TwosWrite things down

I See You've Called In Dead by John Kenney

I See You've Called In Dead by John Kenney

by Parker · 107 things on Twos

A novel
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. — Virginia Woolf
Sometimes I wish my first word was "quote," so that on my death bed, my last words could be "end quote." - Steven Wright
The good news, of course, is that someone died today. That came out wrong.
I know that you are more likely to be killed by a cow than by a shark.
I know that in China, roughly 27,573 people die each day. In India, it's around 26,520. In the United States, 7,700, give or take. In Switzerland, it's about 179. In Micronesia, it's just 2. In Liechtenstein, 1. Why not move there?
Mostly what I know is this. I know that you-all of us-should have the answer to one question: What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now. What comes to mind? What memories, days, moments? What people and experiences?
I realize, at first glance, that the idea of writing one's own obituary while still alive may sound morbid. It's not, though. I promise you. It's a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it's your life and there's still time to write it. Before I have to.
It was going to be an amazing year. This is what I had told myself, had promised myself. It had been about two years since my ex-wife left (another man, which I kind of thought was off the table with the whole being married thing). She was able to secure an uncontested divorce in about eight months (yay for her) and I needed to make a clean start.
Be the You That Not Even You Will Recognize. Happiness Is Daring You to Grab It. Grab It! Everyone Kind of Thinks You Suck.
Being present is a present or Let that shit go.
Men are stupid. Or maybe it's just me.
Dates where within minutes we both knew there was nothing there but continued for a drink out of politeness. Nothing much to say after the cursory chitchat, what do you do, what was your last vacation, have you ever considered suicide. Fine, I made up the last one.
Although he didn't speak his first words until the age of four ("Where are my pants?") he had a command of seven languages, in which he wrote, taught, and lectured. He was a competitive ballroom dancer.
Stanley was married anywhere from four to nine times. His ex-wives, all friends, praised his unique lovemaking technique, one they said could last upward of twenty-eight seconds.
Aren't we all more than our résumé? Aren't we more than the college we attended and the places we've worked? Aren't we a million things that are so subtle and nuanced that most people never see them or experience them? Aren't we also that moment-that nothing mo-ment-on a cool spring day when, stopped by a lilac bush in bloom, by the breeze moving the leaves and full violet flowers, the hint of the perfume smell in the wind and the sound of birdsong, when we close our eyes and feel deeply, profoundly grateful, before it slips away, gone, and we're back to the noise of our own head? Aren't we that too?
One of them being the return button. The one that posted my obituary, live, on the website of the world's largest wire service news organization, to be picked up by news organizations around the world. No delete possibility. I made a mental note to speak with IT about that flaw in the system.
This is all bad journalism on my part, starting a story so randomly, without context. Who what when where why.
Howard once said that the trick to being a good obituary writer was keeping people alive. The moment they stopped being alive to you, that's the death of an obituary writer.
I wrote the obituary for the man who created the longest word in the English language, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovoIcanoconiosis. It means silicosis. The man who invented it was a former president of the New York Puzzlers Club. I made the mistake of asking a spokesperson for the club what their mission was. He said it was to find creative ways to express the language in as many letters as possible. I responded by saying, "So you complicate English, not make it simpler." He hung up.
For starters, the world was under the impression that I was dead. My anemic LinkedIn page-so few connections there -had condolences from fellow obituary writers, from people at the company. There were several likes of my posted obituary on LinkedIn (though far fewer than I'd hoped for). I liked it as well, under my own name.
I had a voicemail message from my brother, in China, his voice a curious balance of annoyed and mildly frightened. "Bud. What the hell. This isn't true, right? Call me as soon as you get this." In the background, a child's voice said, "But how can he call you if he's dead?"
You should have children. Best thing. The only thing. You realize how much better they are than you. That's the hope you see.
"There are these nuns," Howard said. "We ran this story a while back. They practice something called memento mori. Latin for remember that you die. They sit and pray, meditating on this notion, that in every action we should remember, have to remember, that we die. When they were asked if it was depressing, they said no, quite the opposite. They said it makes life so ... almost impossibly beautiful."
That at the end—and I've had the privilege to be in the room with a few people now, my parents, two friends—I think, and it's just a guess, but I think we let go of everything and the true nature of experience falls over us. This ... miracle that is existence. Which we layer with so much. With anxiety and fear and greed and smallness and what's next and hurry up and I've got a meeting and all the ... stuff ... that gets in the way. I'm not saying we should all go live like a monk. I'm saying that if you haven't lived the life you want, if you haven't loved life, then at the end, I think a deep and very sad regret comes over you. But if you have, if you've lived well... friends and family and... if you've lived... then just as true is the peace you feel. I've seen it.
Are we ever fully honest with someone else? I don't mean to suggest outright lies, but do we really express those quieter, deeper feelings? Those amorphous, hazy things, core things that even we struggle to admit to ourselves. Do we share everything?
I knew she was lying. That's the thing about an affair. You know. Of course you know. But you lie to yourself. At least I did.
I did the worst thing you can do. I clung. I waited up for her. I asked too many questions. To watch someone slip away, get into bed at night, always tired, turn the light out.
She left, taking her things, which was most everything. I was happy for her. I was. In the way that someone can be happy for someone else but also sort of wish them dead. I would soon turn forty, and that number, that idea, rocked me. It wasn't possible.
I said, "This is why it's imperative to travel with a handicapped person at all times."
"At first," he said, "and for a long time, you're aware of how people look at you. The pity. You're self-conscious all the time. But at some point you begin to accept the chair. It's not a foreign thing anymore. It's a part of you. A part of your body. You ... You care about how you control the chair. Do you have good form? You were reaching way back, throwing your hands forward. Shorten your grab. Make small circles. They teach you this in rehab but it takes so long to learn to use the chair with grace, with ease."
'We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.""
Can one pee behind a tree in a cemetery? Is that disrespectful?
I don't know why, but I started laughing. I laughed until I was sobbing. I wanted to die. I really did. But I also wanted to live, by just the tiniest fraction more. I just didn't know how. You remind me of that guy. This ... person who refuses to step into his life, watching, commenting. Maybe we're all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now."
"My mother is at a work dinner and my father is in Budapest. Did you know Budapest is a place?" "I had heard that." "There's a country called Turkey. Did you know that?" "You're making that up." "It's true. And Budapest is in a country called Hungary." He looked at me, eyes wide, a skeptical look on his little face. "It's madness," I said.
"A group of penguins in the water is called a raft," he said. "On land they become a waddle."
