The thirty-second Moon Prize
for the January 20, 2018 full moon goes to Ellen LaFleche's moving prose piece "The
Mourning After," posted here on January 3, 2019. It
is a stunning piece of self-examination and self-revelation that may just be a
guiding light for others still blinded by the darkness of grief.
by Ellen LaFleche
In the summer of
1984, I sang Happy Birthday to the young man I was dating. I never sing in
public because I can't carry a tune and have a memory of a frustrated teacher
whacking my head with a rolled-up sheet of music. The young man blew out
the candles, looked up at me, and said, "You have the sweetest voice
ever."
I married him.
After our wedding
in 1985, we settled into ordinary life. We bought a house, had a daughter,
juggled work and family, argued over missing toothpaste caps. We shared values
of social justice and community service but had differences that challenged us
in big and small ways. A sampling of these differences, with my traits on the
left and his on the right:
Ridiculously
outgoing vs. naturally shy.
Thrifty vs.
spend-y.
Night owl vs.
morning person. (He got up two hours BEFORE the cat. Before!)
Hates being cold
vs. believing the electric blanket is a medieval torture device.
Boston Red Sox
vs. Detroit Tigers fan.
Pessimist vs. optimist,
meaning my default emotion of anxiety clashed with his philosophy of “don't
worry, be happy.”
Our first
argument went something like this:
Him: Why do you talk to strangers everywhere you
go?
Me: Because they're there.
Him: Didn't your parents teach you not to talk to strangers?
Me: Haven’t you noticed? My parents talk to strangers all the time! It’s genetic.
Him: Well, it makes me uncomfortable. I wish you wouldn’t do it.
Me: Because they're there.
Him: Didn't your parents teach you not to talk to strangers?
Me: Haven’t you noticed? My parents talk to strangers all the time! It’s genetic.
Him: Well, it makes me uncomfortable. I wish you wouldn’t do it.
Me: You’re asking me to change my basic personality
and my genetics!
Him: Well,
just try.
Twenty years into
our marriage, John began to experience strange symptoms. On the day of our
daughter’s wedding, he couldn’t fasten his cufflinks or button his tux. Knowing
my default emotion is anxiety, he tried to hide his increasing muscle weakness.
He switched to pullover shirts so he wouldn’t struggle with buttons. He would
scan a room before walking through it, strategically holding onto walls and
furniture as he proceeded. I thought he had developed a strange OCD habit but
he casually mentioned that he needed time to balance himself before taking a
step.
He withdrew
emotionally and spent his spare time alone, drawing illustrations on legal pads
or listening to music in the privacy of his headphones. I experienced extreme
anxiety. I described these feeling as knowing an asteroid is headed for earth
but not knowing where or when it will strike. After years of medical appointments, and
several misdiagnoses, John was told he had ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease,
popularized by the Ice Bucket Challenge in 2014). ALS is a fatal disease that
causes progressive paralysis; death usually occurs when the muscles that control
breathing begin to fail. Coming to terms with a fatal diagnosis required us to
do what I called pre-grieving. We reflected on our marriage,
on the beautiful family we had created, including our newborn grandson, Jackson.
We pre-grieved together, drilling into our feelings and enjoying small
pleasures: watching baseball, doting on our newborn grandson, having lunch at
the local diner. John had spent his career working with old people as director of
our local senior center. He’d always looked forward to growing “old-old,”
believing the challenges of aging could be met with grace and joy. He was
devastated to know that he would pass away in his sixties and would not be
there to give grandfatherly advice to our grandson.
The neurologist
estimated that John would live one to two years after diagnosis. But his
disease moved at warp speed. Three months after the diagnosis, my daughter and
her family moved into our house to help with end-of-life care. The phone rang,
friends and neighbors dropped by with food, our cell phones beeped with text
messages. The baby cried, we bickered over whether to turn on the TV or not. ALS
paralyzed John’s throat muscles and in the last weeks of his life he could not
swallow or speak. A musician who works for our local hospice set up her harp in
the sickroom and comforted us with heavenly sounds. My daughter and I hugged
each other and wept at the beauty of her music.
