By Maureen Murdock
Published in the C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta Quarterly News, Summer 2005
My son puts on his bulky winter parka with the faux fur trimmed hood and walks outside on the dock to call his girlfriend in LA. “I can’t get reception inside the houseboat.” There’s not much for him to do here while he recuperates from endocarditis, the bacterial infection in his heart that hospitalized him for two months, so he calls his girlfriend and walks over to the liquor store and back to report on the grizzled characters that hang out there. “They’re a scary bunch,” he says.
I wonder what scares him about them. I imagine that he must have seen scores of similar unshaven characters in his travels scoring dope in New York and downtown Los
Michelangelo, Pieta, 1499
Angeles. I’ve seen the look guys walking down the streets in the Mission district give him; there’s something they recognize in each other — a desperation.
But I don’t ask him much about anything these days because our therapist told me to stop asking questions. Questions about how he’s feeling, how he’s sleeping, if he wants the drawing table set up in his room, when he’s coming back from his friend, Ed’s house in the city. Instead, I take him to his chiropractor appointments or to have his blood drawn to make sure there’s no recurrence of the bacterial infection in his heart or kidneys, I send for his birth certificate from Philadelphia so he can complete his SSI application, I pay his bills. We try to give each other space on the houseboat. But there’s no dialogue about next steps or what he wants for his life. The therapist says what he needs now is love, not prying.
Dr. B, our chiropractor, is encouraged by his progress. “He has enormous healing potential,” she tells me. “ I didn’t recognize him this week from the person you first brought in here, he’s gotten so much stronger. I expected him to be in much worse shape than he is because of everything he’s been through. He really responds to the treatment-- he seems to like it.”
I cry when she tells me this; I have had so little hope lately. I cling to her words. He hasn’t been interested in therapy, AA meetings, or addiction counseling, but he has kept all of his appointments with Dr. B, a no-nonsense back cracker from upstate New York who has given him the most relief from his physical and perhaps his emotional suffering.
My friend Hillary recently asked me a question about my dynamics with my son that stopped me cold: “Does he ask for your help or do you always show up?” I had never given any thought to this. I was embarrassed to admit—to her as well as myself—that I always show up.
Even though I say that I have run out of hope, showing up and offering help must be my way of clinging to it. It goes unspoken but I must think: Maybe this time will be different; maybe if I give him what he needs or thinks he needs, he’ll take better care of himself; maybe I’ll feel less hopeless about his illness; less guilty about how he suffers.
I know that there’s part of him that expects me to show up because I am his mother. He has said that he knows I would never let him end up on the street. But the truth is, he never directly asks for my help.
Our therapist suggests my going to see a copy of “The Pieta” at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in North Beach. I had seen Michelangelo’s statue of Mary holding the dead Christ when I was a young girl during the World’s Fair in New York in 1964. At the time, I was struck by how large Mary seemed in contrast to the lifeless body of Christ draped across her lap. It wasn’t just her size, it was her presence, her courage to hold her lifeless tortured son. I wanted to climb up on that lap and have her hold me too.
The contrast was not lost on my son when he went with me to see “The Pieta” on Christmas eve. At first I couldn’t find her because I expected the statue to dwarf everything else in the church. It didn’t. While we knelt before her, my son said, “Look at her legs in comparison to Christ’s. She’s huge; he looks so puny.” I nodded. As an artist, he was talking about the intent of the sculptor’s design, but he was also responding to the power of the image. “I didn’t like seeing Christ looking so weak, so powerless,” he said later.
Maybe I rush in because I can’t tolerate the thought of ending up like Mary holding my dead son on my lap. During Christ’s struggle to Calvary, she stood by her son while he was whipped and jeered carrying his cross. I have a hard time standing by my son allowing him the dignity of his own fall.