quiet in the silence

A thick falling snow always quiets the world. Even the howls of wind outside are muffled. This is our fourth or fifth, actually I don't remember how many at this point, blizzard of this winter. I am up early - well not actually. It is 7am and I was up a little before 6am. That has been my normal ever since my son started sleeping through the night. Up until he turned two, he was up at around 5am every day...and so was I. Now he is sleeping a bit longer, usually closer to 6am. But today he is asleep, along with my mother, and the house spread with quiet.

It must have been a long time since I have immersed myself in quiet. This uninterrupted, unbroken morning comes as such a relief, and yet a foreign one. I am so distanced from my former self, the one who moved through the world but not of it, for days, weeks at a time. I remember quite vividly my sorrowful year at a prestigious, yet isolated college in the northern hinterlands of New England. Yes, full of sorrow, and the interiority of loss built an enclosed space around me. I walked around as if in a tomb, going for days without speaking a word or interacting with another human being. When you step apart from the world, mute, everything does become quiet. Yet sorrow for what? There was no particular reason, no particular event. There was one boy with whom I had been close who was struggling with his own depression; he had withdrawn from the world and from me. But was that enough to cause the extreme sort of removal that I myself had initiated?

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I wrote the above two paragraphs two or three years ago when quiet was indeed a rarity. Now I sit, once again, worlds apart from a past me, under the weight of silence. My now 6-year old is spending his first weekend away from me with his father under a court order which came on abruptly and painfully. It is not truly silent - as usual, I hear the cars pass on the state highway outside our house; the air conditioner buzzes on and off; the hum of heat rising into the day vibrates itself through the closed windows; robins and chickadees sing their morning rounds.

No, it is the silence of oblivion, of absence, of what is but is not. I do not know this world without my son bumping around in his room when he wakes and then calling mellifluously down the stairs "Mommy?" It is the silence of you wake up and there you are, still alive, yet without all that you would call life.

I may seem melodramatic. Perhaps I am. The emotional anguish is the moment, though, building outward to fill the silence. I have twinges of what it would be like to lose a child. Their toys and papers from school and small pieces of string and tiny clothing all around, underfoot, within view...their voice never in earshot, the amplitude of their calls and laughter displacing none of your space. The composer Samuel Barber is quoted in an article in The New York Times (Oct. 3, 1971) as saying that "I can also tell you that one of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does as that I live mostly in the country. I like being surrounded by nature. I have always believed I need a circumference of silence." In his case, he is filling the silence with music. The space of silence to create. The roundness of the shape of his silence embraces him and opens up, circling around from end to beginning, like the earth or the solar system. My silence is not a circumference unless it is a noose. The weight of silence already bursting with creation missing, with space like sky to atmospherically echo all you no longer have.

I wrote some untranslatable notes from my previously unfinished post - the weight of future pain, that of being a spectator...something about the recognition of my struggle making me feel a sense of loss. Oh me me me. The old me could entirely fill the silence with my own pain. The current me can too, yet now the pain feels valid, feels equally external and connected as it does interiorized whereas my sense of my older ineffable sorrow feels Werther-like, manufactured in order to romanticize the space of sorrow itself. The child I grew inside my body is gone - it is easy to pinpoint the silence now.

I admit that I was jealous of others' silence once. I wrote years ago: "It is so quiet this morning that I can hear others - my bachelor friend painting all weekend in one of the previous blizzards, the scratch of the brush on the canvas, the struggle of his self-expression, the space of making and doing, the sound of me making silence in his presence. And now they begin to destroy the quiet: my son coughing, the water rushing through the pipes, the floor creaking with the weight of my mother's footfalls upstairs." Now it is the silence that destroys. Friends have recommended I take its offerings, hold its hand again, let my own voice pulsate its thickened air. Can you find yourself amidst silence?

There is a room in Minneapolis which has taken the title of 'the quietest place on earth.' Away from the notifications, the headphones, the outside tainted by traffic, airplanes, and leaf blowers, the anechoic chamber allows for a space where noise is measured in negative decibel levels. Though some find the deactivation the room enables therapeutic, others become anxious or disoriented in less than an hour. If noise has been identified as a threat by the World Health Organization, why am I so terrified of the silence?

Steve Orfield who is the president of Orfield Laboratories explains: "Silence is the ability to step out of the world and to be passive." When you take away all of the noise, all of the stimulus, what returns is the opportunity for one to clarify oneself. This 'stepping into myself' is the silence I am afraid of, the silence that hurts. It is the me that is afraid of losing my son's need for me. It is the me that is not yet sure what I am again without constantly being a mother. It is the me who is so used to giving and interrupting myself that I am unacquainted with who I have become. It is the me ready to continue pouring me into every open glass rather than submerge into my own bath, feel the cool of the water on my soul, and begin to swim again. "The highest order thing we can give ourselves, we already own." In this case, Mr. Orfield means peace. For me, I am going to try to sit with the quiet in the silence, because it is the quiet of my own sorrow...once as again. It is the quiet of my fears and my deepest love. The gift of knowing myself is terrifying. I once sought it constantly and it was more terrifying then...because I could never find it; I could never nail it down. I am ultimately unknowable even to myself, a shifting, raw movement within the silence. I am not my son. I am not only his mother. I am sorrow, I am silence, and I am the noise, the voice I can make and the one that might be able to encompass the opposite poles of gentle and powerful. As Jason Rosenthal writes in his piece, "My Wife Said You Want to Marry Me," "loss is loss is loss" and when those of us prepare our loved ones for it in a way that invites new life, they can use that empty space to write a new story. As I prepare my son for a life that doesn't always include me, and prepare him with gentleness, support, and encouragement, my new story begins.