UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS - Jonathan Warner
Some Thoughts To Begin
I have been learning to carry my grief for 44 years now. It keeps changing shape, which has made it difficult to let it in, to understand it. I have been forged into a new form, and for the last 3 years I have been learning how to carry a new thing. Not just loss, but being the Last. It has been the most challenging 3 years of my life. I have been good and I have been bad. I have been brave and I have been cowardly. I have been loyal and I have been faithless. Hammered on this anvil, with no understanding of the end shape, no glimmer of the goal. But I feel I have finally had a sip of comprehension, seen through a darkened glass, a small thing that may (or may not) grow into something more. So I set these thoughts down, to share, hoping that you may find a morsel here that could help in your own journey.
Who Was I, and What Am I Now?
I know it's all different now, but I don’t always know how, or exactly what I have become. Many days I feel the same. Most days I feel kind of fuzzy and empty, like an old carton of raspberries with a little mold fuzzed on the inside. I look in the mirror and I look older. There are more lines around my eyes, a frown line is beginning to appear around the corners of my mouth. I look into my own eyes and I’m not always sure who is looking back out at me. A strange dissociative funk reaches out at me, grasping, whirling, sucking me down. So I stopped looking in the mirror mostly.
It is amazing to me that people I know don’t approach me and ask who I am, what I’ve done with Jon. They look at me like I’m just the same. The same guy from last year, full of jokes and optimism and a ready smile. And hey, that guy tries to come up and wave. The echo of that guy is still reverberating inside of my skull, inside of my soul. But it’s a weak signal some days. It happens that I mostly can’t hear him over the sobbing and the crying. He is drowning in tears, the rivulets turned to a raging torrent and I can’t seem to throw him a life line. He cries. I cry. And I try to reach out to him, but his pockets are full of yesterday’s stones. Each one with a name hammered into it, each one as heavy as a neutron star. They pull him down and down and down and down and down until I lose sight of him and the thread that holds us together is pulled taught and it feels so tenuous and yet as incontestable as a beam of the purest, darkest, light. He is drowning in that sanguine sea of tears. I’m up here like some sort of reverse aquanaut, walking the sunlit world, wearing his skin, marking it with my lines and worries and sorrow.
Who was the person I used to be? Lost? Happy? How far back do I go to determine who I used to be? Before Steve died in my arms? I was scared. Before dad died holding my hand? I was lost, my life unraveling before my eyes. Before mom died, her spirit waking me as I slept next to her hospital bed gently prying me out of exhausted slumber to hold her hand and touch her cooling skin? Before Matt died, screaming and bleeding an impossible hole punched through his gut, the air thick with burnt powder, burnt cloth, and my burned up innocence? ... that is a long while back. Too far to consider him to be who I was before. Just a spark, a glimmer on the surface of a once calm water that has now been thrashed into foam and tormented into a constantly rushing rapid.
I guess I am all of those beings. All of those boys and men, sons and brothers, echos and shadows and solid flesh and bone. Lined and weathered. Weeds and grass poking through the stones and pavers of my fabric. Who did I used to be? Happy, and sad. Wisecracking and snide. Bold but not always in a smart way. Bold like a jumper who crosses the threshold without really knowing what lies beneath. It all swirls away. The thoughts like water wash over me, sand me down with their grit and sediment, and ebb like all tides do. It leaves me here, not reborn but certainly refluxed. Cast back up on this lonely shore. Up on one knee, joints creaking and snapping, skin burnished by the forces that have cast me back up here once again. The Survivor. The One Who Stands. The One Who Weeps.
Hello again. I’m back, my own revenant, my own shadow. Thought and Memory perched on my shoulders.
What is my Truth About Grief, and Love, and Loss
What does not show is how I am taped together. How I feel like a broken marionette inside and the jerky string lead motions of my everyday life are just that: Theatre. A puppet show for you to watch. To be comforted by its craft and cleverness. You can be distracted and entertained as I make this puppet dance and caper and play the fool. I do it for you, my audience, my captors in this strange social stage we call modern life.
