Bernadette's Scrapbook, Part 1

It's a sad season; the sixtieth anniversary of my parents' wedding was last month and the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths is this week. I find solace where I can, so an internet meme moves me like an answer to a prayer I didn't know I had said. The pretty graphic asks, "Grieving?" then states with bracing confidence ("Wow!" I think,  "Someone actually knows how to do this?"):  Perform a Ceremony. 

Which I prefer ten thousand times to sitting in my gentle therapist's office so I do. Or as least I try. 

I go downstairs to the basement, not to the finished part of the basement with its clean drywall, but further back to the dark part by the furnace with the exposed low beams overhead and raw walls, to find the boxes Aunt Ruth meticulously cataloged and organized and sent to me from Kansas City when my girls were little. They are full of photo albums and letters and church business and bank statements and other ephemera that traveled with me and my siblings when we moved in with Ruth and Phil's family. (My favorite notation of hers is the one that accompanies a packet of letters to my mother from boys who did not become my father: "You may want to keep this separate." Oh dear beloved pious, cautious and fastidious Aunt Ruth, we are so different.)

My intention diving into the wreck of old boxes is to unearth the photos of the crash site. Two years after the borrowed plane disappeared, after the states-wide hunt that strangely uncovered the wreckage of another plane crash, months after the insurance investigation... Two of my father's brothers traveled to...

Full stop.

Later. Just trying to write about the crash photos stymies me. I stutter at the keyboard, I sink into reverie, I can't put on paper what seems clear in my head. Please understand, my slowing to a stop at the keys does not feel like incapacitating grief or the fatigue of depression. I know these pictures; they are not gruesome or graphic -- two years had passed and the leaves....The wreckage is settled onto the ground among the fallen brown leaves and the narrow tree trunks of the hillside in Tennessee. The flat hunks of crushed aluminum are difficult to recognize as the pieces of what was once a small red airplane.

Full stop.

Later. I'm not crying, I'm not emotional, I feel like nothing close to confusion, but words fail me. I stop trying to write about it, know that I'll return later.
Later. The world helps me, though, probably as a reward for my continued search for answers. The world likes searchers and the grateful and those who continue to hope, right? 

At school, I scribble, "Word work is world-defining, reality making" in a margin of chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby, the chapter where poor Midwesterner Jimmy Gantz, "no comfortable family standing behind him," reinvents himself into the Great Jay Gatsby.

My pleasure re-reading this book for the third time is part awe at Fitzgerald's gorgeous language and his devastating psychological understanding, part wincing self-recognition in Gatsby's dream-striving, part joy in the feeling of getting my mind blown, but a large part gratitude.

I am so grateful for the dawning that I will never ever understand my loss and I will never ever stop trying to understand.

Later. And the world helps me again: Back in December Randy gave me earbuds for Christmas, yay! that have transformed my workouts from dutiful slogs around the park district indoor track to Podcast Vacations! Whee!  

Nancy Mades-Byrde on the Salem Witch Trials, Jim DeRogotis and Greg Kot's Sound Opinions for music criticism, Rachael Maddow's Bag Man about Nixon's crooked and unrepentant vice-president Spiro Agnew, a bit of Slow Burn about Watergate and then dear colleague Ashley suggested I try Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, a podcast about "things overlooked or misunderstood." I thought Brown v. Board of Ed was one thing; oh no, reveals Gladwell, it is something else altogether. 

Revisionist History had an amazing theory about country music's lyrical specificity and a couple of episodes defending faulty memory, and then I came across one, the last in season three, about a Freudian explanation for why Elvis kept on messing up the spoken bridge of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" when he performed it live. 

"Parapraxis" is Freud's word for mishearings, misreadings, faulty or abnormal speech acts. We call them "Freudian slips," the greater point being that there is always meaning in these errors.  

Michele Press, of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute describes them in this way: "unconscious ideas that are trying to find expression but because they are unacceptable, they may emerge when one is unguarded."

We listen on the podcast as Nashville singer songwriter Kaci Bolls struggles to remember a song she wrote about her mother. Gladwell admits to his embarrassment as Bolls stutters and stumbles, then comes to the realization that parapraxis is a gift. "Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us."

Of course it's hard for me to write about this. Of course I can't. Of course I keep trying.

This is William Styron's Nat Turner after the death of the young girl he loved: "For how long I aimlessly circled her body--prowled around the corners of the field in haphazard quest for nothing, like some roaming dog--how long this went on I do not recollect....I arose again and resumed my meaningless and ordained circuit of her body, not near it yet ever within sight as if that crumpled blue were the center of an orbit around whose path I must make a ceaseless pilgrimage." (N.B. Whiteness alert. Revision: "White William Styron's version of preacher and revolutionary insurrection leader Nat Turner after his murder of the young white girl Styron invents to derail Turner's goal." Work in progress.)

I've been trying to write about my ceremony all month and writing about anything but. Even though my Saturday moments sitting on the living room floor with an eighth grader's scrapbook in my lap were an entire pleasure with revelations delightful, and not at all painful. She's a real doll, my Bernadette is, let me tell you. I want to tell you. And, believe me, dear reader, I will.