Among the rocks I am the loose one
Among the arrows I am the heart
Among the answers I am the question
Among the scars I am the fresh wound
Among the stones you find on the beach
The one that sings, is mine.
Di Brandt: Prairie Love Song
It’s a sound that never fails to move me; the sound of hundreds of women with words. It is a song that it at once sweet and bitter; both gentle and furious. It’s a hymn to womankind and a tapestry of their lives.
It’s one year before M dies.
I’m touched just like the first time I came, by the electricity of all these women in one place. All writers and would be writers and wannabe writers who are first of all women. Fat women, thin women, serious women, women with flowers wound through their hair, new age women carrying wishing sticks and wearing crystals, women from Africa, Native American women, French women. Women who write late at night after they come home from a day’s work; women who dream of writing while they iron their children’s clothes; women who have a story that demands to be told. Women who have been raped; women who have suffered incest; women who’ve never been loved; women who’ve been loved by other women; women who are loved by men who support and stand by them; women who’ve been deserted; women who are in pain; women who’ve never known a good day in their lives; women who’ve been abandoned; women who’ve learned at Skidmore, to re-write the future histories of their lives.
I’ve come to mourn.
Hannelore opens the conference. She’s a tiny, waif-like person with dyed blonde hair. I can’t tell how old she is but she’s near enough to seventy if she’s a day. She must have been a beauty; she still is and so is the daughter she keeps close to her side. She’s known it all. The concentration camps, the cattle trucks, the dislocation, the loss of parents, the hunger and fear, the not knowing who she is or why she, of all those she has known, has survived. She’s found her meaning through the Women’s Guild, the organization she formed some twenty years ago, to help women find their voices and give them a platform to be heard.
They chant: “Theres a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with words.” It starts slowly; tentatively. Women look around; some are new and don’t yet know the song. It’s simple. “There’s a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with words …” The volume increases, more women join in, the sound swells. We are standing in the main hall of Skidmore college and this is the opening session of the annual Remember the Magic Writer's Conference. We don’t yet know one another but we are a groundswell, a consciousness, an archetype, a river of women with words. I can hardly breathe.
Hannelore opens the conference. It’s the same year after year. She honors the newcomers. She honors the oldies. She honors the women who’ve come with daughters; the women who’ve come with their mothers. She honors the young women under twenty and those in their eighties. She honors those who are with us no more. She invites each person who has lost a dear one , to say the name aloud. I shiver. I don’t know if I’ll say anything. If I do, I don’t know whose name I’ll say. Even while I’m thinking, my mouth says my mother’s name, Rachel and the women chant her name back to me. For the moment the whole hall is filled with the sound of my mother’s name: Rachel, Rachel. Rachel, my heart whimpers. I want to say M’s name but M’s not dead. The tears come. I’m in good company. Many tears are shed this night. I am prepared for it. I let it happen. Last year I came to learn about writing; this year I come to mourn.
I choose not to share a room. The work I will do is too personal; too private. I need space. I need somewhere to cry in peace; somewhere to rage and howl. I have much work to do.
There are the usual selection of courses: How to Write a Proposal; Writing Memoirs; Constructing Your Story, Self Publishing; Building Characters, Writing Winning Query Letters. Been there, seen it, done it. I choose none of the courses on writing. Instead I construct my program carefully. I will go to Eunice Scarf and let her lead me through The Art of Writing the Self. I will go to June Gould so that she can tap into my inner life and give me the cues I need to build my story, Stone by Stone. I’ll try Natalie Reid’s course on Writing from Your Higher Consciousness. I’ll go to Mahala Poupko’s grief workshop. She doesn’t know it yet but she will be my guide through this business of grieving. I hope it won’t be crass. I hope I won’t hear a lot of cliché’s. I hope it won’t be all lovey dovey; all gloss without substance. I hope she won’t tell me about the stages of grief. I’m a tear poised to fall.
I don’t know why I am so sad. My mother died. My mother-in-law died. My father’s getting older. My daughter moved away. My husband...
We are a small group. Mahala is a mother earth with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a Rubenesque figure. She wears Mu-mu’s. She begins each session by lighting a candle. This is our mourning space. Until the candle burns out, we will grieve, and then we will put our grieving away. We will tell one another our stories.
I don’t know where I will start. Something innocuous. I tell them about my father in law who is ill in hospital. Mahala tells us to write whatever comes. I don’t want to let it all out so quickly but my hand knows what it knows. It tells the story of how I learned that I would never have children. I’m amazed at what comes out. It happened thirty years ago. It happened yesterday.
“My husband and I have drifted apart,” I say and cannot talk for the tears. “He suffers from depression. We live together as strangers. I feel as though there has been a death between us. I grieve for the death of my marriage.”
Mahala is the kindest, softest person. She folds me into her arms. Hands of women touch me. Mine is not the saddest story in the room.
You get a group of women together and if the climate is right, they let you touch their pain.
I’ve never said the words aloud before. Anger is an emotion I can relate to. I’ve foresworn bitterness; or at least tried to. It's the grief that's done me in.
My friend L. asks me why I stay with him. She thinks I’d be better on my own. “You mean you hardly talk to each other?” she asks, incredulous. She got rid of her bad marriage long ago.
It strikes me as strange that today, instead of justifying why we divorce; why we don’t honor our commitments to each other in sickness and in health, for good and for bad, for richer and for poor – we ask ourselves why we stay in a marriage that’s far from ideal.
I ask myself a million times why I stay. I need to understand what we are: friends – hardly - not any more; siblings – but siblings don’t carry this disappointment, this loss of dreams and expectations; strangers? Too much history. We're tied together by a bond stronger than sex, stronger than friendship, stronger than … I don't know. M is part of my life. He is my husband. I would never leave him if he had a physical illness. I certainly can't leave because of his depression.
So is it all about my goodness and loyalty, then? No, I stay because I prefer the known to the unknown. I stay because I need a body in the house. I stay because M. takes down the garbage. I stay because he does the shopping. I stay because we have a daughter. I stay because I don't think he can live without me. I stay because I have no money. I stay because I don't want to be poor.
I permit myself no anger. Allow myself no bitterness. I foreswear blame and choose responsibility.
The tears come. I cry for the anger I don't allow myself to feel. I cry for the loss of friendship; for the hugs I’ve denied myself; for the affection neither given nor received. I cry for the sadness in my husband’s eyes; for causing his depression; I cry for the death of love.
I cry for seven days. Write some, speak some. Nobody asks questions. Nobody presses me to say more than I can. It is clear that there is more behind my words but Mahala respects my right to mourn.
At the end of the week, we have a ceremony. Symbolically, we cast off our losses and bury them. We’ve been on a long journey and now move away.
When I come home from Skidmore, I am different. I feel more at peace with myself. I am sad for M, but sad in a more distant, removed way. For the first time, I began to speak about his condition, to share the story with my friends and family. No longer lying about him lightens my burden.
We live side by side with a new understanding and even affection.
And then, suddenly, he died.
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