If I could, I would wear sack cloth. I would paint my brow with ashes. I would rend my clothes, and tear at my hair, and wail through the night. Until you were as uncomfortable as me. Until you were tortured by the mere sight of me. You would see my black raiment, you would see the marks of my devastation on my body and in my eyes. And could you look me in the eye? If I were like that, a gibbering madman, torn so completely asunder that I could not speak, that the social garments and niceties would fall from me like ashes.
Would you look? Could you look? What would you say? “Is there anything I can do for you?” “If you need anything at all, just say the word”? As I howled and tore at my clothing and my flesh, could those mealy mouthed expressions still dribble out of your mouth? Would you dare to look me in the eye an SEE ME?
It is so much more comfortable to see my restrained tears. To feel my remote sadness and template it against your boilerplate 7 stages and nod wisely. “Ah, anger” you would muse. “He is progressing through it. Soon he will be ok, right as rain. Time heals all wounds after all.” You then can walk away knowing that its so sad, but it is nature and I’m “getting through it”.
What you don’t know is underneath it all I am that gibbering madman. I have torn the cloth of my spirit and am yelling into the void, railing against cruel fate and happenstance until my nails are bleeding and my voice is horse from the shouting. What you can’t see is the sack cloth I wear and the ashes that fill my mouth as I smile and dance for you. It’s all so 21st century. I’m still productive, I do my job, I move about the house and wash and clean and drive and spend, and caper. I whisper directions from off stage, but the idiot still tells his tale. All the sound and the fury is on the inside, on mute, in a private chat, in the mire that is the subconscious. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see me, torn and limping, bleeding and weeping. Can’t you see I need succour? You don’t have to ask my permission to hold my hand, to tell me you have no idea how this feels but you can see it in my eyes and it is horrible to behold. But that you will look anyway. That you won’t flinch away from this raw and terrible anguish even though there is jack shit you can do about it. You could just look into my eyes and not try to fix me. Just acknowledge that you don’t know, maybe can’t know, but you see it. You don’t have to wipe the ash from my brow, or clothe me in something more appealing. You don’t have to look at me with pity and sympathy. Just see me. Howl with me if it is in your mind scape, if it is in your soul’s rutter. But if it is not, let me howl, let me grieve. Let me commune with this awful god so that I can find my way to the other side, drag my skiff up onto the rocky shoal, and somehow find the breath that used to fill my tattered sails.
Scent
I come from a close family. Our love language was always one of touch, of hugs and handholding. If I close my eyes tonight, I can travel back in time and feel my mother’s arms around me her Chanel No. 5 enfolds me like a warm blanket of the softest merino wool. The scent is all warmth in my mind and I can feel the texture of her skin, which oddly enough never seemed to change across the span of her years. As a young boy, a young
man, and then as her protector/care giver, her skin was always the same warm brown, soft covering layers of muscle and tendon, strength and perseverance. It will always be her and it will always be with me. When she had died and my brother and I were gathering her belongings, I opened a cabinet and that wonderful enchanting smell came wafting out and the tears flowed down my face, it knocked me to my knees. All those warm summer hugs came rushing down the corridors of my mind and it carried me one last time to that special place of love, never known again.
My father had an old cedar box, where he kept his Purple Heart, the pocket watch my mother gave him, and the Sixty Four cents he had collected from the hospital - the only possession my eldest brother had when he died. He kept all of his sacred things there and I can smell it so clearly now, years down the road and a country away. It will always be his smell and it brings that sense of tragic strength and stoicism. He kept his treasures and his pains locked away in the self same place, a censer in the cathedral of his mind.
I close my eyes again and now it’s 9 years later and it’s Steve’s belonging’s I’m gathering. I’m holding his shirts and pressing them into my face so I can breath him in one last time. Tom Ford with just the slightest hint of starch and maybe a little shoe polish. I breathe it in as if I could hold him in the chamber of my lungs, moving him through my veins to live forevermore in my heart. I wear some of his jewelry and feel the soft but insistent pull on my wrist, like his fingertips, and I can smell the silver polish, leather, and that echo of Tom Ford. Such a soft and gentle ghost of a thing, but it lingers with me and gets all tangled up in my clothes and in my heart. If I listen close enough I can hear the gentlest of laughs. All bound up in that scent.
