The Blog of Missing

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Pack up the moon

One night many years ago, when I was pregnant with Jake, I was driving with my then-husband on 6th Street in El Centro when a kitten dashed out in front of my car. I hit the brakes and heard a thump simultaneously, and, already shrieking, I shoved open my door to run around to the front to find the kitten. It wasn’t there. I stood there holding my grief and fear like they were empty bags. It’s been 29 years since that fright, but sometimes I still hold my breath on 6th Street.

 ***

 In 1986, a year after I moved to El Centro, I had to drive on a muddy ditch bank to get to my job, and I didn’t know yet that driving on the mud was akin to driving on black ice. I was rescued from the ditch by four burly farmers who lifted my car like it was a little red wagon. Some feat, that, given the mud.

The summer rains are typically warm and hard, and water sits a while on the dirt, like it’s on concrete. It seeps into the dirt and creates a clay that reminds me of the clay my mother would throw on her pottery wheel. Slick and thick, it sucks your feet down, sometimes so far your heart quickens because you don’t know if you’ll hit hard dirt beneath it. I’ve sunk down to my thighs before. I avoid the fields now. There’s no frolicking in them here in the Valley.

When the boys were little, I soaked the lawn and flooded the palm trees so they could play in the mud. In the summer shade the water was still warm, the clay gooey and, as Jake would say, “throwy.” I stood with them in the mud sometimes because I liked to feel the roots of the bermuda grass as my toes , feet, and calves sank into the clay. I liked to feel the scrape of small rocks not broken down by the water, squishing between my toes with the clay. *Note the glops of mud on the little one’s face. *sigh* Throwy.

 

jake and josh in mud

When I think of this time, I realize my sons probably don’t remember these things.
My son.
Should I be talking in singular now?

I looked for Jake in the Unidentified Persons database today. Emailed two admins to do a comparison. One was ruled out, and I’ve noted it on Jake’s webpage.

I understood something today for the first time: Because Jake had been researching ways to commit suicide and not be found, I can’t rule anything out. He could be anywhere. This means I don’t focus only on California but on Utah, and Oregon, and Montana, and Wyoming, and the entire midwest. I have no real idea where he could be. I do my level best not to waste NamUs volunteers’ time so I go through each possible match and reason my way through it. If I have any question, I forward it–and I do know this makes me look like I’m grabbing at straws without considering what’s actually possible. I am grabbing at straws, but methodically, and I will not stop.

Things you find when searching for your missing son in the databases:

  • terms like putrefaction, or scalps that “slid off,” or insect activity
  • skeletal remains of children
  • terse narratives of how bodies were found
  • socks delivered to the coroner separately from the clothing on the body–why were his socks off? Why did they have to note that they delivered the socks separately? Why not just include an inventory list?
  • unidentifiable tattoos on withered arms or legs
  • eyes with undeterminable color
  • skeletons whose weight can only be estimated because parts are missing

One man was found under a bush in the desert near Bombay Beach, next to a bible. Another man was found in a river, believed to have come from Mexico. Another was burnt to near cinders in an abandoned building in Detroit. I carry them inside me; no one else has claimed them.

Jake could be anywhere. His body could be anywhere.
Me, I’m here, with two empty bags, and a graveyard soul.

 

*Title is a line from W.H. Auden’s poem, here.

Otherwhere

Since my adult son went missing I’ve learned to value connecting with people, even as I draw away.  My story has invited others into a circle of loss where mother-empties are the norm, where lifeless bodies and missing ones evoke a common grief, where no one backs away from the abyss in our gaze. The gossamer thread between my missing son and another’s murdered daughter surprised me at first. A mother whose daughter was murdered followed me on Facebook and offered her condolences there. Other mothers with similar stories follow me as well. We haven’t met but I know they stand with me. I am alone, yet not. We each have uncontrollable situations that have confirmed our worst fears.

