Not the choice to love, but the choice to carry a thing with you, long after it no longer applies. And the pain that comes with that choice to carry.
That day, the day it all came back to me, and left for good, he wasn’t the only thing that came back. There was my father’s death, and there was my break-up with my husband, and there was the torment of my child’s difficult youth, and there was a woman who had once maddened me with jealousy because someone I dearly loved loved her. This went on for several hours, one powerful episode after another. Each came back to me, re-entered me, with the full force of how it had been, with how tightly I had held to it, with how I had ever afterward let it define me. I cried so much that afternoon I thought my body would run dry. It was as if the force of this thing had control over me, one relived experience after another coming to throttle me, to show me how much suffering it carried with it. Each in turn came, in its fullness, and then — it was gone, never, I knew, to return. That is how it was. I was being emptied. I understood this to be the case. Letting go was practicing on me, on all the gigantic stories from which my life and my sense of self had been constructed.
Because I realized, as each thing came, that it was a kind of last hurrah, there was a strange poignancy about its coming and going. Even though so much of what came that day, what burned through me, had to do with painful history, it had also been — for so many years — the way I could tell I was alive. It was the stuff of poems. It was what a person could know me by. When I became close with someone, these stories were what I had to tell, the long and complicated stories of what I had gone through. What I had survived. What had changed me. It was as if I were saying, if you don’t know this story, you don’t know me.
That was how I always was: my stories were who I was. That day they came back and then left, and I knew were leaving for good, I felt a wistfulness, that all of that history was truly history now. But I also felt light, incredibly light, and free. Unburdened. It wasn’t exactly that I had let all those things go. Not that exactly. It was that who I had been wasn’t there anymore. I had changed. The person I had been had left with all those dramatic events that had defined her. She was a memory too, like they were. Now, in the aftermath, I was just standing in my kitchen, dry-eyed, marveling. Utterly empty. Free.
Tissue Paper Wall
I hadn’t been home in a long time, so long I had no memory of having been there at all, at least not till I got there and knew it was familiar. So familiar, in fact, that I couldn’t believe I could ever have forgotten it. How could this be? So dear it felt, like the most precious thing ever created, and yet all my life I hadn’t been walking around with a memory of it, or even a sense of missing something.
Not home as in brick and mortar, no slab or walls with a door and a roof, but home like a knowing, like pure seeing, like what might be called God if it weren’t so worn out a word, and why do you think there ever came to be such a word as that — God? Because somebody knew, somebody sensed it, that dirt and sky had something in common, and they had the same thing in common with the names for things and with the colors of things, and the same thing in common with air and with the absence of air, and the same thing in common with what gets called evil. What? How could this be, all of it home, all of it what gets called God? Not God the father. God the dirt, God the blood vessel, God the spool of thread, God the slither of spaghetti.
When I arrived back home, this is what I knew, all of this. Only I had no words for it. I only felt it, in the body felt it. I had no explanation, no theory, no way to account for it. All I could say was, nothing would ever be wrong again. Nothing would ever be wrong again. Nothing ever had been wrong, only I didn’t know it.
But now I knew it. But even knowing that was incidental. Knowing about it was around the edges. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
But what I’m trying to tell you (here the madwoman reaches across the table, nearly knocking her glass over, grabbing the shirt of whoever is sitting there), what I mean to get you to see is — this was home, it was familiar, it was known to me, since all the way back to forever, and I couldn’t get over it, how it could feel so natural and right, so not-scary, to suddenly have every single solitary thing be so . . . strange. So unutterably sweet.
And then I had the sense that I’d been right close to it, to this home thing, all my life but just not known it, like it was on the other side of this tissue papery wall running all down the length of every bit of my experience. Like in the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence, only the tissue paper was invisible and infinitely rupturable, the whole time all ready to be ripped, to have the whole home thing come flooding in, taking over, obliterating my whole prior understanding of what life was and how it operated. If only I’d known about the tissue paper wall, and had some inkling of what might have been on the other side.
And what happened? How did it go? Something put a match to it. It was gone, just gone. I didn’t even notice it happening. I wasn’t myself anymore. I didn’t tick the way I had. Nothing was the same, and yet everything was deeply familiar. Like I had been in heaven all along, only I didn’t know it.
The Certainty of Death
If you think about it, the fact that death is both dreaded and unavoidable is the perfect recipe for unhappiness. Why live in dread of what is inevitable? It seems like we ought to be able to talk ourselves out of that one.
The way we manage our knowledge of the certainty of death is to live as though it isn’t so. We pretend, on a day-to-day basis, not to know what we know. A lot rides on this denial. So we keep it going.
Then, when somebody dies, we are truly shocked. Even more, when our own death is suddenly imminent, we just can’t get over it. As if we thought it was all going to last forever.
What is it like to live with the ongoing awareness that death could come at any time — to anyone, self or other? To live that way but without dread or paranoia? There’s something peace-inducing about the alignment with reality, even when the reality is painful. It doesn’t much matter if the reality is something we approve of or something we’d just as soon skip. Either way, the thorough acknowledgement of the fact of a thing generates a feeling of peacefulness.
What is real is that we constantly don’t know whether life will still be going on this time next week, or even ten minutes from now. Also, we do know that one fine minute life will have stopped. We just don’t know which minute.
This time last week, my friend was alive. Nobody would have guessed that when he went to bed a week ago tonight, it was the last time he would do that.
Fortunately for him, unlike most people, this man had a pretty much ongoing awareness of the unpredictability of ongoing life. He was one of the most content and joyful people I’ve known. He pretty regularly got ready to die. Which is to say, he didn’t hold on to much.
What is it like to live without the underlying expectation of continuing? To crawl into bed at night as though it is the only time for that to happen? What is it like to live this way and yet not be in a state of vigilance, anticipating doom at every turn? What is it like to live with the recognition of uncertainty and yet not to feel insecure?
Trying to manage the chaos we swim in doesn’t get us very far. Probably the chaos will resist management, and anyhow, during the occasional smooth patches, where things seem to be roughly in order, that tenuous stability will probably not manage to entirely quiet the undercurrent of anxiety, the one murmuring that any minute all hell could break loose. (We do know, however hard we try to pretend otherwise, that someday death will come.)
What is the answer? It sure isn’t in trying harder to keep the dam from ever leaking. It isn’t in avoiding the certainty of death (and the uncertainty surrounding pretty much every minute getting