And Matt, that darkest of memories where normally I do not tread. I have erected some fencing there to keep things at bay. But of course it is the scent memory that always dissolves all resolution and makes my protective measures less than effective. Ink and musk cologne mixed with Marlborough’s stops me in my tracks, and then I start to tremble for the strong scent of gunpowder and hot blued metal are never far behind. It stops me, immobile. It stops me, unreasoned. It stops me and I can not make time do its dance again. That scent is thick and it holds me. It stops me still. So I stay still until the scent has passed and I can tuck those things back down deep, and wrap them up as before. And move away, away, away and hope they come no more.
I Remember
I remember the sound of Steve’s laugh, its one of the things we always shared from the time we were children. Laughing together, being silly, or finding the absurd in everyday life. Sometimes we would laugh out of pure joy. We had cooked a meal together after he was diagnosed with his glioblastoma but before the darkness of radiation and chemo. Taking that first bite, feeling those wonderful flavors and textures, I burst out laughing because it was just so good. I’m glad we laughed over that meal and washed it down with plenty of good wine. The chemo and radiation would soon steal his enjoyment of food, but we had that evening. I will always have that evening. I’m tempted to say that I would like to forget what followed. The sickness, watching him slowly lose himself, the insanity that wasted his mind and his body before it took him altogether. But for me, I think that would be a disservice to his courage and bravery. How he faced his life and how he faced his death. Instead, I’ll try to remember it all, but it is so hard to hold it in my heart and mind.
I remember my Dad’s strength, there was just no quit in him. He plowed through so much adversity in his life. I remember his strong hands and his sure grip. I held his hand often after his Parkinson’s became more dominant in his life. It’s odd, I can’t remember holding his hand when I was little, but I remember it so clearly as a man. I love my dad. I’m glad I held him when he lived and when he died. I hope to always remember. I chose not to forget all of the hurtful and difficult things that passed between us. He was a strong man, but he was just a man, beautifully human and full of flaws. He hurt me, and I know that I hurt him. It seems to be in our nature, the duality of love, the tears of joy and of sadness. I remember you Dad.
I remember my Mom’s beauty, her grace, and her kindness. Parkinson’s took her from me long before she died, but for one exceptional day. I sat on her bed beside her, holding her hand, and she looked at me - really looked at me with that full awareness and presence that was her hallmark. She saw me with her beautiful eyes so full of weariness and said, “I don’t think I can do this for much longer.” And I replied, “You don’t have to Mom. You were the best mom a boy could ever have. It’s ok if you need to rest now”. She died soon after, but I pray that I will never forget a single moment we had together. Things fade after all the years that have passed, but I hold on to them, as much as I can. She is my mom, she was amazing, and I miss her everyday.
I remember Matt’s art. His poetry, and his drawing. I remember worshiping him as only the youngest brother can worship the eldest. His crooked smile, his dark eyes, and his love for
music, fast cars, and animals. He is the furthest away in time, and our time together is dim augmented by the haze and forgetfulness that trauma brings. I try my best to remember him, and hold him in my heart. And I try my best to forget our last hours together. I have tried to forget for 42 years now. But I cannot. I have tried and tried but it holds me. The iron bands of memory clasped tight and hammered through with pins of pain and pins of sorrow. I cannot forget, however much I beg, no matter how I run. Let me go Matt. Let me go. But the smoke and the blood hold us fast. Together. Forever.
Let me go.
Grief like water
My Grief is like water. It has flowed around me for nearly all of my life. It is Protean, changing and always moving. Have you watched a curtain of water fall against a window or a glass plate? Have you seen how the rivulets move and curve and always find a way to go, pulled by the Laws of the Universe? That is how it feels to me. It has always been shifting, my mind has always tried to grasp this oily elusive substance. I think because my first loss was entwined in such severe trauma, I never got to truly hold it. It slipped away as my soul put a gauzy layer between me and reality. The lizard brain survives, and so I forgot much and only dealt with it in the realms of the subconscious and the dream.
