Last night in a dream, I suddenly remembered that I had been charged with looking after a small and special mouse, which was housed inside an intensive care crib in my backpack. This special mouse received all its nutrients via a teat-like drip feed. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to refill this drip feed for several days. In fact, I’d left the mouse in my bag and forgotten about it entirely. Opening my bag, I found the mouse, which was dry and dead. Panicking, I poured water into the crib — thinking, madly, that I could somehow reconstitute it, like Tang.
Despite my feeling this week of calm distance from a world of guilty implications — that perhaps we hadn’t done enough to save my father-in-law, that somehow we’d accidentally killed him — my dream has shown me the shallowness of rhetoric. Those assurances (from others and myself) that we’d done everything in our power are hollow if there is no working through, a proper kneading of experience. Anything else simply papers over the crack and turns into a Hallmark card. Because I’ve been eerily calm all week, and if I look hard enough I’ll see that this calm has been haunted from the beginning by the memory of him collapsing in my arms, his eyes rolling back into their sockets, his limp weight affording my no leverage, slipping from me. That image has always been there, and now I have acknowledged it.
+ + +
The other day my nine-year-old nephew turned to me and asked, “Do you know how to mourn?”
