Emily Rapp Black - Sanctuary: A Memoir

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.

Begin again the story of your life.

Jane Hirshfield, from Da Capo

I leaned against the guardrail above the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge in New Mexico, 565 feet above the river below, my heart beating fire. Heat swelled in my chest. A cold spring of intention lay coiled in my belly.

Under the July sun the high desert of New Mexico swept out in every direction, flush with the horizon, stark and beige with an occasional swipe of green, the line between heaven and earth impossible to distinguish. Scattered under such a sky, the sand- and earth-colored adobe buildings in the small town of Taos resembled broken pottery piecesshattered, accidental, lost. The air at this altitude was thin and dusty; the sun against the skin intense and direct, able to scorch in a flash. Tourists and visitors strolled by, chatting and laughing, wearing visors and sandals, their shoulders striped with sunburn. Along the concrete footpath that ran the length of the bridge, roadside vendors sat behind handwritten signs advertising indian jewelry authentic, the rounded stones in the rings and bracelets and earrings blinking as clear and blue as the sky above us. The clouds looked deliberately arranged: fluffy as a dream, airy as balloons, moving languidly as if straight from a picture postcard. I found this stark and relentless beauty absurdeven grotesque. The rich white tourists surveyed the goods made by the native people of this landassessing, deciding.

I leaned in a bit more and pressed my C-section scar, finally after two years gone white and numb, against the barrier, a white metal fence bearing a few names scribbled in pen Aaron loves Iris signs of those who once stood along this massive rift across the otherwise flat lands between Carson National Forest and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

That morning, I had finished teaching a master class in nonfiction at the writers workshop in Taos, considered my one-on-one student meetings scheduled for late afternoon, and realized I had plenty of time. I told my parents I needed to take a walk, get some coffee, get off campus, and they easily agreed to care for my son, Ronan, while I was away. They had been caring for him while I taught, talked with students, listened, and tried to help people order the chaos of their lives through storytelling. I kissed Ronans face, hugged his still, soft body, looked into his green-gold eyes, which only ever saw me partially and now saw nothing at all, got in my car, and thought, Now is as good a time as any. I had been to the bridge only once before, with Ronan secured in the front carrier, his sleeping body still and warm against my chest.

Peering into the cavernous gorge was like encountering the impact of long-ago violence, perhaps a prehistoric stomp from the gigantic foot of an angry, mythical animal on a murderous cross-country trek. Feeling like a witness to some great destruction appealed to me. I stretched my arms farther and let them dangle, helped by gravity, until my fingertips began to tingle, and until the noise and chatter of people walking past began to dissipate and then disappear. I was lost in the promise of this emptiness, the sound of it, which was the absence of sound apart from a small rock loosening from the steep bank to tumble into the dry brush, rolling down down down until it disappeared from view. I closed my eyes and heard whomp whomp whomp like an invitation: Yes. Jump. Do it. The space below was hollow, magnetic, literally an opening. A mouth to fall into, as deep as any desire.

This particular summer of my thirty-eighth year was marked by the greatest suffering I had known, a rupture that a crater of any size in any ground and beneath any sky failed to accurately depict: a sick and dying child: my son, Ronan; a faltering marriage, which was turning cruel and wouldnt survive the bludgeon of our sons medieval, incurable illness; conversations that ended in you make me sick, I cant fucking stand to look at you, get out ofmy sight; a heart so saturated with dread it was physical work to bear it; a mind so fractured I rushed to make sense of my unpredictable thoughts at every turn. My mind was shifting and molting as my life broke slowly apart, like some strange and painful rebirth, but with no imaginable futurefor what mother can imagine a future without her child? How would I spend my days? What, quite literally, would I do with myself? The world felt as harrowing and gaping as the hole in the ground I stood above, hovering like a fearful, angry bird.