MOURNING THE UNKNOWN

By Andrew Williams

How do you mourn someone you never knew?

My father's first wife died peacefully in her sleep Tuesday night. According to my nephew Patrick, she had fallen and landed on her head last week, causing a blood clot to form in her brain, and she had reportedly been non compos mentis since then. Her maiden name was Harriet Smith, everybody called her Sally, my father divorced her 44 years ago, and she was what psychologists call "schizophrenic." And that is almost all I know about her.

Which is my own fault. My father never talked about their life together, although it wasn't out of reluctance-he even said at one point that he wouldn't mind if I asked some questions about Sally. It was my own reticence that stopped me and my own delusion that there would be enough time to get to that part of his life.

I'd heard stories, of course, second and third-hand, which I will not repeat here. Those of you who know anything about schizophrenia would not be informed by them, and those of you who don't would not be edified, either. Safe to say that she apparently made the best adjustment that she could, and by all accounts was living a relatively peaceful, quiet life by herself in California when she had that fatal accident.

So what can I possibly say about a person I knew of solely by hearsay? For all I know, she didn't even know I existed. As far as I'm concerned, I never knew her at all. And yet we were as connected as family by human bonds strong and yielding. But now, another strand has broken. Another link with my father's life is gone.

I've let my half-brother and nephew in California know that my thoughts and prayers are with them. But I find myself mentally gagging on the paucity of such sentiments. I can't even imagine their suffering. Metaphors don't help. Even relating their experience to my own experience of grieving for my father doesn't seem right.

I feel like I did in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when I'd established no one near and dear to me had been lost in that holocaust. It affected me, but in a distant way. I had no personal connection that I could tie it to, no nexus around which to center my feelings of loss and confusion. Just a sort of hollowness.

Right now, I hear Peter Gabriel in my head singing "Life carries on, and on, and on." So it does. And so it will. Right now, there is work to be done on many fronts-plans to be made, e-mails to be sent, the usual events of mourning. But I don't have a finish for this. And I don't know that I ever will.