"Ask me what I'm going to be for Halloween," he said. "It's April." "A dinosaur who has like a blow-up fan thing inside and it blows it up with air and I'm in there too and I get taller than I am normal so I look like a real dinosaur. It's sooo cool and scary but I can't see good out of it, so I'll go with my mom." "That sounds epic." "It is. Was electricity new when you were little?" "No. How old do you think I am?" "Are you dead? My mother said you were dead." "I was. I'm better now." "Okay. Well, that's good. Bye, Bud.”
Yup. "Can I ask you why you were tapping the stairs?" "To make sure that a meteor won't hit the Earth." He stared at me, as if trying to see if he could trust me. I nodded, making a facial expression that suggested, Well, obviously. "It won't really," he continued, "but I think it will and I have to do it but I don't do it really anymore since Rachel. Rachel says lots of people do things like that." "Who's Rachel?" At the top of the street a fire truck went by, siren blaring. Leo opened the notebook and jotted something down. "My therapist," he said. "She asked me, she said, what would happen if I just tapped five times and I said I had to tap ten times but she said what if I just tried five times and if 1 did I would get a stamp in my good emotions passport which I still have and so I tried just five times and it was soooooo haaaaard. But I did it. And then you know what she said?" "No." "She said try tapping just two times. Can you believe it?" "I can't," I said. His socks were yellow and had smiley faces on them. Muffin was dreaming, making small noises. Without looking, Leo reached down and patted her gently and the noises stopped. "And then one tap. And then ..." He looked at me, caramel-brown eyes impossibly large, mouth open, revealing little gaps where his Chiclet-like baby teeth had fallen out. His nose was running a bit. "Tell me," 1 said, mimicking his wide eyes. "It worked!" "That's amazing." "I know." "Good for you." "So what I do now is blink ten times. I haven't told her that part." I tried to suppress a smile. "I had a therapist for a while," I said. "Did you tap ten times about things?" "No. But I can understand wanting to do that."
"You're not writing the story of their life. You're writing stories from their life."
There was a mother and son from the Bronx. Francesca and Tony larratti. The son had finally come out to his mother, a strict Catholic who found homosexuality abhorrent. She and her son hadn't spoken for more than ten years, until the day he called to say he was dying of AIDS and she informed him that she was dying of pancreatic cancer. He moved back home to live with her and they took care of each other. This consisted of sitting next to each other on the couch, under an afghan she had knit years before, watching Jeopardy!, sipping chicken broth and nibbling on saltines and peanut M&M's. They made a pact. No sadness at death. No regrets. Whoever went first, the other would dance on their coffin. They laughed about it. They listened to Dean Martin records and, when the pain wasn't too bad, danced in the living room overlooking Arthur Avenue, the ancient Italian bakeries and espresso bars, the old men in the folding chairs talking about the weather and the Yankees, the twentysomethings hustling to the city, not a soul in the world knowing these two people were dancing in the face of death.
The thing is, though, when you listen too carefully, too closely, day after day, to that pain, to that keening, it can take a toll. Because to really listen is to feel it, isn't it? Therapists are taught not to own the pain, not to take on the pain, but instead to simply observe it, at a distance. And you do, for a time. And then you don't. Then you begin to let it in, to live it, if only for a moment. How can you not feel it some days? There's a person on the other end of the phone and you're asking them to talk about the most painful thing that’s ever happened.
I looked over at Tim, who had taken his phone out. "We need to get out of this line," I whispered. "Too late. It would be disrespectful." He typed fast on his phone, then put it to his ear and then handed it to me. "Listen," he whispered. It was a Google translation of "I offer you my condolences," in Polish. We were first in line, facing a man, mid-seventies, in an ill-fitting suit, who looked eerily like the deceased and who nodded slowly as he shook Tim's hand with his own large, calloused, powerful hand. Tim repeated the line, sounding like a native Polish speaker. "Składam ci moje kondolence," he said. The man's face changed, a slight smile. Tim moved on, repeated it, rolled to the casket, and blessed himself. My turn. The man reached his hand out. I shook his hand and nodded, tried to remember the line, "Składam ci moje kon ..." The man looked confused. "What is that?" he asked, his accent heavy. I said it again, a bit less sure this time, more of a question, the phrase having completely flown out of my head by this point. "Konni.." I stopped. The man snorted and elbowed the woman next to him in the receiving line. He said something in Polish to the woman, who looked at me. They both began laughing. He turned to me and said, "We don't laugh at you. It's just ... you said, I ofter you my horse.™ "Oh ... I'm ... I'm so sorry." "Yes," he said, still laughing. "But I don't want your horse." He and the woman kept laughing, speaking Polish under their breath. The woman turned to the man to her left in line, closest to the casket, and said, "Maybe I would like a horse? I need ride home," causing the man to start laughing. "I don't even have a horse," I said, regretting it immediately. It made them laugh harder. The man in front of me felt the need to share this to the largely Polish-speaking crowd. He said something while pointing at me. The assembled laughed while looking at me. I nodded, smiling, not knowing what to do. "I told them, 'You are the horse man," he said. "I am the horse man," I said, forcing a smile and an awkward laugh. Tim said, "How do you say horse's ass' in Polish?" They liked that one.
"Isn't that the woman from the funeral the other day?" I felt as if I were in junior high, at a dance, the long walk over to a girl-Beth Creehan, in my case-to ask her to dance. (Beth said no and then I had the four-hundred-mile walk back, my friends laughing. Fortunately, these memories don't stay with you longer than seventy or eighty years.)
"I'm trying to change my narrative," she said, smiling. "That's great," Tim said. "I love your dress." "Thank you. I like your chair. It's cool-looking." "Oh. Thanks." "Would it be rude to ask you what happened?" I stiffened. Tim being Tim, he simply smiled. Perhaps, too, there was something about the way she asked it, almost childlike. "Vespa accident," he said. "With a cab. The cab won."
"For what it's worth," he began slowly. "In my limited experience, I think we tend to flee pain. It's natural. Physical pain. Too hot, too cold. We fix it. Mental pain. Same thing. We ... drink, take drugs, obsess about sex, about food. Trust me, as a half man. I've tried all of it. A smart person once told me to sit with it. To stay in the pain."
To my left, a group of sandpipers waited for a wave to recede and then ran to the ebbing surf, short strides, quick steps, like women in pencil skirts in a hurry, a peck under the wet sand, then just as quickly back, somehow, just before the next wave hit, little thieves, stoic, as if to say Nothing to see here.
My phone buzzed, a text from Tuan. Are you awake? he texted. No, I replied. My phone rang almost immediately.
