The Sound of The Bells

“It’s like I missed a transition in my life, so when I cry I feel like a child. It’s like I never had anyone there when I was crying and not a child. Babies cry. Adults suck it up. I lived by that for a long time. It’s how I got through things. But I’m an adult, and adults do cry. I don’t know how to cry and feel like an adult. But I know it’s possible, and I want to learn how to do it.” -Therese Ragen
 
Sometimes I fear that I cry too much. I cry on trains, a lot. I don’t think about it much, how it must look, a grown man crying on public transportation. I have gotten to a point in my life where I cannot and will not fight the feeling when it arrives. Something is trying to tell me something. What that something is, I suppose, is very young and very wounded. But I am no longer so young or so wounded. So, why the tears?

A body remembers even if our minds cannot. The immensity comes in waves, it washes over me when I am a public body and when I am a private body. It doesn’t respect boundaries all that well, it doesn’t play well with separation, a time and a place for everything. It’s early, young, and ever hungry to be felt. Sometimes, I think, it feels too much. Grief that is unserviceable to growth recurs again and again, at a certain point, the ability to track its change in temperature becomes compromised. Not just sadness for what is missing, but sadness for what is gained alongside what is missing. This is the thing to lean into.

I am aware of it now in moments of silence. There is a room I go to once a week, and inevitably there is a moment of silence so long that it can seem either beautiful or terrifying or often both. But the silence is shared. And its change in temperature took a while to register with this particular body. One day, towards the end of a session with my therapist, I am aware of a silence between the two of us that doesn’t need to be filled or denied, a sacred holding of minutes marked by the gentle rise and fall of our shared breathing, our bodies at ease with one another’s rhythm. At 3 pm the church bells across the street will ring, and we will both smile at exactly the same moment, an unbidden exhalation of breath. The light is falling softly on the carpet. I don’t want to get up but know that I have to. Get up, body, I hear myself tell myself.

Growing up there was not a lot of silence in my home. There were loud voices, rage, aggression, threats, curses, slamming doors, unhealthy communication from adults to children and vice a versa. The body remembers the loudness of it all. And so when silence comes it can so often be filled with the residues of past screams and haunting’s. If I was observed as a child it was in the context of there being something wrong with me, defective, bad.

My therapist tells me that she has been watching my body as I speak, tracking my movements with certain stories. “There is a rhythm where your body and your words meet that I have only ever caught glimpses of before, but today it is palpable, it is everywhere.” It catches me, not off guard, but somewhere in the middle. I feel, for the first time in…forever, some kind of physical spontaneity in my pores. It is nice, for once, to be watched for small signs of life and not for blame or defect. I am not bad, wrong, ugly, defective, I am changing, right here, right now, moment by moment. There are so many ways this could have turned out and yet the very worst was kept enough at bay.

My father is the most explosive man I know. I imagine he has come close to murder countless times. And I think of the murder he himself witnessed at seven years old, playing marbles in an alley beside his apartment, where a man was stabbed to death right in front of him. Did that moment forever alter my father? The world is not a safe place, it taught him. But this he already knew. In his home with his mother’s schizophrenia and his father’s alcoholism and blind rage. “My father almost killed me one day but my mother stepped in between us and stopped him,” he tells me. Mental breakdown did not stop a mother’s loving instinct to protect her son from his father. I remember moments when I was also sure that my father would kill me. Slamming me into walls, he would bite his finger so hard as a way of diffusing what would happen if he didn’t. It was his trademark, or more aptly, it was his fathers.

I have never bitten down on my finger, not once. I cry a lot, too much, I fear. And now I have a better sense of what these tears are communicating to me; that it is okay to be soft. There is a method to it all. It protects me from something else. Something explosive. The fear behind the fear, or the sadness behind the tears is what could happen if the capacity to feel vulnerable were not strong or pronounced enough. Fathers and sons, sons and fathers. The transmission of energy from one reactor to another, if not handled carefully, an explosion could and most certainly would occur.

The body remembers. It remembers the rage and the loudness of my home. And so it prompts tears that feel young because they are protecting me, then and now, from early damage. And the damage is never done. It is never over. And yet, it does change.

Something about silence was for so long intolerable. It had to be filled, with music or films or ideas or self recriminations, but never with silence. There had to be some kind of noise in between the spaces, an audio dissociation. But now I can almost taste the silence. I am waiting for the sound of the church bells, I know they will come, and I know that it is safe to sit here and wait for them with another. We hold this moment together, the two of us. We have survived the very worst, the early years. And while this is not graduation day, it is a sacred moment felt between the two of us that is decidedly different, absolutely palpable.

In therapy with a patient named Ben, Therese Ragen writes of a moment not unlike moments like this;

Therese: You live in an emotional triangle of longing and fear and shame, moving back and forth among them.

Ben: So other people have this problem too? Why aren’t there any 12 step programs for it? Why isn’t there a place you can go to get over it? I mean, aren’t there some exercises that I can do?

Therese: We’re doing what you can do. We’re doing it as we speak.

Ben: But aren’t there some remedies, some life remedies, or whatever? Like get a dog, learn how to take care of it, let it depend on you, depend on it, exercises in life like that?

Therese: That couldn’t hurt.

Ben: But seriously, suppose the antidote is something like that, just as a category to sum up a variety of things that are probably needed, love. Suppose that getting through the fear and shame of being exposed as not worthy, getting through that to finding – and I’m not sure how much of it is finding and how much of it is creating this deeper, truer self – this self where there is passion and life – if what is needed is this category of responses called love from another human being but you’re not ready to be loved – it’s too scary and too exposing – then where does that leave me?

Therese: One place that leaves you is right here. (I told him, slowly and deliberately) right here.

***

For now, this silence feels like it could go on forever. But the afternoon church bells across the street will ring. And it is not the loud shadow of my past homes that scares me the most… sometimes, sometimes, it is just this; that although I still carry all that happened to me I do not necessarily carry it with me in the same way. It scares me because it is a large part of my story and because I must let part of it, the part of me that was in it but is no more, go. I must welcome a new presence on board. I must get better acquainted with this new me that can now appreciate silence, cherish it, even. If I keep one foot in tomorrow and one foot in yesterday, I am missing today. Today, I am not missing anything. I am waiting for the soft sound of the bells.

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