her sense of numbness most this time.  When I learned of my little sister's death, I didn't cry.  My whole family was crying, but I sat there, numb and outside of myself and wondering what was wrong with me.  I was glad to read that someone else went through a similar sort of numb period.  Hers lasted a long time, too, and I feel that mine is spotty and that it helps me cope and that it will probably hover around me for awhile.  I eventually cried on March 20th, when I heard my mom telling my aunt and then my aunt's unrestrained sobbing.  But I think even then, a part of me was willing myself to do it.  I know shock is normal, but I felt like a monster.  When I was being particularly hard on myself for being unfeeling, it was comforting to recall that Wickersham's narrative has an expansive section on feeling numb, and that sometimes it seizes the body and that it can be hard to shake.

There were things I read with a different eye this time around, but I still found Wickersham's language to be poetic, thoughtful, and most of all, a real comfort.

Something she wrote that I still find profound: "We worried about his heart, his liver, his stomach, his lungs.  It was like Breughel's painting of the fall of Icarus--we were looking the wrong way; the focus was on the big events in the middle of the canvas.  Nobody noticed the terrible small thing that was starting to happen in one corner."

For Victoria, we all projected different things onto her.  I wanted her to be more appreciative, to be kinder to my parents.  I wanted her to do these things because I didn't do them very well when I was a teen.  But I couldn't see how unfair it was to load her up with my own baggage over being a shitty kid to my parents.  I wish I had tried to be more of a peer to her, more of a sister than another authority figure.  But this is just one of many wishes I have now, none to ever be granted, all useless and detrimental to the living.

If I'm trying to be kind to myself for the big sister I was to her, I will look back with a sad fondness at our texts to each other.  One I sent her on her birthday: "Happy birthday, sis!! You're growing up so fast, and I'm so proud of who you're growing up to be! I love you! Dancing girl in red dress emoji, dancing girl in red dress emoji, lovestruck cat emoji, lovestruck person emoji, person blowing kiss emoji, glowing star emoji, left hand emoji, heart emoji, tortoise emoji, hare emoji, growing herb of some kind emoji, cake with candles emoji, trophy emoji, basketball emoji, confetti flying in celebration out of what looks to be a bugle emoji." And then a follow-up: "(Is that enough emoticons?)"

Another wish: I wish I could have noticed how fragile she was, how much harder I needed to try to keep her growing.   

The Wave of Fiction I've Been A'ridin' Pt. II

After reading Schappell's great work of fiction, I immediately began looking for a new memoir to read.  I was telling Jeff about a book I'd heard about that was written by an ex-gypsy (now a man, reflecting on gypsy boyhood, which sounded like it was full of horrors), when he kindly suggested I continue on the fiction road and read one of his favorite new-ish novels, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.  This sounded good to me for a couple of reasons: I had just seen a Facebook post by a writer who I greatly admire raving about her belated love of the book, and also it was on a bookshelf in our house already, whereas the gypsy boy book's author, title and other essential info were as enigmatic as a gypsy band itself (awful simile, I know!).

Aside! I heard Jennifer Egan speak at a literary conference shortly after her novel began receiving accolades. She seemed nice enough, but her talk was just this weird thing w/ PowerPoint, where each slide was on an automatic timer for like 1 minute or something, and she had to speak in a very orchestrated, paced way to make sure her words lined up with her slides.  It was an incredibly anxious experience for me as a listener. I only bought three books that conference, and they were all based on how I felt I connected to the writers through their talks.  I did not buy Egan's.

When I was in grad school, this book kind of caused a rift among my peers: people either loathed it or loved it and both sides felt pretty bitter about how the other side could possibly feel another way about it. So, I didn't know what to expect.  Spoiler. I'm on Team Love It.

Reading this right after reading Schappell's short story cycle was such a smooth transition.  Egan does the same sort of cyclical thing in her "novel," and I actually would feel comfortable calling it a short story cycle/novel hybrid.  A minor character in the first chapter circles around to round out the end of the novel by becoming the central character in the last chapter.  There's a lot of time-traveling, and if I'm being honest, there's this one chapter in the book that I can't quite map out on the person's lifetime, but the book really is just snapshots of lifetimes (best evidenced by Egan's symbolic use of windows throughout the novel: people seeing and reflecting on different moments of day seen from the same window) and not a linear view of any one character's life (it's like the antithesis to John Williams' Stoner). 

 

Her writing in this novel was effing mindblowing.  Jeff and I often read in bed before going to sleep, and we're usually pretty good at agreeing on when to turn out the lights.  When I was reading this book though, I made him go to sleep with the lights on to finish reading a chapter.  It ended up being my favorite chapter of all, and after I read it and turned out the light, I curled up under the covers, eyes wide open, heart pounding, and kept repeating under my breath, "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit."

