Terra Infirma Hardcover - 1985

A Beginning

My mother died in the Church Home Hospice in Baltimore, at the age of 54. Her last words were "I love you." The radio was playing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." The immediate cause was respiratory infection, a complication of prolonged medication for pain. My mother suffered cancer for seven years. At the end, a nurse stripped the neck brace, pressed her fingers against the carotid artery, and felt for the faintest sign of a pulse. The velcro made a sound like stitches ripping.

I remember the moment of her death, and in the moments that followed, a kind of wonder at myself, in my own blind efficiency. My father sat stunned as though this weren't something we had anticipated all along. I called my two sisters, and my two brothers, and told them to come downtown and see our mother's body. I called the funeral home, Sol Levinson Brothers. I remember looking them up in the yellow pages, which seemed odd. Shouldn't there be a card, or something, in a hospice? I had all these thoughts. All these practical, cold, abstracted thoughts. Because my mother was dead, and someone had to do something, and I was there to do it.

I felt very responsible for everything that happened. I felt responsible and guilty. I had needed to be there at the moment she died. I was calling the funeral home, and saying "My mother is dead" and saying "Her name is Miriam Kamenetz," and giving a date, an address and a time. All along my mother's body was lying on the bed in the dim lamplight. Her face was crumpled and had lost all its quality. It looked like a rubber mask tossed off on the pillow.

For the next week, I simply rode along on my feeling of mission. The funeral, and the seven days of mourning, coming together with my family, comforting one another, and through all of it, I saw that my eyes were open, and I was observing very carefully, like a son of a bitch, like a writer. I was not cold. I was feeling everything. But back there, way back, I was pivoting around, and seeing, and noting, and remembering.

I knew I had witnessed something extraordinary at the instant of her death. Her last gesture had moved right into me. It was staying with me all through the mourning, there in the place from which I am writing this down.

But I could not put it on paper then. It seemed a violation. I could see her whole life gathering around her last moment. I felt that I could hold its pattern in my hand. But then the fabric would dissolve and I had the gesture of lifting a wave out of water.

I thought I had to let her story go. But three dreams came in the months after she died. They came to disturb, but also to comfort. In the third, very elaborate vision, my mother appeared in a garden to give me a key to her story. I had to write about her then. Just as soon as I began, the dreams stopped.

All the same, I was afraid it would be too sentimental. For what story is more sentimental than the death of a boy's mother--even though Edgar Poe, for one, called it the most "poetical" of subjects? Poe also promised immortality to the author who wrote a simple volume, "My Heart Laid Bare." As though a naive writer could triumph over all the artifices of a master, if only he were sufficiently earnest. But Poe added puckishly, "The title must be true to its subject."

Here is such a volume. But I can be true to the subject only by straying from it. I have read a few books that have been more dutiful. They were all published by the vanity press. Like mine, they were haunted by the loss of a loved one. But their authors make no distinction between history and poetry, as Aristotle does. They tell every detail, in chronological order, as though the reader already acknowledged their significance. They do not see that, at best, history aggregates, only poetry unifies.

I wish to lay my heart bare. But my model is complex, the essay in its radical sense, as practiced by Michel de Montaigne. I admire him because he is so artful there is nothing he cannot say.

Here I must digress, to speak of Montaigne's digression. Only someone constantly aware of his subject could digress so freely. The revelation is always present, not as in the ordinary magic of suspense--but as a barely visible tracing, a pattern of avoidance.

Aggressive writing pursues its subject--a hunting metaphor. Digressive writing flees a painful absence--a haunting metaphor. For Montaigne the hollow induced skepticism, of which digression carved out a warning. For me, the haunting is literal: the dream that comes after death.

Montaigne's project is not always what it seems. If he titles a piece "On Coaches," his subject is not coaches. The title is more like a sign hung outside his construction--WRITING AT WORK. An aggressive reader chasing after the subject, coaches, is quickly outpaced. The coaches disappear at the first or second turn of phrase, and the more determinedly the reader pursues the supposed subject, the more exhausted he becomes, and the more empty the page feels. He has been abandoned by "coaches" and does not yet feel the writing as its own vehicle of transportation. If he lets himself be moved by the prose instead of pursuing the "coaches," then he begins to feel a profound absence of connections and is deeply in Montaigne's skepticism.

I cannot promise that my material is uplifting either. The subject here is death and grief. I am sorry for that, more sorry perhaps than any reader. If I had seen where it would lead me, I might have resisted more strongly. For I have discovered something, apart from the ordinary cynicism that "no one wants to read about death." The subject repulses thought.

Each time I approached the core of feeling around my mother's death, I found my thinking diverted. At first I accused myself of a lack of discipline, or a simple avoidance. I am now convinced, though, that this was at least a complex avoidance. My digression is language turning in grief. Turning away from its subject, to approach it again. This makes for a labyrinthine or spiraling pattern.

This book is part memoir, part biography of my mother, part autobiography. But neither my mother nor I are celebrities. We never committed great crimes. She was entirely a private person, and I am a poet in America, which is the opposite of fame. Yet the pattern of every life is instructive, and an ordinary death may be as tragic as Oedipus.

Every day others will reach the point my mother reached. They will be given terrible medical choices, cures that seem worse than the disease. Many will make courageous decisions as my mother did. I wish this story could be an inspiring one for them, about how defiance won the day, how the doctors were proven wrong, how a fighting spirit confounded science. Some popular books about death have this theme. My mother's story offers no hope. Her defiance did not win in the end.

Yet, if she had read the book of her life, she might have lived. If she had been able to digress, to step away from her own story, she might have seen herself as more than just a body in danger, when she had to decide whether to live or die. Her story, I have come to believe, is tragic. But I did not see this pattern immediately. At the beginning I had only the pain at her death, and three vivid dreams.