Learning Lonely
This summer, I smacked the roof of my car on the ground. One totaled car and one minor concussion later, I was fine. Bizarrely. Erratically. Incompletely.
Earlier that summer, I hit a dog. Maybe. I thought she would move if I honked, then maybe if I rolled forward slowly. She did not move, until I was almost on top of her. A few days and one vet visit later, her shoulder was shattered, and I assumed it was my fault.
This dog chased cows, and sometimes ran after cars on the freeway. She did not start limping until days after I maybe hit her. But it was my fault, in some deep way, regardless of whether her injury was. I was distracted by her playful, gorgeous collie sibling. I didn't notice that she needed me.
So I took care of her, that summer. Without being asked. I turned her into my project and shepherded her through weeks of aftercare while her actual owners forgot to take her outside to pee and forgot to make sure she had access to water and blamed her when she was re-injured. I turned myself into her guardian angel, and we were both satisfied. Until, as I saw it, justice caught up with me.
I fell asleep. Could happen to anyone, but I had just completed a week-long trek from Oregon to Minnesota by myself, sometimes driving until 9 or 10 at night. When I actually fell asleep, it was 8:45 at night, still bright outside, and I like most drivers in such accidents was only two miles or less from where I was going.
The depression phase of grief is, in my experience, another way to describe the self-loathing that comes from surviving when someone you love has not. Guilt is the strangest and least logical part of an accident. What might have happened if is an irrelevant question, but we keep asking it, again and again. We torture ourselves to make up for the fact we are not being tortured, we are not injured. We are just fine.
Gizelle wakes up in a hospital bed, called by the name of her dead twin. She spends weeks trying to figure out who is to blame for the accident, only to realize that the cause is far beyond anything she can comprehend, let alone control. Janice, a teenager herself, rammed into Isabelle while trying to escape child traffickers. Is she still to blame? Are the traffickers to blame? Who could have prevented the accident?
All of these questions hide the deeper concern Giselle has that, at the instant of impact, she was not properly loving her sister. She was irritated, she was upset, she did not consider her sister's feelings. This one moment is of course nothing compared to the years of love between them, but Giselle does not know that. Cannot let herself accept that. As long as she can remain guilty, her sister might remain alive.
The hardest part of letting go is no longer actively feeling things as a response to what someone else does, says, feels, and how they are in the world--well, that's not true. Everything about grief is hard. But this is one of those hard things.
Giselle's looping thoughts impart a great deal of wisdom to us even as they teach us about her personal experiences. We learn how she sees the world in addition to how she copes with it, and we see her relationship with her sister, Isabelle. We become so entwined with their lives that when Giselle loses Isabelle, who we have met for only a few moments before the crash, we feel as though we are losing Isabelle, too.
One of the things I found so interesting about this novel was that none of the characters were symbolic of things, which was both a bit of a letdown and a great revelation. These characters did not have to stand in for their cultures and communities in addition to living their own lives, possibly because we as Western readers from the United States would be very aware of their lives and the culture they were born into, without needing background information. Maybe turning characters from other, unknown cultures into representations in addition to individuals is necessary, which has implications of course for writing Jewish characters in a non-Jewish world.
The craft of this novel takes a background to its intensively wrought themes, which is I suppose the point. I am uncertain how the novel managed to affect me so much in spite of being intentionally uplifting, but it did.
The last note I have is that this novel takes place almost entirely during a period of time in which the speaker is not connected with her body, yet it feels fully realized and her memories manage to ground the piece and stop it from becoming disembodied. This is also a technique for me to think about.
-Ari
Earlier that summer, I hit a dog. Maybe. I thought she would move if I honked, then maybe if I rolled forward slowly. She did not move, until I was almost on top of her. A few days and one vet visit later, her shoulder was shattered, and I assumed it was my fault.
This dog chased cows, and sometimes ran after cars on the freeway. She did not start limping until days after I maybe hit her. But it was my fault, in some deep way, regardless of whether her injury was. I was distracted by her playful, gorgeous collie sibling. I didn't notice that she needed me.
