A response to Karen Lea Germain’s essay titled “Weight” in the Spring 2020 Intima.
I begin with the weight of my parents’ cremains (analogues to those of Germain’s aunt and uncle), physical realities blending with the heaviness of regret. I will end, hopefully, with the lightness of relief (in which the pun of light includes illumination). At the center of my response to her fine essay is the weight of a military veteran’s sorrow.
My parents, whom I loved, wanted cremation rather than burial but specified no specific place for their ashes. My priest told me to take care of this quickly or it would become a heavy burden. He was right. But so, it turns out, was I right to wait (another weight).
My parents met and fell in love in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital whose capitol overlooks the Missouri River. In their senior years, they would take sentimental drives from their home an hour away to have lunch there and view personal landmarks.
It is almost twenty years since my brother and I spread our parents’ ashes, light when freed of containment, over the waters of the Missouri River. We had had church services, which are important in achieving closure. But the water’s flow—on to the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, the world’s oceans—while open-ended, only strengthens the peace we experienced.
Teachers and writers of literature like me are often (sometimes rightly) accused of living in the immaterial—words and ideas. The weight of ashes so important to Karen Lea Germain counters the desire to escape into an imagined world. In the writing program I direct for veterans, I insist we tether words to things and find order in both, a process known to be therapeutic. Recognizing the material, the physical, is necessary to frame moral action. When we don’t acknowledge the bodies of war’s participants, using abstract terms like “collateral damage,” we do harm.
Soldiers like the man and woman in “Bees” carry the weight of their past in the form of physical ailments: Trish with an auto-immune condition augmented by bee stings and Aaron with a spreading cancer. Their struggles in and after Vietnam embody (literally) their regret and their loss. Although fictional, they are offered as weight for my readers to carry in their real lives, just as Karen Lea Germain carried the cremains of her loved aunt and uncle to a final resting place. God bless all
Michael Lund, a native of Rolla, Missouri, lives and writes in Virginia. He is the author of At Home and Away, a Route 66 novel series that chronicles an American family during times of peace and war from 1915 to 2015; he has also published a number of short stories related to military experience. A US Army veteran, he directs a free writing program for military, veterans, and family members that is healing for both authors and audience. He gets excellent healthcare at the The Hunter Holmes McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia. Listen to his short story “Bees,” which appears in the Fall 2020 Intima, on his website Home & Abroad.