Read Online Alligator Candy by David Kushner - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: David Kushner
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life after death,â she wrote. âI only believe we give a person immortality and do so by remembering, thinking about, bringing to mind, touching, smelling, sensing in our heads all the details about the dead one we love. Maybe our concern for our mortality made us discover how to capture an image in a photograph. The special pain of looking hard and long at the picture. I have tapes of Jon. Iâm afraid to listen to them. Why? Why not? What can be more painful, the cloudlike transparent memory of his voice and image, or the absolute almost solid image of his recorded voice, like a photograph.â
And yet, she realized, her pain was changing, internalizing in ways she was trying to understand. âI havenât cried for Jon for a while,â she wrote. âPain without tears (like I used to have). Maybe itâs because the grief has taken root. While rooting, the aura of new grief bubbles and rises almost constantly to the surface. But itâs deep and rooted and solidly planted and the motions and responses are firm and rooted and always a part of our very soul. Never will I cease to love this Jon, or stop longing for him. We must remember him, talk about him, bring his image and sounds to our consciousness.â
While we were now all back in our routinesâme at school, Andy at school and playing in his band, my dad at the university, my mom teaching Lamazeâwe were each still in our own private orbit. But it was my mother, once again, who took the lead, just as she had been the one to open the door to Jonâs room again. She wanted to reach out, to talk with someone else who could understand and share her pain. âBring me a mother,â she told my dad one day.
The president of the university had lost a child as well, and his wife agreed to meet with my mother. Though the woman had lost her child to illness, there was a comfort between them, a motherly understanding of what it felt like to bear a child and lose the child too young. It felt like such a taboo at the time to talk about death so openly, and yet it provided so much solace. They resolved to bring in other parents who had lost children too.
At the time in the midseventies, the field of death and dying, which echoed the name of Elizabeth Kübler-Rossâs pioneering 1969 book, was still new. The movement challenged what one practitioner called our âdeath-denying cultureâ by probing and plumbing the universal question: how to cope with the end of life, both our own and others. But for my mother, the death and dying movement seemed like a natural extension of the social action she and my father had taken part in over their lives. The denial of death had created a kind of mass oppression, a culture of silence that left mourners feeling alienated and ill-equipped. Grievers were supposed to buck up, be âstrong,â not cry in public, or carry on about their suffering beyond an acceptable period of time. By exploring the experience of loss, the death and dying movement was giving voice to the voiceless.
Once again, a personal experienceâJonâs deathâhad drawn my parents into social action, just as my mother sought Lamaze before Andyâs birth and my father sang union songs as a young activist in the Bronx. They had come to D&D, as they nicknamed it, to help them survive the seemingly unsurvivable, and part of helping themselves was to establish this community for others.
After leading informal support groups, my parents started one of the countryâs first chapters of Compassionate Friends, a support group that had begun in England for parentsâ whoâd lost children. It felt radical at the timeâgathering others like themselves to share their losses, their strugglesâas radical as fighting to let fathers in the delivery room or staging sit-ins at lunch counters during the civil rights era. My father, though he had been suffering largely in silence, followed my
And yet, she realized, her pain was changing, internalizing in ways she was trying to understand. âI havenât cried for Jon for a while,â she wrote. âPain without tears (like I used to have). Maybe itâs because the grief has taken root. While rooting, the aura of new grief bubbles and rises almost constantly to the surface. But itâs deep and rooted and solidly planted and the motions and responses are firm and rooted and always a part of our very soul. Never will I cease to love this Jon, or stop longing for him. We must remember him, talk about him, bring his image and sounds to our consciousness.â
While we were now all back in our routinesâme at school, Andy at school and playing in his band, my dad at the university, my mom teaching Lamazeâwe were each still in our own private orbit. But it was my mother, once again, who took the lead, just as she had been the one to open the door to Jonâs room again. She wanted to reach out, to talk with someone else who could understand and share her pain. âBring me a mother,â she told my dad one day.
The president of the university had lost a child as well, and his wife agreed to meet with my mother. Though the woman had lost her child to illness, there was a comfort between them, a motherly understanding of what it felt like to bear a child and lose the child too young. It felt like such a taboo at the time to talk about death so openly, and yet it provided so much solace. They resolved to bring in other parents who had lost children too.
At the time in the midseventies, the field of death and dying, which echoed the name of Elizabeth Kübler-Rossâs pioneering 1969 book, was still new. The movement challenged what one practitioner called our âdeath-denying cultureâ by probing and plumbing the universal question: how to cope with the end of life, both our own and others. But for my mother, the death and dying movement seemed like a natural extension of the social action she and my father had taken part in over their lives. The denial of death had created a kind of mass oppression, a culture of silence that left mourners feeling alienated and ill-equipped. Grievers were supposed to buck up, be âstrong,â not cry in public, or carry on about their suffering beyond an acceptable period of time. By exploring the experience of loss, the death and dying movement was giving voice to the voiceless.
Once again, a personal experienceâJonâs deathâhad drawn my parents into social action, just as my mother sought Lamaze before Andyâs birth and my father sang union songs as a young activist in the Bronx. They had come to D&D, as they nicknamed it, to help them survive the seemingly unsurvivable, and part of helping themselves was to establish this community for others.
After leading informal support groups, my parents started one of the countryâs first chapters of Compassionate Friends, a support group that had begun in England for parentsâ whoâd lost children. It felt radical at the timeâgathering others like themselves to share their losses, their strugglesâas radical as fighting to let fathers in the delivery room or staging sit-ins at lunch counters during the civil rights era. My father, though he had been suffering largely in silence, followed my
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