Today I filled out a Linked-in form - and for its 'professional description' box I wrote:
Unprofessional: presently mourning the death of my teenage son. Check back in 2017.
Blunt enough, Myst? While I recognize that hanging with me isn't
that much fun these days, I seem to be retaining a good dozen close and closer friends - people who are gambling better than even odds that I will stay glued to this planet a few more years.
(I suspect that God is the bookie, and She at least, will break even.)
As both of my children were born and did die in this lovely little city, it behooves me to take a long wander away from its charms and mementos - which are mauve and ultramarine glitterbombs ticking away every few feet. So I am preparing for pilgrimage - to places far and tremendous - wondering what kind of story I can possibly offer that will serve as a social emollient, yet preserve some of my very necessary dysolation. [No, that's not a word - yet...]
I continue to be a writer, as witnessed by the crepuscular production of the handbook I mentioned in the previous blog. That work --titled
HAVOC-- tries to ravel and reweave the first chaotic hours after my son's death. It is the only thing I can work on right now that doesn't interfere with the interiority -
dysolation, if you will - this kind of experience demands. But I still have to buy the apples, the coffee, the wine; still have to ask the woodcutter to bring the
ksilo down to the terrace, and say pleasant things to people who have earned the solid-gold right not to know how much I am suffering.
~~~
While the question of 'my story' is on auto-ponder, and
Havoc makes its way down the mountain, I do realize from time-to-time how much I miss the other work. The work that addresses who we love, and how; what potencies remain unawakened by our forms of cherishing; and the questions of temporality, habit and Nike ~necessity~ that delapidate our caresses. And more critically, what to do about those erosions. What to do... what to do... at one point I had a few ideas. We'll see if they return.
I am not in the same anaesthesia that characterized my daughter's death (how amazingly awful is it that I can compare these?), but the wit I can bring to these issues is off, belayed by this thick longing to hear and feel and smell my son's
corporeal presence. And not separately, but with that delicious overlap that declares what you love in its profusion. When a zephyr brings one of those traces to me, or I am sheered blind by his utter gone'ness, my body's only recourse is to weep. And this isn't just your average 3-hankie sobbing fit - this is an infibulated roar, a baying, as if I am trying to succuss my feet up through my hips and out my throat. I've learned to wrap my arms around this and drag it out of social range, but if delayed too long, I begin to burn, to fry from the inside, as if some hidden sun has lost its ozone layer, and it's August all up in here.
And maybe it is. I hear there is a Mediterranean dish that involves cooking a squid in its own ink. Sounds promising.
I am sitting outside on this mid-October day, in a state of oblivion regarding the fact that I have just over a week to do EVERYthing. It's not hyper, that bole. The high wind will pick up and toss me into another language and form, my eyes resting on things my children never saw. Thank you, Goddess; it will help to be free of these mindprints, free of the way I slip into Quentin and Sarah's frame, voice, shape while regarding the home to which they have become --what do we say?-- insensible. 