The chapter I read that night is called "Out of Body," and it's almost entirely written in the 2nd person pronoun and sticks out like a sore thumb among the other 3rd person- and 1st person-narrated chapters.  It's meant to.  It reminded me of a series of chapters in this memoir called The Suicide Index entitled "numbness and..." where the narrator uses the 2nd person pronoun to express her feelings of numbness to her continued existence after someone close to her commits suicide.  It's a smart move: the reader instantly senses the narrator's sense of detachment, the literal distance they impose on the story by rejecting their own authority in it.  The thing that made me feel painfully aware of my heart's swells and recesses that night I first read it, though, is what Egan does in the very last sentence of this story.  It blew my mind.  (ETA: someone pointed out to me that all I say about the writing here is that "it blew my mind" or "it is ___ mindblowing," and I guess I should be more articulate/specific about what this writing did to me and why I responded this way.  The narrator is incredibly intelligent, clever, and sensitive.  He's a guy struggling to come to terms with his homosexual desires in ways that are troubling, scary, and all too relevant [LGBT suicides are much higher than other demographics], and in the last moments of the chapter, just when I got really close to this narrator, was fighting for him, and felt his heart as a little piece of my own heart, Egan rips that narrative from us, and it becomes this transcendent, strangely beautiful thing.  And I felt unsettled, lost, and wanting more of the narrative I'd gotten so attached to. Egan's masterful and precise shift in this chapter made me stay awake that night, reflecting on the craft of that narrative shift, of how the syntax was upended, while the rhythm of her prose remained steady, in control, and how the effect of that combo was jarring).   I can't remember the last time writing made me feel so beautifully, miserably, terribly alive.

The next day, I remained acutely in tune to the beats of my heart.  I went out with my friends after playing a volleyball game and laughed myself hoarse and told embarrassing stories and stayed up way too late and felt loved and loving and overwhelming compassion for every living thing.  The day after that, I was driving to work and almost cried while listening to Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball." I imagined it as an ode to her father ("All I wanted was to break  your walls/ All you ever did was wreh eh eck me" and "I will always want you...") After I got to work, I looked up the lyrics and realized it would be a real stretch to make that analogy work, but it didn't matter. After reading this book, I felt opened up in a way that I hadn't felt in a long time. 

My friend Laura once asked me if I had ever just cried because I was struck by how beautiful life was, and I remember scoffing at the thought.  But I can no longer scoff, because I had that moment, too.  Where I felt everything, but the one thing that resounded in me and couldn't be shaken was total joy at being alive. Even when I was on the verge of crying or imagining what a tender moment the last beat of the heart must be, I felt such joy and passion for living.

I felt the way literature is supposed to make you feel.

The Wave of Fiction I've Been A'ridin'

I go through little periods of what I choose to read for pleasure these days.  It's usually something like this: nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, nonfiction, fiction, poetry... you get the picture.  I almost always will choose a memoir or collection of personal essays over anything else. I just enjoy thinking about the craft of creative nonfiction, because it's the sort of niche I feel closest to: I enjoy writing it the most, so I also enjoy reading it the most, I suppose.

I found this book at our local Hastings though:

I instantly gravitated toward the clever title, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, and was not disappointed by Elissa Schappell's work, here.  It is a gem and completely revitalized my love of fiction.  The book is a short story cycle with characters who are on the periphery in earlier chapters appearing later and telling their own stories (there is a lot of flipping back through the pages to try and remember how you know so-and-so, which has to be symbolic of something great, although I haven't thought it through fully).  The book revolves entirely around central female characters, all of whom are complex and struggling with various issues like: a cool teenager being wrongly labeled a high school slut, a mother watching her daughter suffer w/ an eating disorder, a pair of moms in NY desperately trying not to let their identities be subsumed by motherhood, and so on. 

 

The real standout in this collection for me was about a college girl who returns home to stay with her family after getting into a possibly suicidal car accident; she is despondent, and you instantly want to get to the heart of her depression. You want to help her. Her mother is the typical worrying kind, struggling to take care of everyone in the family at once: accompanying her husband on a weekend-work thing, trying to communicate with her troubled daughter, and making daily trips to see her rapidly debilitating father in a nearby nursing home.  The meat of this story is the college girl's mom leaving town and requesting that her daughter tend to her dementia-suffering grandfather, so that he isn't alone that weekend.  Through the girl interacting with her grandfather, we learn that she is suffering from PTSD after she is raped at a party.  What struck me most about this story was thinking about who the girl could open up to.  She rejects phone calls from her friends, hardly speaks to her mother, but finds herself revealing her dark secret to her grandfather. The fact that the only person to whom she can communicate her trauma is also a person two generations removed from her and has trouble remembering who he is and how to perform everyday functions is absolutely heartbreaking; the pairing of these two individuals as central characters in a story--genius. I mean, a young girl trying to recover those sacred pieces of herself after being violated and an old man who is full of pride and who also falls in bathrooms and wavers in and out of reality represent two starkly different ways of dealing with the same thing: trying to hold yourself up and be normal when everything you know is crumbling, fleeting, and trying to make you fall.  I found it a stunning story, extraordinarily important.

 

Okay, so that's my little blurb on this book.  Up next will be Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, because that's the order I read these books in.