Paula

By Isabel Allende

Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.

Isabel Allende is not afraid to go deep into her wounds. Her two memoirs My Invented Country, and this story of her relationship with her daughter, show that she learned, early in her life, to use the written word as a solace, a tonic and a balm to heal the wounds she encountered. Not so very different from the wounds we all encounter.

In this particular memoir, the wound runs deep. Perhaps as deep a wound as a mother can experience. Allende shares the story of losing her daughter to a crippling disease with vulnerability and honesty. After her adult daughter’s death, she says:

I am a raft without a rudder, adrift on a sea of pain. During these long months I have been peeling away like an onion, layer after layer, changing; I am not the same woman, my daughter has given me the opportunity to look inside myself and discover interior spaces—empty, dark, strangely peaceful—I had never explored before. These are holy places, and to reach them I must travel a narrow road blocked with many obstacles, vanquish the beasts of imagination that jump out in my path. When terror paralyzes me, I close my eyes and give myself to it with the sensation of sinking into storm-tossed waters, pounded by the fury of the waves. For a few instants that are a true eternity, I think I am dying, but little by little I comprehend that, despite everything, I am still alive because in the ferocious whirlpool there is a merciful shaft through which I can breathe. Unresisting, I let myself be dragged down, and gradually the fear recedes. I float into an underwater cave, and rest there for a while, safe from the dragons of despair. Raw and bleeding inside, I cry without tears, as animals may cry, but then the sun comes up and the cat comes to ask for her breakfast, and I hear Willie’s footsteps in the kitchen, and the odor of coffee spreads through the house. Another day is beginning, a day like any other.

How I would have benefitted from having this description when I was in the throes of grief. I read a great deal, but nowhere did I see a description of the experience that so completely echoed my own. Allende describes exactly how I felt on many occasions. Though I did not “give myself to it” as she did. I thrashed. I resisted. I flailed. I called in my support. But eventually. Eventually I found the courage that she describes here to give myself to it. I simply could not trust, at the time, in the ebb and flow of such ferocious emotions. I, as she did, thought I would die.

I find myself now six years out, having survived. The waves are much less frequent, much gentler now. I now know through experience that the ferocious intensity of the emotion would not be the end of me, but would instead birth me into a new person. I echo Allende’s realization; I am not the same woman.

A prolific writer, Allende also illuminates for me the priceless gift of writing. She allows me to watch her negotiate this most traumatic of experiences, thought by thought, event by event, response by response, along with her written exploration of it and journey into healing. I am so grateful.