Using The Sorrow
And now I am home, back at the ranch, a place that has escaped desecration, to use Wendell Berry’s term, a place so sacred that it is possible now and then to feel separate and insulated from the tumult beyond.
But not entirely, and not for very long.
On our last night in Oxford, I succumbed to a great sadness. Partly it was the matter of saying goodbye–especially to that little baby girl just beginning life, our funny and challenging grandson, and our beautiful daughter, who I wish just once would lean back and laugh joyfully—but these were forty tense and complicated days. Their neighborhood became familiar to us, the walk in morning and moonlight between their house and our rental flat, the coffee place, the bookshop, the path along the river. New duties crystallized into routines both exhausting and somehow comforting. We felt useful and connected, and fortunate to be there. But now the distance loomed, an ocean and a continent, and I felt the anticipatory grief of separation.
Of course, it was compounded by awareness of the horror of what is happening to our country, the nightmare in which we are mired.
And so, although I am committed to being positive and constructive, standing tall, and fighting back, I confess that I fell deeply into sadness, and I sat there for a long while.
Now I am home.
Yesterday I made it worse. I found a letter I had written to my friend Cyd in November of 1975, when I was 24 years old. It was part of a box of letters that Cyd returned to me years ago, when we had the silly notion that our voluminous correspondence might have significance someday, yielding good stories and revealing something about the issues of the era, but in truth, the letters are mostly personal and often cringeworthy, and they are destined for the dumpster. But for no particular reason, I pulled one out, intrigued by its tissue-thin pages of single-spaced typing (on an old-fashioned typewriter, of course) and I was mortified to read about the pathetic jobs I took, the unlikely academic programs I was pondering, the Syracuse slumlord, the abusive boyfriend, the general misery and desperation of my young life. And then came the worst of it, which I will transcribe here in part:
“I almost went down to the Island this weekend to visit my family. My father has changed his attitude toward me to one of cold, thinly masqueraded disapproval and hostility. The very tone of his voice when he speaks to me is different, stilted….My mother sent me a letter last week telling me that my father has lost the feelings he once had towards me, that I have been one of his great disappointments…She closed the letter with ‘I’m sorry things turned out the way they did; I never wanted it to be this way’ or something like that, and I get this sick, sad feeling inside, for all of them, for all those years, and for myself as well, because I know I bear the scars of it to this day…”
To this day? I had written that in 1975. Now, fifty years later, the gold-sealed cracks in my kintsugi heart came undone as I read, and they bled like brand new cuts. It took me by surprise, how much these words still hurt. My beloved father did not live to see that I put my life together. I wept.
In what has clearly been a well-honed mode of coping, I shared this anecdote with my Besties, not in a letter, but a quickly dispatched text. Their responses were wise and kind and loving. “The victory is who you are,” wrote Vickie. “I say burn all those letters. You are forgiven a hundred times over. You were just a girl doing the best you could do…”
It’s amazing, though, how tenaciously an ancient stone of sadness can remain lodged inside. You never know when it is going to erupt and bleed.
“Oh. You again?”
“Yes. I’m still here,” says the sorrow. “Never left. I am part of you. Maybe even why you’re you.”
“The stone agitated enough to make you a wonderful writer, teacher, and friend,” Vickie added in response to this. “Watch what happens to glass or stone before it becomes art.”
It was a lovely and reassuring thing to say, and it led to me to thinking about the sorrows we all carry and how they shape our being.
“We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays,” Salman Rushdie has written, and that feels very true. We may not always know exactly how these calamities and sorrows define us, and we may not consciously know how deeply we carry them, but surely, they help form how we interact with the world forevermore. Their legacy may be bitterness or compassion, remorse or fervent motivation, insecurity or ignition. Until the words in my old letter made me cry, I had not realized at what a cellular level I still contain the pain of my history.
And yet, it is from such sorrow that my identity was born, and perhaps I may evolve further still. These words from Mary A. Osborne (in Parabola Magazine) make sense to me: “If you are grieving now, if you have lost someone, or if your tears are for the ones crouched in the rubble of war, a part of you has died and something true and beautiful lies within you, waiting, begging, to be born.”
I am projecting now beyond personal to the sorrow many of us are feeling as our nation and our values are under attack. I am thinking of the power in the sorrow, wondering if there is not some kind of alchemy to convert it into an external force, to turn it into action. “Remember what you love,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.”
It always is. But I want to use it. I want to focus on the love inside the pain…and use it.
Mary Oliver dreamed a poem along these lines:
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Armed with my sorrow, I will fight. In honor of the ones who loved me, whom I did not always sufficiently love back, I will try to channel my pain and my power for good. We can certainly tend to community, water seeds of kindness and learning, look out for one another. On a bigger scale, I am only one person, but there are millions of us. Maybe those phone calls will add up, and those voices grow in volume. With a million small deeds may come monumental change.
“My actions are my weapons,” writes Brian Colker. “I have my voice, which I can use in person, with a phone, or with my fingers typing. Right now we need an artillery barrage of action –we need to be fighting non-stop.”
And we can do this.
So I’m home, and I’ve talked myself out of inertia. My love for what I love is stronger than my pain. I will put my calamities and sorrow to use. They are part of me. They are why I’m me.