"There's a new intern in our area," Tuan said. "Good morning, Tuan." "The intern. I worry they're shopping for your replacement." "With an intern?" "Seems a fair trade," Tuan said. "What does he or she do?" "He. He's annoyingly handsome. Like someone from an Abercrombie catalog. Not that I have a collection of those. He bites his nails, then spits it out. He calls me bro. Every other word is bro. Sometimes brah. I don't understand." "I don't think of you as a bro, Tuan." "I'm most definitely not a brah. A sis, maybe. A Ms. or Madame on my best days. Apparently he's someone's son. Some CEO friend of a board member. He talks on the phone while he's doing his work, with his AirPods in, so that I think he's talking to me. At first I responded, until I realized he was talking to someone else. Kyle. His name is Kyle. He talks of women's body parts. Sexual conversations. In the workplace. Rack. She had a nice rack. Bootylicious. He says these words out loud." "Are you saying you miss me?" "He greets me by saying, 'What's good?' "I think that's something young people are saying now, Tuan." "What's good? As if he's asking about a special at a restaurant. I mentioned Columbus Day to him and he almost had a stroke. 'Bro, that's like majorly racist. It's Indigenous Peoples' Day.' I wanted to say to him, how can a homosexual be a racist?" "I'd love to hear the punch line." "I'm worried for your job. Well, I'm worried in relation to myself, in that I don't want this bimbo as your replacement." "I feel bathed in love, Tuan." "Where are you? What are you doing with yourself?" "Well, I'm going to the funerals of strangers. And shortly I'm about to go swimming in freezing-cold water with a woman I just met." "I don't have words for how unraveled your life has become." He hung up, abruptly, as was his way.
"Hey, you," she said, smiling. "I'm stunned you showed." "Thank you. I already swam, so if you want to jump in..."
"Here's my advice," she said as we walked toward the water. "Don't think. Don't hesitate. Don't hold your breath. It's going to feel briefly like you're being electrocuted. It doesn't really feel like water." "But then it gets better?" "No. It gets worse." "But you adjust at some point?" "No. You simply go numb, starting in the extremities, arms, legs, restricted movement, and then you drown." "Fun." "But after, you feel as if someone injected you with a happy drug. Also they say it's good for the skin, inflammation, and the immune system. Also depression. Although I might be misremembering that. The Norwegians do it, and they're healthy and happy. Although come to think of it the suicide rate is pretty high in Norway. Anyway. Not to worry. It could also be that you have a sudden heart attack because of the shock to your system." "What's the temperature of the water?" "In April the low is about forty-three degrees and the high is about forty-six." "Is this a good idea?" "Don't be a baby."
She removed her shirt to reveal a bikini top and I tried not to look at her breasts, the shape of them, her cleavage, tried too hard perhaps. To the point where I was looking her in the eye and she at me. "Ready?" she said. "No." She ran and I followed. She screamed when she hit the water. I screamed louder. It was worse than she had described. It felt as if electricity were hitting my body, the pain ferocious. I kept going, following her, pulled forward, against my will, and dove under.
"Wakes, funerals ... They make me feel alive, remind me." "Of what?" "That this is it." She looked over at me and shrugged. "We're so afraid of death," she said. "Standing in that room. A wake. It's so awkward. What do you say to the person? I'm sorry? What a lovely service? I was in line behind a man at a wake a few weeks ago who, when asked how he was doing by the grieving husband, said, and I'm not making this up, he said, 'Well, I'm having a fantastic year business-wise.'"
I floated the idea of adding a quote saying, His son, Bud, an obituary writer in New York, said, "Death runs in our family." Gerry nixed it.
The feelings his annoyance elicited in me. I was suddenly twelve years old. How is it we never escape family?
"Meet someone," he said. "Have some kids. They're the only things that keep me sane. Look,” he said.
"Where are you?" Tuan asked. "Disney World. I'm nude, running from Goofy, who appears erect. It's a nightmare." "Sounds quite wonderful to me."
I said, "You can't believe the news these days."
We had to take sensitivity training. It started a few years ago. A team of experts came in for three days of seminars and exercises. We took part in role-play. I was, at different times, a gay man, a nonbinary woman, and a hearing-impaired person in transition. Tuan was my partner during much of this and I said to him how much I would love to actually be deaf as his office mate. Unfortunately for me, the instructor heard me say this and was unable to find the humor in it. I was forced to leave the class and have additional one-on-one training with a woman who I felt loathed me on sight and asked me why I thought it funny to make a joke about a hearing-impaired transgender woman. I said I believed what had happened was a misunderstanding and that I could explain. She held up her hand as if she had been badly scalded and said that my attempt to mansplain in the context of my white, cisgender privilege was repugnant to her and that she frankly wasn't sure that even an immediate apology would erase the trauma my words had caused but that if I wrote an essay asking for forgiveness for my tone-deafness to the LGBTQ community as well as people of color, minorities, and the non-able-bodied, that might be a start.
Ten months into my malaise, with Judith's counsel, with Tuan's quiet, daily sup-port, I managed to book a trip to the Mayan Riviera. I slept late, swam, read two books. We get better. We heal. I brought back a bottle of Don Julio 1942, Tuan's preferred drink. When I gave it to him, in the office the morning I returned, I found it hard to speak. "I just wanted to say thanks," I said. And then, unaware I was going to do it, I hugged him and he reciprocated by not moving a muscle. "Well, okay then," he said. "Let's never do that again." And that was that.
"Where do you see yourself in the hierarchy of humanity?" Tuan asked. "I don't understand the question," I said. "As a cisgender white male, I mean. Where do you stand, do you think?" "I'm eating, Tuan." "Let me tell you where I see you," he continued. "But let me start at the top of the social food chain. Lesbians. I see lesbian couples as up here." He held his long, thin arm straight up. I noticed that the nails of his slim fingers were painted turquoise with small black hearts. "Women are life-givers. They don't start wars, commit murder. Lesbian couples are almost perfect. Their Achilles heel, of course, is an almost laughable attempt at fashion. Think a female college basketball or lacrosse coach. Culottes. Second..." "Tuan..." "Second would be gay men. Natch." "Maybe let's never say natch again." He ignored me. "While not technically life-givers-despite argument from radical segments of my own people who believe that gender is meaningless in the birth process-imagine a world without us. Clothing, interior design, hair, makeup, choreography, art, theatre, food, topiary. Basically, you'd be left with the gray, ugly world of Eastern Europe during the Cold War or, worse, the soul-crushing blandness of, say, greater Westport, Connecticut." "Third I'm assuming would be Republicans?" I said through a mouthful of tuna. "Third would be closeted gay men in a marriage of convenience," Tuan said. "Fourth would be any trans person, either single or in a relationship." "Tuan, they're closing in, like, three hours, could you speed it up." "Fifth is a straight couple, the saving grace being the woman. And a distant last is ... you." "Thank you."