I’ve learned that unresolved loss is a delicate subject for people. We are resilient, and we can walk through our own shadowy valleys, but hearing about another’s ongoing loss stymies us. Perhaps it’s the catch in the voice, or the careful breathing. Something alerts the listener, and they find they don’t know how to hold their own hands, how to stand, whether to breathe.

I’ve learned that being present is not my natural state, but the only time I really recognize being otherwhere is when I catch myself dissociating while driving. I don’t know how much of a menace this makes me on the road, but I do think driving may be when I am most present because I have to actively pull myself back. I check out so much now that I wonder if I was ever present when my children were little. I look back and see myself being present, but I’m very tricky with my cloak of pseudo-presence.  I may seem attentive, but I’m really trying to get through the next minute. Maybe I draw away from people because they interfere with my dissociating. It’s almost like being in an alcoholic haze; you don’t want disturbing no matter how sick you are.

I don’t like admitting this.

I also draw away because grief is a sneaky, rude fellow with no respect for others’ sensibilities. It’s a remnant of my childhood that I want to take care of people’s feelings of helplessness in the face of my grief. Taking care of a borderline stepmother’s feelings while enduring nightly visits from her husband created an unhealthy lack of boundaries. Not to minimize empathy. I just don’t know where the line is.

Since my son went missing, I’ve been caught in an in-between. Some might call it a rock and a hard place, but that denotes an inability to move between two hard objects. No, I glide between two difficult choices regularly. Don’t talk about mother-empties and thus spare people from feeling helpless, or talk about the yawning chasm I walk beside every day and then empathize with their helplessness even while I’m bereft of true connection. You can’t connect with people who simply feel helpless or sorry for you. They are there and you are here and that in-betweenness that you regularly navigate is impermeable to outsiders. Everyone must walk the pain path themselves, surrounded by love or no.

The problem with withdrawing is that your story doesn’t get heard and you don’t hear other people’s stories, and story is where healing lives. Whether it’s the stories we tell ourselves, or the stories we dream, the core holds life. Story saved me when I was little, and it is saving me now.

In 2016, on my birthday, my 27-year-old, 6’4″ wry, depressed son sent me a loving text–Happy birthday, Mom. I love you–and then disappeared. Went off-grid. Died in a ditch next to a sweet-smelling alfalfa field. Hiked the lush Pacific Coast trail up into Alaska and lives in an abandoned bus. Died out in the dry desert, skin shriveled and desiccated, mouth agape. Died of exposure in Wyoming during last winter’s horrible blizzards, unfound in some grassy valley. Or found in some grassy valley but unidentified because not enough of him was found. Or he lives homeless somewhere in an unfriendly city, hungry, alone, limping in shoes that are too small for him, disoriented and shaggy and unrecognizable. I struggle seeing him in any happy scenario because it means he is choosing not to have me in his life.

Since my son went missing, I have blamed myself for possibly driving him away by literally calling out the National Guard a week after he disappeared, putting him on the news, alerting every police department within 100 miles. He’d been grieving the death of a close friend and was not himself: he’d given everything he owned away, and I was worried he would kill himself. I still spend most days mentally cataloguing the ways I have failed him and his brother as though this will help me make sense of his disappearance: I wasn’t present enough; I let them have too much sugar; I didn’t put them in sports; I went back to school instead of continuing to homeschool them; I was not enough of a mom; I was too much. Now I feel the stories of my childhood vibrating in me, as though they somehow still explain the world to me as they did when I was a child.

I am Nancy Drew, following breadcrumb clues, including ones whose importance I possibly fabricated, like mysterious hits on my blog up in South Dakota, or the way his Facebook friends list disappeared 4 months after he vanished.  I’m a box troll hiding under the streets because this ordeal wants to disfigure my faith. I’m a Victoria Holt heroine in a story with this family curse of disconnection. And I am—have always been—a black sheep.

