Writing
Clay's Death
I'm not sure I will ever fully get over the loss of Craig (my younger brother) and Clay. Craig was always very strong and healthy, and suddenly last summer he had leukemia. The kind he got was called Acute Lymphoblastic leukemia, which a bone marrow transplant often cures. The doctors tried the transplant in October (I was the donor) but in the end he just didn't survive it.
It is still something that I can't believe happened. I can't believe that he is still not here and that I can't go visit him.
Clay was born on his due date in August of last year, and no one, doctors, nurse-midwives or us had any reason to believe anything would be wrong with him. The labor went almost perfectly, with no sign of any distress, yet when Clay came out he could not breathe properly. I'll never forget the look on his face when he was born (I caught him), looking up a me while struggling to breathe. His look had a sense of pleading for me to save him, but also also a sense of accusation that I had made him leave the womb and caused this to happen.
Fortunately we were in a birthing room at a major hospital, and they whisked him to intensive care and put him on a ventilator. A few hours later, they moved him to Egleston Children's hopital where he was put on ECMO, a drastic procedure which essentially substitutes a machine for the baby's lungs.
Oddly, Clay's heart and lungs were themselves fine. But he had lots of lymph fluid in his lungs and chest which made it almost impossible for him to breathe normally. The doctors thought that there were holes in his lymph vessels, which were responsible for his problem, and they hoped that with time those vessels might grow together and heal up.
What followed was weeks of an emotional roller coaster in which Clay would show great improvement one day and be much worse the next.
He came off ECMO after 8 days; at one point he even came off the ventilator for a day.
Anyway, he lived for two and a half months, and even though he was tied down with all kinds of tubes and wires, he was conscious, alert, and intelligent, and was able to respond to us and his nurses in an almost normal way, given the circumstances. We even got to hold him and rock him, tubes wires and all, on several occasions.
At the end, though, he became extremely sick. His kidneys, liver, and other organs began to shut down. The doctors had to give him drugs to paralyze him just to keep him alive. We decided, together with the doctors, that it was time to take him off life support and let him die. At this point, Clay was in a private room, and some close family friends, Clay's primary nurses, and his doctors joined us in saying goodbye to him. We all took turns holding him and crying (even the doctors showed genuine emotion), and then I held Clay while the ventilator was turned off. He died very peacefully and quickly.
The doctors were never able to identify what Clay's problem was. The autopsy showed that his heart, lungs and lymph system were themselves fine when he was born. What killed him in the end was a CMV (cytomeglovirus) infection, but he was tested for CMV three times when he was first admitted to Egleston and all three tests came back negative. Yet nothing else really can explain why he couldn't breathe at birth.
The odd thing about this experience is that as terrible as it seemed at the time, I really feel as if experiencing and interacting with Clay enriched my life, and this feeling seems to be getting stronger and stronger as time pushes me farther away from the event of his dying. Maybe in the end I will remember his living far more than his dying.
The background of this period of my life seems to be speckled with other deaths as well. One of my best friends from college was lost at sea last September along with three of his brothers. My grandmother died in early January, and last weekend, the two year old son of someone I have worked with for a long time died (like Clay, he was never healthy). I worry about the stress of all this on me and my family.
Kip's Funeral
Damn funerals. Damn ceremonies. Damn the preacher or whatever he was. He did not feel anything—he only wanted to get across his message about the wonderfulness of God to all the sad people at the funeral. He sounded like a commercial for some big company.
Damn. How can people see life in such an all-or-nothing way, see God as some sort of being, call him wise, and then pass off death by saying he has a plan or that he dearly loves the Ayers? How can he talk about "coming from dust" and "going to dust" and praise his God at the same time. I think his God is as big a fool as he is. Why did it seem like the preacher was trying to torture us with all his calls to "Jesus Christ" and the wisdom of his God? Why especially torture that family so?
And why must those four—Mr. and Mrs. Ayers and that sister and that brother, all trying so hard to be brave and not cry before the people—why must they listen to well-wishers immediately after in that building there? And why did those people take all those pictures of the casket and flowers immediately after? And why did, even before, those two men start folding up the chairs as soon as the ceremony ended? Damn; at least I understood those people who stood around looking shocked a while, after most had started talking or left to wish well to the family.
But can't people see that death is no time to talk about God. I want to damn God if he had anything to do with it—or any knowledge like what that preacher said.
No, I can't look at life their way or death their damn way. I could never be pagan enough to think of God as some kind of being—or even qualities.
