August 2001
My first week in NYC. Concrete towers. Cars–rivers of them. People–tireless, endless, forever grids of hundreds of people in view. I walk by a homeless kid sitting against a building. Taxis honk by, it’s like the City Symphony Orchestra. The kid’s cardboard sign says he’s deaf. Past me flow conversations and arguments and footsteps, all a piece of the sound. I imagine what it’s like to–not hear–this city. I turn off the sound, let the quiet inside dampen everything. I imagine a city under water, life moving about all the same, silent.
September 2001
New York City was quiet for three days after the strike. Not a taxi blew its horn. Sirens, the only sound on the street besides car doors closing, voices subdued, self-aware.
October 11, 2001
I’m headed to class. People cram into the train. I can see the conductor. A few minutes into the ride, looks at his watch. The train slows, stops. He says, “I got 8:46.” On the intercom, he announces a minute of silence. We are a steel tube stuffed with humans. There is not a sound. A minute passes. The train picks up motion again, then speed. The silence remains.
August 20, 2011
Today, I am thinking of Susan Blake’s comment on last week’s post, the ritual of “sitting with The Widow.” I’m thinking of the memories and conversation that have come in this project of recalling grief, some that feel like blunt trauma themselves. I’m listening, like I do every day, for the memory that wants to be told next. And I’m hearing silence. Silence. And more silence. Silence that follows death, comes close behind trauma, sinks into the crevices and takes hold, to cocoon us for a while in safety between what once was and what will be.
. . . . . . . . . . .
(You can read all of the Memory to Light stories in order on the side bar -–>)
Thanks for reading Day 10 of “Memory to Light: 31 Days of Stories, August 11 – September 11, 2011.” It is an exercise in writing about loss, for the purpose of letting grief wake, live, and pass through the system. Grief is transformation. Story is transformation. Our world could use a some wakeful transformation right now. Take a peek at the introductory post for the full story of what we’re up to.
Join me
Consider this project an online story circle. Read a story that moves you. Write your own on your blog. Link it to the comments below, so we can read your piece. If you don’t have a blog, write your story in the comments.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
on the way back from the crematorium our car was silent. i opened the window to let in fresh air and i could hear children playing and arguing and a lawn mower started up, a car alarm went off. two neighbours laughed.
i wanted to scream out of the window to shut them all up. did they not know what had happened? my mother had died and my life had shifted into ‘after death’ and how could this go on as if everything was normal?
i needed silence so much and all i got was ordinary life.
I just got off the phone with my dear friend Peggy, who now lives in Manhattan. I called her because she has just passed another birthday, bringing her past 58. I asked her how she felt about that. She said she got over it, meaning, she stopped lamenting over another year of growing older within a body that will never return to youth. This is a dread that old and sick people confront: the loss of a care-free body. And with that loss, along with a pile of years mounting behind us, comes the reminder that we all are living with a ticking clock marking off our days of physical expression on this planet. It’s sobering, this loss of youth. I look behind me, down the train to the cars that will be the last to pull into the station; the young ones. And then I look ahead toward the engine, to the souls who will end their journey before I end mine. We’re all on the same train, and yet some of us still have the luxury of a time to forget that we all die. That buffer of youth, that longer time, has left me now. I can no longer forget. Nor can my parents, who will soon take that leap into the unknown. I only hope, that by the time I must take that leap myself, I will no longer be afraid. I don’t ask my parents if they are. I am also afraid of their answers.
Irv
Irving Podolsky recently posted..Comment on FORCED TO TAKE THE JOB by Edwin Tucker