today's 50 essay is "documents" by charles d'ambrosio, who teaches at psu. while d'ambrosio uses three difference documents--a try-hard poem by his dad, who's a professor of finance; a casual letter from his schizophrenic brother; and the suicide note of his other brother--the theme focuses around the latter and the loss of his brother.
i think what makes me nervous about the imagine of these three documents sitting in the boots his brother died in on d'ambrosio's desk all the time (which brings to mind the word, "weight", and not because the boots are filled with rocks), is that these types of artifacts are kind of missing from my life. that diary that i talked about that i kept around the time my dad got sick is in my safety box with my social security card, birth certificate, and our marriage certificate--i consider it just as important as any of those documents.
but my dad's not really big on the written--or spoken--word. i can't even imagine my dad writing something, and he doesn't say much either. what will be left when he's gone? memories, of course, and the life he gave me and the lessons he gave me. but, i won't have anything to literally hold on to. but is that important? not that i'm asking that rhetorically. i really want to know.
my mom is an avid journal writer. she has written in her journal nearly every day since she was a young teenager. i think it has especially helped her fight and see through her depression. the older i get the more i realize that my mom is someone who should have spectacularly and completely imploded years and years ago, but somehow she has kept it together. through severe depression. through isolation. through trials with her kids. through unemployment for our family. and now through cancer. i know her heart and soul are in those journals. they are all in boxes somewhere. once, when i was about fifteen, i found myself in her room alone. i don't remember if i snuck in there or if i was grabbing something. but her journal was on her bedside table. i was so overcome with insane curiosity that i froze, because i am not a spontaneous-deep-diving person. even back then i knew that those journals were special. like in slow motion, i touched it, i pulled it out, i cracked it open. i remember seeing the date of the page i opened to but being too scared to even skim it so i carefully, carefully replaced it on the shelf. despite all of this, somehow she knew that someone had been looking at her journal, or at least that they had touched it, and she knew i had been in her room. she tearfully and angrily confronted me. she asked me if i read her journal and i told her no but she thought i was lying because i had, in fact, pulled it off the shelf. she was so angry because she was so hurt and felt so betrayed, and i think that single thing that i did-didn't do hurt her more than anything else i've ever done as her daughter. those journals are beyond sacred--they are where she works out all the ugly, selfish, messy, dark things i know she hides from us so we can know her as our comforting, unwavering, diligent and (seemingly) thoughtlessly selfless mom.
my grandma, her mom, asked her once what she was going to do with all her journals one day. without skipping a beat, she said, "burn them."
so probably, i will never know what they say. but in a way there's something really dignified about that. i once wrote about this exact thing for one of my women in literature papers, saying that it was kind of a beautiful thing how much they were a part of her and that it was completely her choice how they lived and died, how they were such an important part of who she was and of her identity but that they belonged to her and to no one else. by writing her narrative i think she was often rewriting it.
in his essay, d'ambrosio also recalls when his father shows him his bed where he is constantly eating, showing him all the food stains and how embarrassing and weird it was that a father needed to tell his son that, for no reason except to show it. to me, this only reinforces the need each of us has to tell our story, and shows the kind of twisty but inexplicably healing and solidifying effect the telling of our story can have.
one of the main themes of the essay is that communication isn't always perfect. d'ambrosio talks about how he started writing letters to his father as a grown man because he "believed we might have something to talk about," and that writing it down made it seem significant and almost like a ritual. that kind of blew my mind--that he started writing the letters because he thought he might have something to talk about with his own father, when the two of them had been through so much together. i think communication often falls apart with grief, which is maybe why so many married couples who lose children end up divorcing at a higher rate. there is just something paralyzing about it, something that can't be said, or that you don't want to say because then something dreaded or hurtful or foreboding comes into reality.
in these letters to each other, the author's dad breaks down into pedantic fact-telling, mistaking it for truth-telling, as he explains to his son all the reasons he's wrong about their shared experiences, especially, i presume, the death of their son and brother. plurality and the way two people can experience something different--and then defend that with solid although rarely unopposed facts and definitions and testimonies--is astounding. i think defending our side of the story can sometimes be a way of denying or foregoing complexity or ultimately conclusion, because if you admit that something is complex or that conclusions depend on circumstances, at best, or that there is no one great Truth, then i think you often discover at the same time that you have nothing to say. it's like in the moment you admit there's not a right answer, you also have nothing to say because if there's no right answer there's no point in even taking about it. but i think this is one reason why writing, and especially corresponding, is so important--we work on and eventually dissolve "Truth" with a big "T" for our individual "truths" with a little "t", becoming a compassionate person who is at peace and understanding with their own individual truth (and, often, their inability to change the truths of others). the works of c.s. lewis come to mind, with their reflection and extensive writing on the most important topics and themes and experiences in his life. i think c.s. lewis was a man at peace because as a writer he did the work to write his peace. much like my mom writing in her journals day after day to remember the good and the bad and form not only her story but herself.
i like how d'ambrosio says that one reason he keeps these documents is because as long as he has them, he and that person are "still in a dialogue." there's something really compounding about what we say to others, especially our family. like once something has been said, it's real. i'm grateful to have read d'ambrosio's essay so i can think more carefully about how to write my own story and also how to tell and show my family that i love and need them.
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