by Robin Byrd
Death, spirits, the ghosts of memory, these are the things that turn up in my plays. I used to think that I was weird, not that weird is a negative word to me. I am peculiar and I am okay with that. In Proof by David Auburn, Catherine states while talking about her dad, “He’d attack a question from the side, from some weird angle, sneak up on it, grind away at it.” I love that sentence, it’s all we can do in our world of doing art – attack from our perspective and grind away…
I have been reading The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat. What I mean is I have read it several times 4 and a half times to be exact. I am working out the processing of my mother’s death. She left this earth in April of this year. It has been difficult to write it yet write it I have – to request to drop classes I was in at the time of her death, classes I have had to repeat and get past the point of her death in each of them. One, I made it through, weary but victorious, the other, I am still weathering. It is amazing the depth of grief. I read somewhere that grief causes forgetfulness, that and the lack of sleep… Except I know the forgetfulness of sleepless nights well and this thing – it is scary and it is a demon whose head I am chopping off with a twice dull blade. I will be rid of it. I have found comfort in the stories that Danticat shares in The Art of Death; at one point, she asks her mother, “Did you rage enough?” this in response to Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”:
“…Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” by Dylan Thomas
Similarly, before the thin veil of denial left me, before I bought the ticket and made the journey home, I spoke to my mother’s spirit, “Mommy, do not go gentle into that good night wait for me, I’m coming home…” And, I watched her fight until the end unsure of the road… She almost died 3 days before, we sat in the nursing home around her bed for hours but she would not leave. She wanted a reprise. She wanted to be bathed… Almost like a baptismal service, two young nurses, bathed my mother from head to toe in preparation for the day. She lay there knowing it would be her last bath with breath in her body, resolved to meet the day…clean…. Clean from the blood that had begun to seep from her body in clots of pain, clean from the last of things no one can carry with them into the presence of God. I took to sitting through the night with her, on guard. I did not want her to die alone. I blessed the room and sealed it (in the name of Jesus) from anything that was not like God…so she could rest in peace until that appointed time. I had asked God to let me be there and had traveled from Los Angeles on a ‘red eye’ to make sure I was there the entire month of April. I asked Him, rather demanded that He let me be there, “I want to see her when she leaves, not in a dream, like with Dad, and the others, I want to see her! I must be there, it will not be alright if I am not there. I do not want to get that call.” So, there I was by the grace of God, sitting beside my mother’s deathbed…taking notes in my spirit… and then it happened, and God let me see:
I saw her when she left, the lift off, her eyes shown like glassy circles of pure glee, the hologram of her Self barely visible but not her smile, it was wide and happy because she knew I saw…my mother, my mother – the wind of God…
I wrote and read a poem on behalf of my mother at her funeral titled, “Getting it Right” – the thing my mother had on her mind the last days of her life. I had sat by her bed every day from April 1st till she passed at the end of the month, 2 days before her 83rd birthday. She continually told me to “Pay attention Robbie, you’re going to have to write about this… We got to get this right.” How could I fail? “A mother’s song should be heard in the voices of her children”…it should never be lost to time. I found her song in the space where breath had left her and became her voice for a time… I could feel her there with me… adlibbing…
Part of getting it right is forgiving and letting things go. We all must do it…
It is difficult…these days… not because I do not know that my mother is with Christ…
“…We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with Christ.” Paul the Apostle, II Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 8
It is difficult because the moments have germinated and taken root and are sprouting trees so tall it is hard to see the sky. It is renewing and stripping but best of all, I did not lose on the moments that the last of things said to me by my mother set in stone her confidence in who I am – a Writer…