Since my son went missing, I’ve been more aware of the familial disconnection that drives me to make sense of my role as a child and as a parent, to make connections between the two, to ferret out cause and effect. I’ve also come to value being a black sheep not because of the rebel aspect of it but because the black sheep carries the story of the flock. For every hundred white sheep the farmer includes a black one, and it’s the black ones he counts. I have the sense that my life is a microcosm of the family, and if I can understand what I remember it’ll help me make sense of the whole. What does my single story tell about our flock?

My story of loss echoes other family losses and abandonments: On my dad’s side, Nana’s mother abandoned two sets of children with two different husbands before she had Nana. My mother and her sisters were put in a state orphanage when they were adolescents. By their parents.

Nana lost both of her children. When my dad died all I felt was relief, but she still grieves, thirty years later. Of course she does. He was a bad man, but his mother loved him.

I’m reminded of a story I read in a book about feng shui. A monk came home to find his television was stolen, and his response was, “Oh, I see they’ve come for the tv.” The implication is that everything has a season. Oh, it’s time to go into foster care. Oh, it’s time to give my baby up for adoption. Oh, it’s time to get a divorce. Oh, it’s time to sort of lose one of my sons.

At 1:06am one day shortly after he vanished I woke with a snap, his slurred voice in my head saying, “Where are you?”

I got dressed and drove to the house where he was staying before he vanished. Convinced he had spoken to me in a dream, in a stupor, helpless. Relieved because I’d heard him and might find him.

Climbed onto a white plastic chair, shined a light into the kitchen window and saw that yes, the dishrag was still dry, the sink was dry, the ramen noodles were still stacked next to the stove.

Sniffed around all the windows I could reach and the front door for a dead body odor. Sniffed and listened for his slurred voice, calling quietly into the crack of the window, trying not to wake the dog next door. Checked the porch steps to see if any of the powder I’d spread had been disturbed.

I’ve lived in my impermeable in-between space since May of 2016, and hope does not flourish here. Every dead body found is my son, every unidentified skeletal remains, every John Doe.

And life goes on. The sky is still blue. Onion fields still smell like ranch dressing. Bees hum in the alfalfa fields, busses trundle rickety roads, and I have other loves. My son is missing and I love to teach. My life is not on hold; I have lives to touch.  My son has vanished and I love Kiwanis. Our service project of giving away books fulfills me even while I mourn.  My son could be dead and I love to sew. Learning to stitch things together while I unravel gives me a semblance of control. I love the bright sharpness of living.

I wish mourning were a place I could visit and take pictures of that I could then tuck away to revisit in a decade. Ten years is not too far to dissociate. But mourning resides in me. It opens the front door and pops its head out any time it pleases, whether I’m teaching, sewing, or giving books away. Hope is just as wayward, appearing on the porch whenever she pleases, but I never let her in the door because I don’t trust her. She’s as rude as grief, and leaves footprints on the porch steps even though my son did not.

Life, and hope, and loss, they’re all uncontrollable. Like me. Like my son. My daily mantra is, “It’s harder to disappear by accident than to do it on purpose.” Every day I whisper it as a prayer, and I remind myself that if he’s not dead, he needs me to be present when he returns. This will mean a lot of driving.

how was heaven?

May Day

*Jake has not been found. Thank you for checking.

A year + 1 day since I last saw Jake. Today marks the last day he communicated with me via text. Happy birthday, mom. I love you. And then no more.

Yesterday was difficult because I kept running through that last hour I saw him, castigating myself for not being a better mother, more present, more alert, smarter. None of that does any good, but it was the day for it. I fought back by grading papers. Focus squeezes everything else out.

Today is going to be as pleasant as I can allow it to be. The path is ridiculous, the kind you look at from the base of the mountain and say, ‘oh, hell, no.’ But it’s a spring day, and flowers are everywhere, fierce from the winter rains. The air smells like cilantro, and hummingbirds have come to call. And I don’t have to climb the whole mountain today.

I will hear this week about whether the dental charts match.
I will start teaching a memoir class on Friday.
I will have finals, grade papers, go to meetings, visit with friends.

I love Jake, and miss him, and life doesn’t stop.
I love Jake and I love life.