What is it we remember of a life? From those 28,000 days if we are lucky enough to live that long? Those 960 months? What was Molly Donnelly remembering as she drove home that afternoon? Surely our days are measured in small things, small connections, small thoughts. It's not meetings and deals closed. It is our children. Talking of the day, of lunch, of coloring, of nonsense, the parent listening, half listening, not listening, because this is a thing we do, we daily do, morning and afternoon, the little holy rituals that make up a day, a life, drop-off and pick-up, an expected thing, a known thing, a wave to the crossing guard, to a mom friend, to Ravi and Angie and Brandon, little school friends. My, how they've grown. New lunch box? New backpack? Good day? Hold my hand, sweetheart. Listen to your mother. A shared smile with the other mothers. They know this world. Can you believe this new principal? Did you hear so-and-so got laid off? The deli charges $5 for a half a gallon of milk now. Ineffable feelings. The best kind. Words overrated. Time to go home now. She puts him in the car, in his car seat, buckles him in, burying her face in his neck, a little kiss. We'll go home and have a snack and play and then dinner and a bath and bed. A story. Frog and Toad again. Fishy kisses. Super-tuck. He asks for a super-tuck. That's what he calls it. Night, Mom. See you tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. We have time. Of course we have time. Please dear God.
"You can change the way you think." So said the therapist.
"No, it's not," she said, smiling. "This is therapy. To be vulnerable is to be strong." "Isn't it strong not to be vulnerable?" "Not in the new world." "I don't cry. Well, rarely" "Most men say that, but they do." "No, I'm serious. My mother's death, father's death, my hopes for my brother's death. I think the tear ducts might not actually work."
"Feelings are hard," she said, "especially as we get older. We learn to read, we learn to write, we learn how to drive a car. But we never really learn how to deal with our feelings, unless our parents taught us or we figured it out. Unfortunately neither has happened with you. Read your list, please." "I worry it makes me sound whiny and pathetic. Which are actually two of my better traits." "Sarcasm is a defense, Bud. One we usually outgrow in our teens. But no matter. I think that's the old voice. It speaks to you in cognitive distortions. Let's change the station. No one wants to listen to that station anymore. It plays bad music. It's a crap station. Shoo. It's gone." She said everything changes when the heaviness goes out of living, that I needed to put down the heaviness. I nodded but I didn't understand. She said the cause of suffering is fear and avoidance. Don't run away, don't escape. Embrace it. I didn't like the sound of that. She quoted someone and said, "We need to open to life as it is, rather than how we want it to be. And how we want it to be this constant state of painlessness, of ease and safety." This last part caused me to look up and stare at her and say, "Yes," without realizing I was going to say yes. "The problem, of course, is that that state doesn't exist," she added. "Have you tried scotch?" "More sarcasm. How wonderful. Would you read me your list?" I couldn't stop the voice in my head. After the divorce. The reality that it had happened, that life sort of ... exploded. It was as if I was watching myself and narrating it. I told Judith this. I said, "Is it just me, or do we all have this voice in our head most every moment of every day that is, like, not our friend?" "It's just you. But go on." "He likes to kind of beat the crap out of me, review conversations I've had. In about twenty minutes, after I leave this office, my little voice will tell me how terrible 1 was in this very conversation, how I sounded like a complete buffoon. And it will again urge me to go over everything I said. The same voice beating the hell out of me every day. The same regrets, the same I'm-a-stupid-fuck-ing-asshole-who-never-amounted-to-shit. After a while you believe the voice. And that's one of hundreds of examples throughout the long day ... and those are the good days. The voice is having the time of its life." My homework had been to make a list, to write down what I would want to tell my voice, what I would want to change.
"Bud. The list." I read. "I wish Jen hadn't left. I wish she would have told me ... what she was feeling. I wish I had been the kind of man who she would have wanted to stay with. I wish I'd had courage and believed in myself. I wish the baby hadn't died. I wish I was a real reporter. I wish I was a correspondent in London. I wish I hadn't stayed in obits for so long." I stopped and looked up at her. "It's whiny. It makes me want to slap myself." "It's not whiny," she said. "Maybe a little whiny. Ha! That's a fun therapist joke! Go on." "I wish I rebounded faster after she left. I wish I'd met someone. I wish I hadn't fallen into this ... person I am now. I wish I didn't have a loop in my head about the things I wished I'd done. I wish I could call my mother.”
"I feel like ... it's like I've been driving, okay?" I said, yet again unaware of the words coming out. "That my life is this long road trip. I thought I was doing okay. Things felt pretty good. Job, wife, future. And then it was like someone changed the script on me. Changed where I lived and who I lived with and what the future looked like. This new script was crap. I had a very bad part in this script. I was cast as middle-aged lonely guy. I don't want that role. But here I am. And I feel like somewhere along the drive I passed a marker, a signpost, a spot along the road. I didn't notice the spot. It was a nothing spot. But once I passed it, I crossed into the second part of my life, the part where youth and a fair bit of possibility are in the rearview mirror. And this voice, this person who told me about the signpost, I ask him where it's all gone, and he says, Oh, it's at the last rest stop. You drove away, thinking there was nothing but time. And I say, why the hell didn't you tell me?! And he says, I tried. Like, a million times. Every day. Every word you wrote for your work. Every fucking moment that passed that you let go without doing something to make it matter. Every season that passed, every holiday you didn't spend with anyone. A million times I tried. But you didn't listen."
"Important women in your life leave you." "Yes." "And you blame yourself" "No. Maybe. Yes." "You ask, 'What's wrong with me?" Worse. You doubt yourself. You no longer try." I watched her. I refused to nod. I didn't have to. She seemed to know what I was thinking. "The story forms," she continued. "The women leave. You're to blame. So you retreat, don't trust, perhaps begin to loathe yourself like they must have. The story hardens. What was once merely a thought, a fleeting, fact-less notion, is now a bedrock truth." "Let's stop for today maybe," I said to the floor. "This is where the fear comes from." "The fear comes from opening my eyes in the morning." "You turn forty-five next year," she said. "Yes." "Okay." "Okay what?" "I believe your mother was forty-five when she died?" "Yeah. That's crossed my mind."
"The loveliest place to be is with someone who has lived.
"I'm not afraid,' she told me at the end. 'I don't want to go yet, but I'm not afraid. I wouldn't change a day of my life. I'd just like more of it.'" He paused and looked down. "Do you honestly think, on days like today, that I'm not angry with God, that I'm not compelled to doubt, to swear and scream as I put these garments on? I am. And may God forgive me. Until I see her family's faces. Know that she lives on through them. That she wills us, urges us, to live. Right now. Because this is it. The thing we've been waiting for? It's right here, right now, in front of us. Do it now. Whatever it is. Do that thing that honors life."
How do you not make it sound selfish? Is anyone listening? Somewhere in the stained-glass-diffused light floated the ancient prayers, the words sometimes said at speed, rote, but always as a fervent plea, Lord, have mercy on me.
In my experience, when someone says "Calm down," it usually has the opposite effect.