No, just understand life—that life is not an all or nothing thing—that time is a mental non-entity—that being alive has nothing to do with length or time. It is insane to look at life in such an objective fashion—life is subjective; it has always been subjective; it is made up of moments—really feelings expressed into objects and occurances, thoughts and emotions--and these feelings and the moments they translate into, have no time. What was that saying? —"Eternity is the opposite of time."
From Journal, August 6, 1974
In the Ozarks
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[1981]
When I look at these mists that separate trees near from trees far, I realize how much in my life are separated the things up close from the things afar. Though my heart holds steady to the things far away and my mind, like a ship guided by an unknown captain, follows closely after—the tread tread tread of my feet bring me forever back to nearness. The eyes see far, as also they see near, but feet must be always nearby, stomping at the here and now.
So we come back to the old reality, that life is now; it is what happens right about our faces. What we see far off—that we can never have. For even when the hereness of our feet manage along to the far away land we once saw—it is a changed land, once again the old familiar here and now.
And when I look behind me, at the nearness of this green hill as it suddenly rises from where I stand, how I am struck by its closeness, like a clairvoyance. It almost leaps at me. Reality wanders afoot, across the short, living space.
And the stars—there are no stars tonight, as dusk disappears—but last night, stars, vivid and near at hand. For on a dark night, when one is removed from the rampage of the city, distance disappears. The sky peels back, like an orange. The stars shoot down upon us, close, close, we can almost touch them, they are so near.
So the farthest away things, stars, become here and now in our faces.
Leaves
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She took the kids to Briarwood park hoping she wouldn't meet anyone she knew. She needed to be alone—and think. In summer she had brought the children here to swim, so she knew there was a small playground with monkey-bars and swings near the woods. It was a park frequented mostly by immigrant families.
No one was around. She sat on the railroad tie while her kids climbed and slid. It was early November, a warm sunny day. The trees were yielding halfheartedly to the short days and coming winter; they still clung to a lot of green. Yet the ground was bathed in brown withered leaves.
Her heart felt like the leaves. Absent-mindedly she scooped some up and crushed them into brown flakes, almost powdery. She watched the breeze waft them away. It seemed like her heart was disintegrating.
Despite the threat of winter, the sun was bright and cheerful, the sky a mystic blue. Her children jumped and laughed behind her. She peered into the shadows of the woods and wished she could lose herself. She wished she could disintegrate into the soil, into the loam under the layer of fallen leaves, while the trees grew silently above her.
Drop of Summer
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Tonight the wolf moon stares across the night and howls its low & mournful, mid-winter howl. Darkness, and winter still, and a moon-howl of cold still on its way.
But the afternoon!
The slow, unwinter-like hours of sun-flakes wafting down. The pregnant, lazy warmness. As if a day of summer had dripped into January.
The word for today was languid.
Languid warmth that drifts slow and summerlike on the air.
Birds that chirp soft and lazy and languid as they wing in lazy arc across the warm-rimmed trees.
Languid, easy folds of her hair wrinkled on the grass. Sly invitation of her eyes. Warm lips as you bend over her, kissing her long and languidly in the afternoon air.
Not for me!
Not me, chained in my cubicle. Unfree face and hands pressed shocked against the inside window, looking out.
Looking at the languid day.
Unbearable
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Another beautiful day, almost unbearable to have to be inside. But I escaped at lunch and strode down the road a mile, and back. So luxurious to be walking on a day like this.
One walks, and cars, buildings, sidewalks disappear. No longer exist. Just day, and air, and languid summer, and me. Trees waking up, warmth stirring around in the breeze. And, distinctly, the faint scent of farmland.
Then driving home the moon glowing low in the east looked like something painted on the sky. I could see the brush strokes that fastened it timelessly against the dying blueness, even a thin drab cloud someone had dabbed across the moon-face. Impressionistic. Painterly even.
It seemed so motionless, like something severed from time.
Man from Botan
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[late 1970s]
UFO's and aliens, it would seem, have got popular. Especially saucers that come leaping down to pre-appointed spots, removing the small band of faithful off to the appointed stars.
This alien visitors business has been all through the movies, of course, from Close Encounters down to Alien itself. A week doesn't go by but some friend of mine (usually an intellectual I thought quite “safe”) suddenly drops a hint that, oh yes, he too is a “believer”.
Or I discover grown girls (can't call them women) up in strange states like Illinois who eschew sexual relationships with men, saving themselves instead for their future alien abductors who, in a detail apparently so much more sexual than any man could possibly hope to match, look an awful lot like amphibians or big-toed reptiles.
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