I wish I knew whatever I need to know to breathe right. Is he safe? Is he alive? Is he hiking the Pacific Coast Trail? Is he holed up in a bus  in Alaska living off the land, happy, oblivious? Is he going to text me a happy birthday? Dreadful hope.

It’s a gruesome, ruesome day. But.

I love today anyway. Danville, VT road by the cemetery

 

 

The Blog of Missing: What love looks like

*Jake has not been found.  Thank you for checking.

I’ve spent the morning looking at the NamUs Unidentified Persons System.

Please understand. I don’t start my days with, “Gee, what can I do to skew my day?” I try to avoid thinking of these databases. But I got an email from the site informing me that I needed to update my user info. Trouble is when I get in there I am compelled to poke around.

I did a search with skimpy parameters so as to pull up the most unidentified bodies, and so far I’ve viewed 10-15 records. I checked the coordinates for the entry that flipped me out weeks ago, and discovered that the coordinates and the reported city don’t match. The body was found just north of the rest stop before Felicity, not in Ocotillo. This, however, still does not rule Jake out. I don’t know how they calculated the height or ethnicity.  I so wish they explained the scientific process so I could determine probabilities. Hispanic? How could they know from just the bones? I understand more easily how one could extrapolate height from the femur, but I don’t know that’s what they did, and if one assumption is made, then others are likely. And I can’t tell if they made assumptions because I don’t know their processes.  And this location is a little ways off the I-8, and Jake was on foot….

I’m still awaiting news regarding the DNA samples. Nothing to do but wait.
So why not look at more unidentified body records.

None of the cases I read resembled Jake, but I stayed with each record, paying homage in place of those who don’t know where their loved ones are and for the ones who had no one to mourn them. Someone must see these people besides those who have to catalog the bones and belongings. Someone has to be not detached. Sad. I’m sad anyway. I’ll weep for all of them.

I found a record for Obsbaldo Salto Martinez or for someone connected to him and I clicked over to Facebook to see if anything was there. The NamUs Unidentified Persons System is run by volunteers so it’s possible I could actually help. I thought I could also use my genealogy spook skills if I couldn’t find him or his relatives on Facebook.

But when I got to Facebook, I got sidetracked in a lovely way: I saw a message from my son, Josh. This young man FB-messages, texts, or calls me several times through the week. And I’m telling you, this guy knows how his mom ticks. He sends me think-y distracting things about science, history, or politics, or stuff that’ll get under my skin just to engage me, or something like this:

I appreciate this Italian man and his passion to help children, and I appreciate my son for knowing I would love this.

We are all fighting a hard battle.

Love looks like this man.
It looks like all of you who check on me.

It looks like my son.
Love looks like Josh.

 

 

The Blog of Missing: 346 Days

As promised: (see full poem and original post under the link)

Merrit Malloy, author of the poem, The People Who Cannot Say Goodbye, writes,

“There are people who cannot say good-bye

They are born this way/this is how they die

They are the keepers of promises/what moves them does not wear out

Their loyalty will tear apart your clocks….”

My 28-year-old son has been missing 346 days. He didn’t say goodbye, and at this point I am afraid he is dead.
I’d rather think that what moves him “does not wear out,” that his “loyalty [would] tear apart [our] clocks.”

Malloy writes,

“These are the people who can hear the music in songs

They are the Vow carriers

The grandmothers who always leave the porchlight on

No one is lost to the one who sees….”

I am the one who cannot say goodbye.
It is I  “who always leaves the porchlight on.”
Is it my loyalty tearing apart clocks?
Can I tell you how much that sucks?

When I first read this poem, I thought this was about my son, but I see it is about who is left behind.

Am I not lost?

 


Lyrics
Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me?
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body?

