Slo-mo robbery 10-15-12

A notion that has been coming to me in small waves over the last couple of days has been to look carefully at my own emotional development. A personal matter? Yep. It is nevertheless very tied in with the reason I have been so attached to the M&C story, and as I now am realizing, the reason for so much more in the way my personal outlook has has been shaped.

Really, I think the addictive behavior began in me as a middle school student and built upon itself through adolescence all the way through high school and college. I had no channels, really, to talk over this new absence in our family, and my parents did almost nothing to help us through the struggle of the loss, for the loss was such a gradual thing, as I will explain. Through college then into professional life, I admired those people who seemed to have the sense to acknowledge the loss in their lives, give it a name, honor it for what it represents. I used the fact that Michael simply “disappeared” as a crutch sometimes, a sort of rationale for the despair that stretched over my being like gossamer, encasing me in a long, thin grief; a grief not to be undone by the days or nights, by trauma or catastrophe, by self abuse or neglect. The disappearance is a living  and breathing thing, a symbiont whose existence depends entirely on the life of the host, and to take it a step further, it resides in and is nourished by fear. This particular fear I want to discuss later.

I did not heed this fact, was not aware of it until perhaps the day that I told my MFA advisor that my life depended on writing this book. That was the beginning of the journey for me. It was then that I commenced the hard look back into the person I had become and the reasons. My substance abuse--from alcohol to pot and psychedelics--reflects my need to fill the void, satisfy the craving to feel past my filmy envelope of grief to the real thing, the raw ecstasy of living. The passing of Michael and Cordelia constituted a decades-slow robbery of the psyche, something taking place with no other outcome than the pain of separation, something over which there is no control except for that which can be altered within. And so that is what I sought, perhaps continue to seek, the alteration: a form of control that is purely artifice. Growing up with the day-to-day question of whether or not I should be mourning the loss of my brother or whether I should move on.

There was never any sort of memorial for Michael. I know from a letter she sent, that Dorothy had performed her own ritual of good-bye, but nothing in our family was ever organized. Looking back, I can now say that this was a neglect based on denial borne not as much of the fear of saying good-bye to Michael, but of the need keep him alive: to keep hope alive.