UN

by Jane Edberg

Reach into your sorrow, take hold of grief and dance.

After packing up my dead son’s room, I sped out of town, racing past agricultural fields onto the highway. The moon, as full as the day he died, wobbled my internal orbit, followed me through the valley, over hills, as I wove through mountains to hurry home. In that lunar spotlight, in a warp trance, the road flew under me; a drive that usually took three hours took two. I pulled into the driveway to find the moon perched on the roof of our house.

As I walked past the garage, I heard my husband grinding metal. When not at work, he spent hours as a builder-maker-inventor, but this time, he was cutting into loss. My teenage daughter was hidden away in her room, the TV blaring.

I unloaded bags and boxes into the house and peeled my clothes to the bedroom floor. A shower required too much energy, and I didn’t want to get wet, so I put on a loose skirt and T-shirt. I went back to the car for my son’s red blanket. With breath held, my stomach dropped as I lifted the limp fabric into my arms.

The moon retreated to the west, bouncing from house to house, as I lumbered towards the front door. Halfway along the sidewalk, I stepped from path to lawn to get a closer look at a stand of five-foot-tall stalks of weathered fava beans the color of straw. What dies in winter sometimes returns in spring, but I could not imagine a new life. I cradled his blanket and knelt to the ground beside pungent decomposed roots, felt a chill seep in, listened to the cracking of tubular bones.

Blanket to belly, I drew in a long breath and crouched between frail branches. My skirt dampened from wet earth as I sank in to hold hands with brittle leaves. Sunk my teeth into a fibrous stem, marrowless and empty. I felt as hollow as those stalks.

I hoisted the husk of my body up and trudged to the front door, blanket padded against my chest. Once inside, I slumped the blanket over the back of a chair, pressed my palms into the weave. I wanted to climb in.

One minute gravity sucked me down, the next minute gravity let go.

“No! No no no, nooooo, no no.”

My husband found me circling the floor on all fours, moaning like an trapped animal, gagging on thick snot, straining to inhale. He placed his hand on my shoulder.

“You have got to stop.”

But my body was not my own. He staggered behind me, rubbed circles on my back.

“Please stop.”

“She can’t stop.” My daughter sobbed.

Hours passed. I folded to the floor and the surges slowed to a numb calm.

“What am I now?” I asked.

They didn’t respond. All of us drowning.

Unable.

“I need to take some photographs.”

They both nodded, sad-eyed and vacant.

I dragged myself up, grabbed the blanket and hung my camera over my shoulder. Wedged a tripod under an armpit and trod to the garden tearing open a roll of film with my teeth.

I want to un, as in undo, unmake.

I wanted to see what, unreal, unimaginable, unreachable looked like while I held my son’s blanket.

Un, un, un, undone.

I photographed things to help me see. To recollect. Photographs were my vocabulary of being. I craved evidence, details, proof. To survive, I needed to organize, moment to moment. To make sense of, and be sure of, what would soon be past. To find meaning. To be present with what is found. To make life better. I thought in pictures. Framed what I needed to keep. Held moments still. I recorded to provide myself a way to return to that moment. A keepsake for later perusal.

On a weepy lawn, feet cushioned wet, I unfolded the limbs of the red blanket across a patch of green, stretched its body to the ground, along with memories, the weight of his legs, his arms, his hands. I positioned the tripod, attached the camera and turned the focusing ring. Through the viewfinder, his blanket glowed next to the wintered garden, the ephemeral boneyard. I set the timer and walked barefoot into where he was missing, into the camera’s gaze.

Unsound.

My son’s blanket multiplied the weight of everything as I wrapped it around me. In that empty space, I tried to imagine him. His nineteen years. Beneath the blanket, breathing through pores of his weave, I tried to recover.

Unrecoverable.

Folded it into a book of flesh, unpaged, I read the unreadable, formed the fabric into a sad pillow and buried my face into the sag of it. Unrolled, flattened and lifted with aching arms, a flag I desperately needed to wave, the emergency of it all, yet his blanket remained too heavy to fly.

Unsavable.

I bundled the blanket into a mass of artery and vein. Opened it like a map of muscle. Grabbed its tail and wrestled with what might be left of him. I draped his limp arm over my shoulder, sat up and wailed in my mourner’s cloak. Wallowing in that shroud, I collapsed inside, outside, inside out, outside in.

Unintentional.

Searching in a rhythmic daze before the camera, I unknowingly art-danced my first acquaintance with my new-self as the camera’s shutter opened and closed.

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