The Origins of Guilt

Two weeks after Missy died, Sophie and I were approaching our apartment building after our first day back to school. I could sense from a block away that something was very wrong. I slowed my pace and considered turning back, unwilling to face whatever was waiting for us at home. The first thing I saw was my mom sitting on the front steps, my Aunt Grace close beside her. When Grace saw us approaching, she placed a hand on my mom’s shoulder and said, “Christine, the girls are coming.”

I took Sophie’s hand as we approached. My mom came to us and stooping down, put her arms around our shoulders.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

“Is it about Daddy?” Sophie asked.

She looked at Sophie silently for several moments, watery gleaming eyes fixed absently on her face.

“Daddy’s gone, honey. He died today. He had a heart attack.”

As these words formed and spilled from her lips, the tears, fat, bulbous drops, slipped from her eyes. Her face was red.

Sophie began to sob and my mom turned to her, embraced her. I walked out into the road, past the people, past the sounds, the weeping. I don’t know when my walk became a run. It happened fluidly, my feet gliding above ground between falls. I closed my eyes and kept running. A dark ledge against a dark void. I leaned out just far enough, peering over to regard plain, white points of light, some steady, some madly rushing to catch each other, some unbridled as chaos, some darting toward collision, and others standing silent as sentinels, overseeing the whole melee, unable to affect or change the course, but destined to watch until even their own light dies. A wave of vertigo hit me and I carefully pulled my eyes back open, sought out a deep breath; instead I listened, imagining I could hear the low moan of the wind as it slipped between buildings, increasing in speed as it lifted the breath from my gut up through to my throat. I ran, the grass beneath my feet a blur of green.

Something might have been carrying me for hours to pound out old rhythms in staccato breath; to rain blows in hammering footfalls meant to detach from the earth rather than to connect; a soporific series of repetitive motions--satori.

I was aware of a large knot lodged in my chest, rising, indicating the tied-up presence of a great pain that contained so much. I could not move but to move twice as fast; there was no such thing as slow. I had made my way down the Chicago River. Every so often I looked around and registered the beauty, the amazing face of air, water, earth. My hands were stiff, fingers unmoving. I wondered then if I had left my body; if my spirit had just leaped up above my head to hum and vibrate with the other realms.

The sky turned dark and the moon appeared. That moon and those clouds, even the stars and that night sky were all tattooed with images from so many years. A constellation of pain bodies holding little girl guilt in its seams. As I ran I was certain I had come through some real and terrible time warp, some rip in the fabric of space where he was alive and—

No. Forget it. He was dead.

No time passed, it seemed, between that run and the wake. They are bumped up against each other in my mind like a single memory, separated by a semicolon or a dash. Sophie and I were in dresses. Mine was dark gray cotton with a white collar and white cuffs, the left one smudged with my mother’s red fingernail polish. Sophie wore her Easter dress, a poly satin blue garment with pearl-white beads along the neckline. My mom put on makeup and what she called her black mourning clothes.

My dad lay there in a gray three-piece suit. I had never seen him look so dressed up. Sophie and I stood and stared. His hair had been washed and made to lie neatly, not one strand out of place. His face had an artificial healthy glow provided by expertly applied cosmetics. I thought about the people whose job it was to tend to his hair and makeup and wondered what they had thought of their work. Did they imagine that this was the way he looked while he was alive? Did they think his natural appearance included shiny, soft hair and glowing skin? And how would his yellow-specked hazel eyes have appeared if he were to open them at that very moment and smile?

“I feel like he’s going to pop up any minute and say: ‘Just kidding!’” my mom said to the funeral director.

I became aware then that I had been standing on my toes, bent slightly forward over the coffin, rigidly studying him for quite some time. I sank back on my heels.

We were taken home after the wake because our mom didn’t think we should attend the funeral, but if anyone lacked the means to control her emotions, it was she.
I was both angry and piteous toward her for going alone. I felt too weak to resist, too weak for temper. I remember feeling helpless, it was a strong desire to stand aside and just let the pieces fall, their effortless migration somehow mesmerizing; events giving rise to still more events, gaining force and strength through their motion, shaping in each moment a new subset of possible outcomes. Bound as I was to that formula, the fate of my life in its cold calculation, I had not the momentum of will to catch up, to hold on. There was nothing at all to hold. All surfaces had become round, slick; nothing could allow capture or grip, only sad, hollow grasps.

Later that evening while my mom sat with Sophie, I walked over to my grandparents’ house where he died and stood outside. I remembered how Gram told Grandma that he was going to die if they didn’t help him. That house, tall and skinny, the temple of his death, stood as a testimony from that day forward, ominously affirming how utterly without help he remained until the very end. I saw people standing in the driveway, weeping. I saw the strong, wide back of my uncle and the buxom frame of a woman I didn’t know, her head darkly lowered, patient tears slowly seeping out of broad eyes. I witnessed them as if softly praying (hardly able to find a normal breath, the verdict so irreversible) for her to be comforted. He just let her weep. He did not offer false hope.

I felt the ground holding me up, as if the earth alone were capable of enduring, bravely and quietly, the unsoothable, constant hum of human grief. Suddenly I felt a great although contradictory desire to praise God. The matter of a body unliving will disintegrate into dust and soil, just not right away. Eventually it will join the surface of all creation, absorbing and upholding the byproducts of life, hope, the disappearance of hope, the fullness of endings, the absence of feeling. No despairing, just holding until it is time to be exposed and dispersed, fused with the basis for all sensation. What I know now and didn’t know then was that it was in my recognition of this unending cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth that I found God: A process, a funnel of energy, the outer lining of which is uncertainty and within which all life gets sucked and spun, broken apart, shaken out and unraveled across time.