Loss Is a Body In Flames

The only lasting truth is change. God is change. —Octavia Butler

I had such a great time dancing that morning. My body felt electric, light, and sparking as I moved across the floor of the beloved ballet studio I’d only recently returned to, reclaiming some precious time away from family and professional obligations in order to dance. So, when I stepped out of the academy building on Stewart Street in Santa Monica feeling renewed,refreshed, a little reinvented, even — the last thing I expected was a sky erupting ominous umber and charcoal clouds.

My husband’s texts had similarly mushroomed on my phone that I’d silenced for an hour in service to the splendor of leaps and pliés — those sacred minutes in class now shattered listening to his urgent message: Come home immediately! It’s getting very intense! Though it was difficult to hear with the maniacal Santa Anas whiplashing about my head like invisible bees as I sprinted to the car — whatever rosy, newborn ebullience I’d been feeling minutes before whisked away on the wild, merciless wind.

Everything changes in an instant. I know this and the feeling of being shocked — dumbstruck in my tracks. The tablecloth across a sometimes humble, or, when we’re lucky, delectable meal ripped out from under the banquet of everyday living. All those bony, salty, soupy, meaty ingredients suddenly soured and sent flying with no magician to capture the tossed, disintegrating parts. No one there capable of making it whole again.

When I lost my brothers, my two and only brothers, both to suicide and 25 years apart, I experienced such sensations. Also, to a degree, though not the same absolute and devastating degree, when my sons were diagnosed — one with a serious neurodivergent issue as a toddler, the other with Hodgkin’s lymphoma just after his graduation from UCLA. Thankfully, both are thriving, working, delight-filled individuals today. Still, they lost their childhood home in the fire. How can they not feel as though layers of psyche have been flayed clean off? For all of us, this sudden destruction so entirely unmoors and disorients — everything cast to oblivion without reason or compass — not unlike how in the aftermath of the storm we found shards of wedding china in our son’s wrought iron bed on the other end of the house.

What illusion of home, of wholeness, keeps us together in the first place? What holds us in when no physical walls remain? I’ve thought about, written poetry, and even anchored a doctoral thesis on Gaston Bachelard’s suggestion that What shelters the imagination may be defined as Home. If so, then it’s our imaginal impulses that cultivate agency and ultimately constitute a greater creative and life source. Home may be something far more ineffable and mysterious than the proverbial four-walled abode. Not only is Home not a static entity, but a sense of Home must also keep shifting, just as a human being must keep recreating her path to a more fulfilled, authentic self.

While I have lived my definition of Bachelard’s words as a poet and person versed in uncertainty and profound, violent loss, I must also acknowledge what my old theater mentor from Romania said when I suggested that while my home had indeed been burnt to a crisp in the Palisades fire, at least I wasn’t being bombed. And, anyway, people are being so kind! Houses in flames are bodies in flames, he said. Of course, he was right. Memories are embodied — they live and breathe inside us. Isn’t this what I tell my students as we mine the psyche and world of things, as we make something shimmer out of the alchemy of language, attention, craft? Even as a true believer and disciple of magic-making preached by masters — old and new — à la Elizabeth Bishop’s famous lines about how so much is lost — it’s no disaster — so just Write It! It’s my Romanian colleague’s words that keep buoying up from the deeper watery layers, the leaden leagues of my mind’s ash-logged sea: Houses in flames are bodies in flames. This, from an artist who survived a dictatorship under Ceausescu’s bloody reign of terror.

I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart.—Anne Sexton

When everything is turned upside down — charred, shattered, churned to dust — what on earth can begin to make us whole again? How can we be both grounded and airborne to begin anew? Writing this down is an ordering of words, of sounds and syntax, of images on a page. It more than helps. But if I am honest, it undoes me to do so. It hurts. It pokes, pricks and compounds with each stroke of the pen, each tap of the typewriter key. I’m tearing off skin with the bandage. There is something to be said for a boundary. There is also something to be said for unbinding, says Diane Seuss. To carry on in accumulating chaos, for me, some binding must take place, and I know it is forged from the wildfire of love that suddenly sparks out of nowhere and gathers like a storm to meet you. It is the friends and family, the strangers and estranged who blast you with love from every crazy direction like a burst china cabinet. They show up with quilts of many colors that they started sewing by hand weeks before when they first heard what had happened. They drive all over the city gathering furniture and clothes. They take you into their houses and feed you. They shelter you under their solid roofs. The warmth and breadth of their care surpasses your wildest imagination. Brightness flies full force at you. Love’s superior reaction to an inconceivably devastating action. Spirits ablaze quenching the flames that pulled it all to pieces in the first place.

Michelle Bitting is a senior lecturer in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is the author of six poetry collections and her work has earned her numerous honors. Bitting’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.