"One more thing," he said, sounding angry. "And I hope it's not a Tim lesson. But this whole thing ... It isn't about death. It's about the privilege of being alive. How do you not get that at this point in your life? And fuck off too."
Children do a thing. They watch their parents in a way others can't, at close range, un-noticed, day after day. Keen observers, they know a parent's moods, know the meaning of a prolonged sigh, can decipher a clenched jaw, a change in intonation. It was the second today. It was too bright, too forced. She seemed to falter. "Why?" Gerry asked. "It's just a routine checkup. Nothing to worry about." "For like, what, a day or something?" "Might be a day. Might be two. You know hospitals," she said with breezy casualness. We didn't know hospitals. "Tests take time to come back." Gerry thought about this and nodded. "So, like, will you and Dad be at the game today or what?" "Of course." She turned to me. "You're awfully quiet, mister." "Do you feel okay?" I asked. It was here when it started to scare me. Because it was here, looking at me, that I saw her eyes begin to fill. But she smiled, blinking it back, quickly wiping her eyes, and laughing, said, "I feel fine." "Go," she said to Gerry. "And good luck. Play well." She watched him pick up his bag, then awkwardly steal a kiss from her, pecking her on the cheek, as if on a dare to himself, the desperate need of it, even at eighteen, as if it were somehow a weakness. I watched her watch him go out the door. Her firstborn, her strong, handsome son, athlete, popular with the girls, col lege scholarship to Penn. Her arms wrapped tight around her chest, unaware of being watched. Thick brown hair that tended toward wavy, up in a bun now, the delicate jawline and high cheekbones, doelike brown eyes. She turned and saw me watching her, waved her index finger at me, a small hello, a thing she did, and then walked back into the kitchen.
People came to the house that evening. Neighbors, friends, my mother's dementia-cursed father, who kept asking where she was. I watched as women brought food, handed out cups of coffee. The men nursed glasses of beer.
We kneeled on the hassock, Gerry bowed his head, and I looked at her, her face two feet from mine, this wooden stranger. I don't know why I did it but I reached out to touch her arm. And in the moment before Gerry pulled it back, in the moment before he hissed, "Don't!" I felt her leaden, lifeless arm, felt how her body was no longer hers. Where was she? Her, I mean. Her essence? Where did it go? How does it just disappear?
What no mourner ever said, what I wished they had, was the truth that this would be the day that would define the rest of your life. I would come to learn that much later.
"Well. They did this thing in the nut bin. They said we should ask ourselves, when the thoughts get weird, is it true? Is the thought true?" "Then what?" "Ask what happens when you believe that thought. Then ask who you would be without the thought. The thoughts, the stories and narratives ... they're lies. But we live every moment as if they're true."
"I read this thing. I think it was the ancient Egyptians. They believed you died twice. First when you died, and second when people stopped saying your name. So, then. Louise Stanley."
The visible universe contains about one hundred billion galaxies. Each one of those galaxies contains around one hundred billion stars. That means the visible universe contains something like ten thousand million, million, million stars. That means there are more stars in the visible universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. NASA can now see two billion stars. Which is less than one percent of the stars in the Milky Way."
"We die and are reborn all the time. We just ignore it. About three hundred thirty billion cells are replaced every day. You're different today than you were yesterday." "I like that idea. But I feel the same." "You're not. You're just thinking the same."
"I just..." He waited, the careful listener. "It's just that I ...I want to be forgiven." Tim look confused. "For what?" "Everything. Jen. The obituary. The other day with you. My ... thoughts ... my failure ...just..." "Whoa. Hey. Look at me. All of that ... It's just thoughts. Lies. Ain't real." "The divorce? The obit? The shit I said the other day? I can't shake this feeling that I am just. crap." "You should go with that feeling," he said. I snorted. "For what it's worth," he said, "I think the divorce was a gift. For you, for a new life. And, if I'm selfish, for me. The other day doesn't mean shit. There's just today. Okay? One day. What would you do?" "Get a one-year gym membership." "Genius. One day. Go." I hesitated but I knew the answer. "This," I said. He looked down. "You?" I asked. "Is walking an option?" He forced a smile. "I'm doing exactly what I want to do," he said, a real smile this time.
"About the church and what I said the other day," I said to the floor. "I'm sorry." "It's okay." "It's really not." I looked up and he forced a smile. "I'm sorry too," he said. "Why are you sorry?" "Because I'm a didactic douche sometimes. So much so that I just used the word didactic, which is such an annoying word. Sometimes I hear my own voice and I hate it," he said. "I hate that I think I know something about how to live." "I think you know a lot." "I think I'm a pontificating jackass a lot of times." "You're not. It's just ... it's hard to be like you." "You think I'm better than I am. Because of the chair." "No. It's because you're the best person I've ever known." He looked at me and I could see the effect of the words. "Many lifetimes ago," he said, "after I finally got out of the hospital, I went through ... a lot of shit." He laughed. "Ugly shit. Rage. My life gone. Sex... gone. So I ... 1 did stuff" "Like what?" "Oh, life-affirming things like vodka. A lot of vodka. Vodka and cocaine. I smoked crack, which is quite wonderful The first time. Less so later, when your friends stop calling you because you're so fucked up and you're raging at them and you have no memory of how horrible you were. So that was good." He looked over at the cellist and watched her play. "I was losing friends. Lou flew in, gave me a talking-to, told me 1 was killing myself. Which I was. Begged me to stop, get help. I was numb, even with her. I just kept ... push-ing, to see how low I could go. Oh. Forgot to mention that I watched people have sex. In hotels. I hired sex workers. Had them come over, get undressed. Watched them. A guy beat the shit out of me once. Left me on the floor, drunk, out of my mind, bleeding. Stole money. That was a proud moment." He forced a laugh and looked up at me. "But Lou, Esther, my parents... they just ...they stayed by me. Cleaned up after me. Cleaned me. Fed me. Sat with me." Here his voice broke, just a bit, and he was forced to take a deep breath. "So ... if I overstep, if I give advice and sound like I know what I'm talking about, it's because you matter to me. That's all. I have a hard time seeing the people I love unhappy." I ran my tongue against the back of my lower teeth. I blurted out, "So, I'm almost forty-five and I don't really know how to live." Tim stared at me, unblinking. "Then I would say you are officially a citizen of the world." "I'm just ... I had this vague sense of how life might go. At least I think I did. College. Magically find a career. Marry. Kids. Lately it feels like someone else is writing the script of my life. I don't love this script." I looked up, forced a little grin. Tim had a pained look on his face. "Want to know the secret?" I asked. "The pure-shame, can't-ever-say-it-out-loud secret?" I felt my throat constrict. "I'm afraid," I said. "Of what?" "Dying. Because I'm not sure I've ever really lived. And I don't know how." "And the wakes? The funerals?" "I hate them. They fucking terrify me." Two older women walked through the gallery. One said, in a heavy accent that I guessed to be German, "Look at the pool." "What?" the other asked in native English. "Pool. There's a pool." "Yes." "As a girl I swam nude!" "You did what?" "Nude!" She laughed and they walked on. We'd both been watching them. Tim looked at me, his face in full laugh, covering his mouth. "TIl shut up now," I said. "Just know I'd be lost without you." He looked at me for what felt like a long time. He paused, looked down, and then said, "Show me someone who is great with death and I'll show you a sociopath. I know a little bit about fear. All I can tell you is that it's a lie. It dares you to look it in the eye. Because when you do that, when you stare straight at it and don't flinch, you own it. These ... wakes and funerals? That's you looking fear in the eye. There is another side. I know it. And what's waiting for you there is everything."
