“A heart can be broken…
but it still keeps beatin’ just the same.” A quote from the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, illustrates clearly what our family lives with every day. Our hearts still keep beatin’ and we can’t imagine how or why, knowing Owen’s heart will not pump alongside ours, except in the ephemeral beat of his instant impact on our lives.
We hold tight to the young man that Owen was, and the growing man he was to become. We think of him as the funny, charming, generous kid of his youth. We remember when time took him to a place we couldn’t grasp in the same image of innocence in which we knew him. We remember when he gazed into the distance, looking for something he could no more describe to us, than we could conjure in our wildest dreams, our most dire nightmares. We watched him, we held him close, we let him go in the hope he would find his way, and that his way would align itself with ours.
Sons, brothers, godsons, friends, nephews, grandsons are lost. This is the way of the world, and we are powerless over the way. We can never find them again in the same way we knew them here, in this life. We know them in our memories. We know them in those conversations from which we only remember bits, sound bites, clips. If we go to that place where we really knew them, we’ll recall those times when beauty shone through, and we’ll smile, laugh, and sigh a sigh of relief, that they…our loved ones, will never again suffer loneliness.
I constantly find memories, stories, movies, I can barely stand to watch or hear. They are those freeze frames that remind me of the end…the end of Owen’s life. They remind me that I may never know what happened in those last moments, and I quake at the various scenarios – none less relenting than the others, none less painful. How could I have saved his life? I will never know, but I will always wonder.
Song for the night: How to Save a Life, The Fray (1. love; 11. remember)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BKxnJ5iyC-w
Saving a life…
In notebooks, in picture frames, on walls, in conversations, in memories, at gatherings, in our hearts.
Not the same, but we save what we can from the things we cannot save.
‘How to save a life,’ – yes, and how I love this song.
I heard it playing as I walked into a shop in Horsham last summer, and I found myself compelled to walk over and ask the assistants what it was. I bought the album (which is great) ten minutes later.
The song is mournful and disillusioned, although still I think that it hints at a different and less painful path which might perhaps have been taken. So despite its almost bleak elements of inevitability and regret, I think it does carry a faintly optimistic message forwards – suggesting that with the lesson of forbearance and self-awareness learned, there is still a kind of hope remaining for the future.
Following my discovery of this song last year, and for a month or two, I considered ‘How to Save a Life’ as a title for my book. I liked it exactly because it does have a more upbeat, and constructively redemptive feel than ‘The Price of Love,’ which I sometimes find too overpoweringly sentimental and negatively fatalistic. Eventually I was advised against, perhaps on the grounds that the original title was more transparently self-explanatory. Perhaps I’ll keep it for a chapter heading, nevertheless.
What this song title reminds me of now is that self-pity (whilst essential and compulsory) finally is too bounding a quality adequately to frame the learnings which come with this experience.
Because, more than anything, it’s optimism which I carry with me now. Faith in the strength of the human spirit, primarily in Jenny but later on and to a lesser degree in myself. I think you’re well on the way to the same kind of revelation, too – that the extreme rigours of this journey are exactly the reasons that it does lead to an invulnerable kind of strength.
Spirits up.
Wow, Fried Green Tomatoes is the movie I was watching the night before my father died. I guess the shock of what happened the next day completely wiped my memory of what that movie was about. I have also never been able to watch that movie again because I wish I had spent that time with my father in the hospital.
I think the hardest thing after a death is the realization of who really does not care about me. Those “close friends” who could have easily sent me an email during the holiday season asking how the fuck I was doing, but instead asked for things from me.
I hope I’m not repeating myself, I might have said this here before, but my husband’s uncle told me (a year after losing his son) how he grieved the loss of his son, how he grieved the 17 year old he lost (car accident), then he grieved the 12 year old he was, the 5 year-old, the toddler, all the different ages his son had been. This post reminded me of that.
Of course, I can’t mention this on my own blog because I have an unbelievable amount of lurkers. People who read and never comment. I don’t like making enemies so I keep that crap to myself. Until now. I feel more comfortable talking about it here. Funny.
WordPress is hosed or something, that last paragraph should be the third, and the third one should be the last.
Strange, I kept hitting “Submit comment” and it kept saying “Oops.”
WordPress was hosed tonight. They were doing a network upgrade, or some such…server maintenance, I believe. It took me three hours to post tonight’s piece. I thought I would lose my mind (again) because I couldn’t find the post I was writing when all went…blank. The error message said “wait 5 minutes” and so those 5 minutes came and went about, oh, 36 times, and then voila! – again with the French, but there it was, only a few things to edit.
Like your uncle (no matter in which paragraph he appeared), we lose Owen over and over, at his various ages. Each loss has its own unique poignancy, and devastation. All of us lived those times with our kids, so we lose them in each day we can recall. A constant torture.
Alas, we remember them in each day’s joy, as well. I’m thankful for the joy. There was a lot of it, and I’ll never forget Owen’s smile. I hope the same for your family members in your many losses – remember the smiles. I believe they are all smiling still. Maybe even more often, maybe even more brightly.
Good evening, Kitty.
You must have been trying to post at the same time I kept hitting “reload” because about a minute after I noticed my comment go through, that’s when I saw you had a new post.
But yeah, the last paragraph that appears in the comment was in regard to “so called friends” and not about the uncle.
Kitty’s ‘lurkers’ may really be the weirdos; but they may also be like me — Linda’s posts hit me like a ton of bricks the first time I was surfing and found it. I didn’t want all those horroble & beautiful memories foaming up at the top of my mind again – after 30 years; but they came any way. I had to stop reading and then go back occasionally to read another post one a day or so. Her pain and searching was too familiar, too strong for me to read much more. After about a week, and more than a few strong dreams; I placed her blog on my ‘read’ list.
I try to only post when something is particularly touching; or when I can offer some hope from the other side of this mountain she and her family are climbing & descending day after day. Maybe….they are just too overwhelmed to post. Or…they may just really be creeps! YA never really know. Love & light to you both for your losses; Talula ( a surviver of the dark through sheer persistence.)
Oh, no, I don’t mean creeps, I just mean people you might not see in my comments section.
It doesn’t bother me at all if people read me and don’t comment, I read a lot of blogs and often just don’t know what to say.
I can’t believe this is the song for tonight. This is the song I dedicated to Michael on his Facebook page. I did it as a reminder to those who were with him that last night. My husband often wonders how he could have changed the events of 10/28/07 if Michael had come home that evening instead of spending the night out. He would like to have been given the chance “to save a life”.