When Private Mercifully Goes Public

So already, during the first week of August, death and grieving took center stage--not because a new, confounding death slammed into my own life and promised to reshape my personal days, nights, weeks, and months, but because there was so much old and new grief to be felt personally, or to be acknowledged and responded to in others.

I awoke on August 2 intending to call a friend who'd recently marked the birthday of the teenage son he'd lost a couple of years ago. But thoughts of that death were soon eclipsed by news of other deaths.

• Mid-morning, a college classmate shared with me in a phone call that his mother had died the day before.
• Late in the afternoon, an email from the Boston Synagogue announced the death of a warm, wise, extraordinarily centered senior member of our congregation whose presence, spirit, and efforts did so much to make the synagogue genuinely welcoming of and responsive to its diverse members.
• Just before dinnertime, a comment left on recent blog post let me know that the day was the one-year anniversary of the death of a teenage girl whose memorial in Quincy's Merrymount Park I had mentioned in a blog I'd posted months ago.

 

The next day, I went onto Facebook, which I haven't done regularly this summer, and almost immediately came upon a number of beautiful, intriguing works of art posted by my elementary school friend who now lives in Sweden, art therapist and artist Catherine Rogers.* At the age of thirty-four, Catherine's son Ben died suddenly of a heart attack, and not surprisingly, she continues to mourn for him.

The following words accompanied the works Catherine posted, one of which appears at the top of this post and another of which appears right here:

I've been working in vertical and horizontal journals again. Much of it is grief work. Painting, drawing, collaging and mixed media of whatever is hanging around in the studio. I'm also using Ben's music sheets as a sort of reliquary of remembrance. It's been good to speak to myself this way.

A Meister Eckhart quote comes to mind: 

'There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.'

The Meister Eckhart quotation, the latter half of which appears in the work of art at the top of this blog, makes me imagine that bereaved parents might experience their grief as the antithesis of silence, as a relentless, agitating howling that regularly overwhelms the "huge silence inside us." But then there's that nod toward stillness and fullness in Catherine's post: the "reliquary of remembrance" that Catherine mentions. It comforts me that Ben's music is becoming part of Catherine's art.

 

When another of Catherine's Facebook friends inquired about when and if these works would be shown, Catherine explained that they existed in a bound journal and would not be shown in a gallery. But she's already sharing these works on Facebook. And since her friend asked, she's begun working on small canvasses, leading me to wonder if there could be a future show. 

 

For now, though, she's in this flow of creating and feeling, and showing is not on her mind. On Friday, she posted the adjacent photo of these four small canvases, and explained, "I continue to be completely engaged with these small format collage expressions. I lose track of time and sink into a world that holds my deeply felt emotions and memories."

Is Catherine painting, gluing, drawing the "language of heaven"? Is she in the process of accessing and making visible the "huge silence" within herself, and, in so doing, helping the rest of us to work toward our own inner silences, or at least preparing us to do that? The comments on her Facebook page indicate that Catherine's visual conversation with herself--she said "It's been good to speak to myself this way"--has been resonating with others. She's made her private conversation public, and her Facebook friends, I among them, are grateful for that.

 

This whole question of when should the "what begins as private" become public has been much on my mind recently. It surfaced forcefully when my husband Scott suggested I write poetry and blog posts more the way I write in my own journal--with no concerns about standards, censure, and audience, at least in the early drafting, and maybe beyond that. 

 

As I began to think about the topics I could and sometimes do write about in such a freewheeling, cascading, raw, even ranting way, I wasn't sure that they should be made public. Who would be interested in them? Having just finished These Precious Days by Ann Patchett and Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson, I wondered how these writers decided--or should I say knew--that their personal experiences and ideas were worthy of other people's attention. Or were they even worried about that when they sat down to write? Maybe they wrote first and decided later, or didn't even worry about that at all. 

 

My fear has been that anything I could write about with vibrant abandon would probably be too personal--and too dull--to share. Almost conversely, I've also felt vulnerable about sharing some of the things I've been feeling passionate about, maybe because my passion is somewhat new.

All of that said, Catherine's sharing of her very personal work has encouraged me to be more public with the personal. And so does the comment that was left on my blog post last Tuesday. I first wrote about the makeshift but maintained memorial to Liana Dararaksmey in Merrymount Park last November when I was still very much in the first wave of mourning for my very good friend, Donald Burroughs. I never thought that Liana's family would see my blog post. But I also know that anyone who did an online search using Liana's name could probably come upon my blog post.

A tree has been planted at Liana's memorial.

I also didn't know that my writing about Liana's memorial would comfort her family, whom I've never met. But it did: her grandfather read it last Tuesday on the anniversary of her death and wrote to let me know. I am so glad I wrote about Liana's memorial in what was primarily a blog about my own grief. And I'm especially glad that Liana's family found it.

 

At this moment in the Jewish calendar, we are in the post-Tisha B'Av, pre-Rosh-Hashanah (Jewish new year) period often referred to as the Seven Weeks of Consolation. Tisha B'Av, which commemorates the destruction of both Temples and a number of other catastrophic events in the life of the Jewish people, is a the pivot point that redirects us away from grief and puts us back on the road--the intentional road--toward wholeness, oneness, communion with the divine, and joy. Underlying our annual journey is the understanding of how easy it is for us to forget the language of heaven when our feet are planted so much in our own individually constructed worlds--and in our individually experienced griefs, losses, and challenges.

 

Catherine painted "Double Angels" a few years ago.

But all of us with our private griefs are still "all of us." Our griefs will probably not disappear, but in sharing them, we up our chances of both consoling and being consoled. Maybe we'll recover some of that elusive silence that may make us feel at peace, at least some of the time. Thank you, Catherine, for making me feel so much more hopeful about the power and value of sharing the private.

* Catherine has given me permission to share and discuss her work here.