Pure, Yawping Grief

"O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?"
-- Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
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I have many good things to write about: the success of my events at work, a trip to Charleston that included a number of frighteneing entries to my Online Museum of Historical Kitsch, the peep-show that is the women's room in LaGuardia airport -- all things that have kept me more busy with my life than with my blog.

I can't write about that now. I have to write about this, which is awful, which is something for which there are no comforting words or thoughts or actions. This is pure grief.

In my Christmas 'Possum story you will find a character, Joey. Joey is the son of one of the main characters, George. When the events on which the story is based took place, Joey was maybe 10 years old. He grew up to be a handsome young man, a frat boy -- much to his Marxist father's chagrin -- but one who held leadership positions, who fell in love with a gorgeous young woman, and who was (as anyone who ever knew him would expect) the life of any room he was in.

He also had dark places. He did when he was a kid, when I knew him. He had extremes of uncontrolable emotion, rages that would take him over, or waves of energy that would seem almost creatures of their own posessing his body. Yet, they were still clearly all part of him, all him turned up to eleven. As he grew older, George said, he just became a bigger version of his younger self. All of his brilliance, and all of his extremes. George said that he often had to sit on Joey to contain his rages, and barely could. George is not a small man.

Last week, Joey shot himself. In a break up with his girlfriend, he went into one of those dark places. She tried to get him to someone who could help her and him. He convinced her not to. Then, he took out a gun and shot himself.

Of all of the futures that I would have imagined for Joey, this was not one.

There is nothing good to say about this.

I keep trying to write this grief. What kind of a fucking world allows people to just carry around guns in their car? What sort of mental illness -- and I'm sure that was involved -- plagued this child his whole life? Why could no one diagnose it (it wasn't as if he hadn't seen doctors)? How to you force someone to hang on for one more minute, one more second, when they are deep in their head, wanting releif from overwhelming pain, and can see no other way out of it but dying? I've been there, which is why I am probably the only person who is not angry at him for killing himself, for what he has done to the survivors. You are in an iron maiden. You see or feel nothing else. Even then, I could not tell you how to make someone hang on through that to keep them from suicide. What will become of the poor young woman who loved him and watched him spatter his brains across the inside of her car? What appropriate thing do you say to someone when their child has just shot himself?

None of this is sufficient to describe what is going on. You can't describe it. There's just a big hole where that person used to be. Around that hole, closer to the edge of it than the questions of why and how and what to say or do to bear looking into it, you see the wisps of that person as you knew them.

You see the little boy who at 40 ravioli at one sitting, who ate raw sugar when he wasn't tossing it around like confetti, who could describe raw stew meat in great and sensuous detail at the grocery store.

You remember the kid who sat on your lap to drive my car around the Heights, and the kid who convinced you to walk over to the Menil Collection because he wanted to show you the Cy Twombly exhibit and tell you with fervent passion how bad he thought it was. You remember his insistence that everyone "bite you" -- or, as he said it, "bieshooo" -- which had precise and varied meanings depending upon tone, inflection, and body placement.

You remember the extreme excitement with which he could greet someone he liked. "Aunt Cliiooooooo!" he would sing, running down the hall to jump on your lap, oblivious to his ever growing size and weight, even when it once broke a chair. "Suuuuuuggggarrr!" he would coo, as he wrapped the dog in a big bear hug. You remember also the devastating silence he could turn on someone of whom he disapproved, the icy cold shoulder he gave to a man you once dated, and his early stonewalling of his father's first girlfriend after his parents' divorce. "She's Dad's stooge," he said told you. "His goon." His lonliness in that time, and his need to take lots of walks to talk about whatever.

You remember his fascination with your tattoo. You remember how he insisted on tasting it, and your discomfort with allowing him to do so because you just knew he'd end up in therapy talking about the pervy old woman who had him lick her shoulder tattoo. He insisted it tasted like Jolly Ranchers. Red. You remember taking him to the tattoo parlor down the street from your apartment, just to let him get a look at what went on. You thought the needles and blood might put him off his daily haranguing of his father to let him get one himself. Instead, after intently watching the artist, Gus, ink a "tramp stamp" on the small of a sorority girl's back, he turned to you and said, "let me get one." He wanted a huge Medusa head to cover his flat, bony, 10 year old chest. You told him that he would need parental permission and his parents probably wouldn't go for it. "You could pretend to be my mom and sign her name," he insisted. Legalities were lost on him, so you told him that he would grow -- and he did -- and Medusa would become stretched out, like a comic face on Silly Putty. "Cool!" he said.

You could write a book filled with these wisps; but you can't escape the hole. The missing whole. The pure, yawping grief.

Perhaps it is in poor taste, but I keep thinking this song. I think this song because I first hear it as part of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie soundtrack after my grandmother died when I was maybe 9 or 10. I think of it, too, because it was the song that played at Joe Orton's funeral both when the playwrite died and at the end of Prick Up Your Ears. Joey had that pure, out-of-far-left-field, id energy of Joe Orton, and the song has a cathartic feel that can wring you out like loss: