Friday
Today is the 21st anniversary of the death of my oldest son, who drowned in the St. Mary’s River in a freak accident. My wife Julia points out that Justin, who was 21 at the time, has now been out of our lives for the same amount of time that he was in them.
The memories have dulled over time although, from time to time, certain memories will pierce the haze like brilliant shafts of light. I think of how, after he was born, a line from Sartre’s The Flies came to me. “I’m still too—too light. I must take a burden on my shoulders,” Orestes tells Electra. And further on:
I have done my deed, Electra, and that deed was good. I shall bear it on my shoulders as a carrier at a ferry carries the traveler to the farther bank. And when I have brought it to the farther bank I shall take stock of it. The heavier it is to carry, the better pleased I shall be; for that burden is my freedom. Only yesterday I walked the earth haphazard; thousands of roads I tramped that brought me nowhere, for they were other men’s roads. Yes, I tried them all; the haulers’ tracks along the riverside, the mule-paths in the mountains, and the broad, flagged highways of the charioteers. But none of these was mine. Today I have one path only, and heaven knows where it leads. But it is my path. . . .
And finally:
We were too light, Electra; now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf. So come with me; we will tread heavily on our way, bowed beneath our precious load.
To be sure, the “precious load” that I had in mind was not that of Orestes. In some ways, I could not have chosen a more inappropriate play since the burden Orestes and Electra have taken on is the guilt of having killed their mother Clytemnestra (for having killed their father Agamemnon). Still, Sartre’s existential point applies. In this play about human freedom, Orestes talks about how truly free individuals take on responsibility, not run away from it. Julia and I deciding to have Justin, whom I often bore on my shoulders, meant that we could no longer walk the earth haphazard.
Of course, if we hadn’t had Justin, we would never have suffered the agony of losing him. The memories of sitting on an embankment of the St. Mary’s River as divers looked for his body—telling myself that it wasn’t him while knowing in my heart that it was—is branded on my mind as though it were yesterday. I vividly recall identifying his body and singing to him a lullaby that I had often sung to him as a child. (“Baby’s boat’s a silver moon…”) And waking up at 2 am later that night staring directly into an abyss of horror.
Today being Arbor Day (the last Friday in April), two tree poems come to mind that I can link with the anniversary. One is from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a poem that obsessed me for two or three months after Justin died. Every day when I came home from the college where I taught, I would randomly open it and lose myself in Tennyson’s sorrowing for Arthur Hallam. Early in the poem, Tennyson identifies with an ancient Yew tree in the graveyard where Hallam lies buried, stuck in sorrow as life goes on around him. “Not for thee the glow, the bloom,” Tennyson writes, finding it impossible to imagine himself ever happy again. Instead, he just watches detached as, around him, flowers bloom, lambs get born, and the sun’s clock “beats out the little lives of men.” The summer suns will not penetrate the gloom that has marked this tree for a thousand years.
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.
Yes, I felt something like this for much of the year after Justin died, sullen and stubbornly hanging on and feeling distanced from the flowering season that was upon us.
A very different tree poem captures where I am now, however. In “The Sycamore,” Wendell Berry describes a tree that, while it has been wounded many times, has as a result “risen to a strange perfection/ in the warp and bending of its long growth”:
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
Like Tennyson, Berry identifies with his tree, but in this case he accepts the nails that have been driven into him (alert: Christ image), the hack and whittles, the lightning burns, the illness that will one day kill him. Rather than feeling removed from life and death, he sees them shaping him.
Langston Hughes, looking back at the tormented history of African Americans, once wrote, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Berry is saying something similar.
The Sycamore
In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.
I was not wrong when, in the week after Justin was born, I voiced the feeling that I had been too light before. Because I sank deep into his life, however, I experienced unbearable pain when he died. For a while, I felt like Tennyson’s yew tree, old before my time and cut off from the rest of creation. Now, 21 years later, I can see that all the joys and all the sorrows have been gathered together into some mysterious purpose. Like the sycamore, I see that I stand in this life, that I feed upon it, and that this life feeds upon me. This is the indwelling principle that I would be ruled by.
