The son I'll never have is crossing the lawn. He is lying on an imaginary bed, the coverlet pulled up over his knees -- knees I don't dare describe. I recoil from imagining him as meat and bone, as a mind and hands stroking the fur of his pet rabbit.
Welcome dear readers,
There's something about this time of year in New England, the darkening days of October and the plunge into the chill of November, that brings out melancholy.
The thinning of the veils, some say, is the time when the boundary between the physical living world and the spiritual world almost dissolves.
Even if we don't believe in a spiritual world, the world around us echoes the passing of time. The fiery oranges and reds of the sugar maple hold the winter's bare branches.
It's a time when we find ourselves thinking about the ghosts of life -- once vibrant relationships and passions that have gone dormant, missed opportunities, the things said and done that still haunt us.
We may find ourselves grieving what we never had, what we've never experienced. A marriage, a certain level of success, a pain-free body, a child, the presence of a father at Saturday games, a world in which there is no war.
And for those griefs, we are generally told the following: "Don't dwell in that sadness. Think of what you do have. Be grateful."
That is sound advice. And sometimes we can do that.
But on days when sorrow feels closer to us, it is insufficient. That advice does not help us to integrate our past, our choices, and the things we could and could not control.
Instead, let us welcome our ghosts. Play with them. What would it be like to have been a lawyer in the big city? or to have twins? or to have a neurotypical brain? or to have had a grandmother who baked cookies every afternoon?
Mark Wunderlich does that in the poem, where he imagines the son he'll never have. And in his imagining, he realizes what can never be known. What is it to have someone made by your body, but whose mind remains just out of reach?
Our ghost grieving is bound up in our desires. We grieve what we have conscribed -- we are haunted by our own limitations. When we welcome our ghosts and imagine them -- playfully, amusingly, lovingly, we become aware of what we need to give ourselves. And we become aware that those ghost griefs, manifested in the real physical world, would also be imperfect and unpredictable.
Emily