A scream that gets drowned in a void

A rare insight into parental grief from a fiction writer.

“No one ever thinks of what a violation of the natural order one's child's death means until they have a child themselves. For a parent, there is no greater experience of disorder than their child's death. Suddenly the hours break down, night suppresses day, blood crystallises into wounding needles. Theirs is a scream that gets drowned in a void, a grief whose venom is like no other. Their world shatters, like a mirror on which their image had been reflecting. […]

I ventured into the notion of my daughters' death as if into a nightmare which ultimately was but an exorcism. “If I imagine it, it won't happen, because fiction never ever mixes up with life”, I would tell myself by way of relief. But the nightmare lasted a few years, the years I needed so as to assimilate the fact that, if death happened, it would be an unavoidable reality. I cannot say that I prayed, although I was very close to doing so. The gesture with which I rejected such a recourse was, I think, what brought me back to serenity. No one is the keeper of their future, or at least, no one can say they are until they overtake it and are able to hide that future within their own life, like a part of their own selves. That is why I thought that, if at some point in time I suffered the misfortune of losing one of my daughters, my problem would not be to lose her, but rather worse, to accept my life without her. However, I didn't feel that way about Clara, my wife. Clara's death, just like my own would have to be for her, was a natural event, within the natural order of things, like leaves falling from deciduous trees every autumn. Loneliness, loss, grief…, these would then be the consequences of compliance with one of the laws of life. But a child's death leaves the parent suspended between two voids, a before and an after, and loneliness, grief and loss become an unnatural horror where all hope and all incentive are consumed in themselves, without any support at all, without any consolation.”

Jose Maria Guelbenzu, El amor verdadero [True Love], p.549-50. My own translation.

Valid art

“The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and … woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. […] It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 592.


Or that the real and the sad and the woeful have been becoming utterly unbearable for most people, to the extent that we appear to prefer fiction to fact, virtual worlds to tangible realities, and the safe remoteness of distance to any kind of uncomfortable closeness.

The Little Artist

Clea Salavert, Mother and Daughter Sitting on a Rock (scanned copy of lost original, circa 2006)

It is just a drawing by a three-year old. There is nothing special about it, except that when I first saw it and I asked Clea what it was, the explanation she gave made a lot of sense to me. Once we grow older, we cannot see the world through the eyes of child anymore, so when — or if — we come across a representation of the world as a child sees it, and we are somehow able to trace the interpretation they have made of the world around them, I feel it is a nice surprise.

Of course, at the time I never thought I would end up treasuring this picture the way I do now. It somehow became stuck to the fridge door and stayed there for many years. It is still there, reminding us daily of the little artist she could have been when we fetch the milk for breakfast. The original, of course, was destroyed: it ended up in the recycling bin, like all the many other drawings Clea would make in her early years. I guess I should be glad that one day I took it to work and scanned it. I used Photoshop to add the title Clea had given it, and her name.

It was really meant to be kind of a joke: I would hang her masterpiece on the wall and admire it with a feigned critical eye, making teasing comments such as ‘the evident masterful combination of light, shade and colour’, or ‘the expert control of the line where the absence of light would make it invisible’; nonsense of that kind she giggled to. Now, I cannot remember exactly when she made it, but you might wish to consider that this is one of the few ways of escape we, the grieving parents, have at our disposal: to fictionalise their past, since we have not been given the chance to create a record of their future.

Clea enjoyed all make-believe games. She loved impersonations, and in her rather original games she loved to pretend she was someone else. I wish I were someone else, too, so I could fictionalise a present and a future that did not include her absence as the overwhelming feature.

Writing grief: one disappointing experience

In early 2011 I enrolled in a Postgraduate Certificate in Writing via distance education. In theory, I should have completed it by now: they were only four units and, frankly, its contents did not appear to be either too time-consuming or highly intellectually-challenging.

The first unit I attempted was called ‘Critical Friends: The Real and Virtual Support of Writers’. It was described as an exploration of “how 'critical friends' can enrich others' writing skills and their own insights into the processes of writing”. On paper, the description was quite appealing, and I was looking forward to engaging in some robust reflection on writing and critical thinking.

In any case, I was working fulltime and had as well numerous translations to do throughout the term. Needless to say, I was unable to put in the necessary effort to achieve something. It was never my intention to seek a High Distinction grade, yet I did manage to read most of the lectures and tutorial materials thoroughly, and I even found other writings, which I found to be actually more engaging that those suggested by the course convenors.

We were asked to write something short and submit it to a ‘critical friend’ for feedback, and then write a reflection on what ways this feedback had led us to rethink and/or rewrite the piece. I wrote a short story called ‘By the sea’, which you can read in Hypallage, the magazine of the MWAA. In turn, we would also provide feedback for our critical friend’s writing. It should have been quite straightforward, really. But nothing is these days. [Note: Perhaps it might be a good idea to read the story before you keep reading below, but I leave that to you.]

Then I received my assessment report. Rather than focusing on my writing, the assessor chose to provide some free, unrequested psychological advice: “Your critical reflection is a thorough consideration of [Name suppressed]’s report, good work. You re-think your text with reference to the critical friendship experience. [New paragraph] I am very sorry to hear about the tragic loss of your young daughter, Jorge, and that this story is about those circumstances. It is extremely difficult to write about such a traumatic and recent event, Jorge, and I want you to bear this in mind. You may need to let a lot more time pass. The loss of your daughter will always suffuse your writing because she will always be a part of you and perhaps these events need less direct attention and a more indirect approach”.

I was puzzled, I felt perplexed. “Extremely difficult?” What would they know? They may think, “wow, it must be extremely difficult to write about this subject”. But it never occurred to them that the fact is, it is also very necessary. Actually, it is essential for anyone traumatised by loss and a catastrophe to be given the chance to tell their story.

I was of course baffled that someone who did not know me at all seemed to be advising me not to write my story. I did lodge a complaint. It was dealt with as best as could be in the circumstances. End of the story.

In the last eighteen months I have developed an interest in the interactions of grief and writing. I have done very little research as yet, but I can assure you that there is a lot of interest out there. The works by Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates and Maggie MacKellar, for example, have raised a great deal of attention among scholars in general.

I have now and then thought about my ‘extremely’ disappointing experience. I have come to realise that what truly hurt was that the assessor resorted to clichés and hackneyed phrases: I have underlined the sentence where the real problem was. I now believe that was what led me to take the immediate decision to discontinue my studies.