Reset Password
Reset Link Sent
| Blogs > kzoopair > Take two- they're small |
The Woman in the Well
|
The Woman in the Well The Woman in the Well by PD  The Legacy of the Hungry Ghost My mother was a haunted woman. I knew this even as a . I remember walking to school as a small , intoxicated by her strange beauty and wildly proud of her. I had the most beautiful mother of all, I was certain of this. Aside from her luminous, sensual nature, my mother was also intelligent and rare. She read poetry aloud. She sang to us. She spoke with the spirits of the dead, foretold the future, and recounted lost tales of ancient civilizations with such passion you would have thought they were burning inside her. Yet, as is true in so many fairy tales, that very same beauty foreshadowed enchantment and suffering on an occult scale. My mother was ephemeral, damned, not meant to last. The word 'occult' literally means, 'of the blood'. Suffering in my family was inherited, passed down through generations of women. Terrible secrets, some too old to be remembered, were borne in the blood and passed from mother to . In truth, my mother's theatrics took place in front of a very dark curtain. I sensed that shadow looming behind her without ever really understanding what it meant: My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother were the keepers of key to the family attic. This was their heritage and my legacy. In my family, the men glittered and spoke; the women dreamt and despaired. In Buddhist mythology, secrets kept too long become 'hungry ghosts'; invisible forces of longing and terror more destructive than any worldly creature or thing. In that eastern worldview, to cut off or bury some vital truth is to push the secret into a realm in which it develops demonic power over its keeper. Years after the hungry ghost itself is long forgotten, its destructive power lives on, devouring everyone it touches until it is finally dragged into the light, acknowledged, and laid to rest.  The Wreck of the Hesperus I was about eleven when my mother went mad. Not that I hadn't seen it coming. By the time I was in third grade I noticed that the poetry my mother read to us was almost exclusively devoted to the subject of dead , and was punctuated only occasionally by the odd lyric about a tragically murdered adult. Some of her favorite verses included "The Wreck of the Hesperus," a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about the death by drowning of a sea captain's young lashed to the mast of his tall ship; "Little Boy Blue," Eugene Field's morbid masterpiece about the death of a young boy as symbolized by a display of his untouched toys; "Annabelle Lee," Edgar Alan Poe's eulogy for his dead girl- lover; and "Oh Captain, My Captain," Walt Whitman's elegy for assassinated US President Abraham Lincoln, shot dead in Ford's Theatre by southerner John Wilkes Booth after the North won the Civil War and abolished slavery. After that, our poetry readings fell off. My mother spent the next decade going in and coming out of various hospitals for various ills both real and imagined, and taking to her bed between melodramatic bouts of never-defined torment. My mother's own mother declared her weak and inferior, then spent one hellish year living in our house, feeding us burned toast, and reminding my siblings and me that we were all cut from the same thin cloth, until my father, finally fed up beyond words, sent her packing back to her West Coast cabin. My grandmother was a celebrated painter of roiling seas and haunted woodlands. Like my mother, my grandma was beautiful and very gifted. She was also a bitch. In my twenties my mother achieved a degree of physical health that she maintained for the rest of her life. She briefly believed herself to have been abducted by aliens, then shifted her attention first to the rites of Ancient Egypt, and then to the possibility of becoming a Catholic Saint. Finally, she settled into talking to the dead again, and channeling the spirit of a prehistoric barbarian-warrior who became her familiar. She died at 57 of a sudden, massive stroke in the middle of a phone conversation with my youngest sister. At the time my mother died, we were no longer on good terms, and I was no longer included in family events. We had not seen each other in many years. What happened was this: She had recounted for me one day, with copious tears and visceral physical and emotional pain, the sexual and physical abuse she endured for years at the hands of her father while her mother locked herself away in the bedroom and hid. So I told her the exact same story about myself. Both stories were true. We never spoke again.  When Even One Woman Speaks the Truth My mother's mother died when she was 83. The year before my grandmother's death, I was in Oregon presenting an academic paper at the College of Lewis & Clark. It was a philosophy paper on phallic metaphors in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. (Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his theory that Freud's obsession with sexuality was really a displaced fear of death, but Becker's book is full of incredibly sexual male metaphors, which, back at that particular point in my life I found hilariously funny. So I wrote it up with the intention of annoying and upsetting as many academics as I could at one blow...so to speak.) I visited my grandmother at her cottage by the sea before I gave my paper. She gave me a lot of things all at once. This was unusual for her. My grandmother was selfish, and was used to parcelling out this and that in stingy portions to stir up enmity between her three daughters, but when I came to see her, she seemed to be weary and soft and uncharacteristically kind. She gave me most of the paintings she had not already sold or given to others, a collection of green and purple Japanese glass fishing balls that sometimes float up onto the beach of the Pacific and are coveted for their beauty and rarity, and a box of pure white sand dollars. Then she went into her bedroom and came back with an old photo of a young woman in a simple white dress. The woman was very pretty, still a girl, really, with dark hair, big eyes, a soft expression, and a large white bow holding back her thick curls. I thought it was a photo of my grandmother herself, and that she was going to give it to me, but instead she explained that it was her only surviving photo of her sister, Erma, who had jumped off a bridge to her death at the age of sixteen. No one knew my grandmother had kept this photo. She had never told anyone until me that she had it. Erma had become pregnant. My grandmother's parents, Hungarian immigrants with stern faces and too many , turned Erma out of the house and destroyed all her things and all traces of her, forbidding the and the rest of the family to ever speak of her again. It was after this cruel shunning that Erma lept to her death. She had no funeral. That single photo was all that remained of her. My grandmother had never told anyone about her until that moment. She did not give me the photo. My grandmother died the following year. But I am still here, alive and well, the last and first to know, a writer, and the keeper of no secrets. Become a member now and get a free tote bag. |
|||
|
A sad but fascinating read of your family history.  
