Telling the story

This week I retrieved my copy of Wolsterstorff's book 'Lament for a Son' from one friend, in order to lend it to another. In between I read most of it again. If you've read my blog since 2009, you'll know the insights that I have gained from that book, but this time I noticed something else. In the foreword, Wolterstorff writes about how, twelve years on, his son's death is still important to his identity. Not immediately, but soon after meeting someone, he wants to say "I am one who has lost a son".

In meeting people over the last three years, I find in myself a split response. Sometimes I hold back, more with younger people. I might mention my wife in the past tense, but don't explain. I have two children. Do people notice the lack of a wedding ring? Perhaps they assume I'm divorced. I'm not concerned about judgements they might make about me, but it pains me to imagine that they might think badly of Jen. But I know that unless and until I say Jen's name, and talk about her life and death, there will never be any depth in that relationship. Jen is at the intersection of everything that matters to me: love, faith, death, grief, family, work, hope, happiness and home. There is the radiance and the darkness of those years. If you shy away from these things, you'll never understand me.

I imagine myself as like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, whose penance is to tell his tale as a warning to others:

            Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
            With a woeful agony,
            Which forced me to begin my tale;
             And then it left me free.

             Since then, at an uncertain hour,
             That agony returns:
             And till my ghastly tale is told,
             This heart within me burns.

Talking about Jen is also a moment for me of great vulnerability, which exposes my grief and love to the questions and thoughts of others, and occasionally also to careless platitude. Talking to my divorced friends, I'm learning how they develop a set of answers to the obvious questions, depending on the degree to which they want to deflect the questioner, and avoid painful topics. This blog can sometimes relieve me of the burden of telling the whole story to someone and taking them through the darkness,  but instead can allow that person to absorb what they want. The danger is that the blog can create a false sense of intimacy - there is nothing untrue in what I say, but I distill my experience, and there's much rawness that I'll never write about here.

But beyond people coming to know me as a person, I also want them to know Jen. Strangely they have already met her without being aware of it, in the sort of person I have become, in the character of our children, in the effect she had on our time together. So I must create out of words, as I do here, an image of who Jen was and is. It's never enough. At times I meet someone whom I think Jen would really have appreciated, and in that moment I so want them to meet her. Then I am overwhelmed with the sadness it's no longer possible in this life, and we are stuck only with words.

Elliot Perlman's new book "The Street Sweeper" is about the stories of people and history. His character Adam Zignelik, an historian, muses:

                  Also, it's a way of honouring those who came before us. We can tell their stories. Wouldn't you want someone to tell your story? Ultimately, it's the best proof there is that we mattered. And what else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone? 

Jen mattered deeply to me and many others, and I want to find ways to keep telling her story. Ted Hughes writes of reading an entry in his wife's journal a long time after her death:

I look up - as if to meet your voice
Will all its urgent future
That has burst upon me. Then look back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story. 

I'm powerfully reminded too of what it is for me to follow Jesus.  I have been transformed, and in a strange and veiled way people are encountering Jesus in me without being fully aware of it. I want to keep finding ways to tell that story, not to focus on me but to point to the one who matters most.