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds, flying upward over the mountain

Mother I made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison
Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given
Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to
Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons could be birds, taken broken up to the mountain

Mother don’t worry, I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner
Mother don’t worry, she’s got a garden we’re planting together
Mother remember the night that the dog got her pups in the pantry?
Blood on the floor, fleas on their paws,
And you cried ’til the morning

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds, flying always over the mountain

Written by Samuel Ervin Beam • Copyright © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

 

More poems from Merrit Malloy here: https://merritmalloy.wordpress.com/

Glass shrapnel

*Jake has not yet been found. Thank you for checking in.

People ask me how I am, and I get stuck in a loop where I remember asking Jake the same thing when I knew he was suffering. I feel badly for the person asking me this question because I know the helplessness behind it, and I also feel badly because back then I didn’t know how to help Jake and now he’s somewhere unknown. So  I have truncated my responses. When asked how I am, I answer, “I’m upright.” And thus I avoid the loop.

But truncation leads to isolation. It could be argued that this is self-imposed and all concurrent effects are my own doing. I agree.  But it is infinitely easier to walk alone through the grief than to try to take care of the feelings of everyone around me.  This may or may not be black-and-white thinking. At this point I can’t tell. Heck, I feel badly even posting that I don’t want to take care of people’s feelings because hey, everyone’s only concerned, right?

I could leave it at that and shrug off anyone’s hurt feelings, but I care about those who’re asking me, and I understand the weird spot everyone is in here.

I am the designated driver. Everyone takes their cue from me.

I have puzzled over how to explain what it’s like to walk this path of unknowing, and I finally found a word that encapsulates it: shrapnel. It’s right next to my heart. No explosion put it there, so shrapnel is technically incorrect, but it’s a loaded word that communicates what I feel.

Dr. Christian C. Bannerman writes, in “Wound Foreign Body Removal,” that “[i]dentification of a foreign body can be difficult, depending on the type and location of the wound and the timing and mechanism of injury. Soft tissue foreign bodies most commonly occur secondary to penetrating or abrasive trauma, and they can result in patient discomfort, deformity, delayed wound healing, localized and systemic infection, and further trauma during attempts at removal.”

Delayed wound healing. *sigh*

The fact that Jake’s missing is like a miniscule speck of glass embedded inside me. I had a tiny sliver of glass buried in my foot once. I thought I’d gotten all the wound debris out, so when I felt any pain there I assumed it was just healing. After a week I realized that the spot wasn’t healing, so I went to work on it and eventually coaxed the little piece out and my foot finally healed properly. Lesson: listen to the pain.

This shard cuts deep. I know it’s there and rooting it out is impossible. I listen to that pain and look for small things I can do to make a difference in the day for someone else because focusing outward is the only way I’ve found to legitimately lessen the ache.

I found this song via Bones:
My favorite line:  Storms never come to stay.

 

 

 

The blog of missing: Unidentified body parts

*Nothing new yet. Jake has not been found.

Someone asked me for my blog yesterday so a friend could find out updates about Jake, so I came in here to verify that the person could quickly find updates. This led me to check the database of unidentified bodies. I’ve checked it before, but there was a stop gap in my neurons; I couldn’t go further with it.

Last night I contacted two regional managers for two bodies that have been found but not identified. And actually, one is not a body. I can’t bring myself to go back in there to verify what exactly was found or to tell you the case numbers. Another time, perhaps.

I have been contacted by one of the managers, who asked if I knew who Jake’s dentist was. I had a guess, and sent that on, but if anyone reading this knows, please msg me at sbodus @ yahoo.com (no spaces.)

It never occurred to me that it was possible only body parts would be found. It’s bad enough a whole body, but body parts? It’s another thing where the parts and the sum don’t equal the same. Jake would poke me in the ribs and say, “Yeah, but there IS more to count.”  Funny how I can hear him through the fog still.

I will post updates here: http://onegirlriot.com/about-stacy/info-on-search-for-jake/

I stopped for a while to give my heart and brain a break, but all the important stuff is there.

The blog of missing: Anywhere but here.

