My son wrote a play for his college thesis, a coming of age story about death and divorce and friendship. He set it against the backdrop of the Langtang Valley in Nepal, with the earthquake as a metaphor for internal devastation. It’s a full length, two hour, no intermission play that he also staged, directed, and acted in.
He played the character of the mountain, and cast other actors to play himself and his best friend, his friend’s nineteen-year-old sister who died in the earthquake, and their mother. She sat beside me in the front row on opening night to watch the play, while stage lights shone brightly on the tears flowing down our faces.
I have tried to write about this tragedy several times in the past year, and found myself unable to get close to the bone of it, in a there but for the grace of god go I kind of way. It could have been my child on that mountain, vanished in an instant. While I hesitated, my son walked straight into the jaws of grief and shook his fist at the whimsy of fate. He wrote the play to find answers, to comfort his best friend, to chase the now haunted look from those eyes that once sparkled with mischief. He also felt responsible.
The two boys had done the same trek three years before the earthquake, and they had painted a trip with stories so colorful and soul stretching that of course the girl couldn’t resist going. After all, she was a child of the northwest, born and bred under big sky and mountains, surrounded by water. Nature calls more loudly to some, to those free spirits who crave the very heartbeat of the universe to pound in their veins.
This mother, this friend who I met met in the trenches of child raising, showed up for my kid the other night, to support the artistic expression of grief and rage and guilt clamoring in his mind. I told her she was incredibly strong to watch such a powerful re enactment, and its emotional aftershocks, but she shook me off. Because those kinds of remarks are irrelevant under the weight of such heavy loss. She showed up because she is a mother, and her son needs her to be okay. My son needs her to be okay.
I didn’t understand how many layered this was for my kid until I watched him perform as the mountain. Until I heard his monologue explaining to the audience that his character was created from violent upheaval, the tectonic plates shifting like parents colliding, and the earthquake an explosion of forces from pressure too long contained. Divorce has rocked his foundation, and he seems caught in a landslide of my making, as if I were the mountain. I suppose I am in a way.
While my son used his gifts to tell this story of natural disaster, to create a work that might help his friend process the loss of his sister, and he the loss of his family unit, I realized that playing the character of the mountain gave him the space to forgive himself. For being the catalyst that beckoned the girl to an untimely death, for the grief he could never wipe from the hearts of this family, as if he had betrayed them somehow. But if he could forgive himself, maybe then he would also forgive me.
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