I got out my buttons and beads this weekend with my granddaughter, who is six. She picked through them with fascination and care, as she always does. And she found one she hadn’t noticed before—a silver beetle charm. A scarab, actually. In ancient Egypt, scarabs were symbols of eternal life. Here’s how the internet explains:
Scarabs were symbols of rebirth, resurrection, transformation, and growth. People wore scarab amulets for good luck and protection. The bodies of the dead were adorned with scarabs to ensure that they could travel safely to the afterlife and move on to the next world.
I already knew this about scarabs. When I was a fifth-grade teacher—20 years ago now, which seems impossible—our class studied ancient Egypt. We took it very seriously: the stories, the rituals, the art, the mystery. The shadow puppet play we put on that year was almost terrifying in its otherworldliness. And for the winter holidays, I gave scarab charms to all my students. The one in the bead bin is a leftover.
A scarab is also known as a dung beetle.
My dad died on August 28 and I’ve realized something profound in the weeks since. Something bigger than sea or sky. I’ve realized I protected my future self in ways I did not fully understand until now, living into the future and this strange grief for what wasn’t and now never will be.
Let me explain. You see, I thought, when I was writing my memoir, The Part That Burns, and the various autobiographical essays since then—What My Father Knew, The Cost, and Incorrigible: A Love Story—that any healing related to the artistic labor of excavating these relics of the past and reviving them as stories was the result of honoring a past self, tending to past trauma, integrating past experiences.
Past, past, past.
But I’ve since discovered that actually, unbeknownst to me, I was writing my own safe passage to the future and toward the self I would meet there, rowing through its own dark waters.
This understanding began to dawn right after my dad entered hospice, a fact I mentioned tentatively in a comment thread here at Writing in the Dark. I meant simply to alert my beloved community that I might be distracted and not fully present. Then my dad died very shortly after entering hospice, and I mentioned that briefly, too, saying only that I wasn’t ready to say much. I actually put that brief mention in a footnote. Then on September 3, about a week after my dad’s death, I wrote more openly about the circumstances in this post, including an unsent letter from my 23-year-old self to my father.
At that same time, I also shared the news of my father’s death with a large, multi-thousand-member and passionately supportive online writing community of which I’ve been a member for a decade or more, a community where many know my work and are therefore aware of the complicated context around my father.
What happened, both here at Writing in the Dark and in my online writing community, is that people saw me. The condolences they offered were as real and as complicated as my life itself. Not a single Hallmark card anywhere. Only genuine compassion for the strange and haunting heartbreak of losing what you always wanted and never had.
That compassion has done more than hold me up. It has reflected me to myself, and revealed me to myself.
Again.
And there is perhaps nothing more safeguarding to a person who has been silenced and unseen than being recognized, reflected, and revealed to herself.
When you see me, I exist.
When you see all of me, all of me exists.
That’s from The Part That Burns, page 111.
I had already, over the past weeks, been sharing these insights—and my deep gratitude for all of you—with my husband and kids.
Then this morning I read Kate Manne’s incredible essay, “The Unhelped and the Unmoved: A Tale of Two Traumas and the Violence of Indifference,” in which Manne writes about the significant trauma, especially PTSD, that results from sexual assault, saying, “Trauma invalidation following sexual abuse disclosure is also a strong predictor of subsequent psychopathology.”
Near the conclusion of her essay, Manne writes:
I write because third parties are so often indifferent and apathetic. And that does further harm to victims. In some cases, it even exceeds the original harm of being subject to the wrongdoing in the first place. Third party indifference in the face of second party violence is itself a form of violence.
This feels complicated but maybe it’s not.
What I’m saying is that because I have written about my life and allowed myself to be seen, the complex grief around my father’s death has also been seen, understood, and responded to in a way that feels immeasurably, incomparably different than the alternative.
What I am saying is that to have lost my father either in relative silence or in a disorienting cloud of well-intended but tonally inaccurate and therefore excruciatingly painful condolences would have been quietly re-traumatizing to a person whose original trauma was already worsened by third-party indifference immediately following its disclosure and for all the decades afterward.
But that didn’t happen.
And largely, the reason that didn’t happen is that I’ve let myself be seen for the last decade through my writing, starting in 2015 with the first publication of Wingless Bodies then Tumbleweeds (the latter of which was my first prize-winning publication selected by Joyce Carol Oates and yes, I am still proud of that), followed by my less experimental and more transparent essays about my father, What My Father Knew and The Cost.
Scarabs aren’t the most beautiful amulets. They’re dung beetles. And what dung beetles do is use the dung of mammals for feeding and nesting, eventually breaking it down to fertilize the soil. Thus, the whole regeneration and cycle of life thing.
It’s pretty literal.
However, the mythological version of the story is more alluring. Wikipedia tells it this way:
The Egyptian god Khepri was believed to roll the sun across the sky each day at daybreak. In a similar fashion, some beetles of the family Scarabaeidae use their legs to roll dung into balls. Ancient Egyptians believed this action was symbolic of the sun's east to west journey across the sky.
As the sun god, Khepri also represented the renewal of life. In fact, his name means "to come into existence."
There are many ways to come into existence. Writing is mine.
Love,
Jeannine
PS I get a lot of questions about writing about family, and there are no easy answers. My path saved my life. Your path might differ. I had an in-depth conversation on this topic with Laura Davis, bestselling co-author of The Courage to Heal (among many other titles), a couple of years ago. You can still find that 90-minute conversation online here, thanks to the Writer’s Center.
I love how you wove the scarabs/dung beetles through the progression of your story, or is it the story, weaving through the line of dung beetles at daybreak? Either way, Jeannine, I am so very glad that all your hard and painful work has brought you such light. Such surprising light.
I'm struggling a bit for words; a jumble of thoughts and feelings about risk and reward and shelter and armor and strength and writing. I read Kate's essay earlier today, and I so appreciate getting to see her words in a different way when they are sitting alongside yours. I mentioned to Emily in our exercise comment thread earlier that through WITD I have been writing about things I thought I never would. Your words here help me understand more about why that is. Thank you, for that and other healing things. Grieving in community is like reading in community, isn't it? You see and feel more deeply.