The Taken Heart

Dear Ira Glass,

The first time I lived away from home I was nineteen years old. The experience was short-lived, lasting all of three months before my roommate and I parted ways and I went to live with my grandparents while I finished my undergraduate degree. However, in the elasticity of time, those three months stretch to cover several soul-shaping events in my life. From April to June, the five year old boy I had nannied for two years died suddenly, I graduated from community college, I ended a year-long term on student government, and two of my closest friendships ended. I remember coming home at one point between the death and the graduation and literally breaking down in front of my roommate and her boyfriend because I had not slept for two days. I was pushing so hard to finish the year, which the spring had so wrecked, that by the end I had nothing left, no tether to any kind of tangible sanity.

That was five years ago. In my memory that time is a strange jarred collection of wracking emotions, grief- and love-related, solitary and weirdly public, quiet but the whole thing was one loud shout, raw and unfiltered like liquid before it’s been strained. I didn’t know how to edit it, but I couldn’t keep still, but the singularity of that combination of experiences made me keep still even after writhing desperately to catch onto some kind of social understanding, some human resolution.

One of the friendships that ended during this time burned brightest at the last, hailed my heart to rally for the final exit. Like the paper ballerina and her one-legged love in The Steadfast Tin Soldier, whose spangle attaches to his metal heart when they are thrown into the fire, we became closest in the midst of tragedy. Right at the end. When B (the five year old) died and I was floundering in the midst of my first face-to-face experience with grief, this friend did my math homework, defended me when I failed the test, fed me vegetables and coffee, skipped class with me, and made me watch funny movies. He even picked me up at my house for school even though I  lived a mile away from campus and had a car, because he knew, for whatever reason, how immensely comforting it was for me to be driven around by someone else, in someone else’s car. And I welcomed the care. I opened to it, found solace in it, even sought it out though I knew it wouldn’t last. And as a result this person became unforgettable, though after graduation we parted ways and I haven’t spoken to him in more than four years. I’ve been thinking about him lately as the morning frost seems more and more out of place on my windshield, as the sun reaches shadow wings through my blinds that haven’t gaped their thin dark lines in months, as winter swindles its last hailstorms out of the rising spring. I feel again everything about those three months, the shame of a grief I didn’t have the capacity to process or name, the nightmarish mysticism of sudden loss, the ache for physical touch to remedy, to answer the gathering giant slate-colored storm that is permanent, that is closed without closure, that is death. It’s easier to name it all now, with five years in between, in which time I have learned how to reference art to name my life. As Clarice Lispector writes:

A dark hour, perhaps the darkest, in broad day, preceded this thing I don’t even want to try to define. In the middle of the day it is night, and this thing I still don’t want to define is a peaceful light inside me, you might call it gladness, gentle gladness. I am a bit disoriented as if the heart had been taken out of me, and in its place there now were a sudden absence, an absence, almost palpable, of what before had been an organ bathed in a darkness of pain. I feel nothing. But it is the opposite of stupor. It is a lighter, more silent way of living…But I am also uneasy. I was all prepared to console myself in my anguish and pain.

When you are in the midst of it with grief, nobody tells you some things. Like that grief is addicting. And seductively prone to resist the cyclical process. Prone to get you stuck. And that if you fight the stuckness and enter the process, you will obsess over trivial components. The day that B died my first laptop came in the mail, and late that night I curled up on the floor of my apartment while my brother and my roommate’s brother spent two hours setting it up, installing software, and responding to my delirious calls from the carpet to scan B’s picture onto the desktop. Nevermind that we didn’t have a scanner. Somehow they made it happen. I fell asleep at 3 o’clock in the morning, on top of my bed, but I couldn’t get under the covers, and I couldn’t even go to my bed until well after everyone else had passed out in various places throughout the living room. I woke up three hours later, and knew the crushing awareness of that first morning after somebody dies, and went to the bathroom to glance at myself in the mirror to make sure I looked the correct way. In my grief-stoked obsession, the correct way was no make-up, a red t-shirt, and blue athletic shorts. I had to have a completely blank face for weeks, just blank. And I had to wear blue and red, for no reason I could have identified at the time. This is the shame of implacable, ambiguous grief: colors matter. Clothes matter. Not how they matter in every day life, but a strange mattering that requires cognition to keep running underneath the deep black current. It glints and rolls on, and somewhere in the depths clothes matter, and working through a small obsession keeps you going.

It is the swift lightness, almost a phantom that grabs hold, that takes the heart. The “organ bathed in a darkness of pain” is left throbbing, bruised inside you, drenched by the black current, dependable. Needing care indefinitely, just to soothe and not to heal. The small lightness comes later, if you are fighting for cyclical grief, and fleetly arrests the grieving heart, takes it as ransom for peace. Returns it, not soothed at all, but mending. Working. Beating blue and red hope.

In grief, nobody tells you some things, but hopefully they tell you in some way how to recognize the fleet light: one morning after B died I took my laptop just outside our apartment door to sit on the cement porch, to read and write with tea. The 10 o’clock day was all green and bright sky blue, covered in corner-searching sun. I was quiet and typing, and my cell phone rang. It was my friend. This was the conversation we had.

Him: “Hey. How are you?”

Me: “I’m okay. How are you?”

Him: “Good. Just calling to check on you. Are you outside?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “Are you sitting in the sun by your house? Writing about B?”

Me, quietly awed: “Yes. How did you know?”

Him: “I just knew that you would be. That’s what you should be doing today.”

Rewritten, it sounds like something out of a ready-made paperback novel. But on the phone, it was a reassurance, a buoy. Taking my laptop on the porch was another behavioral obsession like the red and blue outfit, like the blank face, and there were so many of these compulsions starting to build up that there was no gap for perspective. On the phone my friend pulled me toward the taken heart, the healing, long before it would actually happen. Kept me holding on to the tug-of-war so that when I lost, I would lose to the side of the fleet light and fall forward into the mud rather than backward.

Sometimes I go outside only to sit in the sun. I curl up and grip my ankles with my palms, press my knees together, dip my chin into the hollow where they meet. I sometimes think of B, and other things since that have caused a similarly ambiguous grief, a similar dark immersion. I think of my old friend and others who have pulled on me. The light disorients me, fools my compass, tries my analysis till it’s poked full of small irreparable holes. And I have sunny skin, and prisms in my eyelashes over tiger-tinted eyes, and brightly-lit blues & greens are everywhere I look, and the colors matter.

Sincerely,

Courtney

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