So I took care of her, that summer. Without being asked. I turned her into my project and shepherded her through weeks of aftercare while her actual owners forgot to take her outside to pee and forgot to make sure she had access to water and blamed her when she was re-injured. I turned myself into her guardian angel, and we were both satisfied. Until, as I saw it, justice caught up with me.
I fell asleep. Could happen to anyone, but I had just completed a week-long trek from Oregon to Minnesota by myself, sometimes driving until 9 or 10 at night. When I actually fell asleep, it was 8:45 at night, still bright outside, and I like most drivers in such accidents was only two miles or less from where I was going.
The depression phase of grief is, in my experience, another way to describe the self-loathing that comes from surviving when someone you love has not. Guilt is the strangest and least logical part of an accident. What might have happened if is an irrelevant question, but we keep asking it, again and again. We torture ourselves to make up for the fact we are not being tortured, we are not injured. We are just fine.
Gizelle wakes up in a hospital bed, called by the name of her dead twin. She spends weeks trying to figure out who is to blame for the accident, only to realize that the cause is far beyond anything she can comprehend, let alone control. Janice, a teenager herself, rammed into Isabelle while trying to escape child traffickers. Is she still to blame? Are the traffickers to blame? Who could have prevented the accident?
All of these questions hide the deeper concern Giselle has that, at the instant of impact, she was not properly loving her sister. She was irritated, she was upset, she did not consider her sister's feelings. This one moment is of course nothing compared to the years of love between them, but Giselle does not know that. Cannot let herself accept that. As long as she can remain guilty, her sister might remain alive.
The hardest part of letting go is no longer actively feeling things as a response to what someone else does, says, feels, and how they are in the world--well, that's not true. Everything about grief is hard. But this is one of those hard things.
Giselle's looping thoughts impart a great deal of wisdom to us even as they teach us about her personal experiences. We learn how she sees the world in addition to how she copes with it, and we see her relationship with her sister, Isabelle. We become so entwined with their lives that when Giselle loses Isabelle, who we have met for only a few moments before the crash, we feel as though we are losing Isabelle, too.
One of the things I found so interesting about this novel was that none of the characters were symbolic of things, which was both a bit of a letdown and a great revelation. These characters did not have to stand in for their cultures and communities in addition to living their own lives, possibly because we as Western readers from the United States would be very aware of their lives and the culture they were born into, without needing background information. Maybe turning characters from other, unknown cultures into representations in addition to individuals is necessary, which has implications of course for writing Jewish characters in a non-Jewish world.
The craft of this novel takes a background to its intensively wrought themes, which is I suppose the point. I am uncertain how the novel managed to affect me so much in spite of being intentionally uplifting, but it did.
The last note I have is that this novel takes place almost entirely during a period of time in which the speaker is not connected with her body, yet it feels fully realized and her memories manage to ground the piece and stop it from becoming disembodied. This is also a technique for me to think about.
-Ari
I really like your point that Giselle struggles so deeply with no longer being able to interact and respond to another person, with dealing with the fact that this person you love, this person who used to actually do things, is gone and will do things no longer. I think this is part of the reason why we learn so much about Isabelle in the novel, because Giselle feels as though she needs to delve into her memories of her sister in order to keep interacting with her; the past, when Isabelle was alive, is influencing the present, when Isabelle is gone. I agree with you that because of this, it feels as though we are losing Isabelle too as we read the book, since Giselle spends the entire novel reconciling the past with the present to completely comprehend the loss of her twin sister.
ReplyDeleteHey roomie! (Rumi?) I appreciate how you point to "Giselle's looping thoughts." Like a pentimento painting, the crash and the moments leading up to the crash surface again and again, like the painting beneath the painting. Each scene in the book, both flashbacks and post-crash scenes, are informed by the loss of Isabelle. It feels overwhelming, inescapable, as I'm sure it feels to Giselle. Of course she feels guilty that she was snappy to her sister that day of the crash. A reminder to us all to be kind to the people we love (and probably everyone else), all of the time. That too is an overwhelming thought.
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