"You don't deserve Vermeer. Look at the painting. Pretend you're not you. Let the picture speak to you. It wants to speak to you. It's speaking to you across hundreds of years. This is its power. It's trying to tell you something, a universal thing, a thing that has no boundary in time. Why is the girl laughing?" I stared at the painting. I waited. It seemed too obvious. "Because she's happy?" I said. Tim turned to me and smiled. "Yes." "That's it?" "What else is there?"
The American belief that if you travel far enough physically you can escape yourself."
"The answer is yes," Tim said gently. "I thought about suicide." "I hope it's okay..." Tim shrugged. "Of course. I did more than think about it, actually." Tim's expression didn't change. He nodded and pulled the sleeve of his sweater back, turned his wrist over, and showed her the thick keloid scar running crossways along the inside of his wrist. He'd told me once he'd gotten it in a boating accident. "I lied," he said and shrugged, looking at me. "I tried twice. Turns out I wasn't good at it." "Why didn't you ever tell me?" I asked. "It's hard to describe what it was like," he continued. "Just a constant twenty on a scale of one to ten. Nerve pain. Anytime I moved. All I did was try to find periods during the day when there was no pain. Moments. I'd doze off. Until the next throb, the next electric jolt. And then there was the reality of it. The unending nightmare of it. I'd sit there all day and just ... weep. I was thirty-one years old and I felt like my life was over. And that ... psychic pain and sadness turned to rage. Just ... this rage. The world had screwed me and I played an endless loop of if only, of I want my life back, of this isn't happening, this can't be happening, this isn't fair." He stared at his wineglass and sighed. "To fully describe what it feels like to be imprisoned in a seated position... when you Look at me and imagine it... it's way worse."
"You have a wound," she said. "If it was a cut, you'd have put Neosporin on it, a Band-Aid. But you did nothing and so it festers. You and me and a billion others. We walk around with these deep wounds that alter how we think and what we say, the relationships we have, who we trust, the decisions we make. That keep us from really living."
"We hold the past in our body," she said. "It never forgets. But it can learn to let it go."
"So what's a year?" "A long time." Tim turned to look at Tara. "Tara. Would you wait for a guy for a year?" "Absolutely not." "See? Tara would wait." "Your friend is quite a character," Tara said to me.
Our lives each day are a series of choices. It's one decision over another. One person over another. One job in a new city over staying at the old job. Whole worlds of what-ifs. What if Jen hadn't had the affair? What if we'd had a baby? What if 1 had never met Tim? Whole parallel worlds, parallel paths that are there for the taking. It's the chicken over the fish, even though you had no idea the chicken was bad and you ended up with food poisoning, missing work the next day when the gunman came into the office, Killing nine, and saving your life. It's the broken washing machine in your apartment build-ing, forcing you to lug your duffel bag of soiled linens five blocks, the strap of the bag breaking, the frustration causing you to burst into tears and a man named Michael stopping to ask if you are okay, Michael with the kind face who offers you Kleenex and who, in two years' time, will be the father of your two beautiful children. Lives are changed by seemingly unconnected, random decisions that change everything. So it is also the detour to get a few slices of pizza and two bottles of root beer so we could eat lunch. Which is why I wasn't in the room when Tim died.
"Tim is dead, isn't he." I nodded. He stared at me. "Are you sad?" "1am." "But you know what?" "What?" "Like, you knew him and isn't that better than never knowing him even though he's dead now?" I wanted to reach down and hold him, bony bird of a body, all eyes. "What do you think about it all?" I asked. "Well. My grampa died. And we had a gerbil that died. And Lucy my sister. So. I just think Nope, nope, nope, nope when I saw their dead bodies because that's not them. I have them in here." He pointed to his head. "They're all here. I talk to them all the time." "You do?" "Course. My sister is always with me. Tim will always be with you." I had trouble swallowing. He reached over, without looking, and I felt his little paw of a hand take mine. We sat, looking out at the street, waiting for life to continue, holding hands, holding on.
I shouldn't have grabbed him by the throat. That was wrong. And I shouldn't have pushed him up against the wall. Nor did I know I was going to do that. It's remarkable what you can do when you don't care what anyone thinks anymore.
Tim Charvat, longtime adviser to Sotheby's on twentieth-century art, patron to writers, poets, filmmakers, and dreamers, bon vivant, and man about town, died suddenly at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. He was 59. Mr. Charvat, a one-time Peace Corps volunteer, was a passionate lover of the arts in all forms. He advised the New York City Board of Education and helped design an art curriculum for elementary school students. An accident at age 31 left Mr. Char-vat a paraplegic. The accident, and life in a wheelchair, did not slow him down. Indeed, it seemed to drive him to do more for others.
I continued to listen. Of course I listened. I heard the words—"small incision one inch to the left of the belly button and one inch up." But I also drifted, looked briefly at Tim, then away. I looked at his hand, his ear, his shoeless feet. Where was he? Not this body. But him. His essence. That ineffable thing. Is animation, life force, just brain function and electricity? Heartbeat? Is that all it is? Is that all it is that built the Brooklyn Bridge and invented penicillin and wrote "Let It Be" and created Cool Whip?
The thought came fast. Tie them together, he seemed to say to me. I dare you. He would have loved that. Standing, finally, in some distant place, some magical, stardust place where we go, when we go, if we go, Tim finally able to stand, to walk, the joy of it, the sudden desire, in his new sneaks, his handsome suit, ready to burst into a run, and then falling from the knot tying his two sneakers together. "That sonuvabitch," he would have said, smiling.
