One Book On Henry

So while the lamb pushes into the world, Kevin Powers reads to us about death, his prose lush and buttery, light and layered like phyllo-dough, and about shame.  My eyes take in the rows of students from Saul, Mastery Charter/Thomas Campus, and Widener Memorial School. The students in wheelchairs are up front. The Saul students sit in the next rows, and we are behind and among them. The character named Bartle feels shame, Powers reads, but it’s “more particular than that.”  It’s what Bartle “has become,” it’s his “particular history.”  Then he reads the line that made me stop and reflect and wonder each time I read it: “All pain is the same.  Only the details are different.”

Researcher Brene Brown’s TED talk on shame comes to mind, and I wonder who among us here in the auditorium knows the particular, painful shame Powers writes about.  Who among these beautiful young people is certain that s/he is, as Brown says over and over in her talk, “worthy of love and belonging.”  

A young woman named Aurora asks Powers questions, and he answers by citing the complexity of human nature, which includes bravery and cowardice in the same person, all at once. Young people in war, he says, absorb in a few years a lifetime of death, and grief, and loss for which they are totally unprepared. So do young people in cities, I think.

I see in my mind’s eye my grandmother as I put her to bed before she died. She would curl up like a fetus, this 101-year-old woman who lost her own mother at two. After the One Book reading, I will hear her calling me in my dream, and I will tell her that she cannot come back; she has to stay where she is. How do soldiers absorb it all?  Where do they put it?  

Now the students can ask their own questions. The first comes from a young man whose wheelchair is parked right next to the stage, and his hand goes up into the air fast.  His voice is wheezey; we strain to hear him say: “Why all the profanity?”

Powers says something about authenticity and smiles just a little.  Then he says—and it’s the first time I feel as if he’s talking to us directly, “And that’s how soldiers talk.”

Asked why he reveals the death of Bartle’s friend so early, he says that books have a mystery, and he did not want a soldier’s death to be the reader’s pay-off.  Asked a question, I can’t remember what, that I thought he’d answered already, he did not dismiss the student, but rather, he dug deeper into candor and intimacy:  “I knew that going to war defined me, but I didn’t want it to limit me.”

Finally a young man wants to know whether Powers is famous.  Like, is he in the movies?!  For the first time Powers laughs.

If we chose, we could do this in schools every single day.  

During the book signing, I told Kevin Powers why his story was meaningful to me. Yes, mothers are the generation above soldiers that deserve to know what happened there. But what about the generation below? My stepmother, who was a 5th grade teacher at the time, joined the National Guard and served in Iraq for a year. It was a scary time of many changes in my family. But we, my stepmother and I, never really talked about it. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to use the wrong words.

My understanding of that experience, like most with my family, was further complicated by the fact that I was only a summer child. I spent the school year away from my dad and stepmom. But, despite the distance from my family, it still meant something to me. So much so that for a decade, I kept a bottle of brown sugar vanilla lotion in my bedside drawer next to a stuffed bear with a shirt that said “Someone from OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) Loves Me!”—my gifts from the Iraq War.

Powers’ book can be a bridge between generations—in any direction. I told him so and he seemed to really appreciate that fact. His voice was genuine when he said, “That means a lot. Thank you so much for telling me that. It’s great that this book could be a talking point for you and your mom. That’s what I hope for.”

That’s what I hope for, too. But her response to the idea was less than enthusiastic and one I have a hard time accepting: 

“I may one day read that other book though. Maybe. Not sure I am ready to go there yet and quite frankly may never be. But who knows.” 

Where does her story end and what part can I claim?