Over the last 8 months I’ve focused on just, you know, staying in the precise center of my boat. I get hit by the waves but I haven’t been thrown overboard. No thanks to any skill I have, frankly. I’m just trying to get there. Wherever there is.

My there is anywhere but here. Here is where despair creeps like fog over the edges of my boat. The tendrils curl around the lip of the boat like fingers, and I know that if I give it too much attention it will yank the sides of the boat apart. I’ve stayed afloat this long by giving it the side-eye, but despair is relentless.

I want to hope.
I want to believe that Jake’s out there somewhere, being Jake.

I don’t.

 

Despair Machine

 

Fortunately–or unfortunately, depending how surly you feel–life is relentless, too.
Dawn comes whether you sleep or not.

I had an early morning meeting with people I value, in which we discussed issues and plans for the year. I came back and meditated on goals and lesson plans and syllabi and the dinner menu. I read the Word, which helps me maintain perspective. Last summer I worried that I would lose my faith over this ordeal.  I’d just returned to the faith and had found peace; I didn’t want to lose that.

I haven’t lost my faith.

I’ve learned that I can feel despair and yet feel peace.
I can ache and yet be okay.
I can be in despair and not be depressed.
I can be present for my son, Josh, and be glad for who he is.
I can go on dates with my husband and enjoy him.
I can be in despair and yet laugh.
I can be a ghost mother and walk in the desert and find joy in the things that have always made me happy.

Everything does not exist in the context of my missing son.

I haven’t lost. I’m not lost.

I know this on some level most of the time.
What I’m missing is hope.
Which maybe sounds like I’m not okay, and maybe I’m not.
I have peace with not being okay for now.

partial lyrics:

Have we eyes to see
That love is gathering?
All the words that I’ve been reading
Have now started the act of bleeding
Into one, into one
So I walk up on high
And I step to the edge
To see my world below
And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down
‘Cause it’s the world I know
Oh it’s the world I know

 

 

 

 

Even silence resonates.

I’ve been thinking to myself, thinking that I’m not ready for real life to start up again. Apparently my lizard brain thinks that the last two weeks of December are not real life. Dunno what’s up with that. It’s not like I have this starry-eyed notion of Christmas; most times I don’t even like it. I just don’t see the sense in wrapping something I’d rather just hand over with an “I love you.” I also don’t see the sense in waiting all year to give my husband things he’ll love. (He’s the same way. he brings me something cool a couple of times a week.)  It could also be that recently Christmas has just been plain difficult and has lost its flavor for me. (right?)

Whatever the case, I’m glad it’s behind me but I’m dreading the upcoming weeks.
I am involved in several activities by design several months ago when I foresaw my state of mind. I’m not happy about that right now. It means I have to participate. Grand jury, Kiwanis, school, writing, quilting. No, I do have to. Of course I may choose not to, but integrity and responsibility require otherwise, which I knew would be the only things that would propel me forward. So I’m thankful that I know myself, but I’m a little short on truly appreciating it right now.

Here’s what I know, why I scheduled these things for myself back then:  It’s when you least want to do something that you need it the most.

Case in point:  I got hit by the don’t-cares on Wednesday. I’d gotten free tickets to the Book to Screen event at the Palm Springs festival for Tuesday and Wednesday. I was excited to go for a week, and I’d relished the movies on Tuesday–and now in retrospect I see that I avoided conversing with anyone beyond polite howdies. (Seriously. I skirted rooms and stayed close to the walls and avoided eye contact. )
Wednesday promised to be interesting, since authors and screenwriters would be talking about their work. My favorite stuff.

But Wednesday morning I lollygagged and waffled and I was struck by the sudden fear that I would get in a wreck to or from Palm Springs. I finally decided to GO around 11am, surprising my husband, who’d been certain I’d stay, given my ambivalence.
The series began in the morning; I got to Palm Springs at 1:30pm, in time for the fourth talk.

