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May 5, 2003
Everything that Rises Must Converge
One of my closest friends passed away at the end of January. Like many friendships that progress beyond shared interests, casual conversations and occasional emails, ours started off with little fanfare and no indication of what our relationship would be like years later. And right now, as I write this out, I still wonder about it. Craig was the kind of person that could be completely self-congratulatory and self-deprecating in the very same moment. He was well educated (Masters from Yale), successful in his difficult career, and still was genuinely bashful about himself. I never heard him use his education or many successes as a means to gain a foothold in any argument, even when those around him did.
Most of all, he was one of the only people who knew how to talk to me in the days and weeks following Ivan’s diagnosis. In the months since his death I’ve had some time to consider how and why we became so close, the circumstances of our friendship and why it was that he ended up being the person that had, above all others, guided me through this past year and a half on nothing more than long-worded emails and distant phone calls. The differences between us could have easily prevented us from becoming friends in the first place. We were of different genders, generations, sexual orientations. He had never had children or wanted any. We had grown up on opposite sides of the country. He was dying of cancer, and I was just a kid in comparison. Healthy and with kids of my own.
I wanted to write this and say that we became friends out of mutual needs – he facing cancer and me facing autism – but that isn’t true; we were friends before chance and dumb luck hit either of us with much force. I wanted to write that we both took pains to say the right things to each other, knew how and what to say and when to say it, like some personified Hallmark card, but that isn’t true either. Craig was often too bold, too opinionated and too argumentative for his own good. And if he were here, I’m certain he’d say the same of me. And so I’m at an unfamiliar spot; I’m not sure what to write.
But in the past months I’ve thought about it a lot, perhaps more than I’ve meant to. This entry is evidence of that; it’s entitled after one of my favorite short stories of the same name, by Flannery O’Connor. She wrote amazing stories of the South filled with characters who were often difficult, if not impossible, to like. A southern white woman herself, she captured the moldy frilliness of society balls and cotillions with dead-on accuracy and portrayed the heart of the South during the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s with a starkness that is both honest and evocative.
Alice Walker, another famous southern writer and also a favorite of mine, wrote an amazing essay about the intersection of O’Connor’s life and her own. It’s an essay about feminism, writing, race and class and the generational gaps between parents and children. But it’s also about something beyond all that, something that gets closer to the core of truth, I think. It’s the part of the essay that always catches me off guard, even though I know it’s coming. When Walker writes, “I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one,” I know she’s gotten it right.
I haven’t written about my family much, though it isn’t for a lack of trying. Usually I sit down, bang out an entry in a couple of hours, post it, and that’s that. Whenever I hit a snag in a topic, I just stop – I have plenty of things to talk about and I know how to fill the gaps. I know how to cover my tracks. I don’t have to write about anything I don’t want to, and I don’t. Intuitively I know, though, why I can’t write about some things. It’s painful, maybe. Or because writing about it would require a measure of self-reflection and honesty that I haven’t been ready to offer up to some faceless online crowd that can, at will, pick me apart for sport.
But when I read Walker’s essay, when I get to that part in her writing, I can’t help it, I think of my family and this diary and my life and Craig and my friend Tiffany and school and the fact that I leave so much out. And I think of Kim, the other SK writer, who writes with such clarity and conviction and honesty that it makes me feel disgraced that I can’t follow in kind. And I wonder why I substitute speaking up about the important things – war, literature, art and film, politics – for not speaking up about the more important things – my family, who I am and how I fit in this world, and what I really think at night when I pull up the covers and am alone with my thoughts.
In a way, too, it all ties in. My family and I live in this world of Conversations We Have, as opposed to, Conversations We Should Have, and I play just as big a role in it as they do. When Ivan was diagnosed they were distant and I should have known that they would be; it wasn’t a difficult thing to predict. But I watched them pull away and measured their silence in days, then weeks and then months. The aunt and uncle that live in Portland, the ones I had admired since I was a kid, and had felt a familiarity and closeness I hadn’t with any other relation, stopped calling. They called at Thanksgiving and Christmas that year, extending a half-invite for celebrations, saying that they wouldn’t be able to help watch the kids and they would understand that we probably wouldn’t want to go, it was so loud at their house…. Then they stopped inviting us to family gatherings all together and didn’t call for four months, right when we were in the thick of things, needing an ear, a hot meal, a night of sitting. It wasn’t until this year, this Easter, that the invitation was extended again, and though we accepted I know that it was a conditional invitation, not necessarily to be repeated and based only on Ivan and his continued development into a more normal-like child.
