(Above: A purple gorilla, which is the metaphor for grief used by Mathew Dickman in his poem, “Grief.” )
“The loss of my voice was a grief,” Ashley Judd told David Kessler on his podcast Healing at Grief.com. Judd was talking about her having been molested as a child. She then informed some adult family members about it and was dismissed because they believed that the person who had done it was a nice old man who didn’t mean it that way. She spoke of that grief along with concurrent losses of her innocence and her childhood and her dominion over her own body.
I just listened to the podcast. You can listen to it here.
I have been thinking about Ashley all day today after seeing the film She Said last night which is about New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s exhaustive - and exhausting - reporting on the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse stories. They won the Pulitzer Prize for their work. Key to their breaking the story was Judd’s willingness to go on-the-record about her own experience with Weinstein. Ashley plays herself in the film - a bit of meta-casting that makes sense when you realize her bravery as a person has always been about overcoming shame and the performance was on some level making that statement: Yes, I am owning my part in this without shame. I am still not backing down from being exactly who I am: this.
In addition to that molestation as a child, Judd has been raped three times. One of the rapes resulted in her getting pregnant and then receiving an abortion. When in the Democratic Republic of Congo on a hike, she fell and broke her leg in four or five places and had to learn to walk all over again. Then there was the suicide of her mother and all the subsequent news coverage. She wrote about that here.
When I sat down to put together THE WEEKEND READ today, I thought I was just going to utilize something else I had already written about Ashley when she was my date to the Vanity Fair Oscar party one year and post it along with the original story I had written about her for Allure that was never published. I’d frame it all about how much I admire her survival instincts and her bravery, but it still seemed as if it were too much about fancy-pants me when I no longer wear fancy pants. You can read all that here.
I then decided I was going to make this column today more about the sexual abuse of women and how it can become systemic because of the enabling that takes place with the asymmetrical power structures where it still can thrive. But all that would be abstract to me as a gay man. Plus, the young man with whom I saw the film last night asked me if I had ever been around Weinstein myself and didn’t I know what kind of man he was and is. I honestly said that I found two men so repulsive and vulgar and distasteful during my career - Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump - that whenever I was in a room with them or in their vicinity when our parallel worlds conflated, I averted my eyes or left the room. I could not bear to even look at them, much less contemplate them back then. I found them - I find them - pollutants. So I am an outsider regarding this aspect of Ashley’s life. I have nothing really to contribute except outrage.
But there are three important aspects we do share. We are southerners. We are in recovery to remain sober. And we have had to navigate grief all our lives. When I heard her speak of the loss of her voice when she was dismissed by family members when she told them of her molestation, I realized for the first time just this afternoon I have never acknowledged that grief in myself, that loss, when I was looked on askance by family members when I too told them I had been molested by a trusted older man who was a family friend. I have said I lost my innocence but I have never said I lost my voice. Maybe that is why I became a writer: to reclaim my ownership of it.
When Kessler asked Ashley to talk about her mother’s suicide, this is what she said. “I guess what I would want people to know is that I had an extraordinary journey with my mom and when I came into recovery it was very difficult for me to express my love for my mother because of the record of the childhood As a wonderful mystic says, ‘Understand everything, justify nothing.’ But I didn’t quite understand everything yet. I held on to my adult rage until about 2006. And then when I got my own help and I was able to separate out when I was the vulnerable, defenseless child and things were not my fault and things were not my responsibility - and then when things became my responsibility and I could then take radical responsibility. It was then I could love and adore my mother and accept the love that she was capable of giving me in those years since 2006. Obviously Mom was someone who had a mental illness and so I had to work a good program. I had to understand her mental illness was a disease. I didn’t cause it. I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t cure it. I could contribute with my attitudes and my actions because there were ways by which I could be supportive and there were ways by which I could sabotage. I needed the wisdom of other people with a lot of experience to help guide me. There were times when she got excellent and expert professional help. And then there were times when she chose not to pursue that in ways that I thought would be better for her. I had to respect her autonomy and give her the dignity of making those decisions for herself even when I thought her thinking was distorted. … Everybody has the right to be wrong [and have their own destiny]. I am not the arbiter of right and wrong. I resigned from the Committee of You Must Accept My Views. But what that leaves me with is my grief and the loss of my beautiful mother and my own feelings and my feelings are my own responsibility. That is why I need my own recovery. The best thing that family members can do for themselves is get their own help.”
Grief
BY MATTHEW DICKMAN
When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the check-out line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.
What a gorgeous poem. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Especially the ending.