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Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath
Do not hang your head or clench your fists when even your friend, after hearing the story, says, My mother would never put up with that. Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, more often, a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered. The hundredth time your father says, But she hated violence, why would she marry a guy like that?— don't waste your breath explaining, again, how abusers wait, are patient, that they don't beat you on the first date, sometimes not even the first few years of a marriage. Keep an impassive face whenever you hear Stand By Your Man, and let go your rage when you recall those words were advice given your mother. Try to forget the first trial, before she was dead, when the charge was only attempted murder; don't belabor the thinking or the sentence that allowed her ex-husband's release a year later, or the juror who said, It's a domestic issue— they should work it out themselves. Just breathe when, after you read your poems about grief, a woman asks, Do you think your mother was weak for men? Learn to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought- cloud above your head, dark and heavy with the words you cannot say; let silence rain down. Remember you were told, by your famous professor, that you should write about something else, unburden yourself of the death of your mother and just pour your heart out in the poems. Ask yourself what's in your heart, that reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and contend with what it means, the folk saying you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: that one does not bury the mother's body in the ground but in the chest, or—like you — you carry her corpse on your back.