Strangling Light
by Natalie Pompilio
NOVEMBER 12, 2009 TAGS:
Poet Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno didn’t want to write about her daughter’s murder. It was something so painful, so outside the norm, she didn’t think anyone would be able to relate to it. Struggling with grief, she sought solace and escape in words – and found herself unable to write about anything but the subject she most wanted to avoid.
“This event created so much emotional noise that there wasn’t room for anything else. I couldn’t write about anything else,” she said. “Writing this book was the mountain I had to get over in order to get to the mountain of writing anything else.”
Bonnano’s first book, Slamming Open the Door, contains 41 poems revolving around the 2003 strangulation death of Bonnano’s 21-year-old daughter, Leidy. Bonnano, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania and a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review, had had poems published before, but never in a collection. Two of the poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The title is a line from the book’s first poem, “Death Barged In,” which imagines a Reaper in a Russian greatcoat crashing into the Bonanno home and refusing to leave. He is there when the family answers the phone, eats dinner, goes to bed at night. As Bonanno turns to writing for comfort, Death is there:
“Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck:
From now on,
You write about me.”
The first poem Bonnano wrote in the days immediately after her daughter’s murder is the last one in the book. “Poem About Light,” which was read aloud at Leidy’s funeral, is addressed to her killer. (Although the man had not been arrested at the time of the writing, Bonnano was confidant the killer was a man Leidy had worked with and dated. He was later convicted of Leidy’s murder.) The poem is strong and defiant.
“You can try to strangle light;
use your hands and think
you’ve found the throat of it,
but you haven’t.
You could use a rope or a garrote
or a telephone cord,
but the light, amorphous, implacable,
Will make a fool of you in the end.”
“It was a way of saying to him, ‘You are not God and you do not have the last word. Leidy has the last word,’” Bonnano said.
The poem has a finality about it, as if written by someone who has worked through grief. Bonnano knows about grief’s stages, but said she sometimes felt she was experiencing many of them simultaneously.
“Grief is a process. There are benchmarks, moving from one stage to another. In some ways, I’m not the greatest example of that,” she said.
The most difficult poem to write was “How To Find Out.” In many ways, she says, it’s the most simple, light on simile and metaphor, a straightforward recounting of events. But “I worked and worked on that poem. I knew it had to be there,” she said. “I wanted to jerk the reader by the collar, unwillingly, on the journey like we’d been yanked.”
The poem begins with Bonnano, her husband and her sister leaving multiple messages on Leidy’s home and cell phones, like, “We are going to drive up there right now, young lady, if you don’t call us back in fifteen minutes.” It ends with the trio arriving at Leidy’s apartment to see the local police chief outside:
“Try to be thoughtful,
don’t make the poor man say it;
see how human he is,
he has children of his own,
it is your job to ask:
Is she dead?
And he will nod and say yes.
And now he can never not nod.
And now he can never say no.
And now he can never not say
Yes.”
Bonnano says the only fact she’s consciously changed is the name of her daughter’s killer. Everything else is brutally, amazingly true: the woman who hugged her at the funeral and whispered that she should go to Weight Watchers; Bonnano’s sister’s remark that Bonnano wouldn’t die during kidney stone surgery because “you are not that lucky;” the maggots in Leidy’s mouth when she was found.
That last detail, Bonnano said, was “almost like putting an obscenity in the book.” While she was determined to be truthful and unsentimental, the words hurt. The image it conjured burned.
But Bonnano kept it. Such honesty, she said, was essential. It would be especially helpful for people who, like her, had lost children. Seeking the words of others, she’d only found pieces that were “very sentimental about rainbows and butterflies and that was not useful to me,” she said. “Even if the truth is horrible, there’s always beauty in it. There’s beauty in the facts. To have people share frankly what they do know or share their experience with real candor is beautiful to people like me who are not easily comforted.”
The result of such honesty is often raw and captivating, as in “Nighttime Prayer,” where Bonnano blends lines from “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” prayers with a personal plea for an answer to the most haunting of questions: Did she suffer? The middle stanza reads:
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
was it long was it long was it long,
was it one,
was it two was it three,
was it ten was it this,
when she suffered”
Writing the book did help Bonnano deal with her grief, but she says she is “loathe to admit that anything is too cathartic.”
“Survivors … are often confronted by other people waiting for closure: after the trial, after the arrest, there can be closure. I’m sure some people think that after the book, there can be closure. I hate that word. It’s a curse word,” she says. “There’s no closure for the loss of a daughter than there is for the life of a daughter. … I don’t want my memories of her to end, and I will suffer as I will suffer, and I will heal as I will heal, and there’s not a lot of room for that word to be used truthfully.”
