Throughout this month, we’ll be using the blog to have a conversation about Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning. Rosenblatt will receive the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in New York City on November 5, and he will be in Gambier on October 2-3 to give a keynote address at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival.
How do we remember? How do we grieve? Those two questions are at the center of the genre we’ve come to call “grief memoir,” in which a writer seeks to map that gray region between life and death that we enter when we suffer a loss. The authors of these memoirs – Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2012), David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), Anne Roiphe’s Epilogue (2008), Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story (2011), Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye (2011), Roger Rosenblatt’s Making Toast (2010) and Kayak Morning (2012) — turn to the act of writing in the same way that we all turn to memory at these moments of intense grief: to fill the hollow place in the heart, to comprehend the pain, to transform that pain, and the great gulf of death itself, into one of the stones by which we build a world that can’t be swept away. After a profound loss, we look for a transformative act as a ritual of remembrance and way to reclaim our shattered lives: we build monuments, start movements, run marathons, create foundations. And that’s just the positive stuff: we also drink too much, go into inexplicable rages at nothing, withdraw from the world or throw ourselves into it in unwise ways. And no wonder. Grief is a devastating blow to our hope, our faith in the world, and our sense of self.
In a conversation with Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times, Meghan O’Rourke observed that after her mother’s death, she found herself reading Hamlet over and over, understanding his character for the first time, especially those early lines when he cries out in pain and rage, “O God, God! / How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (I.ii.136-38) But what she also did, even before her mother died, was to write:
You know, writing has always been the way I make sense of the world. It’s a kind of stay against dread, and chaos. My mother was diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer in 2006; she was 53, and I was 30. As her disease progressed, I found myself writing down all the experiences we had — the day she got giddily high on morphine at the doctor’s office; the afternoon we talked, painfully, about her upcoming death. It helped me externalize what was happening. After she died, I kept writing — and reading — trying to understand or just get a handle on grief, which was different from what I thought it’d be. It wasn’t merely sadness; I was full of nostalgia for my childhood, obsessed with my dream life and had a hard time sleeping or focusing on anything but my memories. I worried that all this was abnormal.
And yet, could anything be more “normal” than to become obsessed with memory at this moment when the world falls to pieces? But how do we remember? O’Rourke uses the word nostalgia, which implies a gauzy veil of pleasant memory, the kind of memory that is almost painful in its own right, because it reminds us of the pleasures we’ve lost. Nostalgia is also a word we use, in politics and in literary study, for a kind of memory that borders on fiction: the world we recall to ourselves when we slip into nostalgia is one that probably wasn’t quite that lovely when we lived it. We’ve swept away all the banalities, all the complexities, in our desire to remember only the pleasant things, so the past we build in our imagination becomes like a children’s story or an old family movie, where smiling faces flicker and blur slightly through a veil of sweet tears.
My colleague Sarah Heidt has promised to join this conversation in the next few days: she writes and teaches about memory and memoir, so I will leave it to her to talk about the complex relationship between memoir, as a literary form, and memory as a psychological experience. I’ll simply observe that writers tend to evoke that experience of memory in two basic ways: one is the sudden flash of sensory experience, what Marcel Proust evokes in his description of tasting the madeleine at his aunt’s house in Combray in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (translated into English as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past):
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
We might call this lyric memory: it’s the way memory works in poems, a flash of mental imagery or sensory experience. And it’s an experience that we all have at some point in our lives, when we catch the scent of fresh-cut grass in the early spring, or a spice that evokes our grandmother’s kitchen, or that faint whiff of perfume that summons up a first kiss. But that’s only part of the story. While that sensory experience may be the trigger for memory, it sets us on a path, a narrative quest: our minds go searching for the connections that allow us to make sense of the wave of emotion and nostalgia that wash over us when we taste the madeleine. Narrative memory, I would argue, is the result of that conscious process of reconstruction. It’s the story that the mind tells us, the well-worn path to Grandma’s house, where she stands in the kitchen, humming quietly to herself as she prepares our favorite meal.
But where does grief fit into this structure of literary memory? The problem of grief is the way it transforms memory into both a temptation and a trap. We long to remember every detail of the person we’ve lost — their smile, their hands, the funny thing they said to us on that lovely day at the beach – but every detail reminds us of our loss. “When you love someone,” Roger Rosenblatt writes in Kayak Morning, “every moment is shadowed by the fear of loss. Then loss occurs, and you feel more love than ever. The more you loved, the more you feel the loss. Depression, then, may be seen as the strongest expression of love. That’s where logic gets you.” And the problem of grief is that, while it may fade in intensity, it never truly goes away. “I feel worse now than I did shortly after she died,” Rosenblatt tells his therapist early in the book.
“And you’ll feel even worse next year. And worse the year after that, unless you find a way to transform your grief.”
“We’re back to that.”
“We’ve never left it,” she said. “Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime.”
“How should I treat this guest? This unwelcome, uninvited guest.”
“Think of the one who sent it to you,” she said. (20-21)
Kayak Morning is Rosenblatt’s second book about the experience of grief. Does writing about grief heal it? Sadly, no. Later in the book, the therapist asks him, “Why did you write Making Toast?”
“It was therapy. As long as I was writing about Amy, I could keep her alive.”
“What about afterwards?”
“When the book was finished, it was as if she had died again.”
“The book isn’t enough,” she said.
“No, it’s not enough.”
“So what do you do now? Write another book?”
“There has to be something more lasting than a book.”
“And what would that be?” (143)
The question remains unanswered, but by this point, we know that the only thing that lasts, in the face of grief, is life itself, if only from day to day, and the way to recognize that is to experience it fully by doing something as simple as paddling a kayak on a creek in the mornings. The kayak “organizes the universe the way art organizes the wilderness – without improving it. We pass the time. Time passes us.” (50) Rituals heal us, and living heals us: the wound remains, but it becomes part of the act of living, one of the things that you think about as you paddle your tiny boat against the tide: “Daughter. Water. I turn my boat.” (80)
For me, one of the most moving moments in this book is when Rosenblatt meets a reader of Making Toast:
A woman approached me on the street in New York. I had never seen her before. “I read your book,” she said.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. (15)
This is what the genre of the grief memoir offers us: the consolation of seeing our own experience – the universal experience – of loss reflected through the experience and insights of other people who wander with us in that gray land of grief. Sharing the pain turns grief into something collective, a consoling ritual we call mourning. We need these rituals to lift us out of our isolation, to return us to the world, to force us to look at something else besides our own pain. For Rosenblatt, that ritual includes the precise observation of nature – the water birds, the flow of the tides, the dragonfly threading his course among the reeds – that define his mornings on the water. The title of his book contains a quiet pun: Rosenblatt might have called this book (and, in a sense, did) Kayak Mourning.
“What is the difference between grief and mourning?” Rosenblatt asks in Kayak Morning. “Mourning has company.” (39)
Read the next post in this series here.