Words Spoken--An explanation of the work

An explanation of "Words Spoken"

When my son Jeremy was growing up, he had a talent for remembering things that David and I had forgotten, so we would sometimes call him "The Rememberer." And David had a talent for finding things that Jeremy or I had mislaid, so we would sometimes call him "The Finder." At one point, I asked the two of them, "If Jeremy's the rememberer, and David is the Finder, what would a nickname be for me?" Jeremy answered, "You're the one who goes away."

Of course this phrase has been with me ever since. In the morass of guilt that any parent carries after the death of their child, these words are an unchanging catalyst that over and over again, across the sixteen years since Jeremy's death, precipitates my sense of failure and loss. 

And why this nickname? It was true that my job involved some travel, a night or two or three away from time to time, attending a conference or giving a guest lecture somewhere. It had never occurred to me that these were significant absences to Jeremy. Although the nickname did not make its way into later conversation, the next birthday gift Jeremy got me was a wheeled laptop bag, to make it easier for me when I was traveling with my computer. 

The nickname may have referred to my travel away from home, but I think also of the significant part of the day that Jeremy was in day care or after school care, rather than at home with me or David.  One of the things I discovered about Jeremy after his death, talking with his friends, was that his being adopted as an infant was a larger part of his mental landscape than I knew. I think that may have given him vulnerability to a sense of abandonment that I didn't have a clue about. 

In July of 2016, preparing for an exhibition of my work about loss, I wrote in a blog post: "The series of quilts I've been making for the last twelve years is complete—this work that has been about the death of my son Jeremy and what it is like to live with loss. I have put out into the world, as best I can, what there has been in me to say.  There are no more angles to cover.  This doesn't mean that my deep sense of loss is over, just that I have said what I can about it." Perhaps no new angles, as my previous work included a quilt on regret. But guilt is different from regret, even while overlapping. So, here's something else I found I had to say.

As I thought about the place of these words of Jeremy in my life, I realized that there were other clips of speech that live on in my head, bits of concentrate of a relationship, of a person's meaning to me. My plan is to do a series of these in stitched panels. I will do at least one more, words spoken by my mother. Perhaps I'll do a half-dozen. The others are not so painful. . .  

I'd also like to tell you about the design and construction of the work, but I'll save that for a later post. 

I showed a draft of this post to my husband, and in addition to improving the prose here and there, he asked me, "Why are you writing publicly about this?" Good question—why not just keep it private? My first answer is that I've learned, through people's responses to my earlier work, that others really appreciate having difficult messages out in public, that it gives them a chance to consider similar things in their own lives, and it also helps them understand people they know who have gone through such an experience. This was most notable in the outpouring of response I received when I showed "Self-Portrait, Year 2: Beneath the Surface" at a national exhibit. In the case of "Words Spoken," even if the specific words may have no resonance, I'm thinking many of you carry words from long ago in your head, an isolated phrase or sentence that stays with you, standing in for a person, a relationship. 

Then my second answer to David's question, after I thought a bit more:  Writing publicly about this is also a form of penance.