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A review by briandice
Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes
5.0
2013 is the ten year anniversary of my mother’s death.
Pre-dawn, Las Vegas, August 17. “I’m sorry to wake you,” my sister’s voice through the receiver, “but Mom died last night.”
C.S. Lewis: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Barthes conjures words wrenched from suffering. A day’s events are distilled and filtered through the lens of loss. Every ache, an intensity that wounds anew. Barthes: At each “moment” of suffering, I believe it to be the very one in which for the first time I realize my mourning.
I went to bed late the night of August 16th, smug from having won $4,000 playing blackjack. I envision the specter of time tapping me on the shoulder as I laid my head upon the hotel pillow and whispering in my ear, “You will use that money to bury your mother.”
Barthes: As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.). August 18 – 22 in Houston. Our family room is filled with every chair in the house to accommodate visitors. Everyone looks and acts like they are in a play in which everyone has forgotten their lines. My father offers people food, cooked and delivered by other people. I give a dirty look to anyone who unwittingly sits in Shirley’s favorite chair.
November, 2004, a year after Shirley’s death. I am home for Thanksgiving, the second without her. My childhood home has become a Shirley museum. A year after her death and everything is exactly as it was the day before she died. Her medicine bottles sit bedside, clothes in the closet, recipe book open on the counter. I expect to see her walk into the room at any moment. I am the only family member that seems to be bothered. This is the last time I will spend the night in this house, the last holiday celebrated.
Barthes: The most painful point at the most abstract moment…
The family is in the hearse heading to the grave for the ceremony, leading the long line of mourners. Police tag-team the stoplights; we avoid all traffic. I laugh, actually laugh, thinking of Dennis Miller’s joke: “It is a cruel irony that we spend our whole lives waiting at stoplights, and when we die, we don’t have to stop at them. ‘Well, I’m dead, but I’m making good time!’” I cover my chuckle, turn it into a sob. No one notices.
Barthes: Don’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
Holiday season, 2012. I call my sister and say, “Doesn’t it bother you that ten years after mom’s death she still doesn’t have a headstone?” She agrees with me, says it is time we get her one. We have both tiptoed around this issue with our father, but I can’t take it anymore. I imagine people scouting the graveyard for a nice plot, see the unmarked area, inquire and find that it contains an interred beloved. So beloved that they didn’t bother to give her a grave marker. I call my father, tell him we are getting a headstone. “I’ll do it,” he says, defeated. “It just has always felt that to do so would make everything … so final.”
Barthes: To see with horror as quite simply possible the moment when the memory of those words she spoke to me would no longer make me cry.
It’s been ten years, Shirley. I have a daughter you’ve never met. I am married to a different woman. Would you even recognize me?
Pre-dawn, Las Vegas, August 17. “I’m sorry to wake you,” my sister’s voice through the receiver, “but Mom died last night.”
C.S. Lewis: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Barthes conjures words wrenched from suffering. A day’s events are distilled and filtered through the lens of loss. Every ache, an intensity that wounds anew. Barthes: At each “moment” of suffering, I believe it to be the very one in which for the first time I realize my mourning.
I went to bed late the night of August 16th, smug from having won $4,000 playing blackjack. I envision the specter of time tapping me on the shoulder as I laid my head upon the hotel pillow and whispering in my ear, “You will use that money to bury your mother.”
Barthes: As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.). August 18 – 22 in Houston. Our family room is filled with every chair in the house to accommodate visitors. Everyone looks and acts like they are in a play in which everyone has forgotten their lines. My father offers people food, cooked and delivered by other people. I give a dirty look to anyone who unwittingly sits in Shirley’s favorite chair.
November, 2004, a year after Shirley’s death. I am home for Thanksgiving, the second without her. My childhood home has become a Shirley museum. A year after her death and everything is exactly as it was the day before she died. Her medicine bottles sit bedside, clothes in the closet, recipe book open on the counter. I expect to see her walk into the room at any moment. I am the only family member that seems to be bothered. This is the last time I will spend the night in this house, the last holiday celebrated.
Barthes: The most painful point at the most abstract moment…
The family is in the hearse heading to the grave for the ceremony, leading the long line of mourners. Police tag-team the stoplights; we avoid all traffic. I laugh, actually laugh, thinking of Dennis Miller’s joke: “It is a cruel irony that we spend our whole lives waiting at stoplights, and when we die, we don’t have to stop at them. ‘Well, I’m dead, but I’m making good time!’” I cover my chuckle, turn it into a sob. No one notices.
Barthes: Don’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
Holiday season, 2012. I call my sister and say, “Doesn’t it bother you that ten years after mom’s death she still doesn’t have a headstone?” She agrees with me, says it is time we get her one. We have both tiptoed around this issue with our father, but I can’t take it anymore. I imagine people scouting the graveyard for a nice plot, see the unmarked area, inquire and find that it contains an interred beloved. So beloved that they didn’t bother to give her a grave marker. I call my father, tell him we are getting a headstone. “I’ll do it,” he says, defeated. “It just has always felt that to do so would make everything … so final.”
Barthes: To see with horror as quite simply possible the moment when the memory of those words she spoke to me would no longer make me cry.
It’s been ten years, Shirley. I have a daughter you’ve never met. I am married to a different woman. Would you even recognize me?