I went for two reasons: integrity/responsibility, and David Ulin. If you’re given $200 tickets, you use them. And David Ulin was moderating a talk on the film, Genius. I didn’t know if I’d get to talk to him, but I really just wanted to hear what he had to say at the symposium. (David was one of my main profs in my MFA program, and it’s his voice I hear when I write or edit.)

I told my husband that I believed I’d get something unexpected out of just showing up, and I did. The talk itself was brilliant and insightful. But beforehand, David stopped to talk with me for  about ten minutes, and because of it my faith in myself reawakened. The fact that he took that time to connect underscored his words: What I have to say matters, and my writing resonates–our writing resonates–even when we don’t know it’s connecting with anyone.

Resonance.

I thought about this all day afterward. Why do our stories move others? I’ve been focusing on story more and more in my classes because I believe they  move people beyond the superficial recognition of another human being to actual connection with who they are. That toddler in the back of the ambulance in Aleppo moved people in a way that event reportage could not.

What does it mean when something resonates?
I think it’s like your body is an echo chamber that reverberates when it hears a story that has the same emotional weight that the one you’re living has. It doesn’t matter if the stories are exactly the same. Tonally they’re the same. My mother-grief and fear about my missing son is the same as any parent’s grief and fear.

It always takes me aback when people  respond to my ordeal with, “What I’m going through is nothing like what you’re going through. Yours is so much worse.”

No, it’s not.

There’s no measuring stick. If it’s ripping you apart it’s your own private hell. There’s no measuring one hell against another. The keen is the same.

That reminds me of a part in 13 Hours when one of the men paraphrases from the Joseph Campbell book he’s reading: “We carry heaven and hell inside us….”

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that we hold eternity in our hearts. So why not heaven and hell?

I found this interesting article about Shakespeare when I sought the exact *reference for Campbell’s quote:

In his greatest works, he strikes a chord with the essence of the human existence. Shakespeare causes us to turn our eyes in to our hearts and see there the greatness of man, and the horror that man can inflict upon the world and upon himself.

He makes us realize that, like his characters, we have a choice in what kind of person we shall be and that heaven and hell are not foreign concepts in our existence, but they are the consequences of our actions and how we live our lives. Heaven and hell are inside us, and are manifested in us as conscience and virtues. . . .

“HAMLET:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. . . .”

The thousand natural shocks . . . .
The grief is part of the journey. The heartache. The silence.
Children are born to break our hearts. I’m sure I ripped my mother’s to shreds. Never meaning to, but still.
Because of this I understand and forgive and hope. I still fear so much that Jake is dead; every day I wonder, so much so that a callous has developed on the question.

On the way home from the symposium, traffic was at a standstill on the I-10 EB freeway in Indio because a young woman had fallen from the Jackson overpass. I’d Googled it while sitting there, and at the time I thought she had jumped. (I’ve since driven under the bridge again and can see how someone could fall off.) When I thought she’d jumped,  I wondered if the victim had had anyone stop for her when she was alive. And then I thought, with fierce gratitude, that just that day, David had stopped for me.  That act will resonate in me for a long time to come.

 

Here’s what’s resonating in me right now, and it ain’t cheesy. I love the first question.  I’ve been saying it a lot lately.

 

*Campbell’s quote comes from The Power of Myth.
You can find more info on Bill Moyers’ website: http://billmoyers.com/series/joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-1988/

 

Two hundred twenty one days of lossfulness

It’s been, let’s see–
May – 31 days
June – 30 days
July – 31
Aug – 31
Sept – 30
Oct – 31
Nov – 30
+7
=221 days.

I do this mental count like it somehow gives me a handle on things. Counting. What is that, anyway? You count what counts? What?

221 days

Three digits. Macro in micro.

Two hundred twenty one days since Jake went missing.
It’s winter now, and it’s cold everywhere.
I put on my slippers and I think of Jake’s feet.
Not just, “Are they cold?”
I remember him wearing shoes that were too small. That made him limp. I am fixated on this.
Why did he wear shoes that were too small? I forgot what he said. I don’t like that I forgot something he told me.

