Author: Catharine H. Murray

When someone comes into our life to love and then is taken away, what’s left is not only a longing in the heart but in the body too. There was a way that our body fit with that other one, that our arms held him, that our cells turned in his direction when we were with him. All that too has been lost and its absence is acute. The touch that was so nurturing like food we didn’t know we hungered for is gone. And we are physically, as well as emotionally, bereft.

With patience and tending, grief of the heart can be transmuted. It is there in the poems we write, the compassion with which we respond to another’s heartbreak, the awareness we bring to love of its double-edged quality that makes us more careful of its power.

What of this physical loss? Can it too move through? This muscle memory of the one we loved? The body in grief can be heavy and slow, the cells no longer springing up in anticipation and hope for that delicious touch of recognition from another. Instead it’s hard to pull oneself up out of bed or out of sadness. But if we follow this spiral of grief down, if we let ourselves be pulled deeper into the heavy darkness, if we follow the physical urges to cry and we yield to the knowledge of the body, we can heal. It requires knowing, resting in, the fact that this state, like everything else, is not permanent, that as the body rests and releases the pain of loss, it will eventually lighten and rise of its own accord.

If we let ourselves experience this, we can remember that this pain and lethargy are only manifestations of the eternal pulse of the cosmos, opening and closing, rising and falling. Just as the stars erupt into brightness and burn out, the heart expands and contracts with each beat, and the lungs fill and empty with each breath, we are forever riding these endless waves of rhythmic, cosmic movement.

I think the physical loss can be transmuted. At first to a small boy’s sweater knit of yellow yarn because I needed something to keep my fingers moving when they couldn’t tousle his hair or wipe away his tears or rest contented on his skin. Later to a good loaf of bread because I needed to feel the silky weightlessness of the flour on my hands, needed the soothing rock and rhythm of the dough coming alive as I kneaded it into shape.

But now the expression of grief, indivisible from the love that defines it, has moved through me in a deeper way, a more full-bodied way. I find myself dancing differently. When I dance now, there is something larger in it than before. There is more room for intentions to move through and be articulated. It feels as though the hollowness, the emptiness, the aching desire, all of which felt as though they would overwhelm have instead left more room behind. Now there is a more space for a fullness of expression, as if, when I dance now, I am pouring something out from those cavities, as if I have created more space in and around my body. I have been stretched open in a way that was almost unbearably sad, but sometimes now I feel that I am a moving part of a world that is almost unbearably beautiful.

3/7/2013

Catharine H. Murray,

Author of Now You See the Sky, Akashic Books, 2018

I dreamt last night about my son who died when he was six and worn out from fighting Leukemia fifteen years ago. In the dream, he was healthy, and someone else was looking after him upstairs while I was busy downstairs in a house. I came up to find him in a white, claw foot bathtub full of water. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully at the bottom. After a moment, I realized that he must be dead, unable to breathe under water. I pulled him up and held him, his legs around my hips, my arms around his back. I looked into his beautiful face, his eyes closed. I screamed and keened in the realization that he’d died.

After a few minutes, presumably from all the noise of his momma’s wailing, his eyes fluttered open. Seeing that he might be able to come back to life, I shouted for him to wake up, to come back. Slowly, in little bits of waking, moving his head from side to side, opening and closing his eyes, and finally smiling that unforgettable, mischievous smile, he did. He was alive. I hugged him and felt the indescribable joy of having him returned to me. I even felt proud that I’d raised a boy so healthy that he could survive ten minutes without oxygen.

Later in the dream there was some talk in the family about how I shouldn’t have left him alone with a sitter. “Where was his mother?” was the gist of it, blaming me for his almost death.

This morning, when I told my fiancé my dream, I was surprised by the tears that slid down my cheeks when I got to the part about Chan being alive. I was surprised by the strength of the grief that overtook me as I wept harder, allowing myself to hold the thought of him in my arms, to hold the thought that he might have lived.

If only fifteen years ago my keening could have awakened him when I walked out of our cabin into the sunrise, his body stiff in my arms.

Nowadays I think I’m “over it,” healed. Mostly I am, but his birthday is in a few days. June has always been hard. This year it’s been better. This year I’ve made it this far into the month with no more than some low-level anxiety, which I didn’t recognize until today as unacknowledged grief.

But this dream tells me to remember, tells me to give myself the time and space to feel this loss. Because sometimes I still miss my little boy.

Now You See the Sky, Gracie Belle, Akashic Books, 2019

These days, fourteen years later, I always think I’m done. I think I don’t miss him anymore. And usually, I don’t. It’s over. That life was so long ago.

Then it’s December, a few days after his brother’s birthday, a few days before Christmas. I don’t know what’s hitting me at first. At first I’m just mad at my lover. I’m distant he says. He doesn’t understand what he’s done. I don’t either, so I make things up. I knew this was too good to be true. I’ll always be alone. But after a while of this attempt to make him the reason I feel so bad, I remember. Oh yes. The date. This damn date. December 21st. And the memories push in. The middle of the night moments when my boy took his last breaths.

And I tell my lover now, and the tears that I’ve been holding in with my emotionless distance slide down as I realize the remembering. The indelible pictures of my boy’s last night with us muscle their way forward. The creak of the rough floorboards as I came and went from his side. The rustle of the sleeping bag I pulled over his failing body before I left for a sip of the dark night sky, a glimpse of the moon. The feel of his hair, silky under my palm as I held his head, warm under my hand for what I didn’t know would be the last time. The rattling of his shell drying out, dying out. The glow of the candle above the bed. The hands of the clock almost at the half hour past one a.m. when he took his last breath. The way we rocked him between us in our arms, our empty arms.

And the pain is so much now that I come and go from cold and distant to hot and sad and remembering. I say I need to be alone, but I don’t leave. And my patient beloved asks me to tell him the story, and I don’t want to. But I do. But only a little. Little pieces. I’m so tired of all of it.

This cat and mouse. This playing with the pain. This trying to hide from it. This opening little windows to it. This has been my life since then. For fourteen years. Only now there’s more space between the openings. There’s more room for other things than the pain. A lot more room. But still it comes. This day of the year it comes. And I remember.

Catharine H. Murray, Author of Now You See the Sky