Eulogy for My Son (who is Still Living)

My son asked me to write a paper for a class. No, not like cheating. The assignment in his college Psychology class was to get 2-3 friends and family members to write the students eulogy. As if he had just died. I agreed and then conveniently dodged the assignment. Who was this teacher to ask me even to imagine the possibility of my only child (who is waiting on the birth of his first child) extinguished like a candle flame? I wanted to slap her. I still want to.

But it wasn't for her that I wrote it.

Eulogy for Dathen

From the second he took that first squalling breath in 1983, I have lived in terror of this moment. Death pushed him on the swing set and built sand castles beside ours. Parents understand that terror. If Dathen had lived a little longer, he would have inherited that same shadow of fear. The invisible scythe like the sword of Damacles spinning over his daughter's cradle like a Winnie the Pooh mobile.

Don't look up, Darling. It's always there.

Grief takes us by surprise. Even though we hold our breath and speak joy in whispers lest the dybbuks hear us; lest a jealous god is in earshot. We will be punished for every joy.

Knowing Dathen was such joy. Being his mother was a delight without equal, though not without difficulties. He was wholly himself and yet also the echo of my best self. Every trait I admire in myself or aspire to-- creativity, compassion, hunger for justice, wit and intellect-- was mirrored in him and magnified.

I could tell stories all day about the brilliant, affable child he was. He loved those stories. He would say tell me about... your pregnancy, my birth or the vagina tennis shoes or the suitcase that made money or how I pretended to be colorblind in kindergarten or how I named the turtle Antibula or psychically cheated at board games and miniature golf. Remember when we... Remember when you... Remember when I... We were both in love with remember.

What is most shocking about a world without Dathen in it, is this: I have nothing left but Remember.

I will not tell the stories I mentioned. It is too painful to imagine him not being here to hear them, to laugh along or correct or question me. They are mine now. Sealed in imperfect amber. A charm on a bracelet of a grief that can never be assuaged. No doubt

Though no one else here in this huge room filled with friends and colleagues, saw him as I did: the baby. The Little Prince. My Baby Krishna.

there is a poem by Bill Knott

The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

I look out into a sea of faces and I only know some of you. I recognize childhood friends, "the guys", family some by choice, some by blood. So many I don't know. You each have your own stories. Your own Dathen locked in the amber of your heart. So many people are here because they cared for him; because he was beloved and admired. He was hopelessly likable. I liked him very much.

I could tell you what he had accomplished and was still accomplishing in his young life. He was a brilliant writer, a passionate thinker, a tireless activist. I was his greatest fan. We could list his accolades or mourn all that he had left to do. All that he might have done. Some of you will do that and my starving heart will consume every syllable of whatever adventure you choose to share with me now or later, but I will not make that list for you. No list could contain what Dathen was to me.

I wanted to write a funereal poem of grief and love that he have could read before he died. I wanted to give him the wicked joy of a Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn funeral. Hide in the alcove, my angels, and hear the tears that even your enemies weep when they hear you are dead.

I wanted to but I couldn't. I wrote enough of them when he was a baby. Poems about how his own ghost haunted me, threatening to snatch him from me, from life. But I outgrew that fear. I came to believe he would live forever. Or at least in the way that children live forever which is to say, longer than their parents.

When he was first snatched away from me, it was life not death who snatched him. Actually it was Cassie. I resented it much less than Freud had threatened. I reveled in that parting. As if my dearest thought had grown legs and walked out in the world to seek adventures. In so many ways, that is exactly what had happened.

He was my magnus opus. He was my baby. He was my friend. I cannot write the grief now that I wished him to see. I cannot show now how grief has torn the skin from my flesh, ripped with broken teeth. I cannot write you the damage it has left. How I am only meat and howling.

I would tell him. I would tell you if I could. Later. Later there will be another memorial. I will read the poem grief has written in my bones on that day. No one will be able to understand it through my sobbing. When loss is a dull ache I wear like a sweater and not this fishhook in my heart and eye, I will publish the poem. Strangers will weep with me.

Instead I offer you the pale substitute of another's poem, so that we may weep with that stranger.

W. H. Auden, not I, wrote:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.