I’ve gone through many stages since the loss of my son Will almost six years ago: disbelief, self-pity, anger, numbness. None of that is particularly helpful and yet it seems inevitable to all who suffer severe loss. We are human, after all, and strange as it sometimes seems, I and many other people expect happiness. The record doesn’t make that seem likely or even possible and yet it is a bone-deep belief. I don’t think I’ve ever recognized the inevitability of disappointment, sadness and tragedy, even though I’ve written about it from the time my first fiction was published, in the early 1960s, to my latest, my memoir about Will, which I’m calling Will’s Things. It begins with a description of what he was carrying in his pockets when he died, lost in a blizzard in southern Colorado.
And yet, I must always question the righteousness of what I write. Digging up and examining buried pain is always questionable, and our culture urges us to “move on.” But I believe that there are events from which we really can’t move. They are too big, too important, too heavy. The challenge, for me and perhaps for many of you, is to find a way to protect the rays of light that we can always find even in the deepest blackness.
But that may be hard to do in the absence of faith.
Today, Ash Wednesday in the Christian tradition, has always been difficult for me and I will have to force myself to go to church tomorrow and accept the black smudge on my forehead. I have never believed in Original Sin—no one who has seen an infant can think that damnation is a present possibility. Fortunately this ancient idea seems to be disappearing from most modern rituals. We are no longer expected to repent of sin buried in humanity itself.
The traditional Christian Ash Wednesday service begins with a prayer “lamenting out sins and acknowledging our wretchedness” which sometimes seems to me a dramatization of my shortcomings. But I am aided here by a useful blindness and denial and the ability—which we all share—to forget, fudge, explain. And it is also useful that, traditionally, this is “a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful” are forgiven and received again. In this heedless time, when we as a country are again involved in a horrifying and senseless war, a season of “self-examination and repentance” is surely needed. We are all implicated in this country’s misdeeds and feeling powerless to do anything about them is no excuse.
Yet for women, it seems to me, repentance is sometimes a part of our assumption of responsibility for the people we love. Our repentance might more usefully be the repentance of the drinker we have tried to save, the abuser we have tried to excuse and mollify, we, the caretakers of the world. The ashes, too, are an unwelcome reminder of our mortality—the fact that we all face, at some point, whether we want to or not.
It seems fitting that the only truly Christian president we have known in this century, Jimmy Carter, should be laying down his life at this time. All our presidents, with one glaring exception, have paid lip service with attendance at church, public prayers and so on, but the bone-deep faith that shows itself most clearly in humility and public service is not what we have seen and perhaps not even what we want.
The little town of Plains, Georgia, is turning out to say goodbye to the peanut farmer who proved once again that knowledge of and closeness to the soil is the best ground for growing leadership. Perhaps we might be well-advised to repent for our failure to recognize what President Carter meant for all of us and what he was able to achieve in his one term in spite of determined opposition.
James Ozyvort Maland says
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that the initials of the ex-President are also those of the one celebrated on Ash Wednesday. More to the point of thinking Will is in good hands now—that thought, like the favorite songs of Tennyson, could be a doubtful condolence.