Hey tomorrow, where are you goin'
Do you have some room for me
'Cause night is fallin' and the dawn is callin'
I'll have a new day if she'll have me
-Jim Croce
The mystics, poets, and philosophers are all wrong. There’s nothing deep or meaningful about watching someone die. Just existential angst. They all succumb to their pontifications just the same, having gained, at most, a stoic resignation to the guarantee. The years I spent looking through the window at the specter of my own mortality was actually just opaque, on the other side of which was a child’s stick figure drawing.
Spend ten hours driving across three states, the entire time thinking about what I’ll say to his wife, who’s understandably losing her mind. Something that doesn’t feel trite or fucking stupid or something that you’d find on a hallmark card or in a lifetime movie. Rack my brain for something that never comes, between taking calls from my wife, giving me sobbed updates on his rapidly worsening condition. I’m driving as fast as traffic and my rig allows me, doing constant mental math on just how late I’ll show up.
We’re here for you. Whatever you need.
We miss him, too.
Fucking stupid. I’ve got nothing for it. Neither does anyone else. Frost, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, the Gospel according to John. Just a hot knife plunging, plunging, cauterizing the wound every time it’s removed, just to be buried again.
I show up at midnight, many hours too late. As we walk up to the room, my wife is trying to prepare me, but I wave her away and ask her to stop talking. I’m nauseated. I walk in, and his wife is lying next to him, rubbing his arm and holding his limp hand.
“Look, D. T is here.” Her eyes are a thousand miles away and her soul feels like it’s made out of wet paper mache, fallen into life’s goddamn blender, thrown around until it’s an amorphous paste. He’s only breathing because of the dozen machines he’s connected to.
I sit in the corner and fucking lose it, sobbing, face in hands. Harder than I can ever remember before. Maybe since I was ten, two decades ago, watching my grandfather take his last breath and flatline.
His wife becomes calm for a moment and says something to him. A funny anecdote, a “Dave-ism”, and she falls into despair again. The room is dark, just the four of us. Nurses and doctors flit in and out, mostly leaving us be. My wife and I stay for an hour. As we walk out, I bend over and hug his wife as tightly as I can, kissing the side of her head and croaking that I love her. I feel like a useless fuck. A hundred thousand words in my life, and I can’t think of five good ones when it really matters. She will spend three nights laying next to his body as friends and family slowly trickle in and out. My wife and I go to an airbnb, where I’ll lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until the indifferent sun comes up again.
* * *
It’s two weeks later. His wife is driving the jetski, and I’m riding on the back, trying to get lost in the wind and jarring waves. I want to enjoy myself, but it doesn’t feel quite right. We are going faster and faster, until I can’t even hear my own thoughts over the engine. I almost want her to top it out, turn everything into a blur, including her woes and my secondhand depression. A summer storm is rolling in, and the half mile long no wake zone approaches. She slows down and we idle through it.
“When D and I went to the national parks out west, we wondered if living out there would make us immune to the beauty of it all. If we’d just get used to it after a while. Now I’m thinking the same about D. If we could ever be married so long I would just eventually take for granted how good he was to me.”
My white matter rolodex is whirring, looking again for The Right Thing To Say. Again, I’m coming up short. I want to slip off the back and sink to the bottom of the lake so I don’t have to respond. I squeeze her shoulders and say I understand.
“You and AK are good friends.”
“We try to be. Friends are the family you choose. You ought to really do it, otherwise you’re basically just a good acquaintance or a nice coworker.” Fucking stupid thing to say. Just let me drown so I can stop saying stupid things to this woman who has become a sister to me, and who needs a lot more than anyone can hope to offer her. No one will judge her for quitting her job and drifting for six months or a year until she can find new winds and latitudes across shores that feel nice without being too familiar. My wife and I will watch from afar, wishing beyond reason and reality that there was a way we could carry her burdens, even just for a little while.
Great writing, J.L. Thank you.