After my son died and the whole world, the one that started in my mind and radiated out like a great sea of light and noise and movement went completely dark and silent, I lay in my own wet madness and the only movement was my chest expanding and deflating, expanding and deflating. When my eyes moved, I could hear them, as if they were my childhood doll Lisa’s eyes from so long ago, the eyes that opened and closed with a gentle clack when you tipped her forward or back. Her face came into my mind and it was of course also my son’s face with the wide set blue eyes, the full pink cheeks and the frozen, angelic smile. She/he floated there, an image in the otherwise dark void and I believed that the task before me was to move towards that point of light, that by moving I would once again create the world of light and sound and movement. And so it was that I did sit up and I did stand and like a person waking from a coma, I saw before me the whole world as it was before, chaotic with color, saturated with scents and clamoring voices, dizzying noise. But it was not my world. Not the one that went dark. That world held me. It held my family intact. It held my son. Was this a movie? A re-enactment? A trick?
Pulled outside into my garden by a honeysuckle by the kitchen door, my garden lay verdant and overgrown in every direction. I have always used working in the garden for therapy, weeding and pruning and transplanting got me safely through many hours of my son’s addiction and psychosis. It gave me one small space in which to achieve order in a time when helplessness was my normal frame of mind. But what I felt when I looked at my weed choked garden now was a sense of un-belonging.
Almost without thinking I picked up the broom that leans outside the door and I began to sweep. I swept the flagstones that my son helped me gather from the neighbor that was tearing them out across the road a decade ago. I swept in an inward pattern, around the edges and towards the center. I circled my grief like a dog weaving a safe bed out of nothing but intention. I gathered the mess of all that remained of my life and my self into a small, neat pile of leaf and duff and ash, pushed it gently into the rusted metal dust pan and tipped it into the bin. There.
There.
I have cleared a space. It will fill again, I know that. But the broom makes sense in my hands, the dry sound it makes on the pink stones is calming. It is a simple agreement. The broom asks only to be put to use. I ask only for a reason to get back up. Together we can clear a small space. We can do it today and again tomorrow and the day after that. It requires no speech, no emotion, no insight; only the purity of simple focus and mechanical motion. Oh, beautiful, gentle motion.
I do not need happiness anymore. I only need something to hold in my hands, to set a meaningless and humble human task and see it through.
Pulled outside into my garden by a honeysuckle by the kitchen door, my garden lay verdant and overgrown in every direction. I have always used working in the garden for therapy, weeding and pruning and transplanting got me safely through many hours of my son’s addiction and psychosis. It gave me one small space in which to achieve order in a time when helplessness was my normal frame of mind. But what I felt when I looked at my weed choked garden now was a sense of un-belonging.
Almost without thinking I picked up the broom that leans outside the door and I began to sweep. I swept the flagstones that my son helped me gather from the neighbor that was tearing them out across the road a decade ago. I swept in an inward pattern, around the edges and towards the center. I circled my grief like a dog weaving a safe bed out of nothing but intention. I gathered the mess of all that remained of my life and my self into a small, neat pile of leaf and duff and ash, pushed it gently into the rusted metal dust pan and tipped it into the bin. There.
There.
I have cleared a space. It will fill again, I know that. But the broom makes sense in my hands, the dry sound it makes on the pink stones is calming. It is a simple agreement. The broom asks only to be put to use. I ask only for a reason to get back up. Together we can clear a small space. We can do it today and again tomorrow and the day after that. It requires no speech, no emotion, no insight; only the purity of simple focus and mechanical motion. Oh, beautiful, gentle motion.
I do not need happiness anymore. I only need something to hold in my hands, to set a meaningless and humble human task and see it through.