You probably see the issue already, but it took me long years of suffering and questing and failing to finally find it: When I lost my grief, I lost my love. My brain and soul intervened to save my sanity, but in doing so I lost my connection to deeper love. I have watched my entire family die. Quite literally, I have been there each time, to say good-bye, to witness those final breaths. And Grief has slipped through my fingers, as compartmentalization stepped in, whisked it away, and kept it aging in the cellar of my soul. But this dark cistern was never drained, it just filled and filled until it leaked out into my life in destructive and subversive ways. Oh how I wish I could have held it, faced it, suffered with it... but I didn’t learn how until Steve left. I had finally accrued enough wisdom, enough psychotherapy, and enough self-awareness to see how I needed to be with this Grief. So I fashioned a vessel to hold it, to drink its entire volume to the bitter dregs to find that the cup was full again the next day. I have drunk from this latest cup for 213 days. It fills each day and I see many more days before me. I must drain my dark cistern one cup at a time.
But my grief is fluid, it changes, it moves. And so my loved ones move. And so time moves. And in all this movement, I find that I love them still, I miss them always, I cry nearly every day. The muzzy wool blanket that is my Grief Brain hampers me, but it too moves. The
symphony of my aching soul, movement to movement, accompanies my thirst as I drink my Grief down. And my love does not diminish. My people, they are with me although there are days when I cannot see it. My family, my loves... I don’t fear that I will lose you again. I have held this cup for 14,965 days. I am the One Who Stands. I am the One Who Weeps. I am the One Who Moves.
A Drawer Full of Knives
I remember the drawer full of kitchen knives at Steve’s house. It was full, chaotically full, of different knives. There were knives for all uses and occasions in there: Chef’s Knives, bread knives, pairing knifes, fillet knifes... the list goes on and on. They were all in different conditions too. Some were sharp, some were painfully dull. Yet others were notched, chipped, or otherwise marked. It made my hands itch when I would see them. I wanted nothing more than to take them out, restore their edge, condition the blades, and bring them back up to speed. I did that for a few of them, wiping them down with a little oil afterwards, rubbing it in to the clean steel and then lightly wiping it down with a cloth. I would the return it to the crazy chaotic drawer, knowing that when they got used again he would notice, even though they were in a haystack of knives. I wish I could have done them all. It just got too busy near the end and those knives just had to wait, and wait, until it was too late.
After Steve died, we packed them all up and put them into boxes. Most we gave to my daughter, so she could have a starter set for her kitchen. She could learn their uses, and add chips and notches all of her own. As I pulled each blade from the drawer and placed it into the waiting box I began to recall a very similar drawer from my childhood. My mom kept her knives like this too. In fact, Steve had recreated our mothers knife drawer in his own home, the length of a country away and years after she had died. It makes me look at that drawer in a new light. It wasn’t just a messy drawer of kitchen tools, flung in haphazardly with no care for the state of the steel. I think it was a kind of shrine or altar. Steve’s homage to our Mom, his way of calling out to her across the stretch of time and space. Maybe it made him think of her too, or maybe it was just one of those subconscious echos that happen in our lives. Spiritual Crop Circles of the Mundane. We never really notice them until something dramatic happens to make us look, actually see what was there in front of us the whole time.
Now I look back at his house and it’s like watching The Sixth Sense for the second time, knowing the twist and seeing the whole thing differently. The art in his bathrooms, the pillows and the throws placed just so in each room. The way the spices were organized,
and the way he placed odd little things in ziplock bags, to be used some other time. Looking back now, I can see it. He missed her, he created a gigantic shrine to her that he lived in, so that he could be near her always. The realization brings tears to my eyes. What love and devotion he had, how profound his grief, although he never expressed it to me in any particular manner. Of all of us, he was closest to her. It makes me miss him more, if that’s even possible. I wish we could have had that conversation. I wish we could have shared it, and laughed and cried, and had that special oneness that comes from shared memory. In all the world, you only get a few people who know you best. The others only see to the next bend or if you’re lucky they can see to the horizon. But never beyond, no matter how close or how beloved. There is a finite amount of people who have known you your whole life... and now all of those people are dead for me. How I wish we could share one more glass of wine, all of us together in a way we never were in life. All of us adults, looking back on the strange journey that was our family life. Instead, I raise my glass to them, loving them, laughing and crying at my faded memories. Knowing that here, I see dead people.
I think maybe I’ll go downstairs and look at my own knife drawer. Perhaps it could use a little chaos, perhaps I could consecrate it with my love and my tears and my memories. A little shrine, in my own kitchen, to them all.
