THE SMALL DOOR OF YOUR DEATH

I sit on the sun porch of my home in New Iberia writing the review of a book about a tragic death, hoping that wherever the tortured soul of this addicted son in Sheryl St. Germain’s The Small Door of Your Death now resides, he’s no longer allergic to sunlight, as his grieving mother once supposed... and I pray that his mother no longer feels “night everywhere in me.”

This volume from the former Louisiana Writer of the Year, 2018, is a chronicle of St. Germain’s beloved son Gray’s death, by addiction and her subsequent grief —it is expressed in both tribute and lament…but does not fall into the realm of the maudlin. Surprisingly, St. Germain, like all mothers of addicts… perhaps like all mothers… gives voice to Dickinsonian hope that “never stops at all"; e.g., in “Feral”: “All you once hoped to be/still lights your face, though:/it is almost a holy light/you are trying to be a good man/you are trying to live in this world you hate/I love that you still care enough/to pretend to be/the one I named,/hoped to birth.”

In Section 3 of this volume, St. Germain tells the reader how a witnessing mother struggles with grief and her own addiction, literally stitching her fractured Self through sewing a blanket “of the most sumptuous yarns, each a/slightly different shade of gray: blue-gray, reddish-gray, silver gray, a/gray that’s almost black…and I wish I could have stitched your/wounds as confidently as I do this blanket…” St. Germain has developed a keen interest in textiles and quilt-making as part of her recovery from addiction and grief and recently visited Oaxaca City Mexico, where textile making flourishes, to help her further a second career in Textiles.

The 4th Section of The Small Door brings readers to an agonizing visualization of Sheryl viewing the body of her dead son, a dark place of realization:  “never again your body, never this vessel through which I knew you.” But she finds herself “In A Church Two Weeks After Your Death,” where she confesses, “I don’t believe, but here I am lighting a candle./She had a son too, I suddenly remember,/could do nothing/for his suffering.” Of all the Mary poems in the lexicon of poets, this one impressed me with its authentic voice, the voice of a suffering mother who is left with her son’s ashes and regrets. Here is acknowledgement of spiritual doubt, of a self-crucifixion without resurrection, again taking St. Germain to the place of “night everywhere in me.”

This volume doesn’t just trickle out and into mothers’ hearts; it touches a sometimes unexpressed deep sadness as in “Summer Solstice, 2015”: “Today, I’ll walk another day without you./I’ll carry you in me, like before you were born,/on these walks.” However, after her son has been dead seven months, in “At the Keukenhof*,” St. Germain finds resolution in viewing the color red where tulips remind her of her son’s laugh, and she expresses that she wishes she had brought him to this country she’s visiting because he had loved intensity and “would have felt it in these flowers…”

St. Germain’s “ode” to those tulips is the redeeming lyric in which she “step[s] into the sun/ step[s] into the light…” “See,” she writes, “I would have said, tulips that look like ballerinas,/fringed and frilled tulips, multi-colored parrot tulips, double peony tulips,/star-shaped tulips, lacy, open petals, thick, bold petals…” 

Here, in powerful, raw lyrics, a mother creates poetry from inevitable loss. Here, readers stand with her at the edge of a formidable chasm where she voices sadness, hope, despair, return to life, and, most of all, love. As I wrote in an e-mail to St. Germain: This collection of pain and passion reminds me of one of my own poems addressed to a daughter. “I am surprised at how agony/and tenderness/resemble one another."

*The Netherlands

ENFOLDED IN SILENCE...

During my time on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee, I've befriended several artistic women who have made notable contributions to the writing and art world and who explore connections between art and spirituality. I've written about Sewaneean Barbara Hughes and her work teaching art to children in Haiti, as well as her work with the women of Tanzania in previous blogs, but today I'm looking at her beautiful new book entitled Enfolded in Silence, subtitled A Story in Art of Healing From Sexual Trauma in Childhood, and am moved to write a few lines about Hughes' personal journey through this painful experience of childhood molestation.

Hughes' long journey from childhood sexual trauma to healing is traced through poetry, prose, and graphic paintings that illustrate the powerlessness and guilt she experienced for years following molestation by a predator. The exalting aspect of this narrative is Hughes' triumph over this trauma and her healing through spiritual grace that returns her to personal wholeness.

In the second section of her book, Hughes shifts the emphasis from personal confession to a helpful plan for survival that includes journaling, praying, 12-Step Recovery, and Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder strategies, but it is through art that she achieves wholeness. The paintings, some of which are accompanied by raw poems that howl with her suffering, tell about her odyssey in passionate images that no candid written confession could achieve. When Hughes began to rethink and re-image her sexuality, she used the medium of art, making collages of positive images of sexuality and putting them in a safe place. She discovered other pictures that connected sex with love and tenderness and placed them where she could view them often.

A special section highlighting recovery from addiction will be helpful to those who attempt to cope with sexual abuse by overeating, overworking, and other forms of addiction. Her work with therapy and 12-step recovery is a testament to the power of 12-step groups — in her case, her involvement in this program gave her time "to mourn the loss of the comfort addiction had given me and to become entirely ready to let it go." Combined with therapy, Hughes began to heal and to emerge from denial, and she confesses to a "long slow struggle," witnessing to a recovery that "feels like a miracle every day."

This is a rich narrative of a personal transformation that Hughes decided to share with all women who have survived childhood sexual trauma, and the book is only one of the ways in which she supports individuals who have been abused in this way. She writes that those who have been abused seem to find their way to her, and she also leads workshops, retreats, and support groups using art for women survivors of sexual abuse in her studio, Rahamim Retreat and Clay House, and for churches and other centers of healing. In addition, she does spiritual direction using art and touts it as a "powerful force for healing in the world."

Hughes has taught art and spirituality at the Episcopal Seminary, University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee for many years and teaches in Tanzania when the opportunity arises. She has exhibited her sculptures and paintings throughout the U.S., and her Cathedral Nativity is the official crèche of the Washington National Cathedral. She is married to The Rev. Bob Hughes, an Episcopal priest and retired professor of theology at the Episcopal Seminary, University of South, who has authored the definitive book on the Holy Spirit entitled Beloved Dust.

Enfolded in Silence is a tragic story, but it is a redemptive one that inspires victims who have suffered childhood sexual trauma and those who work toward the goal of healing abused women throughout the world.

Enfolded in Silence includes a cogent foreword written by Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana

Order from Border Press, P.O Box 3124, Sewanee, Tennessee or amazon.com.