Let My Love Open the Door
On Easter Happily Ever Afters
Easter 2007 is a memory that will stay with me forever and quite paradoxically it is a memory that I retain despite having been in the throes of amnesia. Just three days before I awoke early morning to find my beautiful son had died. This is an event in my life that escapes words and which took my journey in this world to places I had never before imagined.
Indirectly, my child’s death led me to leave academia and to address the fact that although my son’s short, seven-week life was cut short so painfully, he had seven perfect weeks of love, food, shelter, and freedom from disease and war. I couldn’t mourn as many people instructed me. Many said, “Go to a support group,” to which I said, “I really don’t give a fuck about other people’s losses and I am quite sure they don’t give a fuck about mine.” I knew then that mourning was very individual. And lonely.
So, three days after my son’s death, on Easter Day 2007, a university colleague and friend, Silvestra, informed me that she and her partner, Serge, had to take me to the funeral home to identify my son’s body. I asked why since this was already done when we were at the children’s hospital. “Protocol before cremating bodies,” she said dryly. So, off we were with Serge at the wheel, Silvestra, and another woman, Serge’s colleague from the university where they taught.
I forgot that it was Easter. For me, it was just a horrid day where a parent was obliged to go to a gothically decorated funeral home to identify the body of a small child before cremation. The gentleman who greeted us at the funeral home said, “Go in that room,” pointing to a large stained-glass door, “Your son is there.” We entered this large room where a 3-metre cross stood at the front, behind it a set of enormous stained glass windows. At the foot of the cross laid my son in this mini styrofoam “coffin” where he was dressed in blue. As I drew closer to his body, I was as upset by the blue clothing as I was by the cross. I turned to Silvestra and said, “Blue? That’s where their head is? And did they even ask if we were Christian?”
Yes, that’s me, political to the end, but my spirit was crushed. I had brought an orange puja cloth for my son. I started to undress my son’s body and the funeral director stopped me saying, “We will do that. Your son had an autopsy and you don’t want to see his body.” He was a kind man and meant well, but the sanitisation of death was already too much for me three minutes into this journey.
I told him that I would leave him the cloth for later and I took my son’s body in my arms and sprinkled rose-water upon his forehead. As I did this, I accidentally bumped the cross sending it hurtling towards the ground. I remember this scene in slow-motion: my three companions ran to grab hold of the cross to keep it from hitting the ground and there we were, all four of us, holding onto this cross, frozen in time. It was as if we were transported in time to the atelier of Raphael re-enacting some fantastical Biblical narrative, a scene from a bygone era where death is the one constant. It was at this moment that all four of us suddenly burst into laughter at the irony of the moment.
A couple of days later I had to return to the funeral home to collect my son’s ashes. My colleague, Philippe, was driving and he, his wife and I are discussing the book of Job as we returned to my home. Philippe noted that Job lost his children, his possessions, and his health—all taken from him by God. I asked Philippe if Job, after all his suffering, ever found happiness. I was desperate to believe that this was not the dead-end of my life.
Philippe smiled and said, “Job ended up having many children and living a very long life—140 years. In the end, Job lived happily ever after—he went on to have many more children adn he died a very happy man.” Indeed, this is how the story goes: “So the Lord restored what Job had lost after he prayed for his friends, and the Lord doubled all that had belonged to Job.” (Job 42:10) I told Philippe then and there that I wanted my “happily every after.”
Job’s story gave me hope as I travelled through a great many passages of mourning my first child’s life and death. I have been blessed with a fortunate and blessed life. I could hardly be angry with a god who could so sadistically take a child from me. For me, my son's death marked that moment when I knew with all certainty that there was no god. There was only nothingness.
This feeling of nothingness I have not felt since—that is until the brutality of lockdown and the totalitarianism of so many humans willing to lock up the planet to secure their fears. These past two years have been hell for most of us without the means to secure a living from our sofas, for those of us who have no guaranteed income, whose fear of starvation outweighed that of getting a virus. Indeed, the nothingness of this pandemic was brought to us courtesy of the neoliberal chattering class who views their lives as somehow worthy of our collective imprisonment.
I am exiting the shit of the pandemic, the horror of realising what we have been forced to give up, while the elite wax poetic about how much they accomplished during what seems to have been a staycation for them. It’s quite easy to “accomplish” when your fortress is protected by wealth and class privilege. Theirs is the postmodern gallows for the “little people” who pay homage to their fear through the dissolution of life savings, the emaciation of the body, two years of lost sleep, for those of us who struggle to survive.
Survival is both somatic and psychological and humans simply cannot live fully without both being fine-tuned and in sync. Where we were put into a prison and the terminology of correctional facilities fully embraced by the so-called left, “lockdown” came to represent metonymically that which was denied most of the planet struggling for survival. And the fallout to our psyches has been devastating.
Where I was caught within this elite sorcerer’s grasp of my freedom, I have spent the past six months slowly coming to terms with the endgame of this imprisonment. Never before did I think that anything would graze the enormous aporia—the sentiment of sheer loss—of my son’s death. But here we are in 2022 and I am reeling from the aftermath of the tragic and sadistic political strategy aimed at making the poor, the masses, pay for the exchange value of the life of the few, the wealthy.
Fellow humans who think these past two years were at all necessary, I implore you to wake up and smell the carcasses. To the rest of you, we must fight this force of sheer evil and greed with love, political action, and expropriation. To assuage the fears of a tiny minority, we have paid with our bodies, minds, health, and our hearts these past two years. Now we must stand together and fight the tyranny of the elite who will, in a not-so-distant future, again use emotional blackmail, granny, and their certainty that their freedom rests in our captivity.
Today I am drawing a line under this historical and personal tragedy which we sadly share. I am moving forward towards a political future where locking people up will only be employed for those who believe that valid political action in response to a pandemic rests upon locking people up. We must mourn our losses collectively by moving towards mutual freedom where nobody’s fear should ever again implicate or culminate in the mass-imprisonment of the planet.
To my love, Rachele, there is only one thing left for me to say as I awaken from this somnambulant incubus: “Let my love open the door.”