358 Days To Go

Mourning as practice and rite

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Central Park is verdant again, the dogwoods in bloom, a few late lilacs, and the grass so very green, which as I walked across it this week, my sister and her death ever on my mind, I thought of our shared love of Walt Whitman.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? ......I do not know what it is any more than he.

So begins one of the most profound and comforting meditations on immortality and, thereby, on grief, I’ve ever read. With scriptural depth free of religious stricture, the poet proffers possible answers to the boy’s question – the grass as symbol of his own personality, as the handkerchief of God, as a hieroglyphic with democratic encouragements – until he finally lands at the line which came to my own mind across the park:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I first read Whitman in my mid-twenties. A battered, used copy in my hand, I loafed in the grass at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., my dog running in circles through the brush, excited for freedom and the outdoors. So began my decades-long love of the poet, but it wasn’t until my thirties that I learned my sister had an equal passion for him.

This week, the first since her demise left a profound absence in my life and the lives of so many, I’ve naturally thought of mourning, its practices, its formalities, how it’s observed in various cultures. From the year-long blacks to head-shaving, the survivors mark that first, interminable 365 days, a timeline I’d often wondered about until, some years ago, my aunt enlightened me.

A childhood friend of hers had lost her husband, a devastating blow, and after the first year, on day 366, my aunt, whose loss of her own mother was profound, called the friend and said, “Now, you’ll never have to do that again.” The first Christmas, the first birthday, the first Thanksgiving, the first time the daffodils bloomed which the deceased looked forward to every spring, the first snow when the now-dead insisted on drinking hot chocolate on the porch no matter how freezing it was, the first of so many firsts that couldn’t possibly be survived, but cruelly can. (In the Indian epic the Ramayana, when various characters buckle under misfortune, including the death of a beloved, they often cry, “My heart must be made of stone that you’re dead and I’m still alive.” How is it possible that we go on in the midst of such sorrow?)

In our over-rationalized world, in a society where rites of passage have been excised for their superstitious flummery or disdained for being maudlin, we’ve robbed ourselves and our psychology of the deeper healing that grief and death demand. As I sit inside of this particular loss, I notice the liminality of grief, its time-out-of-time, its place-out-of-place, a borderland or, better, an interstitial underworld where one level of life carries on while another is arrested while another spins backwards into the fog-wet landscape of memory.

As I walked the park, I carried on with my recitation, speaking aloud, not caring who heard:

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe....and am not contained
     between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself;
They do not know how immortal, but I know.

That’s it – that last triplet – that’s my sister. She didn’t think she was more than she was, but we all knew that “more” was big enough – a mate and companion of people – a reminder that, regardless of what we, in our smallness, in our neuroses, in our fears, in the traumas imposed upon us by others and taken to heart, that beyond what we tragically believe of ourselves, we, too, are fathomless.

Continuing onward to that section’s final closing, it seemed as if Jen, herself, spoke the last lines:

You are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless....and can never be shaken away.

One of my well-worn copies of Leaves of Grass, the 1855 edition, Whitman’s first.