I walk outside in the morning, feel the bite in the air, and wonder where Jake slept last night. If he slept. If he’s even alive.

Yesterday was his birthday. I navigated through my responsibilities with remarkable aplomb, and gave myself space to breathe, and did some genealogy research on Susan B. Anthony because I’m pretty sure we’re connected, which resonates in me fiercely. Doing such research seems to be the way I get out of my head most effectively. It’s a problem to be solved that CAN be solved.

There’ve been several birthdays I didn’t get to celebrate with him because of our estrangement. I’d adjusted–I knew he was in town then. Mad at me for inexplicable reasons, but safe.

Every year I remember his 18th birthday and laugh, because that day I’d taken him to San Diego and on the way back got pulled over by CHP for going too slow in the second fast lane. Jake’d been making me laugh. If you know him, you know how he is. I hear the bloop of the siren and toodle over to the side of the road, roll down my passenger window  and the cop leans down to talk to me.

“Ma’am. Did you not see my lights in your rearview? Did you not see everyone passing you? License and registration, please.”

I know my jaw dropped. I got pulled over for nonspeeding. For driving like a granny. How can you not laugh at something so absurd? Oh, how I laughed.

The cop frowned at me. enhanced-29172-1417629865-22

It did not squelch me.
The cop asked, “What’re you laughing at? You think this is funny? Are you laughing at me?”
“Sir, no, no, no.  I’m sorry,” I said.  “I’m the funny one here. I’m funny. I’m laughing at myself.” And continued laughing.
The cop stood up abruptly, and I’m guessing he might’ve been struggling not to laugh and it’s not good protocol to laugh with someone you pull over, right?

 

Jake’s looking at me like disapproving-husky-dog-is-judging-you

 

 

Then the cop bent down to the window, handed back my stuff, and said, “Lady, stay over in the right lane. You can go 40 miles an hour and it won’t be a problem. You can go as SLOOOOWWWW as you want.”

And he looked at me like tumblr_m79x1s5eac1rbnvj3o1_400

 

I wonder what Jake remembers about that. Did he think about it yesterday?

I thought about what I could have done differently that could have prevented …whatever this is. I don’t even have a name for it because I don’t know…anything.

Today is harder than yesterday was because I don’t have anyone depending on me for anything. So, time to think. And actually, no. It isn’t harder. It’s more feel-y.  Feely and thinky. So here I am. Counting.

24 days till the end of December. The end of 2016.
17 days till I get to see my youngest son, Josh.
140 books to Urban Life in San Diego.
50 books to one of my students for the ASES program where she tutors.

Today I’ll be counting squares I sew on my sister’s quilt.
Tomorrow I’ll be counting toys that my RWS 100 students are donating to Toys for Tots at SDSU-IV.

Counting what counts.
Nothing adds up. It doesn’t change anything. Counting doesn’t matter.
But it quantifies things so that I feel like my existence matters. I make differences that I can sometimes count in the midst of the intangible, unquantifiable fog of loss.  I’m enshrouded by the uncountable. We all are.

But I hear Morgan Freeman saying this in his “God” voice:

guarantee-loss

 

So, okay, it’s raining and foggy and uncountably lossful.
And I’m reminded of another Jake story.

He was five years old. It was raining outside, raining so hard it hit the sidewalk with fat splats that sounded like hundreds of small wet mops slapping the ground. Jake cocked his head, listening to it, and asked, “Mommy, what’s that pokeness?”

My heart still leaps at that word. I love its descriptiveness, its logic.

We went outside and stood in the rain, listening to it hit our faces and clothes and the sidewalk.  The wet didn’t matter. It was just part of the day. The dichotomy in the picture below is unnecessary and oxymoronic, but I think the underlying idea must be to move into the uncountable.  Move with it. Some of it becomes part of who you are, like the ache that seems normal now. The ache makes me weigh things differently. The rest of the uncountable will eventually lift. I know this because I’ve been here before and survived.

 

beautiful-rainy-quote-by-bob-marley