My mom goes months without calling, too, and then calls impulsively, guiltily, I think, calls several times in a few week span. She yammers on about her life, and then asks about the kids, always pausing a little too long when she asks about Ivan. When I tell her he’s doing better, she seems to breath a soft sigh of relief and then jibbers something about how she always knew he’d be fine. I want to scream at her, tell her that I know she’s as afraid as I am, but that John and I are the only ones forced to ante-up, and that it isn’t right for her to claim the unclaimable as though it was hers. My grandmother e-mails replies when I send her updates, but only then. Sometimes she sends money, unexpectedly. After Ivan was diagnosed a check for a thousand dollars landed in our mailbox with a three sentence note. Sometimes I hate myself for taking the money, even though we need it, and I know it’s the only way she can express grief or pain or sorrow. I think about the stock of great aunts and uncles I have who remember calling cards and know the right color and cut to wear to a funeral, the right flowers to send, but with all the misguided stoicism of their generation, don’t understand how to respond to any other situation with grace or love or compassion.
And I think of all the friends I’ve known who have said things that, in their hearts I’m sure, were their condolences, their attempts at reaching out, but that fell so far short of what any reasonable person would find comfort in. One friend, I remember, said, soon after Ivan was diagnoses, “I’m so glad that if it had to happen, it happened to you and John since you guys are such great parents.”
When Alice Walker visits the house she grew up in, in rural Georgia, she sees the decayed roof, the dilapidated walls, and the daffodils her mother grew that have overrun the kitchen. O’Connor’s house, in contrast and only a few miles away, is meticulously maintained, the small unpainted shack where black slaves had once lived, and then later, a black caretaker, still standing. Walker is angry at the discrepancies between her old house and O’Connor’s, both celebrated women writers of the south, both brilliant and both with critically acclaimed works, and one, by virtue of race and social position, whose memory and life was commemorated at a far greater degree than the other. And even though she fights it, for a moment, she hates O’Connor and hates the world that forces her to feel that hate. She knows she can’t blame O’Connor, knows that neither of them drew up the plans for racism and poverty and capitalism and slavery, but part of her still seethes, still reels from the differences between them, so carefully laid out. “What comes close to being unbearable,” she writes, “is that I know how damaging to my own psyche such injustice is.” It isn’t the injustice itself as much as it is her reaction to it.
When I read this, when I read it last quarter and when I read it now, I know what she feels. Which makes the title of the piece so poignant. Everything that rises must converge. Alice is indicting herself along with the rest of the world. Like I have to. If I’m going to do this, if I’m going to have friends like Craig, and deserve them, if I am going to force my family to understand Ivan and me and our family, then I have to do the hard thing and call them on it all, point blank, end of sentence. That it hurts is non-important; it has to be done. If I’m going to keep writing this diary, I have to be honest, more honest, than I’ve been before. Because if there is to be a convergence, then I have to raise myself up and pull everyone else up along with me.
About a month before Craig died, I wrote him a letter telling him what he had meant to me. We both knew he was dying, and I knew that I didn’t want him to go without these things stated between us. That I wanted him to know that I had meant every moment of superlative praise and every moment of exasperated truth. But there went unsaid everything that hangs between each close friendship, all the things that are only made true in their ephemeral existence by never being said. And after he died I worried that perhaps I hadn’t been a good enough friend to him, maybe Craig had been a better friend to me.
I might have gone on wondering forever, if it weren’t for the box that was delivered one Wednesday while I was at school. It was from an out-of-state attorney’s office, and when I opened it, I realized it was filled with folders and folders, CDs and diskettes. And on top was an envelope addressed also to me. Inside that envelope, on thick parchment paper adorned with a gilt letterhead, was a contingency plan of sorts, set up some months earlier. The folders and diskettes and CDs were Craig’s writing, all of it, and he had, in a sense, willed it all to me. While he granted the copyrights to his family, he gave me the artistic rights. Tucked in the envelope with the ivory attorney’s letter was one from Craig which simply stated that he wished certain elements to be retained in his work, but that he knew I would follow his wishes and still, “manage to make the pieces better.” Anyone can give and get money. But to be given another writer’s work…it’s everything.
That same night, while I dried the beaded bath water off his back and kissed the creases below his ears, Ivan looked at me, smiled, and said, “mama”, and touched his small finger to my nose. Mama. And maybe, sometime before that moment, I had actually believed that it wouldn’t matter if he never said it. And maybe I would have gone on believing it as best I could, filling the gap with metered phrases and pragmaticism if he had never said it. I’ve always felt sheepish bragging about the moment when Chloe said it, or Giselle, and maybe I’ve felt annoyed, too, when other mothers blathered on in self-induced fits of pride that I didn’t quite understand. But naming something makes it so, it calls it into being, and somehow, in my heart, I don’t think I ever truly believed Ivan knew I was his mother until I heard him say it.
That night, alone in my own bed, waiting for John to come home, I didn’t imagine the box of writing, or Ivan’s “mama”. Instead I wondered which was the greatest leap of faith. Was it, months before, tucking a lifetime of work into a box to be spirited away across the country? Or was it dusting off the pages of a baby book and in small, even handwriting, penning a date on a page that, until then, had remained blank? Or maybe, better still, it’s the small moments in that bed, thinking, however fleetingly, that the timing of these two occurrences wasn’t merely chance. And, still, perhaps it’s believing that my family is changeable, and so am I.
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