13 October 2004

"...to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." --Whitman, from "Song of Myself"
I have reread the entirety of the 1891-2 version of the "Song" from *Leaves of Grass*, and what an extraordinary poem it is; despite occasional longeurs, how it seems to include everything, even to anticipate all objections to itself. Of course my eye lit on this phrase. Can the good gray poet possibly have been right? Such states of ecstatic access, such affirming certainties, a confidence so supreme that it is supreme even in its generosities--it is scarcely possible for any human being to cling to such states long, except at the moment of poetic creation.
At times like this, it is hard not to feel that the nineteenth century, with its prescribed forms of mourning, had something to show us. We tacitly expect that the survivors will move on, move back into their lives, in a few weeks. I remember that FSG was careful to wear black for many months after his elder sister died; he can scarcely have imagined that I would now wear his black neckties to mourn for him. There were scarcely forms for divorced spouses; there were certainly no forms for divorced spouses of the same gender. A widow was to wear full mourning for a year; a brother was to wear full mourning for three months, and half-mourning thereafter. As something less than a widow or widower, and perhaps more than a brother, I say: full mourning for six months.

10 October 2004

For many months after her sister died in 1996, A has told me that she began every paper in the graduate program she was attempting to finish with the sentence: "I hate everyone." A simple outcry of rage upon a living world revolving senselessly around a black absence. Now that her brother--FSG--has also died, I find myself in her place; I called her to tell her that she had been quite right all along. It is not so much hatred I feel as distaste for the noise and bustle of others--how can they, how can we all, be alive, when that loved one is dead? Halt the buses; cancel the colors; stop the sun.
I am at my parents' community in Virginia, where they live among other military and paramilitary retirees; they are scarcely held back by their relative rarity as liberals here, and enjoy the fullest social calendar and the happiest daily existence I have ever known for them. They were invited to a dinner party by near neighbors, who are organizing a second trip to China, and indeed they spent the first half-hour or more settling the broad outlines of the adventure. My parents know well that I could not consider such a trip except at their expense, and they give me perhaps too much already: I make polite demurrals that I hope will not reveal the extent of my indebtedness to them. After about two hours of this--I listen attentively to my host tell of his visit to the widow of Minoru Ota, the Japanese commander in the Okinawa campaign (she was, he reports, "a very nice lady," but he later learned that their formal call was against military protocol; I was yearning to say, "But her house--was it Western or Eastern? were the doors wood or paper?"); I politely ask my hostess' grandson about the stone in his necklace (jeweled adornments, scarcely found even on gay men when I was an adolescent, is now general across my sex, except, it seems, for me)--I had had enough, and retreated into a study of Andrew Wyeth's fruitful relationships with the Kuerner and Olson families. "Have you found something to interest you?" my hostess inquired, in a rather bronzed tone. A man in black is never an ideal guest.
"I think I could turn and live with animals"--Whitman. I have thought very much of these other witnesses; they have been easier somehow than my species. About ten days before FSG died, driving toward Boston, I came to a very sudden halt before three deer that had begun to cross Amherst Road: they regarded me stilly with their wide holy eyes, their gaze fixed for a moment on my car, before they turned their heads as one and walked floatingly into the trees on the other side. A week or so later--while I was on staff at Circle Lodge--six white swans floated on the lake as I passed by to go to my bed on the Saturday night, stirring the water aimlessly, amazing with their sinister eye-patches and long tragic curved necks. And yesterday, as my mother and I walked toward the gym, we chanced upon a neighbor's new dog, a four-month-old dachsund. Wolfgang was at first frightened by my great leather hat, but I took it off and knelt to be near him, and he lay happy in the grass under my hands, unguarded, guileless, free.