Writing Is My Drink (27 page)

“Oh,” I said, thinking briefly of the kneeling woman in the

temple and wondering if her son would have a Buddha here.

“Babies who died in miscarriages,” she continued, and then

added matter-of-factly: “And abortions.” She stumbled only

slightly on the word “abortions,” but it sounded more like a

second-language snag than any hesitance about saying the for-

bidden word out loud. Other than in the news about the war

between pro-life and pro-choice, it seemed that I’d rarely heard

the word “abortion”
spoken aloud, and I couldn’t think of a time when I heard the word said so evenly.

“Abortions? I think you might have the wrong word.” I didn’t

want to embarrass her, but I also felt compelled to find out the

true purpose of the baby Buddhas.

“No, ‘abortion’ is right,” she said, without hesitation.

“You mean when a woman has an operation when she is

pregnant?” I asked, not sure how to phrase it in simple English.

“Yes!” she said.

“Would you mind checking in your dictionary to make

sure?” I asked, surprising myself with my own insistence.

“Not at al ,” she said, flipping through the thin pages. And,

then a moment later: “Yes, ‘abortion’ is right.”

“Okay, thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. She

continued up the trail toward the temple that I would later learn

was called something that translates roughly as the Temple for

Unborn Children, expecting, I’m sure, that I would trail behind

her. But I stayed for a few moments with these
jizo
s, a piece of shrapnel abruptly loosened somewhere deep inside of me.

I fell back in time four years. The Grand Canyon, the Scotch

drinking, the snow. The cold day in Santa Fe when a girlfriend

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had driven me to the abortion clinic, praying there’d be no pick-

eters there that day. There’d often been a small group of protest-

ers marching back in forth in front of the clinic. But luckily that day they were off scouring the world of evil somewhere else. The

day was insanely cold, the sky a blue that can only be achieved

in the winter at seven thousand feet. I remembered the barely

heated room. Waiting with just the thin paper sheet over me.

Waiting, waiting, eternal y waiting, eternal y cold. And then it

was over.

Except it wasn’t. I thought it would be over. I thought believ-

ing in a women’s right to choose meant I’d leave the abortion

there and leave it all behind me. I was twenty-three. I couldn’t

have been more wrong.

Within a day or so, guilt pierced through me. I hated myself.

After a month, I final y gathered up some of my waitressing tips

and told a therapist in an old adobe house how I felt. “It’s sort of Victorian, don’t you think?” she said, “to punish yourself with

guilt.”

I walked away from the session and never went back. I

continued living, dragging a weight of shame with me, never

knowing what to do with it. It’s a common story, but one rarely

portrayed. Other than the old Hemingway story “Hil s Like

White Elephants” (which never explicitly mentions abortion),

I never seemed to come across any stories about abortion, and

when I asked a few friends who I knew had had abortions, their

experience didn’t seem to be quite the same. I knew that part of

the problem was that I had so few women I could consult, that

in any tiny sample it was uncommon to find people who were

troubled by an experience in an identical way. Even then, I sus-

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pected that if I could talk to lots of women about this or I could

read lots of their stories, I’d find at least a few whose experience more closely resembled my own. But I had no means of accessing these stories. There was no social y acceptable way to bring

the question up. And even if there had been, my shame would

likely have kept me silent.

With no means of expressing my grief, I pushed it down and

down. What did it matter that I no longer wanted to have sex

unless I was half-drunk? What did it matter that I felt like I’d

betrayed someone but could never quite name who? What did

it matter if I flinched whenever my memory strayed that way?

But now, standing in front of the temple, I felt something—a

shift. It wasn’t just a reaction to the sweet stone
jizo
s
looking be-atifical y forward into the future with their poignant plastic bibs secured under their chins. It was also the straightforward voice

with which the woman had said they were for miscarriages and

abortions. No shame, no hush. Just “And abortions.” They count.

They get commemorated. You don’t have to just push it away.

These solid stone babies insisted to the world that abortion ex-

isted and that a baby lost that way was worth recognizing. That
I
was worth recognizing. That the abortion and I didn’t exist in a

netherworld beyond the reach of humanity and spirit. The
jizo
s seemed to speak: we lived, we died, and we forgive you.

Somehow that woman’s simple voicing of the unsaid within

the gaze of the stone
jizo
s
had broken the spel . The grief, the guilt, the shame, they were still there, yes, but halved in mass

and weight in a reduction so swift and dramatic that I felt cer-

tain that they would eventual y be gone, if not completely, then

almost.

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My grief had stayed stashed within me until it found an-

other form to fil , a means of existing in the world outside of me, a means of expression. “When we tell our own stories, we are

forgiven,” I heard someone say recently. Upon first hearing this,

I thought briefly, Forgiven for what?—and now the answer, for

me at least, is clear: for being human.

My friend Abigail Carter seems to agree. “When we tell our

own stories in an honest way, we give permission to others to

tell their stories honestly as wel ,” she told me on a recent rainy Seattle evening, sitting in a crowded bar. “You are freeing people

to be authentic by telling your story honestly, courageously.”

