That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her

Early last summer, I had occasion to consult the episode in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in which the narrator revisits Balbec after the death of his grandmother. This well-known passage describes a rush of tears to the narrator’s eyes—tears whose source he has to search his memory to find. What he realizes is that he has just been belatedly mourning the grandmother whose death hadn’t really hit him until now.

Even after I’d found the specific passage I’d been looking for, it wasn’t easy to close the book and (as a phrase nearly as annoying as the word “closure” would have it) move on. Soon, in the vicinity of the account of these tears, I came upon a longer passage I hadn’t remembered as well. In a haunting sequence, the narrator, still reeling from the shock of his belated grasp of the fact that his grandmother has died, dreams about her. In his dream she is both dead and not dead.

This unsettlingly apt description (I’ll quote it soon) of the way a dream presents an indigestible reality was still much in my mind a few weeks later, when I found myself in my country house rummaging through papers. I was sifting through some folders of work I’d discarded or left unfinished—poems twenty years old, from the late 1980s and early 1990s. One short poem stopped me. It had neither title nor date, but I could easily tell more or less when I had written it, for the poem recorded a dream that had clearly presaged my mother’s death. Her cancer had been diagnosed in November 1990, and my dream preceded the diagnosis by only a few days or weeks. Indeed, the dream’s timing may well have been occasioned by some tests my mother was undergoing. I remember that when, after the last of these tests, the doctor informed me that my mother had a tumor, I told him I’d dreamed she was dying of cancer. As I recall, he seemed more interested than surprised or skeptical. Perhaps such prescient dreams are not so uncommon.

Somehow, brought to light about twenty years after I had first written it, my little poem seemed more worth preserving than some of the others I’d turned up in the same folder. I gave it a title and tightened its original eleven lines to nine.

Subterranean

A gate that had been open closed behind me. Light was streaming into a low-ceilinged bedroom bare but for the bed and a sort of throne on which I sat to hear the news from the recumbent figure calm in the face of oblivion, hands folded. She told the end herself. The gate, the tunnel, the dark dais, all had been leading toward the one conclusion.

All her life, my mother was a composed, reticent, and dignified person. The dream, as preserved in the amber of the poem, has a static, formal, almost hieratic quality; emblematic or heraldic are other adjectives that come to mind. The recumbent figure recalls funerary sculpture—knights and their ladies lying in effigy, or Greek grave steles, or Egyptian statues. In keeping with the paradoxical pairing of feelings that such representations of the dead all seem to evoke—feelings about death that all people probably share—my mother, in the poem as in the dream, is somehow both alive and not alive. In order to reach her, I have to go underground, passing through a tunnel (not mentioned in the poem) and then a gate to reach the dim, low-ceilinged chamber where she is lying. Yet lying as if entombed, she is also able to receive me as a visitor and talk to me calmly and cogently—which was precisely how my mother nearly always talked. Her hands are folded heraldically across her chest; she seems almost like a statue of herself—and yet she is still my (barely) living mother.

Here now is the Proust passage:

But as soon as I had succeeded in falling asleep...