Games like, “Okay, I’m the cowboy and you’re the Indian, and you can try to scalp me, and then I’ll massacre you.” Or when they were slightly older, “I’m the US Force Reconnaissance Marine, and you’re the ultranationalist Islamic terrorist, and you can try to blow me up and then I’ll obliterate you.” It seemed that Benny was always the one getting massacred or obliterated, but when she tried to discuss it with Kenji, he just laughed. The games they played caused her even more concern. “Is that your real mom?” she’d hear them ask, and it was all she could do to keep from yelling, Of course I’m his real mother!, but Benny, untroubled, simply answered yes.
Kenji would pick them up after school and bring them home, give them a snack, and send them outside to play in the yard, where she would see them when she came home from work.īecause Benny was mixed race, she worried about bullying. This sounded right to Annabelle, and she was relieved when the counselor said they didn’t need to start thinking about medication unless the problems got worse.īenny had never been the most popular kid in school, but he’d always had friends-odd, furtive little boys, with blank side-slipping eyes, un-washed hair, and moms whom Annabelle didn’t quite trust.
Grief, she said, was personal and expressed itself in many ways. She’d scheduled regular sessions with him and said she thought that the difficulties he was experiencing were a normal part of the grieving process. The following fall, his seventh-grade homeroom teacher reported some issues with focus and attention, but the school counselor had been very supportive. Sometimes, on the brink of sleep, he thought he heard his father’s voice calling to him, jolting him awake again, but since nothing more ever happened, he never mentioned it. ĭuring that first summer after Kenji’s death, Benny slept a lot and was more subdued than normal, but he never seemed to want or need to talk about his feelings, in spite of his mother’s encouragement to do so.
Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. The following is excerpted from Ruth Ozeki's novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness.
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