What Remains of the Night?: The Unbearable Burden of Grief

Abstract

What Remains of the Night?:The Unbearable Burden of Grief Anna Harrison (bio) To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barringthe way to and from the soul's hall out in the light it shows clear, whether shrunken or known as a giant wrath-discrete at least, where before its great shadow joined the walls and roof and seemed to uphold the hall like a beam.1 You have kept count of my wanderings. Put my tears in your bottle –Have not you recorded them in your book? Psalm 56:8 (ISV) I was doomed. I could not shake the sense, a surety that has only recently begun to lift. It greeted me first thing in the morning, feasting on my fear. It tucked me in at night. It had a physical accompaniment, bowling me over and taking my breath away. It was the sober recognition that I would be done in that did me in. The end was waiting for all of us; I knew this, of course. But in my case, its looming presence and the way it stretched back into my beginning and coiled around the middle of things, made it an almost-all-pervasive specter in the here-and-now, dimming the light and sometimes casting an almost-total shadow in the midst of every-day sunshine. In my family, few got out alive, even the living, the damage razor-sharp and bone-deep. This wasn't my imagination; reality confirmed my calculous: the survival of the cold and conscienceless (I won't name names), the demise of the decent (my mother). The psychology [End Page 269] that compelled me to take sides (life as a child's game, the inability, the refusal, to read subtlety) and cast my lot with the doomed was simple: the only ones for whom I had lasting love were either dead or in a ditch despair. The allegiance of the child of divorce runs deep. My mother's death was a lonely one, deserted, she was convinced, by her two children and, it is certain, left by so-called friends, compounding the isolation and despondent inward turn that too often are the primary or sole companions of the dying. Her death seemed like the inevitable bookend to her early life. Her mother hated her, and she became her own wet nurse, self-suckling on love's abandonment. This, her bedrock autobiography, was a primary food on which I was nourished, growing into a replacement I longed to be and hated becoming, a daughter well trained in her determination to compensate for her mother's own failed mother, offering one childhood (mine) to compensate for another (my mother's). But I was destined to join in fleet of those who failed her, doing so at no time more dramatically than during death's approach. Since I was a young teenager, separation and survival (and the almost unbreakable link between the two has long been clear to me) have been to me a kind of betrayal. I never ventured from the belief that not to swing with my mother's wildly oscillating moods was a form of infidelity, early on assimilating the dark side of what I would one day learn was the Pauline observation, and which I have taken both as a depiction of how things are and as an injunction: "There is one body, but it has many parts … if one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honored, every part shares in its joy." (1 Cor. 12:12, 26 NIRV) The body was, in my case, my mother's, and I held on as tightly as an infant, its own body tucked snugly into another's as necessary and known to it as its own. I became an expert at shadowing the momentum of the high-flying trapeze artist, acquiring the grace and strength of one long apprenticed in the tandem craft. When she died, I was abandoned mid-air, or rather, I plummeted—no longer anything to hang onto!—into the earth with her. The ground of Bethlehem, Connecticut, holds her bodyWhere I—in my likeness...