18/10/2022
"This is not a memoir in the usual sense. It is the story of Jim's life only as that story pertains to his attempt to recover the memory of his childhood, after early trauma, an attempt that shaped his art, just as his art finally allowed him access to that shuttered world. And so it is equally the story of his development as an artist.
Jim glimpsed his mother, from the hall, bleeding and dying, before someone thought to close the door.
His family and his community closed ranks, constructed a wall of silence around the event, perhaps acting out of a desire to shield Jim and his sister Anne, who was in adolescence by then, or out of their own embarrassment or grief.
Or perhaps out of the knowledge that there was no way they could tell this particular story—the story of the circumstances which ended in Lurlene's su***de—in a way that would help her children deal with the loss of their mother.
This was how civilized, responsible people dealt with such matters in those times, before anyone knew anything about grief counseling, or the effects of loss on children, or PTSD. The rules for right living and respectability back then were to hold your head up, get on with things, mind your own business. And button your lip.
So there was an erasure, to which everyone involved consented. Thinking to spare him, to protect him, they divorced him from his life. Instead of a living memory, there was a great, featureless, dense silence. No one ever mentioned his mother's name to Jim. If he mentioned it, he was treated to a reply that meant the subject was closed, his interest in it shameful. And Lurlene's family, except for one brother and his wife, were evidently completely out of the picture.
Jim was forty-seven when I married him. By then, he hardly knew he had a mother. She was—immaterial. Erased.
Or maybe not entirely erased. She was a story he told, occasionally, always in the same amazed, puzzled tone of voice. He told it almost as if he were himself hearing it for the first time, as if he were trying to get himself to believe it by telling it. The bed. The gun. The door. Except for her su***de, by then his mother seemed to have had no existence. No attributes, except for what could be gleaned from her wedding photograph and a few other photographs in the family album.
A beautiful, smiling, bright-eyed young woman, at first. In later photographs she looked muted, conventional..."
-- Mary Ann Taylor-Hall. From the introduction to The Missing Body of the Fox