A few days before
he died, I told John that I forgave him for anything he might have done to hurt
me. “And I hope you forgive me for anything I might have done to hurt you,
especially my cooking.” He grunted out a kind of laugh. Our daughter
leaned over the bed rails and stood there for hours, reading him poems by his
some of his favorite poets – Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Wallace Stevens. Our son-in-law shaved John and measured
morphine doses.
John died at home
on January 16, 2014. At his memorial service, people advised me to find comfort
in the joyful memories I had banked. I hated that cliché. My grief was so raw
that joyful memories were too painful to remember, let alone provide solace. When
someone told me “He’s in a better place,” I cried out that he was now inside an
urn. “What kind of a place is that?” I wanted to know.
John’s death was
bracketed by the loss of my dad two months earlier, and the sudden loss of my
only sibling three weeks after John. Overwhelmed, enraged by the feeling that
fate was picking on me, I sought counseling. The therapist explained that the
fullness of grieving means taking time - years, not months - to understand the
lost relationship in all its sorrows and joys. I learned that the best parts of
a marriage can be the faults and foibles, the big and small differences, even
the sorrows. Navigating those differences can be the heart of a relationship,
the good stuff, the joy. I’m not writing this essay wearing a pair of
rose-colored glasses. (I realize that not everyone can navigate their
differences; also, none of this applies to relationships involving abuse). We
had hardships – real hardships - that triggered less-than-perfect behaviors and
the full range of emotions, including anger, despair, even moments of hatred
toward each other.
Early in the
grieving process, while trying to fully understand our relationship, I focused
on forgiving his faults and foibles. What a magnanimous
feeling that was. There was the time he’d re-arranged my closet alphabetically
by the first name of each designer. I came home to find an Abercrombie shirt
hanging next to a Betsy Johnson dress next to a Calvin Klein skirt (items I had
thriftily plucked from yard sales and thrift stores). I yelled and yelled. He
calmly closed the windows so the neighbors wouldn’t hear my shrieks.
My therapist
helped me to realize that alphabetizing my closet was a creative way for
him to let off steam after a stressful day at work. In the comfort of her
office, I was able to (mostly) laugh at the escapade. John’s OCD made sense to
him in the same way my extreme thriftiness makes sense to me. The fullness of
grieving forced me to acknowledge my own faults and foibles. There
was our 10th anniversary dinner at an Indian restaurant. Our
food sizzled on our plates, releasing the fragrance of saffron, curry, lamb. On
the way home, John pointed out that I had ignored him during the feast. I’d
been too busy chatting with the hostess, the waiter, the acquaintances sitting
next to us. I’d even invited those acquaintances to push their tables next to
ours, which they did. Our romantic table for two had become a table for four! I
had to acknowledge that my relentlessly outgoing nature strained our marriage. John
was painfully shy and felt embarrassed, even jealous, when I chatted with
strangers.
Shining a light
on my own faults wasn’t an enjoyable endeavor. But it was crucial to grieving
and healing. An unexpected benefit of this fault-finding expedition was a deeper
understanding not only of myself, but deeper insight into how relationships
work (not just romantic ones), and a tenderizing of my capacity to love. Many
of the books about grief get it wrong. Grief doesn’t end after that mythical “six
months to a year” deadline. It is a lifelong journey. A grueling, tear-soaked
process (there will be setbacks, maybe even despair), the price we pay for
loving someone.
* * * * *
Ellen LaFleche
is the author of three chapbooks: Workers'
Rites (Providence Athenaeum), Beatrice (Tiger's Eye Press) and Ovarian (Dallas Poets Community Press). She
won the Tor House Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Poetry Prize, the Hunger
Mountain Prize, and the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Prize. She is an assistant
judge for the North Street Book Prize and a freelance editor. She is currently
finishing a manuscript tentatively titled Walking into Lightning with a Metal
Urn in My Hands, a collection of poems following the death of her husband to
ALS.
Ellen LaFleche is a previous Moon Prize winner for her poem "After"
posted on Writing In A Woman's Voice
on June 9, 2017.