An Unkindness of Ravens
I have been followed by Ravens and Crows since I was a little boy. It sounds like I’m simple when I say it out loud (or type it here on the page). It feels like being young, looking out the car window in the night, watching the moon and exclaiming “the moon is following me!”. It would be tempting to write it off as just that, but I can’t do that, nor do I want to. To me, it is a symbol and a sign. My own familiar, a connection to what I think of as “The Greater Thing”.
Come close, bear witness, and I’ll tell you a secret.
Maybe a year before Matt died he brought home a Raven. It was huge, definitely the biggest bird I had ever seen at the time. He lived outside in an Aviary my dad built and I used to love to bring him food, even though that razor sharp beak frightened me in a very deep and unsettling way. I was drawn to him because he would talk. “Hello” he would say. And after he lived with us for awhile he would call our names. My mom used to stand on
the balcony and shout for us at the end of the day to come to dinner “Lew, Matt, Steve, Jon!” She would yell. And soon the Raven would yell it out too. I would creep up to his house with a morsel of steak or chicken and he would call out “Lew, Matt, Steve, Jon!”. Afraid, I would toss the meat into his house and quickly back away. He would look at me with those knowing black eyes and hop slowly to the food and gobble it down. “Nevermore” he would conclude. Clearly, the person he lived with before us had a sense of humor. I don’t remember what happened to him after Matt died. I lost so many memories when that happened. But I will always remember that midnight black bird, calling out our names.
My mother died two days before Christmas. The snow was thick and deep that year, “A Hundred Year Snow!” The old-timers proclaimed. After her casket was lowered into the ground we were walking back to the hurst, and I chanced to look back while my dad and brother we already warm inside the car. And when I looked, I saw the ground around her grave was covered in crows, all silent, no laughter. Just sitting there in the snow... Steve called to me, but I couldn’t quite turn away. I felt a... connection. I half raised my hand in greeting and slowly turned away. So strange.
When dad died, two large ravens perched outside our old family home. They came everyday while Steve and I packed up the house and prepared it for sale. I would nod to the birds each morning and I felt that same odd connection. This time it brought a sort of softness with it, like unclenching your fists after holding them tight. The day we finished our estate duties, they didn’t show up and I missed them. I searched the cold winter sky to no avail. They were gone, and their passage left a palpable hole in my days.
The day after Steve passed, I was actually looking for my birds, as I now thought of them. But nothing came and I felt a bit let down and a bit foolish. I chided myself for injecting importance into chance and coincidence. I set my head down and got back to the arduous work that comes after death. The following morning, in the early dawn, we stepped out on Steve’s balcony to drink our coffee and breathe in the cool air and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as if a black carpet had been laid down on the lawn behind his house. So many crows I couldn’t count them. Tears streamed down my face, I felt that uncanny connection, that fist around my heart softened, and I waved slowly to them. My birds had come after all. My Valkyries, my Hermes, come back to say good-bye.
Almost everyday I am visited by crows and ravens. They sail by, perch on my patio, and caw their greetings. I greet each one with gravity and with a small bit of wonder. Hello my
loves... It doesn’t make everything all right, but for a small moment things sit right for me. My family, my flock, my Unkindness of Ravens.
Grief Eternal
Grief does not pass. As old as the topography becomes, it doesn’t change its nature or transform into something else. It is what it is, and it will always be that way. It’s our relationship to it that changes, not the beast itself. Stonehenge has stood for long years, too many for me to count. Has it changed? Has the stone transmogrified into fibreglass or carbon fibre? Has its nature mellowed and given way? No, it is still the stone it has always been. It remembers the earth, quantum physics suggests it is still part of the mountainside from which it was was hewn. But our relationship to it has certainly changed over time. And to me, that is Grief. One day it will not magically disappear. It has been Fourteen Thousand days since Matt died. My loss is still there, it remains a hole in my life and in my being. But my relationship to that loss has changed over time, indeed as I have changed with the years. It still hurts, it is still traumatic. AND IT WILL ALWAYS BE THAT WAY. But I have changed. My perspective, my understanding of truth, of science, and the nature of life has evolved. And that means my relationship to my brother’s suicide has also changed. Viewing things in Two Dimensions, then Three, and then Four... it changes certain aspects of it. Is it softer? Oh hell no. It still makes me cry, it will rend my soul for the rest of my life. But I find it fits into my cosmology in a different way now than it did when I was eleven years old.