“This event created so much emotional noise that there wasn’t room for anything else. I couldn’t write about anything else,” she said. “Writing this book was the mountain I had to get over in order to get to the mountain of writing anything else.”Bonnano’s first book, Slamming Open the Door, contains 41 poems revolving around the 2003 strangulation death of Bonnano’s 21-year-old daughter, Leidy. Bonnano, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania and a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review, had had poems published before, but never in a collection. Two of the poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The title is a line from the book’s first poem, “Death Barged In,” which imagines a Reaper in a Russian greatcoat crashing into the Bonanno home and refusing to leave. He is there when the family answers the phone, eats dinner, goes to bed at night. As Bonanno turns to writing for comfort, Death is there:
“Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck:
From now on,
You write about me.”
The first poem Bonnano wrote in the days immediately after her daughter’s murder is the last one in the book. “Poem About Light,” which was read aloud at Leidy’s funeral, is addressed to her killer. (Although the man had not been arrested at the time of the writing, Bonnano was confidant the killer was a man Leidy had worked with and dated. He was later convicted of Leidy’s murder.) The poem is strong and defiant.
“You can try to strangle light;
use your hands and think
you’ve found the throat of it,
but you haven’t.
You could use a rope or a garrote
or a telephone cord,
but the light, amorphous, implacable,
Will make a fool of you in the end.”
“It was a way of saying to him, ‘You are not God and you do not have the last word. Leidy has the last word,’” Bonnano said.
The poem has a finality about it, as if written by someone who has worked through grief. Bonnano knows about grief’s stages, but said she sometimes felt she was experiencing many of them simultaneously.
“Grief is a process. There are benchmarks, moving from one stage to another. In some ways, I’m not the greatest example of that,” she said.The most difficult poem to write was “How To Find Out.” In many ways, she says, it’s the most simple, light on simile and metaphor, a straightforward recounting of events. But “I worked and worked on that poem. I knew it had to be there,” she said. “I wanted to jerk the reader by the collar, unwillingly, on the journey like we’d been yanked.”
The poem begins with Bonnano, her husband and her sister leaving multiple messages on Leidy’s home and cell phones, like, “We are going to drive up there right now, young lady, if you don’t call us back in fifteen minutes.” It ends with the trio arriving at Leidy’s apartment to see the local police chief outside:
“Try to be thoughtful,
don’t make the poor man say it;
see how human he is,
he has children of his own,
it is your job to ask:
Is she dead?
And he will nod and say yes.
And now he can never not nod.
And now he can never say no.
And now he can never not say
Yes.”
Bonnano says the only fact she’s consciously changed is the name of her daughter’s killer. Everything else is brutally, amazingly true: the woman who hugged her at the funeral and whispered that she should go to Weight Watchers; Bonnano’s sister’s remark that Bonnano wouldn’t die during kidney stone surgery because “you are not that lucky;” the maggots in Leidy’s mouth when she was found.
That last detail, Bonnano said, was “almost like putting an obscenity in the book.” While she was determined to be truthful and unsentimental, the words hurt. The image it conjured burned.
But Bonnano kept it. Such honesty, she said, was essential. It would be especially helpful for people who, like her, had lost children. Seeking the words of others, she’d only found pieces that were “very sentimental about rainbows and butterflies and that was not useful to me,” she said. “Even if the truth is horrible, there’s always beauty in it. There’s beauty in the facts. To have people share frankly what they do know or share their experience with real candor is beautiful to people like me who are not easily comforted.”The result of such honesty is often raw and captivating, as in “Nighttime Prayer,” where Bonnano blends lines from “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” prayers with a personal plea for an answer to the most haunting of questions: Did she suffer? The middle stanza reads:
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
was it long was it long was it long,
was it one,
was it two was it three,
was it ten was it this,
when she suffered”
Writing the book did help Bonnano deal with her grief, but she says she is “loathe to admit that anything is too cathartic.”
“Survivors … are often confronted by other people waiting for closure: after the trial, after the arrest, there can be closure. I’m sure some people think that after the book, there can be closure. I hate that word. It’s a curse word,” she says. “There’s no closure for the loss of a daughter than there is for the life of a daughter. … I don’t want my memories of her to end, and I will suffer as I will suffer, and I will heal as I will heal, and there’s not a lot of room for that word to be used truthfully.”
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COMMENTS (1)
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Joanne West Cornish wrote on November 12, 2009 2:12pm
As a mother who lost her 25-year old son to violence, this was particuarly poignant. Grief is always a process, and unless another person has been in those shoes, he or she is unlikely to understand or to know what to say. People think they must say something to soothe but many wind up saying something either vapid or inappropriate. Seeking to understand and heal is a lonely business for parents, and I applaud Bonnano for sharing the process. Sharing seems to difuse the pain a bit. Ultimately, I ended up marrying a man who had lost his own child. The questions keep coming, and the gratitude for a gentle hug even fifteen years later. ...Joanne in Perth, Western Australia [Report Comment]
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