-
7. preparing for his ghost: about loss
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
preparing for his ghost: about loss seven A bout five years ago Sophie, a new friend who is an artist a generation older than I, had me over for lunch. Her apartment was beautiful, enhanced by and integrated with her sculpture. It came out that she had been a well spouse for thirty years. "First it was heart attack ," she told me, "and it was at a time when doctors were advising him to take it easy-" "Which meant," I interjected, "you taking it hard." She nodded. "Then it was Parkinson's," she continued. "And next . . . well, I now believe it was Alzheimer's." We talked awhile about the nuts and bolts of it and then she said, "I was a mean care giver. I did everything, but I didn't do it lovingly." Especially at the end, she added. Her children, other relatives, and friends had offered neither understanding nor support; they'd expected her to do it all, cheerfully, unquestioningly, to live up to those marriage vows with no help, to conform to that world image of woman as eternal care giver. "I feel horribly guilty," she said. "You know, you don't re127 Copyrighted Material dirty details 128 member how hard it is, you don't remember the bad thingsi what you remember is how bitchy you were, and you think 'Now, what was I so bitchy about?'" "You won't feel that way," she said. "You're working things through. You have the support of your family, and you're in touch with your feelings. You won't have that problem." I hoped she was right. I think she was right. But I'm careful about a lot of things. Careful to keep the support of my family, to keep in touch with my feelings, to keep not being a "mean care giver," and mainly to keep remembering what it was like, how "bad" it was, which means, in part, to keep writing about it. Writing-my journal, my poems, this book-has been an act of necessity, maybe an act of desperation . I want to make sure I won't forget "what I was so bitchy about" and I won't feel "horribly guilty" like Sophie. I call it "preparing for his ghost." I have been through the process before. The first ghost I prepared for was my mother'S, beginning eighteen years ago after my father died suddenly in the night, heart attacki I was thirty-three at the timei Elle and Arin were six and three. My father and I had not been particularly close-in fact, there were tensions, mostly because my father was so repressed he was not particularly close to anyone. Family relations had been such that I was consumed, and later haunted, less by grief than by the impact of what I called "the power of the family." My father had given his body to sciencei there was no funeral. My parents had been atheists, so there was no sitting shiva. There was, however, plenty of congregating at that housetoo many, too concentrated, too close for comfort. The Copyrighted Material [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:16 GMT) preparing for his ghost 129 tensions were aggravated. I had my own inner tensions; guilt issues especially came to the forefront. I wrote poems about it, and perhaps the most helpful was a two-liner that came to me suddenly: "1 am preparing / for my mother's ghost." I meant that I was going to make sure that, when my mother died, I wouldn't be consumed in this way. In particular, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be consumed with questions of guilt or other unfinished business. In conscious preparation for her ghost I wrote more poems, longer poems, in which I worked through a lot of the tension, and sources of tension, between my mother and me. I shared my poems with her even more than I already had, and I wrote her a letter about all the issues we hadn't shared. She wrote me back, a short letter saying essentially that she loved me but wasn't strong enough emotionally to deal with those things. So I dealt alone; preparing for her ghost was a one-sided effort. A few years later, when she died from a massive stroke over a period of sixteen days, I found that the preparations had been sufficient. Preparing for her ghost had paid off...