“What are you free of?” I asked.

“Guilt. Shame. Feeling disconnected from the world.”

I met Abby in January 2006 in the very first section of my mem-

oir writing course at the University of Washington. I noticed her

right away, a pretty woman in her early forties sitting in the back row. When I saw her there, I thought (I’m not sure why): Something’s wrong. She’s a happy person who for some reason is very

sad.

I pushed the thought aside and then remembered it when

she handed in her first workshop piece, a story about some of

her first dates as a widow. Her husband had been at a break-

fast meeting at the Windows on the World on September 11.

Abby was thirty-five in 2001, with a six-year-old daughter and

a two-year-old son. A year or so after that, Abby, who’d never

considered herself a writer, began to think about writing about

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her surreal experience of her husband’s sudden death and the

crazy events that followed that, including, among other things,

meeting Prince Charles and the Prime Minister of Canada and

attending a public memorial for the families at Ground Zero.

“I held myself up for two years, though, trying to define what

I should write: a book for kids? For widows?” Abby says. “As a

result, I didn’t write anything until my therapist suggested that

perhaps it didn’t matter what I wrote, that just getting it down

was what was important. Best advice ever. I sat down just after

returning from England, where we went for the second anniver-

sary of 9/11, and wrote ‘September 11th, 2001’ across the top of

the page and started writing.”

Without a plan or permission from anyone to write or “be

a writer,” Abby had forged ahead. “That first write was sort

of a ‘vomit’ of words. I just wrote. I had no idea what I was

doing. It was real y an exercise in memory for me at that point.

I didn’t worry about grammar or spelling. Sometimes I had to

check with people who were at a particular event, because my

memory of the early days of widowhood was pretty sketchy. I

just wrote whenever I could, story by story—or bird by bird,

as Anne Lamott would say, though I didn’t know who she was

at the time.”

From watching Abby’s process, I learned that grief can cre-

ate a great need to write, to form a story, and that in the very tel -

ing of the story, the grief slowly, gradual y begins to lift. Just over a year after I met Abby, her book was published in Canada, and

then in the U.S., Australia, and the Netherlands. Through writ-

ing
The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation
, Abby became connected to widows, widowers, and others besieged by

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grief all over the world. She began speaking to groups about loss

and healing and connected with even more readers through her

blog. The loss that had brought her to the page had transformed

into a book that, in turn, transformed her life.

I’ve seen this process repeated with students and other

writers many times. Many of the students who take my class

would never have dreamed of taking a writing class before liv-

ing through a trauma—often the loss of someone essential to

their lives—which resulted in a great need to express their ex-

perience. Grief seems to override a person’s self-consciousness

as a writer. Like Abby, these writers find that the need to express what they’ve been through is greater than their fear that they’re

not up to the task.

And for those already established as writers, writing can be

a first port of refuge when the loss blows through their lives. It

wasn’t long after her son, Jason, was killed in the battle of Wanat in Afghanistan that my friend Carlene Cross, author of
Fleeing

Fundamentalism: A Minister’s Wife Examines Faith
and
The Un-dying West
:
A Chronicle of Montana’s Camas Prairie
, took to the page. Two years after Jason died in 2008, Carlene had finished

a screenplay about the Battle of Wanat, and now she’s working

on a memoir about her experience of surviving her son. Like

Abby, Carlene says that the initial words she wrote about Jason’s

death came out of her in a rush and that she would spend hours

holed up with her computer, typing through the tears at times

but continuing nonetheless. “I felt like Jason was telling me to

keep going,” Carlene says.

Teaching my memoir class over the last six years has been a

lesson in humility. Each year in September, I face a classroom of

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strangers, and by June I say good-bye to group of people whose

stories of loss have become as familiar to me as those of my close

friends. No matter how unscathed by life these students may

have seemed to me in the fal , by the end of each year my as-

sumptions about the ease of their lives have been dashed. Every

year I am reminded that the story of loss is indeed our universal

story and the need to find expression for that story is essential

to our humanity.

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Try This

1. Answer this question very quickly in list form and include

the abstract as well as the concrete: What have you lost?

Things, people, preconceptions, dreams, hopes, fears—in-

clude them al .

2. Which losses have you not yet recovered from?

3. Write for ten minutes on a loss from which you have recov-

ered. As you’re writing, think about what aided your recovery.

4. On a day when you think you’re ready, write for twenty min-

utes on a loss from which you have
not
recovered. You might want to plan a pleasant and distracting activity to do after

this writing session, such as talking to a friend or watching

a comedy.

5. Write about a loss you didn’t know how to grieve or that has

been difficult to articulate.

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15

Memoir: It’s All About you

(and the Rest of Us)

A lot of my writing ideas come in the night. Four a.m. It’s not so

much that I dream an idea as I’m washed up onto a shore where

there are no ideas. Once my mind is quiet mind, then an idea

comes: Write about this. Now go turn on the light.

But sometimes, very rarely, an actual idea comes in a dream.

I had one such dream a few years ago. It is exceedingly boring