discussion about the ways in which video games might offer metaphors through which we can connect with each other in surprisingly profound ways. The essay also looks at the ways in which gaming helped me both grieve and heal.
Writing is a key tool in healing, and a couple of pieces address that explicitly: “Essay in Search of a Poem,” for example, which traces my attempts to write a poem too soon after Gray’s death. Underlying all these pieces, though, even the ones not explicitly about writing, is the need to find a writing structure that houses grief honestly, especially in the second section, which was written in the aftermath of Gray’s death. The pieces in the second section are, for the most part, shorter, because they were written closer to the death, when any attempt at narrative seemed like a lie. The early pieces in this section, especially the first really short ones like “First Days” and “The Amaryllis Bud,” function more like fragments, prose poems, if you will. Anyone who has experienced tragedy knows that all one can do for a time is wail, and it seemed important to acknowledge that.
Many of the travel pieces are also in this section, and eventually the reader can witness me able to reflect more calmly, rifling off new landscapes to explore the landscape of grief inside.
The final piece of the second section, “Memory, Ever Green,” written in Paris, is built around memories of my father’s life, and asks questions about how we might best remember those we love who have destroyed their lives with drink or other substances.
The decision to make this book a collection of essays rather than one unbroken narrative was one I thought about for a long time. Wouldn’t there be a larger audience for an uninterrupted narrative, one that moved inevitably through beginning, conflict, resolution, the traditional art of story? Maybe, but to camouflage the way in which grief and healing moves in fits and starts, as well as the fits and starts of a life caught in addiction seemed to me the most profound of falsehoods. Some of the pieces in this collection were written before Gray died, and I did not want to go back and change them to reflect my knowledge that he would soon die. It felt more honest to let them stand as genuine moments in time.
It also seemed wrong to try to make all the pieces seem as if they were written in one voice. Depending on what the essay seems to need I might write in first, second or third person. Sometimes the essays are excruciatingly personal and other times I use a more distanced approach. There’s at least one poem in the collection, depending on how you define poetry. I haven’t tried to project a single voice or a single narrative, as we don’t all speak and think with one voice. Sometimes I’m an angry mother, sometimes a grieving one. Sometimes I write as a poet, sometimes as an essayist. Sometimes I privilege lyricism, sometimes narrative. Sometimes I write as a teacher, sometimes a critic. I am always writing as an alcoholic. I am all of these things, just as my son was a musician, a passionate lover of science fiction and video games, an angry young man, a depressed young man, a loving young man, an alcoholic, and an addict.
Although AA was important for me in the early days of my own recovery, and though I still cherish the friends and community I found there, I couldn’t complete all the steps (see “The Third Step” for one take on why), so I took what seemed useful and left the rest. One of the things I did take from AA, however, was the message of Step 12: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” Having personally experienced the ways in which writing could encourage healing and assist with recovery, in 2007 I co-founded, with Sarah Shotland, Words Without Walls, a program that sends MFA students and faculty into jails, prisons, and rehabilitation facilities to teach creative writing. I teach myself as part of the program in Sojourner House, an in-house rehab center for women who are mothers. “The Ink That Binds: Creative Writing and Addiction,” the final essay in the collection, was inspired by teaching in this facility.
My son once said to me that he didn’t think he could be creative (and by that he meant write music) without being high. This made me sad because I know a great number of writers (including myself) who are in recovery and still able to be creative. Facilitating a group that supported each other in creative fellowship, a group that could then go on to share with others, seemed a good way to “pass it on.”
This collection tells two stories, one of a fall, and one of healing, and is yet another way, I hope, of passing it on.
I
Do No Harm
That’s our discipline style. A paddle is part of a principal’s toolbox. If we remove that tool, we may open a can of worms that cannot be closed.
—Ron Price, Dallas Independent School District trustee
The week before my son started kindergarten, I trimmed the long hair tail I’d let him grow. He hadn’t wanted me to trim it because, he said, if it got long enough, he’d become a lady, which seemed sort of cool to him at the time. It was 1989, and we were living in Dallas, Texas. A photograph taken on his first day of school shows him wearing a new Batman sweatshirt, stonewashed jeans, and new sneakers. He’s standing in front of his new school, Lakewood Elementary, holding a purple lunch box and smiling brightly. His blonde hair, tail-less, is neatly combed to the side. It’s one of the saddest photographs I own. He’s happy, naïve, full of promise, and his future seems as unmarred as the cloudless August morning. I was excited that first day too. All the hustle and bustle, all the children in their new clothes, all the hopeful faces of the parents mirroring my own. The new cars and well-dressed moms and dads dropping off their well-dressed kids impressed me. For the last three years, I’d been divorced from Gray’s father, putting myself through graduate school, and Gray and I had been living just above the poverty line. Now I had a part-time teaching job and two roommates to help with the rent. For the first time since we’d left his father, Gray and I were living in a “good” neighborhood.
He came home from school that first week quiet; I couldn’t get him to talk much about how things were going. On Friday morning, though, when I woke him, he rubbed his eyes and said, “Today is tomorrow, Mommy.”
“What do you mean, sweetie? Today is today. It’s Friday, a school day.”
“No, it’s Saturday. I don’t have to go to school today,” he said, pulling the covers over his head.
After some cajoling and threatening, I got him out of bed and to school on time, but since I’m an educator myself, I was disappointed that he seemed already disenchanted with school. That night, he had a series of nightmares, one about a two-foot long scorpion, another about a kidnapper who could take his head off and put it back on, and the last involving his teacher, who appeared as a witch with a magic diamond that made kids look ugly. He slept with me that night.
Monday afternoon, one week into the term, I discovered a note from the principal in Gray’s book bag. At the top was the Dallas Independent School District letterhead. Below, the principal had handwritten:
Parents of Gray Gideon:
Please see me as soon as possible about several problems that Gray is having at school. His teacher is having problems with him, and I have had to correct Gray many times during and after lunch.
Larry Williams, Principal
After dropping Gray off the next morning, I met with the principal in his office. He was a short, plump man, balding and ruddy-cheeked, who spoke with a heavy Texas accent. He looked me square in the face.
“I’ll get right to the point, Mrs. Gideon. Your son has Attention Deficit Disorder. He needs to be put on Ritalin.”
To
