No Gorgeous Finales

by Daniel Asa Rose

JULY 19, 2011 TAGS: BOOKS, GRIEF ADD A COMMENT

“The death you see on the screen will not be the kind of death you have.” Judy Bachrach made a penetrating point last month in this space, arguing that Hollywood presents death in a prettified manner that is far different from the denouement we actually experience. “We get television episodes that mask finality, even while pretending to confront it, and films that gloss the ends of our lives with gold dust and perfume, giving us a finale as flimsy, fantastical, absurd, and gorgeous as their dewy-eyed stars.”

Grief

I concur. But if I may continue the discussion, let me suggest that it is in the nature of Hollywood to do exactly this. Hollywood’s special genius is to mirror our lives back to us with enough surface shine to enchant us with our own glamorized image. Hollywood knows we look to the screen specifically for this solace of gloss -- a cosmetic ennobling. It’s one of the many ways film is different from literature, where the subject of death is very much alive – in fact, is being presented with greater grim verisimilitude than ever before.

Perhaps it’s because the exigencies are very different, print vs. film, that we seem to go to literature for something so different. Generally speaking, reading is a private, slow-moving experience, internal, reflective, meditative – seeking not to gloss the heart but to inform it deeply.

Consider the recent spate of books addressing the final passage. Just this year there has been an unflinching flood of books from widows and widowers talking about the death of their spouses (A Widow's Story: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates and Say Her Name: A Novel, by Francisco Goldman), from siblings of the deceased (History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life, by Jill Bialosky) as well as from their offspring (Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, by Anne Sexton’s daughter, Linda Gray Sexton; The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, by Meghan O’Rourke).

“It doesn’t really surprise me,” comments Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review. “Memoir remains our period’s dominant genre, and death has always been the biggest literary theme. Put them together and there you have it.”

Inevitable or not, the weight of these new books can be devastating. Of the last category listed above, books by offspring of the deceased, a compellingly merciless book by the poet Barbara Blatner stands out: The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother’s Death.   In poems with such titles as “Grotesque,” “Dehydration,” and “Mom Agonistes,” Blatner supplies a level of intimacy we never asked for, yet yielding unexpected rewards of language and feeling:

… you lie
in bed, flat and
hairless, little more
than skin-wrapped bone,
face carved by
hollows, lips palest
pottery brown, almost
cured of moisture …   [p 40]

… you whimper
and crack
your lips,
sneer them back
from horsey teeth …”   [p 83]

Elsewhere she sears us with even more unforgettable visuals: her mother’s “yellowing weed of hair” [p 18], “pink hole” of a mouth [p 51], and “raw vermillion throat.” [p 51] Nothing, not even the most private of bodily functions, is off limits:

it all comes
down,
as if everything
you’ve ever eaten
turns liquid,
and overwhelming,
gushes through
your body
which like a broken
hydrant
lets go
streams of shit
over the bedclothes …
and still the hot
muck pours
out of you. [pp 26-27]

Equally unsqueamish is the poet’s refusal to sentimentalize the emotional half of the ledger:

you were too
uptight too
emotionally
arthritic
to hug me,
too weak
for the strenuous
sweetness
of “I love you,”
too delicate
for the fat
of a compliment,
taken or given.   [p 57]

Honesty bids Blatner be just as forthcoming about her own emotions as the daughter of this complicated dying mother. Not once but twice she admits to murderous thoughts. “I want to kill you, mom,” [p 21] she admits early on, and elaborates 30 pages later:

I could simply
kill you now,
get it over with,
who would
know the difference?
I could easily
kick you in, stove you
under, for all those times,
mean on gin,
you rammed words
into my belly. [p 52]

Of course, it’s one thing to write about a parent’s death, entirely another to address a child’s. Literature has never shied away from this most deadly of subjects -- David’s lament for his son Absalom is one of the most moving passages in the Bible – but to my knowledge, there has never before been anything like the rigorously frank manner in which today’s writers are speaking of these most awful deaths. It’s specific. It’s terrifying. It’s heartbreaking. Precisely because they do not give us “gorgeous finales.”

Two recent publications will illustrate.   The June 13/20 issue of The New Yorker includes a piece called “The Aquarium” in which Alexsandar Hemon admits to less-than-noble feelings at the time of his infant daughter’s demise. “Before we followed Isabel into the pre-op, I put the cannoli in the fridge that was in her room. The selfish lucidity of that act produced an immediate feeling of guilt.” Too, there is a level of gritty detail (“Undergoing yet another emergency scan, face upward in the MRI tunnel, she nearly choked, the vomit bubbling out of her mouth”) as well as an emotional candor (“Teri is in the corner weeping ceaselessly and quietly, the terror on her face literally unspeakable ... as I wail, ‘My baby! My baby! My baby!’) that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era of The New Yorker’s history. Nor would an earlier generation of this genteel publication have dared the degree of nihilism that closes the piece:

“One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling – that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place, as there was no place better for her than at home with her family. Without Isabel, Teri and I were left with oceans of love we could no longer dispense; we found ourselves with an excess of time that we used to devote to her; we had to live in a void that could be filled only by Isabel. Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.”

Absence as an organ for secreting sorrow – it doesn’t get much unhappier than that. But Ann Hood takes us even deeper in a recent article she wrote for salon.com titled “What I never told anyone about her death,” an act of bravery made even braver by the onslaught of negative comments she surely knew she was going to receive. Hood was taken to task by readers for wallowing in her daughter’s death, for milking it, for not “getting over it,” in our culture’s careless phrase – basically, for not giving it a Hollywood gloss. Heroically, Hood somehow found the strength to gouge these final indelible four paragraphs from her core:

Lorne and I were allowed back in the room. Grace lay on that gurney. I looked at her, my daughter. I knew I should hold her. I knew I should take her into my arms. But I couldn't. In the nine years since Grace died, with all the pages and pages I have written about losing her, I have never written these words.

My beautiful girl with her long legs and pale hair was now rigid, mottled, her tongue pushed forward, her hair pink with blood. This was death. It was ugly. Something acrid filled the air, a smell like a chemistry lab. This too was death. I tasted it for days, that smell. Her blue eyes were no longer blue. The dilated pupils took all of the blue away.

Nurses kept asking us questions. Did we want this? Did we want that? But all I wanted was to leave that room, that hospital. All I wanted was to run as fast as I could. So I did. I left that room where my daughter lay dead, and I screamed so loud that my voice remained hoarse for a long time.

What kind of mother leaves their child like that? I have wondered this. But now I know: Seeing death like that, seeing what it looked like and smelled like, how it robbed Grace, how it robbed me, I knew that this was final. Grace was really dead. I never had that feeling some people describe of waking up and forgetting the person has died. I walked out of that hospital into a warm spring night, my arms empty, and I knew: Grace was dead. I fell to my knees from the weight of what I knew. Even now, I am barely able to stand.

Can you bear it? We as readers are barely able to stand, either. Fortunately, it is not literature’s timeless function to get us to stand. It is to wrench us inward, make us face our most deeply buried energies, and at times, bring us to our knees in grief and empathy.

Daniel Asa Rose writes frequently for Obit. His most recent book is Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant … and Save His Life.

illustration by James O'Brien