Oh to choir the right praise

Avoidance, self-defeat, and poetry

The view of Pisgah National Forest from Southern Dharma Retreat Center

I wanted to throw myself into a ravine yesterday. For whatever reason, the hollowed-out mountainside shelf seemed inviting and secure, surrounded by textured walls of leaves and roots. A natural sensory room.

It wasn’t a sinister drop, the slopes were just a few degrees steeper than someone could roll or sled down without losing control. Even that image felt too joyous for me—have you ever seen a heartbroken person roll down a hill?

The first six months after my mom died by suicide, I lay under beds and desks and benches to feel semi-secure, semi-soothed. I was prone to panic attacks. Even at work, I sidled my way across hallway carpeting to tuck myself under a bench for a few minutes of shielding.

I preferred that to my intrusive thoughts. You’re worthless. Cut the climbing rope. Open the door on the highway. Throw yourself into the ravine.

Neither of these happened to me before she died. And after a year had passed, I didn’t need to keep the space under my bed free of clutter anymore. I relearned to dismiss the voices, the self-critical and self-destructive ghosts in my mind.

Last week, I intended to write to you all about joy.¹ Then the colonial holiday exhausted me. The temporary ceasefire in Palestine felt too tenuous and fearful to call the feeling in my heart “joy.” And my annual season of mourning began.

My mother died sometime in the night of December 1st to the 2nd. Each year, that night is too long.

On the first anniversary, her sister and I smudged the dark house where she’d died and talked about her late into the night. Last year, I went on a three-day self-guided meditation retreat, a vigil for the Buddha that became a vigil for her. This year, I blocked out my trauma, forgetting even the day that she died (I told myself it was the 2nd or 3rd), and scheduled myself to work the whole weekend.

Which led me to uncontrollably weeping into a bag of Chik-Fil-A, and not even out of shame of eating there. I burst into tears at the sight of dread-headed parents holding their baby in the Whole Foods parking lot. And then, when a nice person gave me a free cone for my ice cream, the waterworks sputtered on again. In the car, I asked my partner through sobs, “What is wrong with me?”

He was stoic and gentle, patient in a way you have to be when you have no control, just driving through the night to check off my list of junk food demands. Only chicken nuggets could stop my crying. Which I said to him, and he laughed, and I was glad to see his concern melt off for a second. I don’t want to scare him.

It’s widely known now that our body remembers trauma, even if we consciously repress it. I’ve read The Body Keeps the Score and Waking the Tiger, and I’ve worked with therapists for years. And yet, at the beginning of this week when I felt despondent and agitated, I still couldn’t place the reason why.

My ever-pragmatic mind wasn’t letting the reality of my mother’s death touch me. But my body knew what was coming, that the Big Hurt Time was cycling around the sun again and barrelling towards us.

So I avoided everything. The shrinks call it dissociation. I downloaded a phone game and played ten hours of it this week. I watched a lot of Rick and Morty. My internal dialogue was littered with “fuck”s. I fiddled with anything—a too-short walking stick, a paper clip, a thread—like a child avoiding conversation, but I only had myself to talk to.

I dreamt of my cousin getting murdered, rocketing my family back to a state of despair, shock, and denial reverberating from violent death. We sat in the same room, in the same agony from when my mother passed, numb with new grief.

I hardly meditated, I hardly walked. When I did, I shuffled around this remote mountain valley and smoldered. The naked trees on the ridge were no longer black lace, but claw marks scraped into the sky. A hawk’s incessant calls, zipping back and forth in the valley, became just a muted observation, devoid of curiosity or love. Sunlight pushing out through the gray belly of a cloud inspired no hope or delight. I stared at bare branches and willed them to bud out again, to fast forward to spring, to skip this season entirely.

I wanted to lay down in that bowl of valley until a tree could grow through my knotted stomach. That’d make something of this pain.

But this is just a microdose of despair. This pain, disembodiment, grief, trauma—it’s a fraction of my mother’s suffering. To take your own life, you have to be lost in delusion much deeper than I have ever known. Suffering must seem inescapable, joy unreachable, and presence just a burden to the world.

I am, by nature, buoyant. Fundamentally, I’m different from my mother, different from my brother. I’ve never truly been depressed, beyond languishing in grief. I laugh and befriend and work and play; I dream of the future and enjoy the present. If this sliver of grim apathy is my only taste of what they felt when they died, so be it. Let me hold it because I, on other days, hold immeasurable hope.

I can’t stay out of my body forever, distracted by media and chicken nuggets. And I can’t bear distancing myself from the people I love, most of all the people I love who I’ve lost.

There’s a CD in my car that someone burned for me in 2020 that I’ve kept in my glovebox since. It was all her songs that she’d recorded and sent to people. I’ve never had the strength to listen to it, to hear her voice, to listen to her songs. Until this anniversary.

It’s mostly poetry, her own as well as Auden² and Pagis³ and others, all set to music with her ringing vibrato and simple ukulele. Tears came back again when I listened to her last birthday present to me, a poem from April of 2020.

Oh to choir the right praise!
Oh to embellish just so
and prune and tame and let run
free
as if we have a choice in
the matter.

Oh to say yes and no at once.
Oh to be being here exactly
like
this
(exactly).

Oh to thrive
and die
(also).

Oh to leave a mark
a ripple
a quaking silence
inside song!

Oh to be lost in fortune!
Oh to wither & ride
and possibly collide

Oh to name things impossible to name
and name them
anyway!

Oh because
here we are.

Oh because here we are. Thriving and dying and saying yes and no, trying to hold the two truths of pain and joy, the fact we love and love deeply but inevitably will lose every subject of our love.

I didn’t dive into the ravine, no tree erupted from my belly. Instead, I perched above on steps overlooking the mountains. As the sun set, mist drifted up from the valley below and I watched as fog filled our mountainside, as gentle and diffuse as hope.

1. Inspired largely by this lovely Q&A session with Ross Gay in Tricycle magazine.

2. Specifically “As I walked Out One Evening”

3. And “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car”