I felt the departure of my oldest son, Jasper, when he left for college, like the breaking of a bone. I had been under the illusion that his going away to college would be the same as his going to camp or traveling alone to Europe; his independence had long been tested and proven, as had mine. I would have more time to concentrate on my painting and my life, having been a parent since I was 25 years old. This was supposed to be a normal and healthy separation, the next step toward adulthood for Jasper. I actually felt confused when mothers who had been through this experience told me about the sadness they had felt as their children had left home.
I broke Jasper's collarbone when he was born, his ten pound baby body had been that reckless in its desire to escape. That was twenty years ago. Last year, I was the one who broke, when we deposited him, God knows why, at a college across the country. Grief found me, I wasn't looking for it. In the plane on the way home, I took the window seat and hid behind my husband as I leaned against the glass and looked down at the miles of arid hills now lying between me and Jasper. I sobbed, at first quietly, and then uncontrollably, wracked with the useless effort of trying not to cry. It seemed as if some hidden enemy was unwinding a panorama of hills on an endless scroll, laughing as I looked down with disbelief at the expanse of barren territory. From the sky I pictured myself miniaturized and alone, walking feverishly for days, futilely searching for my child in an unrecognizable, gigantic landscape. I don't know why this split between us felt as serious and as physical as when we were first ripped asunder, at his birth. That had been a biological necessity , but now I had left him, by choice, 1000 miles away.
When we arrived back home from our college odyssey, our two dogs were overjoyed to see me, my younger son, Hart, 16 at the time, was relatively happy to see me, but nothing could smooth my fresh edges and jagged wounds. I was flooded with the knowledge that we had to sell this house, immediately. There was no way it could ever be our home again, not when any car that drove up would never be his, coming home from school or a friend's house, the sound of anyone's feet coming up the front steps wouldn't be his, and when the dogs ran to the door it wouldn't be to greet him. The knowledge that this was more than a brief interruption in the way things had always been was unbearable and irrefutable, and already everything was reminding me of his absence.
It was as if I was in some kind of play, some Shakespearean drama, or maybe I was just a robed figure in a Victorian tableau. I didn't know who I was, what I was doing, but just that I suddenly embodied Sorrow herself, and that with no rehearsal, my body had this role down cold. Josh suddenly reminded me that he needed to go on an overnight business trip, "tonight", something extremely routine for us, a shorter trip than usual, in fact. But now this script called for me to be a medieval peasant woman, throwing herself at her husband's feet as he is sent off either to war or to a dungeon. My knees buckled and I didn't even know that that happened outside of fiction, I had no bones, certainly no backbone. I think I managed to gasp, "don't leave me", although I am not proud to remember that. I heard Josh on the phone in the next room, canceling his trip, saying, "She just can't be left right now", and I was conscious of not being embarrassed by the fact that whoever he was talking to in Washington was now aware of my pathetic state. I was gratified that Josh's voice sounded like that of a doctor with a dying patient, appropriately grave, even delicate, as if he needed to hide my prognosis from me, and I was grateful, too, that he was not teasing me.
It could be only the parent who feels the separation like the snapping of a bone. I remember my own adolescent escape as an endless frustration, where I was met at every turn by people intent upon denying me my idea of freedom. As a teenager, I attended a yet-to-be-coed high school whose Episcopal legacy required the entire student body, two hundred boys and only thirteen girls, to attend chapel twice weekly. I remember an end of the year ceremony when we were all squeezed into that small building, the air inside hot from the day of spring sun, as we sat, incubating and unlistening, to the minister. Because listening in chapel couldn't really be enforced, I gazed at my enemy, this tall man with dark, indirect eyes and a pitted face, on that day wearing an ungodly costume of cream and light green, his special occasion robes. His throat, as usual tightly collared, was cinched by a hidden fastening like a zipper on the back of a dress, unreachable by the wearer, who would need assistance to put it on. And I stared, as usual, at the opaque stained glass windows that didn't let the outside in, black lead lines defining the designs, holding in the colored glass, as if ruby and emerald light could be contained. We sat, ready to spring forth into the beautiful afternoon, and the chapel was like a thin skin stretched over a skeleton that was too fragile to hold us back. We fanned our embers by letting our shoulders touch and our knees brush against each other.
And finally we were released outside, into the tiny surrounding cemetery where lilies of the valley grew in the shade, in the corners and in the circular shadows under the trees. I was wearing my white sandals, which would sink deeply and suddenly into the moss when I stepped off the path. As we had streamed from the chapel, I had been unable to avoid a personal enemy, a boy who had called me a cunt, tauntingly, as if he were the one who knew what the word meant, as if he could divine the secret parts of me. But for every boy I hated, there was at least one I loved, and I was walking safely between two of them, our shoulders fused together in a loose and jointed line. My skin was hot where it had been sunburned earlier, where the straps of my sundress grazed my collarbones. I remember that I was happy, in a sudden soft and bone melting way. And I remember that being hidden was its own reward, and that we stayed away until we were ready, nominally, to be found again.
Liberating myself from my current and bereft "parent's point of view" has been impossible; the vivid memories of my own adolescent excitement and escape don't help me here. Of course I have survived Jasper's college departure. It's quieter in our house, although Hart, a senior in high school, is still here. Still, my hidden enemy is capable of morbidly and coldly ambushing me. The other day, I went for a walk in a nearby cemetery, beautiful and old, a relatively secret place. The marble carvings have softly eroded, conveying the illusion that grief doesn't hurt, at least not anymore. The beauty is not an illusion, but the emotional and physical pain of death is hidden, muted, as is the physical pain of loss itself. The atmosphere encourages resignation and the acceptance of loss. People are now only soft, grassy mounds, tucked in to rest, gently, at the foot of every stone. Sadness and despair are also buried deep inside the body of the earth. Walking along one of the paths, I saw a little cylinder of white marble that must have fallen from its base; someone had stopped it from rolling completely away by jamming a few rocks underneath. The stone was discolored from its journey over the dirt, but the inscription was still plain; a name and dates that were too close together, the brackets of a seven month long life. And then the words, "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." There is nothing consoling to me about the image of children in heaven. I hope it consoled the baby's parents, whose grief, unmentioned, hovers in the spaces between the carved letters, alive for these last one hundred years. There is, of course, no comparison between our pain, grief can't be the word for my pain at all.
I found a small piece of wood on my walk, grey and soft from the weather, a hole at one end where a narrow branch once grew. Holding it up, I see the sky through the hole, the unbearably blue Colorado sky, as unbearably beautiful as the visibility of bone seen through skin. It has the shape of a collarbone, an arch with blunted ends. A wooden bone that once grew and arched away from the body until the tension was too strong, until the skin couldn't stretch anymore, and then, before the bone broke, it sailed off into the sky. The hole looks like it could have held a screw to fasten the bone at one end, attaching it to the sternum, forever, allowing it to swing gently back and forth, as if it were on a hinge.
Wendy Clough is a 45 year old artist with an MFA in painting, and have two boys, ages 18 and 20.
