Here, There, and Everywhere
Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
A little over a month ago, I sat down to write what I believed would be my last public essay about the loss of my son. With a new year upon us, I thought January would be a natural point to close my journal and leave whatever thoughts were to come to my private meditations. In large part, my decision was driven by two concerns. First, I did not wish to become repetitive, saying the same things in different ways. More importantly, I worried that my essays were bringing sadness into the lives of others, an act that I could not justify—no matter the benefit writing was for me—given that we all contend with sufficient pains as the world turns.
I return to my journal today, however, because since I stopped writing I have heard from readers who told me they found solace in these shared memories, meditations, and regrets, and that seeing their experiences put into words brought them some comfort, even if some never said so in public. Reflecting on the messages I received, from friends and strangers alike, I was reminded that for some readers, my journey was their journey too—that I was part of a collective experience of loss that belongs to all of us.
As for me, after publishing my last essay I was overcome with a deep, and unexpected, sadness. It was as though I was finally letting go of one dimension of my grief for Enzo, but doing so hurt me more than I imagined it would. Though I have discussed the good that writing was for me, I had not realized the extent of that good until I was left alone with no way to unchain my pain. It has been for me a strange phenomenon that I can put thoughts on paper that I could not say aloud. What is it, I wonder, about the process of shaping my grief into sentences and paragraphs that I found necessary and comforting? “Anything that’s human is mentionable,” said Fred Rogers, “and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” Perhaps the mere mentioning of the sorrow was, in itself, an amelioration of my feelings of helplessness and futility in the face of my loss.
In an essay on writing, Joy Williams notes the following:
The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.
Perhaps the essays were a release for me, as I tried to escape the reality into which I awoke on June 2, 2022. It is, after all, a world that I often hate and from which I sometimes wish to vanish. It is a world in which any fleeting moment of joy is paid for with a thousand sorrows, an unfair trade that depletes me and leaves me wanting to find some alternate universe into which I can disappear. In such an existence, writing allowed me to “push back”—a way, as Williams writes, to transmute and disturb. Losing the power from writing, however illusory, left me unbalanced and isolated, and I have spent the previous weeks wondering whether perhaps I should write again.
As I contemplated another essay, Enzo’s mother sent me the picture below, which was shared with her by someone who lost a young daughter not so long ago. For some reason, this simple drawing stayed with me, and I wanted to know its source.
I discovered that it came from a book written and illustrated by Alessandra Olanow after losing her mother to cancer. The more I contemplated Olanow’s images and words, the more I thought about Enzo’s presence in my life, for, even now, his death is what I first think about when I awaken and what I think about last before I fall asleep. Though I seldom say it to those around me, his face, his walk, his hair, and even the sound of his voice saying “Hi, Dad” are ever in my mind. His memory accompanies me everywhere as an invisible presence that brings both comfort and sorrow.
Olanow feels that her mother is everywhere except here, the expression of a sad paradox that encapsulates her environment with, and without, the person she lost. While I understand Olanow’s sentiment—that the memory is everywhere but the physical being is gone—my own experience is somewhat different. While he lived, Enzo always had a locus—a fixed place in which I could place him mentally: at home, at school, with friends. From the day of his birth, he was always tethered to earth at one point, like a kite tied to a tree. While we exist, to be in one place is to be nowhere else; thus, I lived with the knowledge that Enzo was sometimes with me and sometimes not. Since his death and cremation, however, my mind is not able to tie him down to any one point; the kite has flown, and his essence has fused into everything around me. He is in his room, our driveway, the street in front of our house, the road that passes by his school—anywhere I look at any moment of the day. Unlike Olanow’s lost parent, however, Enzo is everywhere and here: watching me read, playing the piano, or even writing these words about him. I can feel his physical presence, even if I cannot see or hear him. I understand that this is a psychological phenomenon occurring only in my imagination; nonetheless, it is a constant state of mind that, I suspect, may always be with me. Perhaps this is a difference between losing a parent and losing a child: a parent lost in old age can (and should) be let go, for his or her departure from our lives is in accordance with nature, but a dead child, because it is against the natural order of things, can never be let go from our psychological space—not even for an instant.
The untethered nature of his presence now causes me to long to be in those fixed places where Enzo once stood. A few days ago, I got into my car and drove to the University of Maryland, recreating a trip Enzo and I took often in his only year of college. I drove with no particular destination in mind and with no sense of the trip’s purpose or meaning. Arriving on campus, I found myself parking in front of his old dormitory and looking at the doors from which he had so often emerged. It seems foolish to write it now, but that afternoon some part of me, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, believed that if I waited long enough—if I wished for it with all my heart and soul—I would eventually see him walk out to me once again. Thus, I sat silently, watching young people open the doors time and again, exiting to afternoons of youthful promise, each face that was not his a pang in my heart.
At one moment, I stepped out of the car and looked at the campus on which Enzo spent his last year on earth: the green lawns, the copper trees, the brown and white buildings, the winding path that connects his dorm to the college of journalism where he spent most of his time. I searched for his face among the students around me, for his form to come walking around a corner, for some sign of his presence that yet remained. In time, I came to focus on the small field of green that lies just past the steps to his dormitory and over which Enzo crossed each time we met. As I stared at it, I recalled “The Bright Field” by R.S. Thomas, a Welsh poet:
I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had the treasure in it. I realize now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Standing before that piece of earth, I realized that I had come back to it because it was to me a “field that had the treasure in it.” Those moments in which I waited for Enzo in my car, proud to be there—proud to be the father of this young man—were the hidden jewels I was trying to find that afternoon, which, like Thomas, I would give “all that I have to possess.” In retrospect, that trip was, perhaps, an imaginary grasp of the floating kite—a moment that, however fleeting, once again united Enzo and me in a single place and time.
Enzo never walked out of those doors, of course, but that afternoon alone in one of his places comforted me somehow, and it made me cognizant that there must be other such fields around me in which such treasures lie—all of them “pearls of great price” bought with my son’s life, that I must find when I can. Indeed, yesterday I walked for two hours along the shore of the Potomac River, a place we visited often when Enzo was a child to watch the rapids rise and fall and to talk about the marvels of the natural world. I stood where we had stood, remembering the splendor of a sunny day spent contemplating my boys as they pointed excitedly to a spray of whitewater formed by a jutting rock or stepped quietly into a hidden cove carpeted with tiny grey shells cast off by the currents’ momentary digression.
Driving home, it struck me that these recent voyages—and those I know are to come—were both to and from Enzo: toward the present of his memory, which is deeply real, and away from his reality, which is only recollection. That is a paradox of true loss: that which was substantial becomes shadow, and that which was immaterial assumes the power to shape our conscious and subconscious, dreams and waking moments alike. Thinking about that transformation—the awful exchange we make with the universe when a child moves from life into death—prompted me to write again today.
Past or present—here, there, and everywhere—the child whom we lose moves with and around us, our sun and our shade, the memories of which never let us forget that once we hold a baby in our arms we are then and forever the guardians of their memory and the keepers of their light.