THE BALL OF GRIEF, NOVEMBER 19TH, 2009

My mother died over six months ago.

I’d say that grief is like a tai-chi energy stream. It is all around. When relaxing into a mediation, grief is a ball of liquid wide open and across one’s chest. You hold that energy’s weight and see that the weight itself is weightless.

In younger years I wondered how I would “deal” with death. I strove to understand it. I read the right authors. I traveled to the Holy Land; went to Egypt and stood on pyramids. I tried to touch death like a dog pissing on electricity. Late at night I played with fire; embraced a fear-filled Kurdish girl in Istanbul and a sabotaged mid-western chica in New Orleans…

And…

While those experiences smashed me across the face they weren’t “death.” Death came soft.

I heard about it three years ago. I was at a gutted school in New Orleans’ 9th Ward. All around me young volunteers from Vermont and California chirped away. I was in New Orleans for only a few months, helping to rebuild after Katrina. I had a plane ticket purchased to return to my old life in Istanbul.

And then a funny thing happened. On a break in the gutting of the school my father called me.

Dad’s voice is normally smooth and rich like well aged bourbon. It is the kind of voice which covers you and holds you tight. But that day his voice was quiet on my cell. Mouse-like. All of its magic was gone. He said, “Your mother.. Your mother.. we just came from the doctor’s office. Your mother has ovarian cancer.”

As we spoke I was standing outside on the steps of the school. The sun was blinding in the mid-afternoon and the smell of Katrina’s funk hung decayed and moldy in the turgid air.

I couldn’t understand my father’s words. “That means she’s like… um… this’ll pass. I mean.. she just needs some chemo, right?”

“No son. She’s stage three. It’s not going to ‘pass.’”

I stared at the phone lines. There were pigeons up there. The birds fell and lit off from the lines. Dipping and bobbing in the air they returned to their original places. The lines shock visibly.

What did stage three mean? Should I cry? Could I cry?

When death and dying happens you don’t really realize it. Not really. Not REALLY. It stays somehow on the periphery and untouched for a very long time like old school telephone lines in a drowned 9th Ward.

Three years ago – after the call from my dad – I went up to the phone lines with those birds and lived a worry-free life. I decided to stay in New Orleans and experience America. I’d stay close to Wisconsin and not go far off abroad again. I would work and live and booze and date in New Orleans.

I told myself, mom would be okay. Everything was going to be okay. I was in my early 30s and doing my thing. She would be fine. I visited every few months and didn’t cry about her slowly dying. At home, I lifted stuff for her; took her to hospital; lifted more stuff; joked like the old times. (We had the best way to joke together. She understood me better than any woman.) When she was well enough we’d walk together in the forest by her and my dad’s house…

And she often was well enough! Those doctors! Those clever clever hope peddling doctors! They keep people alive so long nowadays and it is so good that they do! She’d have been dead in months had it been 1990. But she was diagnosed in 2006 so that meant that she got an extra two years of hope-filled life!

Operate they did. Hopeful. Right away. They cut her open and they took out the bad stuff. Out it went! Out! Out! Out! Out! And I heard all about it on the telephone from my uncle and my dad.

Over the phone during the surgery mom’s brother seemed pissed I was not there. A ball of guilt briefly formed in my throat. I felt low. But I reasoned to myself that since I was working, it was alright to be away for her surgery. Sure the surgery could have killed her but what were the chances of that, right?...

“Chances low but you never know… next on the Price is Right!... Could your mother die from ovarian cancer surgery??… Spin the wheel! Will you not be there when she goes? Will you have said everything you needed to? If you spin the wheel right you just might win… A NEW!!!!”…

Field.

Flowers.

The caretakers come out every day in the warm Wisconsin summer and I don’t like to visit but dad wants me to. I hate visiting. Normally I want to stay in the fucking car. But today I came out alone. They don’t have the marker in the ground yet but that is normal. I hear it takes time. Beautiful field really. Rolling hills. Corn stalks waving in the distance. Cows lowing.

It is a Wisconsin countryside, a sort of egalitarian Deutsche dream. Those Germanics and Poles came from central Europe 150 years ago to milk the land with progress and mediocrity. A big red quilt is what Wisconsin is. Everyone is equal here. Everything is uniform and works well.

She is below the land now. She resides under. The tree branches, like finger tips, blow in the wind around me. I squat down and look at the spot one month earlier that we put her in the ground. Covered over now with sod – grass stitched together the way her lower stomach had been stitched together after the cancer surgery.

I can’t feel my mother in the sunshine of the cemetery. They have put out flowers for her in a plastic holder. The flowers are real. She is not real. She does not care about the flowers.

I squat down and upon closer inspection see that ants have feasted away bits of the flowers. The ants have made visible holes in the petals and corolla. I extend my forefinger and an ant appears on my fingernail.

Happy the ant is to have this extremity on which to shake. It is a fast ant. Like a tiny dust particle it flashes over and under and then back over my finger, passing with singular purpose to the knuckle and then up towards the wrist.

If I don’t hold this ant I’m not sure why I’m out here in the first place. I’m not sure why she was put in this cemetery. My father’s brother (my godfather) is a minister and he made a nice speech at the funeral. Uncle Minister – like all the rest of the Muslim-Judeo-Christian clergy – tells us that mom is most likely with God. Some of the clergy would say that she is (probably) with God and since God is in everything, mom is (probably) now in this ant crawling on my hand eating the flowers above her carcass.

But no.

I don’t think so.

I don’t feel any of her in this ant or the tree branches. I don’t feel her in the wide open blasted Louisiana afternoon or the verdant Wisconsin field. She is in not there.

Hidden she is.

My mother died over six months ago.