Over the last month, I began several times a post that talked about grief in terms that made it abundantly clear to me that I was unable to talk intelligently about my own grief. This despite the inclusion of several homilies stolen from Latin and scenes taken from Virgil and Apollonius Rhodius, which technique everyone knows increases your understanding of your own situation through a kind of paratactical organization of time, emotion, and erudition. Everyone also knows (and, here, please read "Everyone knows" as "The author now knows") that it is an empty and symbolic way of dealing with anything, this endless referring to an external locus where supposedly universal scenes are depicted. It is an attempt at vocalizing what is essentially doubly marked with, on the one hand, an introspective silence, and on the other, a kind of continous mental screaming that overawes all thought and becomes just another way of remaining dumb. One camouflages the inadequacy of one's own rendition of events with someone else's inadequate rendering of other events, emotions, times, places...
I suppose that I just want those of you who still read this blog to know that I am planning to continue it as a semi-regular project. I just needed to gain a little distance from the events of early January, because to write about them immediately somehow seemed inappropriate. It seemed to take those events and make them abstract. I felt that the kind of detachment I would need to have to write the post I nevertheless tried to write five or six times would somehow be damaging in the end. Certainly, processing the emotions I experienced was difficult enough, lapsed often enough into confused or embarrassed or abject silence without the added abstraction of text. Now, though, text is creeping back in at the edges.
For those of you who do not know the nature of those events--cannot have known because of the fundamental impediments to the spread of information with such sharp contours despite, or perhaps because of, the intricate intimacy of the social networks in which we are all ceaselessly engaged and with which we are continuously engaging and the extreme reluctance everyone (including myself, cf. paragraphs one and two, supra) feels in the face of this topic, combined with my permanent, shuddering distaste for the telephone and people's (sometimes quite heated) arguments about how "private" a person I am...
I am starting over.
In early January, my wife and I suffered the loss of our daughter, Elissa, who was diagnosed with triploidy in mid-December. Labor was induced, following confirmation of the diagnosis by amniocentesis and doctor's orders, because of the dangers inherent in continuing the pregnancy. Elissa did not survive. She was cremated soon thereafter.
For those of you who did know, and who offered your support (in whatever form), I wish to take this moment to (however (yes, yes) inadequately) express my gratitude. Thank you.
For those of you who did not know, and who might be saddened or angered or...by my reluctance to pick up a phone, or let you know in some more pleasant way than this, I wish to express my sincerest regrets. [I have grown comfortable with regret in the past few weeks--comfortable in a way which is striking to me.] Please know that I made no conscious choices to exclude anyone from the process. I blundered my way through as best I could.
I am sorry.
