The Body Remembers

The leaves have finally started to show some brilliance here in New York City. There’s not much flashy red or orange, but lots of Big Bird yellow. It feels late; perhaps the copious rain we’ve had this fall is the reason. For the last few days, at least, the weather has been sunny, chilly, fresh. Gone is the stench of smoke from the summer’s Canadian wildfires, the smell of dog urine on hot pavement, the need for respite from the heat and humidity. 

I have complicated feelings about this time of year, delighting in the changeover from shorts and tank tops to sweaters and boots, but nonetheless triggered by the chill in the air. It wasn’t until researching for my memoir that I found my mother’s death date, October 15^th, 1951. So much immediately became clear: my heretofore inexplicable anxiety around Halloween; feelings of deep sadness prompted by the start of heating season; inappropriate tears when leaf peeping. Why had such things always made me feel so alone, so deeply wounded? Now I understood.

I had just turned two when my mother crashed her car at speed into a parked truck on Main Street. I’ve spent a lifetime wrapped in silence about her troubled life and its violent end, as if swaddling me tightly in the not knowing could have prevented my soul from aching on dark post daylight savings fall afternoons. The body remembers, as they say.

I still get caught unawares when the trauma buried deep in my belly becomes manifest. Watching season six of The Crown last night, even knowing Diana’s fate, I was surprised by the sobs that emerged from deep in my gut at the sound of metal barreling into concrete in that tunnel. My mother, like Diana a beautiful blonde with a thorny past just entering the prime of her life, also lived for a short interval after impact. But as she was not an international icon, no paparazzi swarmed the scene of her accident, no crowds lined the streets as the hearse carried her to her final rest. Unlike William and Harry, I was too young to be included in her funeral procession.

Loss is loss, whether you are an heir to the British throne, a pigtailed toddler in New Jersey, or a child from a now abandoned Israeli kibbutz or a flattened apartment block in Gaza. So much trauma buried, so much heartache. For a two-year-old grief has no name, only physical manifestations begging over a lifetime to be branded with words that recognize their origin, their depth, labels that I am only now beginning to affix.

I have lived to see many autumns, striving to balance awe at the majesty, the beauty of nature’s cycles of death and renewal with feelings of alienation, of aloneness. This week, sitting at my own daughter’s table, I will give thanks for the life my mother gave me, understanding that my body remembering the pain of her absence is not just a reminder of her death, but of her love for me and mine for her. I will embrace her great grandson, his face hers, a living testament to the mysterious power of nature’s renewal.

Happy Thanksgiving dear readers.