Maybe its because I’ve lost so many of my loved ones: 4 family members, 3 dogs, and my own innocence. It has changed how I relate to my grief. But is my grief for Steve any less or easier to accept than my grief for Matt? No, no, no. In fact, it is more poignant, more sharp. Because now, I am willing to sit with these BIG feelings, these sometimes Impossible feelings, and not rush off. And perhaps that is the thing that rankles me. Grief cannot be rushed off. I feel like you have to sit with it, have dinners and drinks with it. Take it with you, let it eat from your plate. Let it wear your clothes, bathe in your tub, and sleep in your bed. You have to be willing to get intimate with it. It doesn’t mellow over time, good god, does your love mellow over time? Or does it ripen, does it mature and become something magnificent over time?.... Don’t you have to allow your Grief the same room, to mature, to ripen, and to evolve? Don’t you have to sit cozy with it, and smell its fetid breath? In the end, don’t you have to wrap your arms around it and speak it’s true name? “Grief, I name you: You are love, and you are love divided. You are lasting, cured and salted, and in the end Your Name is Mine. You will be with me, as long as I AM”.
The wind roars, the oceans flow, the stars wheel in the sky, and the earth spins. Time the Everlasting. Grief Eternal. Love the Genesis of all.
Because I love me...
It is quiet here in the chambers of my heart. Dog lays next to the hearth, quiet for the moment, but his big soft eyes never leave me. The weight of his gaze is telling. These pages are nearly full, one last thing to add and of course it is the one that is the most challenging for me. The gatekeeper who waits at the threshold, who will easily let me pass if I will only whisper my true name.
Lifting the heavy and wet wool blanket of self loathing off of me is so hard. Building the space to love myself and allow myself to be loved is my own herculean task. Of course you ask this of me at the end. The door warden watches and sweat beads my face, rolls down my brow and stings my eyes. I know my dead. I know they loved me. I see them more clearly now than perhaps I ever have. My writing and our sharing has been a sort of baptism for me. It has been in turns a refiner’s fire, a smith’s hammer, and the cool quenching of love that I have needed. But it is so hard to let go of my guilt, of my shame. I have kept these big feelings locked away for so long, I have run from them and denied them til all of the cocks have crowed thrice. I give my love away freely to my dead, to my darling, sweet wife and my daughters. To my friends and companions. You have my love, there is no condition, there is no price.
So I will try this.
Jon is eleven years old. He has just witnessed his brother shooting himself with a shotgun. He is so devastated, so utterly lost and traumatized. Almost, his light was extinguished with his brother’s. I will put my arms around him, and kiss him, and bathe his face in my tears. I’m here, you are not alone. I love you.
Jon sits next to his mother, her frail hand wasted by Parkinson’s disease. Her body is so still and all of the grace and light she held is fading now, her skin is cooling under his hand which grips hers so tightly. I will pull his head into my shoulder. I will smooth his rumpled shirt and hold him close. There are no words for this, just being there being near and sharing the breath we push in and out. It will never be the same for him, but I love him.
Jon kisses his father’s brow. His skin is so pallid, his breath so ragged. Jon holds his hand and feels the strength in his world ebbing away. His rock and his pillar is slipping away
and he can do nothing about it. I will sit close to him. I will hold his hand and cup his neck in the palm of my hand. He is so lost now, but I will love him. I will be an anchor for him in the storms that are yet to break. He is lost and he will need support for what lies ahead. I will love him quietly.
Jon cradles Steve’s head in his arms. His breath is rattling in his chest, his once strong face is so emaciated now. Jon is so afraid. As Steve leaves he is so afraid to be the last one left. So afraid to be alone. I will love him most. I will hold his hand and stand beside him. I will forgive him all of his stupidities and frailties. I will love him as best as I can, and in turn I hope he will let love in. I hope he will let me love him.
Let love in, let it hold us up, and stand as a shelter in this great storm. Love for me, love for you, love for us. Unbar the door, and let it in.
