Lindsey's Response to Hep

[Sondra Perl]

#575

In Pinard’s opening paragraph “recently widowed father coupled by the third paragraph, on the first page “I was five at the time” immediately resonated with me. I was four when my mother died, leaving my father widowed. However, she continued the essay in lengthy discourse on the history of the trapeze, even supporting her discuss with cited information. While I’m all for insight, this type felt a bit academic for me.

Pinard does not pick up on her mother loss again until the halfway point of her essay, “I don’t remember exactly the last time I saw my mother, but there is somewhere inside me the mark of memory that tells me that the last thing I saw her do was wave to me.” (30). As a motherless daughter, similar to someone who knows someone cut from the same cloth, I had my mother loss antenna up, I was patiently searching for loss, for her internalization of her traumatic event, instead I read about the trapeze, Leotard, birds and the anthropology of flying.

On page 30 Pinard finally gives the reader a break from all that trapeze information and shares the details of a horrific accident. Here, understand her apt description that she must have overheard as a child describing her mother’s accident and death. By focusing on the “flown out of as it flipped over and over in the air” (31) I can infer how the trapeze, flight and death merged.

I also related to her relatives trying to convey death to a five year old, (concept even adults can’t fully realize). Like her Aunts, my family acted similarly, mostly floundering about on explaining death and the new trajectory for my life from this point forward. One of my cousins to me aside during the shiva and told me to “look up at the sky for the first bright star and that is where your mom is now.” Those words, beautifully poetic, yet 44 years later, I find myself looking up to the sky for that one mother star and thinking “mom are you there?” So, yes, children remember things and embed words and compound events into a bricks of grief and hope.

The author finds herself writing poems and here her sentence “leap of faith, that terribly scary but satisfying thing we do when we risk expression through the use of form” (33) finally brings both worlds; loss and trapeze together. At the end of the essay she links the connection between the absence, loss and grief with the ability to let go and finally, trusting herself. I found myself thinking of “Hep” as another way of reminding her to Let GO!

For me, parts of the essay, as mentioned above, clearly resonated with me, but not enough to convey the message of loss or letting go.

[Website Services Admin]

#588

Hmm the connection between Hep and letting go is super interesting. I wonder what the difference between ‘go’ and ‘let go’ are, you know? Like how do they look different in stories? And how might they look similar?

It seems that you found a message at the end of the essay, a sort of healing? Like she felt she could move on from the grief, or at least But she didn’t go far enough to really take the point home, for you. I saw that last quote as living with absence loss and grief, not necessarily as letting it go. I don’t know if there is a difference between trusting yourself and letting go, in this story specifically, what do you think?

[Sondra Perl]

#604

Yes the command, “Go” and “let go” have to very different meanings.

The idea that Pinard physically let’s go of the trapeze is pretty significant. While I don’t know if that release also gave the author a true release in the sense of closure on her mother loss, it does give the reader that image.

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