Closet World

Outside, in the world, the day was brilliant: a blue and green mural, a scene bursting with

springtime after a harsh winter. Birds sang, trees and bushes were laden with new leaves and

blooms. Branches swayed in the breeze while sunshine bathed everything in a dazzling light.

Inside, in the closet, the man sat motionless, not just oblivious to the day, but as usual, offended

by it. How absurd, he thought from his seated position. He felt slightly foolish as well as

peculiarly composed. Minutes before he stood mutely, scanning the bland array of shirts and

slacks suspended on the rack in his closet. The choice of clothing seemed baffling. The odd

feeling that had increasingly stalked him daily, had finally grown to the compulsion he now

embraced. Groping to his right, he shut the door, bent to stuff a robe across the horizontal glow

streaming under from the next room, and reached back up to flick off the light.

Darkness enveloped him as he braced his back to the wall and slid awkwardly to the

floor. Years earlier, when their marriage was fresh and new, the man had discovered his wife

sitting in their closet after some silly argument they had. Her behavior seemed irrational and

emotionally over-reactive to him. His disdain for such childish behavior had been obvious to her,

yet she did it again and again. She called them mini-retreats and chose various dim or dark

locations. She claimed they helped her focus her dark inner thoughts and somehow banish them,

or at least diminish their intensity. But the man knew his way was better. He put his troubles

behind him as quickly as possible. After banishing whatever introspective thoughts intruded on

him during the little crises of daily married life, he got busy doing something, anything, and

moved on. Though he continued to find the periodic seclusions ridiculous, they no longer
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surprised him. A new tension developed in the marriage, not because of their different

approaches to stress or troubles, but because the man saw her as pathetic and unable to cope and

the woman knew it. He walked for many years in deluded superiority until one tragically fateful

day.

The man was interrupted in his chores that Sunday morning. Screams beyond his ability

to comprehend reached his ears from a distant part of their home. Had she caught her hand in the

garbage disposal he wondered? Ludicrous as this seemed, the man was propelled out of his chair.

He followed the keening sound of her voice to his son’s room, where the woman lay prostrate,

hysterical and inconsolable across their son’s lifeless form. The previous evening, while the man

and his wife were out, their son had taken his. As the couple enjoyed a last peaceful sleep in the

bedroom above him, their son’s body grew cold. A bullet to his head … instant death said the

coroner; he probably never even heard the shot. Their child, barely a man, was gone and with

him almost everything his parents had believed in or hoped for.

Almost two years ago, the man thought. Or just last week, he felt. Time no longer

proceeded normally for the man and woman; Hours, days and months expanded and contracted

to mutate the time since the death into a parody of living. Thus the man found himself, after

many years of arrogant righteousness, sitting in a dark closet on a sunny day, seeking a truth, any

truth, even his wife’s truth, because he no longer felt he had any of his own. A beautiful day no

longer tempted him, but rather taunted him: the world without was vibrant and alive, the world

within was bleak and lifeless. This uneasy coexistence of inner and outer world set up within the

man a tremendous, ever-present conflict. Sitting in this real closet was no worse than inhabiting

his own mind these 20-some odd months. He had tried virtually everything else the post-suicide

world had to offer: counseling, grief, support groups, depression, anxiety, anti-depressants, guilt,

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tranquilizers, confusion, drinking, crying, insomnia, keeping busy, sleeping too much, going to

work, not going to work. The list of healing, coping or falling apart strategies was endless.

Previously, in his first life (or so he thought of his life before the suicide), the man had watched

dispassionately as others lived through tragedies. The news was full of tornados and earthquakes

and murders and a hundred other human sorrows. The man would shake his head, distantly and

intellectually regretting whatever sad story dominated that day’s television reports. He always

made these observations about the sad events that befell others from the vantage point of his

smug superiority and self-perceived strength. Now in this new unwelcome universe of sorrow

and loss, the man had joined the ranks of humanity and become one of the walking wounded.

Now each and every awful incident he read about pierced his heart and soul with true empathy

and pain.

Since his son’s death he shambled through days at work and home with a restless stream

of haunting images as his constant companions, an endless internal dialogue ever-present,

drowned out only by television, radio or sleep, but not always. A glimmer of what he now

considered to be his other life occasionally shone through the gloom that shrouded him like a

cocoon. More often than not, getting through the days or even hours that comprised the weeks

and months and years sometimes felt like running in deep mud. This small, dark space in a

cubicle-sized closet felt reassuring by comparison to most everywhere else he roamed.

It seemed only seconds to the man since he had donned the undersized room like an

oversized coat. Eyes still closed, he realized he no longer felt silly. He imagined his wife finding

him in the closet and thinking him mad. But no, he knew she inhabited the same horrible post-

holocaust world in which he lived. His wife would understand completely, though she might

wonder, briefly, why it had taken him so long to make the retreat. His second conscious thought

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was that he had begun to feel peaceful since he sank to the ground. Tension, stress and worries

oozed from his body and the continuous stream of memories about his son’s life and death and

funeral abated. Minutes passed and the man began to take sensory inventory of the few mundane

details inside the closet. Not many sounds penetrated the walls. A barely audible humming of

household processes hovered about him. Far away muffled sounds of the nearby highway and

distant airport droned on. His nose picked up only the scent of clean clothes blended with a few

days accumulation of laundry. He opened his eyes to find that the dark had receded into soft

twilight. A bit of light squeezing in from either side of the door had created shadowy forms, only

some of which resembled clothing. Shirts brushed up against his right arm, while shoes on the

door rack pressed into his left shoulder.