"We are here today," I said, "to honor the life of my dear friend, Chaim Lipschitz." I waited. I looked out over the faces. I'd made a mistake. And then they started laughing. "I am so sorry," I added. "I've brought the wrong eulogy." Good man, Bud, I could almost hear Tim say. Do not let them feel sad. "My name is Bud Stanley," I continued, "and I was, like all of you, lucky enough to be a friend of Tim's. I'm not sure why I'm up here. I have little to add to what Louisa said so beautifully. No one knew him better." Here I looked up, locked eyes with Louisa. "I'm not exactly sure how to begin to describe Tim Charvat. So I'll start with the time he went skydiving. A man without the use of his legs let himself be pushed out of a plane. I know this because I went, too. One of us screamed. I won't say who but it wasn't him. Now, granted, an instructor was on each of our backs. But in those seconds before the parachute opens, before it jerks you back up, you think, you feel, like you are going to die. And what is thrilling is that you don't. He wanted that. That thrilling feeling of being alive." I cleared my throat and sipped from the bottle of water. "He loved life. I don't mean that as some ... cliché. He didn't just go through the days. He made them ... matter. Unable to walk and yet reaching for life every day. With each salon, each party, each random meeting in the street." I looked up again, out over the rows of people. I hadn't seen her before, but there, in a middle pew, was Jen. Jen, and next to her, the Englishman. Perhaps I stared too long. "Tim and I spent the last few weeks going to the wakes and funerals of strangers. We went to the wake of Judy Bennett, aged seventy-seven, and the funeral of a Dr. Samuel Gauss, aged eighty-six. To the wake of Jan Kaminski, seventy-six. Molly Donnelly, forty-three, and Eddie Donnelly, six. To the funeral mass of Ava Gutierrez, forty-one, and Vincenzo Marchetti, sixty-three. Tim would have wanted me to mention their names. Tim was, in his own way, trying to show me something. Teach me something. Here's what I learned. Nothing. I learned nothing. In the movie version of this eulogy, they would change that to some bullshit Steven Spielberg ending about how I learned so much, how the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the value of life. But the world didn't change for me because these people-as lovely as I'm sure they all were—were no longer in it. Death didn't ... It didn't enter my soul and... leave a mark." A siren in the distance outside. The clouds must have shifted because a thin shaft of light came through one of the stained-glass windows on the right. "And then Tim died. And death entered my soul. I think the question is, what do I do with that? What do we do with that? There's this ... quote ... from an ancient Sanskrit text, the Mahabharata. And please don't think I knew any of this. It's all Tim. A character in the book is asked what the greatest wonder in the world is. And he answers ... He says, The greatest wonder is that every day, all around us, people die, but we act as if it couldn't happen to us. And yet... living is hard. What's the point? Why are we even here? How can we know all this ... stuff about how to live, about how there is literally a one-in-four-hundred-trillion chance of ever being born and yet, in the next mo-ment, when some jackass cuts me off on the Belt Parkway and then gives me the finger, I give him the finger and wish I had a shoul-der-mounted rocket launcher on the passenger seat. Oh, humans. Or maybe it's just the Irish..." Ilooked out over the faces, at Tuan, at Leo. At Jen. What came out next wasn't on the page. "People can break you," I said. "Through pain. But also ... also ... through love. The feelings so strong, the loss so great..." I faltered, never the good ad-libber. But I kept going. "I was broken two years ago. And Tim... he showed me grace and dignity and kindness when I had none, wasn't able to see it, kind of gave up. Tim saved my life because he showed me how to live." Ilooked at Tuan. He was blinking quickly and gave me just a bit of a smile. "So what now? After we all leave this church, leave the reception, go home, put in laundry, watch a show on Netflix, go to bed, get up tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. This has to mean something. Something lasting. I mean, why do we do this thing, wakes and funerals? A sign of respect, of course, for the dead. A sign of respect for the family. But I wonder if it's also for all of us. Each of us here. Surely it's a reminder. But perhaps also a call to a state of grace, if only for a few moments. A pause to remember how fleeting our own mortality is. I had an office mate." I was tempted to look at Tuan but couldn't quite do it. "He's a... he's a dear friend," I continued, "who I've never told how much I love. And when I first started my job with him and his annoying office habits, he said to me, he said, "The good news is that someone died today. I thought he was joking. He later explained that this thing we do, the writing of these things, the celebration of someone's life, it's a gift, a reminder. What death dares us to do, is celebrate it. To celebrate the gift of life in its fleeting face." I looked down at my speech, at the last line, and smiled. I took the pages, folded them in half, and put them in my jacket pocket. "Here we are, as Tim would have said, all of us, on this lovely day, alive. What are we going to do with that?"
No one tells you about how, in the days and weeks after, when others have moved on, perhaps rarely thinking of the event, the passing, you sit there and think, How am I supposed to live?
If you're reading this, I win. I went first. Wait. Is that a win? I forget the rules. I write this knowing that a person with my condition isn't likely to live a long life. Too many complications. So one prepares, writes notes to dear friends knowing they will be read after I am gone. Fun! Here's what I want to say to you. You saved me. You did. Your childlike wonder masked in sarcasm and absurd jokes. Your asinine comments that somehow make me laugh. I have a tendency toward self-pity. I try not to show it. But alone, late at night, I like to have little pity parties. You wouldn't let me. You were there. The best friend a half-man could have. It never dawned on me, your old-school ridiculous name. Bud. How perfect that that's your name. I don't know if I would have made it without you. Alone in the house. That I want you to have. It's all in my will. The lawyers will take care of the paperwork. Find a good tenant though, please. Someone a bit lost. Someone with a kind heart. Someone who can't afford our lovely neighborhood. Don't charge them much. Invite them down. Play records. Keep the salon alive. Start a new one. The lost souls are out there. And they're always looking for free booze. Thank you for moving in. Thank you for being my friend. One last request. Please, please, please be happy. Try. You're going to die, you know. Trust me on that one. Much love, Tim.
Before I left the house, Clara had said, "What's the worst they can do? You died already. Everything else at this point is gravy." She kissed me goodbye, and as she did she put her hand on my cheek. What a thing to have in your life.
"Okay," he said when we got to the conference room. "Come by when it's over" I nodded Tuan was wearing what appeared to be culottes with espadrilles and a bright yellow sweater with Daffy Duck's face on it. He turned to go. "Tuan," I said. He stopped and turned back. "I just want you to know," I started, pausing, wanting to find the right words, "that even if I was gay, I wouldn't date you." The hint of a smile on that beautiful face. "Bland white boy. Please." He turned and walked away.
