"The Cracks Are Where the Light Shines In": Grief in the Classroom

Abstract

"The Cracks Are Where the Light Shines In":Grief in the Classroom Leeat Granek (bio) Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether, that would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanely speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. —Marilynne Robinson (104). I am sitting with my mother in a restaurant. It is a day before she is to be admitted to the hospital. We are, in fact, discussing this possibility. She is wearing a pink corduroy hat that covers her balding head and a thin pink shirt with a stain on it. We argued about this shirt before we left the house that morning. My mother was an impeccable dresser, the kind of woman whose shoes matched her purse and whose shirt was always tucked in. On this day, for the first time, she didn't care that her shirt had a stain on it and this worried me. We sat in the dark restaurant. Her meal, ordered from the children's menu, sat mostly untouched. She rested her head in her hands, her elbows propping her up. The last few days had been difficult. She had awoken the day before speaking in riddles, and we were trying to make sense of the gibberish. We didn't know yet that the tumors were in her brain, we didn't know yet that it was affecting her speech, we didn't know yet that she would die in less than seven days. We didn't know. But she knew. She closed her eyes as had become her custom over the last week. I watched her, let her rest at the table. "Mom," I said, after a few minutes. I was taken aback by her own startled response when her eyes jerked open. She had fallen asleep with her chin cradled in her palms. "I think we should ask the doctor about these symptoms." She had explained away the odd behavior as side effects of the drugs she was taking. There were red pills and blue pills and yellow pills and green pills and orange pills, so many pills, she had said, perhaps she had mixed them up? Perhaps she had taken too many? "Still," I persisted, "it's good to ask, just in case." She looked up suddenly. Her head had become too heavy for her neck in the last week; she seemed to be continually hunched over. Her beautiful piercing blue eyes were dulled, laced with a grayness I had never seen before. "I'm scared, Leeatie," she confided. "What if I'm dying?" My mother's death was not a surprise. Despite eighteen years of relative psychological and physical health while she lived with metastatic breast cancer, the last year of her life was a violent struggle against the disease that aggressively invaded her body. My mother fought her death until the last moment. One day we were shopping, [End Page 42] eating lunch, we were united, arm in arm, solid and content in our togetherness, and the next day she was in the hospital, attached to tubes, wires, and pain pumps. Suddenly her face was swollen, suddenly she was confused, suddenly she was no longer my mother but a body withering in pain, uncomprehending in her terrible, terrible suffering. Within five days of being admitted, she died. My mother was a cancer patient for as long as I can remember. I was nine when she was first diagnosed and twenty-six when she died. I don't remember much before that. I remember the matching dresses we used to wear when I was a toddler, a visible sign of our unity. I remember the comfortable weight of being embraced, nestled contentedly in the concave shape of her curled body. I remember the weight of her scent that used to envelope me when I came back from school each day, familiar and intoxicating. I remember the feel...