Dwarves of Grief

From "O" Magazine

**Excerpted from "This Does Not Have to Be a Secret" from the book "An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination" by Elizabeth McCracken**

"...In the hospital in Bordeaux one of the midwives looked at us and asked a question in French. [The Author, McCracken explains her and her husband Edward's mediocre grasp of the French language during when they were in the hospital in France and their son, Pudding, was born stillborn at nearly full-term.] This particular [midwife] was a teenager, checking itmes off a list. The room was like a hospital room anywhere, on a ward for the reproductively luckless, far away from babies and their exhausted mothers. Did we want to speak to -

'Excusez-moi?' Edward said and cocked an ear.
'Un femme relgieuse,' the midwife clarified. A religious woman. Ah.
Here's what she said:
'Voulez-vous parlez a' une nonne?'
Which means, Would you like to speak to a nun? Of course in Catholic France it was assumed we were Catholic.
But Edward heard, 'Voulez-vous parler a' un nain?'
Which means, Would you like to speak to a dwarf?

When he told this to his friend Claudia, she said, 'My God! You must have thought, 'That's the last thing I need!''
'No,' Edward told her. 'I thought I'd really like to speak to a dwarf about then. I thought it might cheer me up.'
We theorized that every French hospital kept a supply of dwarves in the basement for the worst-off patients and their families. Maybe it was just a Bordelaise tradition: the Dwarves of Grief. We could see them in their apologetic smallness, shifting from foot to foot.

In the days afterward, I told this story to friends over the phone. Our terrible news had been relayed to my friends...and now I phoned to say - to say what I wasn't sure, but I didn't want to disappear into France and grief....We ordered carafe after carafe of rose', and I told my friends about the Dwarves of Grief, and I listened to their loud, shocked, relieved laughter. I felt a strange responsibility to sound as though I were not going mad from grief. Maybe I managed it...."

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Dear Oprah & Ms. McCracken, please don't sue me.

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I loved this for so many reasons.

I loved Elizabeth McCracken's writing.

I loved humor and heartbreak coexisting like lover's fingers interlaced on a walk down the beach.

I loved the impossibly lovely image of the "Dwarves of Grief"... so out of place and unexpected and almost gruesome that they fit perfectly into a situation of agonizing loss and suffering. [Though I have not experienced the tragedy of losing a child and won't even pretend to compare, my grief over Mr. M's drinking and the death of my marriage and all my hopes and dreams while we have 4 kids depending on us, has been profound and devastating in its own right.] How many times would someone's offer of a Dwarf have been welcomed? It seems like a validation of the crazy out-of-placeness of what is going on in my life.

"None of what is happening in my life makes any sense. What is happening?" I flail against reality.

"Excuse me Madame, would you like to talk to a Dwarf?"

"A Dwarf?" I would respond

"Why yes, of course, Madame, A Dwarf."

"You know what?" I feel a little calmer, a little more understood "This situation definitely calls for a Dwarf. Please! Bring out the freakin' Dwarf!!!"

And finally, I love the last paragraph where the Author acknowledges that she feels a responsibility to be OK, to offer a laugh, to not be too much of a "downer" in the midst of her entire world being ripped apart at the seams. So ridiculous. So unnecessary. And yet, so me!

Ah... what a deliciously beautiful piece.

Thank you so much "O" Magazine and Elizabeth McCracken that "refreshed my spirit".