Kindling

I've lived more than long enough to know that grief can end in gratitude, the pain, the memories of what once was. I know it, I say it, I hear myself say it. There's a book lying on my nightstand that promises the same. Time is a healer. Time. I say to my hurting students: "Just promise me you'll find a way to get through until 30." I say it will hurt less then. I say I have no idea why. I mean it: so many things are better. Accepting that you'll never get what you wanted from a parent. Not caring so much what others think. Knowing that the sky won't fall.

Maybe those are losses too, these more easeful things, but they're not the kind that make you sing all the sappy songs: "But I don't think time is going to heal this broken heart." Not the kind that turn you eloquent when you explain to a class why "(Write it!) "comes between "losing you" and "disaster" in a wonderful poem. Better to have loved.....oh, yes. It took Tennyson a long time to say that.

A long time it always takes and, years ago, the time between Halloween and Christmas--that usually flying-by-too-quickly-to-grab-hold-of time--had inched itself like sludge squeezed agonizingly through the straitened vessels of my still-beating heart. It was that first Christmas...after. And it had come too soon. I was still convinced that he would recognize he'd cast away something he'd "never see the likes of again," as we say where I grew up. I was equally convinced that he'd never see that. I had driven past his house once, and I swore I'd never do such a thing again.

It was Christmas and I even thought of buying gifts for him and then returning them. I could not bear to be the woman this could happen to, the woman who had already given much too much. Christmas and nowhere to go except to my hometown since my mother would be alone for the holiday otherwise. I wonder, now, what had plunged my mother into depression that year. She'd never been a huge decker-of-halls but she usually made some kind of effort. That year, not a solitary decoration. I think there may have been gifts; my sister asks me about some costly present but I have no memory of ever receiving it. I know that my mother and I spent Christmas Day in chairs watching the nothing on TV, neither of us able to call up the energy to cook.

We sat there silent, neither of us even thinking to ask a question of the other.

Late in the afternoon, I got back in the car and drove fairly empty roadways back home. I had to leave because I was committed to take a group of students to England for a Winter Break course; we were flying out early on Boxing Day. I remember asking myself in all seriousness whether I could do it. By then, I believed that grief could be hidden. I found it a marvel that someone could stand there with massive internal bleeding, still looking like anyone else in the crowd. But I felt that something in me was precarious, too close to the edge. What would it do to me to have to "carry on" with teaching, with leading 18 students traipsing behind me all over the south of England, students who had invested much money and more expectation in that "it will be wonderful" journey? (It had been easy to sell it to them several months before Halloween.) In a way I couldn't identify, I was afraid of what might happen.

I dragged myself to the airport where missing passports and teary good-byes, frightened flyers and too much luggage took the time before boarding. I arrived, jet-lagged, only to be told to hold an organizational meeting of my class in the hotel lobby, before any of us went to our rooms. A boy from another university told me "he wasn't going to do any work while he was on the trip" and I told him in a voice that I didn't recognize that he certainly would. My course was titled "Dickens and the Idea of Christmas" and I walked through the days and the streets feeling far less substantial than Marley's ghost. There were wonderful things to be seen, to be learned. I saw them; I learned them. I watched over my students, anxious for them to enjoy it all. I refereed lovers' quarrels, told the students to ignore the herring on the breakfast buffet, heard their in-drawn breaths at first sound of a boys' choir during a service at Westminster Abbey.

It was bitter cold. We saw Stonehenge in hoar-frost like snowfall. In the photographs taken at Dover Castle we hug ourselves with gloved hands. At night in my room I piled everything I owned on top of me in the bed and still shook my wakeful way through the nights. I took the students to Lincoln's Inn Fields to see the poor who live in boxes there. With their beautiful souls, they befriended the buskers, anybody in a pub, the men who slept on the grates outside our hotel. I wanted them to have freedom; I would have held them all under my coat if I could. I think I feared we all might die.

Then one day closer to the end than the beginning, we went to Oxford. The students were distressed by the meat hanging in the market. Much as I had been the first time, they were a little disappointed on first sight of the university. But I wanted to take them to a College that I knew would be lovely even in winter time, a College where hallowed writers had walked. Here I must stop to tell you of something that I found a wonder. The students had free days, half days, even a period of time now to roam Oxford as they chose. Invariably, though, five or six of my own students, the ones I had brought with me from my university, would choose to be with me, to go wherever I chose to go. I couldn't believe it. I thought they must see that I had nothing to give; I couldn't even answer many of their questions. People back away from the wounded. I understood that.

The group who chose to go with me that day were the best of the best, the dearest of all the dear and diverse students who followed me to England. We walked the corridors; we marked the hallowed places. Then, attracted by unusual green on the lawn, we decided to walk by the river.

This past week one of those students wrote to me. The last she knew, I was in Australia. But she'd found me on the university website. She wrote to me about that day in Oxford. You must understand that, as far as I remember, we never talked about it. I might have tried to tell someone else about it, sometime during the intervening years, but, if I did, I'd have been unable to express it. But for me....so many times I have wandered among the trees beside the river with those young women. I don't remember what we said, but it doesn't matter. You see, they saved me that day. I believe that. You couldn't convince me otherwise. From that day on, I began to heal.

Since that time, I've had to admit that the love I mourned was best not continued. I have known far greater love, greater grief. I have risked perhaps even more. But I think I will never be in that kind of black place again, one that I believe had more to do with me than with the lost "us." Still, there was that time and there was that day.

I never thanked them, constrained as I was at the time about what was professional for a teacher to heap upon a student. I've seen two of the 16 students who traveled with me since they graduated. One, who had already loved medieval stories, was so moved by the 5th century churches we toured that she returned to England, borrowing the money to do a master's degree there. Since then, she has not been able to find the money to return. I wonder if she will spend her life trying to repay the loans, longing for what she sees as her "real" home. Another woman who took the riverwalk worked in our department for a while, long enough for us to move on to a simpler friendship. Then I left and she disappeared. She came by one day last year, hoping to find work again. But the troubles she had found were known, and no one would take a chance on her. I received an email this semester telling me she had taken her life.

Now, you may have a small idea what it has meant to me that Sarah wrote to me now. A small idea. She wrote to me about that day by the river, and she gave me a link to her blog where she had written about it. She also speaks of things later in the day that I don't even remember; she gives me back to myself and I smile. She confirms for me that God gives such days, gives us to each other for such days, so that we may take what we need from them.

If Sarah is willing, I will publish a link to her blog. Her writing to me has meant enough that I have, after such a long time, written here again.
posted by Sandy at 9:18 PM