Tuesday
Yesterday I wrote about the conflicting feelings that tore at my heart following the death of my mother this past Saturday. There was numbness and sadness, to be sure, but there was also relief and even joy—relief that she was no longer suffering and joy that Julia and I, so long immersed in her illness, can now go out and engage in activities and travel. And then there was guilt over those feelings of joy.
The most intense literary version of these contradictory feelings may appear in Andre Malraux’s 1933 novel La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate). Set during a communist insurrection against Chinese premier Chaing Kai-shek, the novel includes a character who has very conflicted emotions about the deaths of his wife and his sick child. While he cares for them deeply, they also prevent him from throwing himself whole-heartedly into the insurrection.
At one point Hemmelrich, who runs a phonograph shop, refuses to participate in an assassination attempt on the premier because of concern for his family. Then, when the attempt fails, he blames himself for its failure. It so happens that the authorities still see him as an accomplice and blow up his shop, killing his wife and son. At that point he experiences a “profound joy of liberation.” By “tearing from him everything he still possessed,” Malraux writes, destiny had freed Hemmelrich.
His first feeling is apparent indifference, which is not from hardness of heart but from shock. We often use denial at first to cushion us against a blow we fear will tear us apart:
He knew he was suffering, but a halo of indifference surrounded his grief, the indifference which follows upon an illness or a blow in the head.
More difficult to understand is the joy and the satisfaction that follow:
In spite of the catastrophe, of the sensation of having the ground give way under his feet, leaving nothing but empty space, he could not banish from his mind the atrocious, weighty, profound joy of liberation. With horror and satisfaction he felt it rumble within him like a subterranean river, grow nearer; the corpses were there, his feet which were stuck to the floor were glued by their blood, nothing could be more of a mockery than their murders—especially that of the sick child: he seemed even more innocent than the dead woman…
Malraux elaborates on the reason for the emotions:
[B]ut now, he was no longer impotent. Now he too could kill. It came to him suddenly that life was not the only mode of contact between human beings, that it was not even the only mode of contact between human beings, that it was not even the best; that he could know them, love them, possess them more completely in vengeance than in life. Again he became aware of his shoe-soles, stuck to the floor, and tottered: muscles were not aided by thought. But an intense exaltation was overwhelming him, the most powerful that he had ever known; he abandoned himself to this frightful intoxication with entire consent. “One can kill with love. With love, by God!” he repeated, striking the counter with his fist—against the universe, perhaps…
Then comes a welter of conflicting feelings:
He wanted to laugh, to weep, to find relief from the awful pressure on his chest. . . . Nothing stirred, and the immense indifference of the world settled, together with the unwavering light, upon the records, the dead, the blood.
After locking up his store in a useless but symbolic act, he strides forward into the future, no longer held back by his former responsibilities:
His shoulders thrust forward, he pushed ahead like a barge-tower towards a dim country of which he knew only that one killed there, pulling with his shoulders and with his brain the weight of all his dead who, at last!, no longer prevented him from advancing.
And finally:
His hands trembling, his teeth chattering, carried away by his terrible liberty, he was back at the Post in ten minutes. (emphasis mine)
I can’t say that my emotions were this intense after my mother died. After all, she had lived a good, long life, and there is something fitting about someone fading away at 96. That’s why, in such cases, we gather “not to mourn a death but to celebrate a life.” But I must confess to having felt something along these lines when I was watching divers search for the body of my son 22 years ago, after he died in a freak drowning accident.
Paramount among my emotions was denial—I felt sorry for whoever it was who had lost a child in that water, even though a deep part of me knew that it had to be Justin. But I must confess to having also experienced a certain relief—relief that I wouldn’t have to worry about what Justin would do with his life after college, relief that I would be spared Justin’s infatuation (although I was pretty sure it was temporary) with Christian fundamentalism.
Was I horrible person? Is Himmelrich a horrible person? I don’t think so in either case. Rather, I think that the mind, faced with unimaginable horror, looks around for every possible rationalization and coping mechanism. We get mad at the lost one because his or her death is tearing us apart. We rationalize that the death could be a good thing because we can’t face up to the prospect of an event that has no bright spot, no silver lining. The mind, in other words, rends itself because the love goes so deep.
In Himmelrich’s case, tragedy resolves itself in a kind of death song: his love is transmuted into murderous revenge. In my case, I needed those ways of distancing myself from the death in the early moments so that I could fully open myself to my grief when I saw the body.
When I did, all the anger at Justin dissipated, as did my attempts to rationalize. Instead, I saw him as the baby I had once carried in my arms, and I touched his cold body and sang him a lullaby he had loved as a little child.
The 12th century Jewish poet Judah Halvi has written, “’Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch,” and it’s fearful because love renders us vulnerable and exposed. In our fear, we lash out in ways that may make us appear callous and insensitive. Our lashing out, however, actually reveals just the opposite.
I look forward to celebrating my mother’s life in an August 20 memorial service. And while I have never gotten over Justin’s death, the tragedy has—to quote Langston Hughes’s “The Trumpet Player”—mellowed to a golden note.