A Score of Sorrows
When family stories aren't what connect us, but what make us
It’s been a week of shifting weather, and shifting moods. The rain has come with the news of three deaths, in increasingly closer circles. A stranger loosely connected, a child of a friend of a friend in a chain where one fills in all of the unknowns with clichés. A college friend—briefly housemate—where I fill in all the unknowns with intense wishes for his having packed in a lifetime’s worth of good moments into his life, cut short of the eighty-or-so years that most of us assume are ours to saunter through.
A lot of people I know think that if they knew they’d die soon, they’d hurry to experience as much as possible. They’d make a bucket list. They’d do this or do that thing they’ve always said they’ll get around to doing someday.
But for now, we hoard our love—our loving—as though it were coins in a piggy bank, as though loving might cost us more than we can afford.
And we undervalue ourselves: I barely know/knew them, why would they want to get a random, loving word from me? They’ve enough in their life and they’d wonder what I wanted, what I lack that I might demand from them. Something like time, maybe. They’d pity me.
Norwegians have an expression “De har nok med sitt”: “They’ve enough with their own concerns.” Families and communities can be fortresses. Whispers and giggles are shot at outsiders like arrows through the arrowloop. Knowing this is true, I’m not feeling regret, per se, for not having tried to maintain ties with more people in my past. It’s something akin to curiosity: not a hypothetical what if? as much as an imaginary what might have happened? In an alternate world. If I’d grown into someone different.
If we all still could.
I tried to reach out to my aunt a couple of years ago on Facebook. I’d waited until after my mother’s death, so as not to put her in an awkward situation in regard to allegiances. My friend request went unaccepted for three years before I deleted my account. She died this week, after her second bout of lung cancer.
The Bible says that we’re allotted three score and ten years. My aunt got that, and a few more. The Bible also says that if we make it to four score and ten, our lives are filled with labour and sorrow.1 I’m glad my aunt didn’t have to endure another score of sorrows.
Is it possible that death can be experienced as a rush of joy? I’ve never read that. I have read that one Rinpoche2 cried out for his mother at the end.
Sometimes I wonder if I will be overcome by a resurrection of joyful memories and cry for my mother at the end. I wonder if my aunt cried out for her mother, for her estranged daughter, for her boy who died so long ago his story lives enmeshed in the marrow of all our bones.
Writing the wasp poems, I’m often distracted by trying to define family. I define it as something other than the household, beyond a “chosen family” of confidants, beyond the concept of family as a support system. Because, even in a tightly-webbed social constellation, some families are not supportive. I’m not saying it’s a moral failing. It’s just a fact. We are variable creatures, unable to read one another’s mind.
Historically, when the resources are scant, someone in the family gets bumped from the shelter. Too little food, too great an obligation. We don’t like to believe it’s true. In Norway sons were allocated by birth: the farm, the military, the church. After that? You’d try to find someone to take the kid in as an apprentice.
And girls? About 20 years before the Kennedys put an ice-pick into the brain of their too-demanding daughter, my great-grandmother dropped my 9 year-old grandmother off to work for room and board in Vermont. She then drove across country with the older sister. I have a photo of her—of my great-grandmother. I think she looks like Ma Baker. But that’s just me being romantic. “To care for”: what does it mean to you?
Families aren’t connected like branches of a tree, but mapped like constellations. Star dust all. Held together, or kept apart, by stories.
My grandmother was her own modest protagonist. Modesty is a construction, and it was central to the role she created for herself. It was the scaffolding of all the details she left unspoken. It was a tower of allusions.
Just as you can never step into the same river twice, you can never recall the same story twice. Movement is one of the seven signs of life3. Stories have a kind of life.
Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.
I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.
I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.
Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.
I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heat
writing a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s mother
And in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highway
Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.
I’ll be back next week with a new poem.
Warmly,
Ren
Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:
If you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, or have reservations about substack, I’m always happy to accept A CUP OF COFFEE ☕.
Psalm 90:10-12 KJV. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, Yet is their strength labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? Even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.
The title for an esteemed Buddhist teacher.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://naturalresources.wales/media/695397/activity-plan-characteristics-of-life-and-classification.pdf
"Estranged is not the same thing as extricated."
Wow, is that ever true. There was no estrangement in my family, so I was unfamiliar with it until I left home and met other adults. Then I learned how common it is.
My spouse's family: much estrangement, but all his family members' issues, behaviors, personalities, and histories are indeed inextricable.