| ||
|
How beautifully written, and so very touching! Thank you PD for sharing it with us!   WITHOUT PASSION LIFE IS NOTHING
| ||
|
PD, This writing and turn of prose reminds me of the writer who wrote "Prince of Tides". Your writing voice is haunting and insistent, poetically vague and then blunt. I love this piece. Please write more of this. Kitkat The observant make the best lovers, I may not do right, but I do write, I have bliss, joy, and happiness in my life, Kitkat Come check out my blog KItkat1415 check out this post by me Adventures In Body Grooming #39 April Topic Link: What Lies Beneath If April Showers Oh Bloody Hell What Kind Of Weather Turns Me On Bloggers Symposium 40
| ||
|
A very interesting read.. Haunting and inspiring.. ty for sharing.. hugssssssssss V Become a blog watcher sweet_vm
| ||
|
Thank you for taking the time to read it. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
A sad but fascinating read of your family history. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
How beautifully written, and so very touching! Thank you PD for sharing it with us! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
PD, This writing and turn of prose reminds me of the writer who wrote "Prince of Tides". Your writing voice is haunting and insistent, poetically vague and then blunt. I love this piece. Please write more of this. Kitkat Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
A very interesting read.. Haunting and inspiring.. ty for sharing.. hugssssssssss V Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Thank you kinkyfem. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Write on you are a gifted writer! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Thank you for reading it Claire. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Thank you so much mmmmchocolat. There are way too many of us, aren't there? What a lovely compliment, I appreciate your kindness. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
I'm looking for words to express my mixed feelings... This story enthralls me in many different ways. It is sad and poetic, it is also cruel, yet positive. And the writing is so beautiful! Thank you for sharing, PD. Visit my blog It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World of NaughtyInSO, leave a comment, become a watcher. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ LIVE AND LET LIVE Be happy! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
| ||
|
So very well written, not easy to do with some of the topics in this post. I hope you feel that you've transcended the troubling aspects of your family history.  
| ||
|
So sad and so beautiful at the same time. I had a thought earlier today, there is nothing worse that shunning a person, it's far worse than any confrontation. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
PS I still liked this one.. ty for sharing hugssssssss V Become a blog watcher sweet_vm
| ||
|
sad. made me realize how blessed I truly am! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
So sad and so beautiful at the same time. I had a thought earlier today, there is nothing worse that shunning a person, it's far worse than any confrontation. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
PS I still liked this one.. ty for sharing hugssssssss V Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Oh dear, ladyleo, that must have been a VERY sad book! Thank you for reading it. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
So very well written, not easy to do with some of the topics in this post. I hope you feel that you've transcended the troubling aspects of your family history. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Such sad experiences for the whole family. The bearer of secrets often carries a heavy load. Such secrets always do damage to people, families and relationships. Sometimes it breaks the bearer. Sometimes people have to escape reality to survive. It sounds like your Mother couldn't deal with her own history let alone yours. No doubt your Grandmothers experience weighted heavily on her and affected her relationship with your Mother. The things people do sometimes for such foolish reasons as pride, no wonder it's a sin. Vive La Difference
| ||
|
Poor Erma. Many families traditions leave no room for change. I'm not totally for it but I'm not totally against it either. But these were sad results of it. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
| ||
|
Good writers are keepers of no secrets indeed! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
|
Become a member to create a blog