"But that's not why I'd fire me if I was on your side of the table. I'd fire me because we do the job wrong. Obituary writing. We sit in a room in this building and we make phone calls and type down data and facts and birthdays and Oh really, he was in a bowling league, sorry about your loss, bye. And we print it. And people read it. And think ... nothing. Because it was cheap and easy. It didn't get to who they were. To do that, you have to go to the wake, the funeral. You have to watch and listen and see the grief and try to feel the pain. You have to get to know who they were and what they meant. Each life. We do it wrong." I looked at Howard, who held my gaze. "I bet if you looked out that window right now," I added, "you'd see a guy down there waiting for the light to change, the world hustling by him. He's just a guy, both ordinary and extraordinary. And what he doesn't know is that in about an hour he's going to drop dead of a heart attack. You know why? Because it happens. Who was he? Does he have family? Kids? Friends? Was he in the military? Did he see combat? Does he help coach his son's flag football team? Does he drive his daughter to swimming practice at six a.m. each morning? Is he thinking about a funny story he wants to tell his wife, who's still his best friend? Does he look at his kids when they're sleeping and feel God? I don't know. But an obituary, a good one, from a news company worth its salt, should owe him that. These were whole lives. They mattered. Don't we owe him that?" I slipped my jacket on. "Anyway. I'm sorry. As you are now no doubt acutely aware, I am an idiot. But I don't care anymore. I made a mistake. I didn't kill anyone but myself. And now, apparently, I'm alive again. I'll tell you what I'm going to do with that. I am going to start by stealing a Coke from the kitchen as well as several notebooks and pens for my eight-year-old friend Leo."
Do not ask a man to write about sex, to explain sex. It will be boring and expected. It will lack nuance. It will make you wince with embarrassment. Of the many things men are taught, either directly or culturally —how to fix a flat tire, say, or hang shelves, siphon gasoline, track a buck, build a fire in the woods, parachute into enemy territory (not one of which I know how to do) —we are never taught to understand the largely indescribable feeling that is sex when it is far closer to love. Sex-if my experience with Clara is any clue-is largely about eye contact. Flesh helps. The look of it, the curve of it, roundness. Breast, hip, inner forearm. But also breath, irregular and hurried breath, partially open mouth, the newness of this experience that you've had many times, renewed, made fresh, made alive, the urgency that begs for slowness, the seeing someone so closely, from a place you have never seen them before, just a few inches from a freckle, an eye whose blue, you now realize, contains dabs of emerald green. Now a head thrown back and the shape of a jawline, a long neck, introducing yourself to someone, her fingertips touching your face, barely touching your face, realizing, as it's happening, how strange that your lips aren't touching, simply breathing, as if suddenly in a place, a landscape you have never set foot in. The slow jazzlike rhythm of it, unplanned movements somehow seamless, intuitive, bodies moving in a kind of slow dance, as if they had met long ago, a feeling so exquisite, Don't end, don't move, and yet the movement itself a kind of sublime pleasure. This feeling of wanting to laugh, to cry, to say things that in this moment you know you feel without a doubt. This act has nothing to do with sex. You know that now. Because even in the early days, the heady days, with Jen, the sensation was not this. This is something different. This was what you had been looking for. This feeling of being fully alive, connected, emotionally, with someone else.
"I love you," I said. It was out too fast. It was a thought in my head and it slipped out. "That's what I'd say. If this was the last time." She stared at me. I waited. She turned to leave, then stopped. "I know. Me too." She walked through security and didn't look back.
At night sometimes I would call his phone. I would wait for the answering machine message, listen to his voice. After a while I stopped calling. The bastard didn't answer. Ikept running.
Then it was Leo's turn. He had insisted on wearing a sports coat and tie and asked me to do the same, as he felt this was what serious people did during presentations. As always, he held his notebook. "Mmm... good morning. My name is Leo Hoyt and I am in third grade at PS 29 school in Brooklyn. I chose for my show-and-tell my friend Bud who is also my neighbor from five houses away but the houses are connected, so if you think about it except for the bricks it's kind of the same house." I looked over at Leo's mother and father, watched them watch him. Leo looked up at his classmates and hesitated for a moment, suddenly shy, and then looked over at his teacher, who smiled and nodded. "Do you know what an obituary writer is? Well, neither did I. It is a person who writes about dead people. But isn't that sad? you might ask me. No, it isn't, because to do a good job you have to write about their life and the good things because that's what life is. When someone writes your obituary, you will like it because you will have laughed a lot during your life and you had friends and a dog and went to birthday parties with balloons and to the beach and so many things that at night, each night, when you go to bed, you will think, Wasn't that a great day." Leo's mother wiped at her eyes and her husband put his arm around her shoulders. I wondered what I could possibly add to that that would make any difference.
I see a red cardinal from time to time, out the back window, on the old ash tree, occasionally hopping onto the back deck. They are hard not to notice. Their color, their particular beauty. I did a search online and came across an interesting story. Apparently red cardinals can be spiritual messengers. The word cardinal comes from the Latin word cardo, meaning hinge or axis. Like a door's hinge, the cardinal is a kind of doorway between Earth and the spirit world, the story said. There are, depending upon how late you are willing to stay up and how much you want to read and how much you miss your friend, many myths around the cardinal having to do with renewal and good health. They are, say some, a visit from the other side.
I don't understand death. The biology of it, yes, but not what remains for the living. Pain and memory and an empty place. I think to fully get it, you have to feel it so profoundly that it upsets your sense of the world. It has to make you a little crazy. But it also has to make you love this miracle of existence to the point of bursting. If it doesn't, well, then you don't get it yet. Life prevails. How strange and wondrous. In the midst of death, life prevails, calls to us, begs us, says, Come, please, don't you dare waste this precious gift. It's just after 7 a.m. on a cold December morning. The sky brightens later now. I sit and wait for it. The coffee is on. I can smell it. Tim's apartment—it will always be Tim's apartment to me—ticks and creaks in the early-morning quiet. The vague smell of old fires, of polished wood and clean floors. The man who delivers The New York Times just tossed it up on the landing, hitting the door. I open the refrigerator and see that I need milk and eggs. I'll go later. There is an obituary to write. I want to do it in a way that reminds anyone who reads it that that person's life mattered, that we won't forget. It is so easy to forget. Tim said we are all obituary writers because we get to write our life every day. Write it. Please. It's your life. Also, it will certainly make my job easier.
This book was inspired by something my brother, Tom, said the last time I saw him. He died in June 2019 at age sixty-five. Tom was a firefighter, like our father and both grandfathers. He was also a rescue team manager on the Massachusetts FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Team who worked at the World Trade Center during 9/11. He had walked into burning buildings. He had saved lives. He was the man. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and my four other brothers and I had been visiting fairly regularly. His condition worsened, and Tom's wife, Kathy, called to say we should visit as soon as possible. I arrived before my other brothers. Tom was sitting in a reclining chair, a blanket over his thinning frame, but still himself, still in there somewhere, still sharp, quiet, darkly funny. We talked, and after a time I heard a car pull into the driveway and I looked out the window. "The others are here," I said to Tom. With a Buster Keaton stoneface, Tom dropped an arm over the chair, let his head fall to one side, and, trying to suppress a grin, said, "Tell them they're too late."