The man had long since ceased to be scornful of what his wife had so long ago described

as voices in her head. Since his son’s death, his own inner conversations were constant and

almost deadly at times. He knew the dark potency of the voices derived as much from his lack of

experience with them as from his chagrin about mentally belittling his wife for so long. Nothing

stemmed the tide of his inner musings except sleep or media input. Keeping busy did not help

him quiet his mind. In the same way that a talkative co-worker can intrude on office business, his

constant thoughts about death and the meaning of life simply superimposed themselves on

whatever he happened to be doing.

The man’s breathing was shallow and slow. Sensory input faded and thoughts again

began to flutter through his head like lazy butterflies in an overgrown garden. Closet thoughts, he

discovered, did not feel intrusive or invasive. Closet thoughts were benign and friendly, lacking

in emotional depth. Rather than adding to or precipitating confusion and depression, he found a

clarity that had eluded him for many, many months. Is this like death, he wondered? It seems so

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peaceful. Perhaps, he thought, this was the kind of place where his son now existed, in a dim,

closet-like space free of the despair and torment that had surely consumed his final days. Another

mental silence bathed the man in calm. He felt the threads of his worries and stresses drift away

like dandelion fluff in a gentle wind. The chains of his new unwanted life fell away link by link.

No chores beckoned to him as they did anywhere else in his home, yard or office.

For these few minutes in the dark room, his mind ceased to process the never ending

barrage of guilt he directed against himself. Not an hour had passed since his son’s suicide

without the man reliving every interaction he had with his son in the months prior to his death.

He could never shake the thought of what he could have done differently, the signs he thought he

should have seen. He could not stop himself from imagining the life his son would have had if

he, the man, had been able to save him. But somehow in this shadowy almost soundless space,

his thoughts and feelings had momentarily suspended their ceaseless churning. He tried to invoke

the endless list of duties and responsibilities awaiting his attention, but the healing powers of

closet-world sealed his mind from such concerns. He had found a relatively large, tidy womb-

like environment in which only breathing and peaceful, meditative thinking existed.

Could this be what prison is like? Prisoners have little or no control in their lives.

What a sense of freedom that would be, to not be responsible for anyone or anything else. No

one else can get hurt if a man is not in charge. He briefly longed for such freedom. Then the man

returned to his sanity and recognized that true freedom came from his ability to leave the closet.

Without the many responsibilities that had shaped his life, even those he had hated, he would

truly have been in a prison. For all the great loss he had suffered, he had experienced great

happiness. His prisons were of his own making.

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These closet thoughts startled the man; they were not all about his son’s death and this

came as a revelation. For nearly two years he had struggled unceasingly to control and explain

his thoughts. The struggle to make meaning out of this death and to follow his old, shallow

advice to move on had proven useless. The man had no answers and expected to find none. To

say he was stuck does not convey the sense of nowhere to turn that dogged the man. But

somehow, by confining himself, even briefly, in the closet world, he had allowed his mind to

empty and then refill with some new ideas. He succeeded in stemming a glut of anger, guilt and

sadness that seemed more a way of life than feelings he possessed. The very despair and hopeless

that had brought him to sit in the dark closet were vanquished, at least temporarily, by the closet

itself. His physical presence in the closet forced out his mental pain, the primary circumstance of

his existence for so long now.

Unconsciously, a smile crossed his lips.His wife had been right all along and this time he

did not mind. Idly he wondered would he confess his experience to his wife. He might share this

experience with her someday, but for now it would be his secret. The man gradually became

aware that his thoughts had taken a new direction, returning to the world outside, his house, his

yard, his neighborhood, his planet.

The man checked the luminous dial of his watch, certain that mere minutes had passed

during his experiment with isolation and semi-sensory deprivation. He was startled to see that

more than thirty minutes had elapsed. Since his son’s death thirty minutes had too often

expanded to feel like an interminable span of time, an amount of time to get through as

counselors or support group friends had described. Each half-hour increment latched on to the

previous creating endless centuries of existence until he allowed sleep to take him away. What a

pleasant revelation, thought the man, closet time contracts rather than expands! He realized he

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felt happy, and pushed himself up to a stand. The man could see a mental snapshot of the April

morning he had dourly encountered earlier. Now he felt anticipation to plunge into the day, to

take a walk, drive to work, to do anything out there, just to feel a joyous moment of living.

He opened the closet door and walked to his front porch to truly greet the day. He had

banished the darkness within, for a time at least, by immersing himself in the darkness without.

The last butterfly of thought that flitted through his mind, one he scarcely acknowledged, was

that closet world would always be there if he chose to go there again. For now life beckoned.