desirable, someone easy, in your sphere. You have to choose someone you’d still want to be with if you had to travel to Dubai to see them. Only then will your heart be authentic. It’s like the difference between choosing the milk in the front of the display case with the expiry date on it just because you need milk, or driving to a different shop for the organic milk you really want.
Lacy was never easy. But she’d been worth it. We were light drawn to darkness, dark to light, like opposite sides of the same coin. Her moods varied because of her past. It had been a tragic childhood, and as an adult the memories remained. Sometimes she was day, sometimes night. Day and night is still the same day.
The chopper hovered over a tiny airport in a desolate brown field. Music drifted in through the headset. It was an old song by Rush.
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision,
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision.
Some are born to move the world—
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we’d like to be.
C S Lewis once wrote that grief is a long valley, and that sometimes you wonder if the valley is a circular trench.
Conrad landed the helicopter gently, and we unloaded and waited inside a hangar while the Cessna was fuelled for the remainder of our journey. When we boarded the small plane Marilyn was so alive, with eyes wide open, that it was impossible to think she was dying. Her son naviagted the small craft down the runway and it lifted into the sky, gliding in a completely different sensation than the ride before, my blood moving horizontally this time. He flew across different terrain and we coasted in silence, until I spied an airport in the centre of a mountain range that was overflowing with green and thousands of trees. We lowered deeper, and touched down on a small runway.
Conrad removed his helmet and turned to me. His eyes were blue.
‘Welcome to New York!’
‘Here briefly, in this forest shall you dwell…’
Dante’s Purgatorio
I woke from a dream at 3 a.m. and sat for a while staring out the window. A storm was coming, and as I watched the bending of the trees I wondered if one would break.
The taxi ride from the airport had been 10 miles to the nearest cabin. We’d landed in the heart of the Adirondacks, and when I asked an airport employee to recommend a hotel he said he knew just the one. It was remote and at the edge of the lake. It was a bit of trouble to get there, but without snow it would be OK. His uncle owned it and the key would be under the mat, and the caretaker would be up to bring wood for the stove in the morning. The road wound deep into the forest through a row of tall maples, ending at a small gravel drive. The cabin was more than I’d expected.
A stone walk led up to the door, and a small garden with brightly coloured flowers surrounded it. There were white pines everywhere, and complete silence. The cabin was a traditional log exterior, and someone had painted the door candy apple red. Above the door was a hand-crafted wooden plaque with an inscription: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’ intrate. I pulled the key from under a brown welcome mat with a smiling beaver on it, slid the key into the lock, and entered. I stepped in to a small open space that resembled a Kinkade painting I’d once purchased for Lacy, called ‘The End of a Perfect Day’. Wood stove, tin roof, and a canoe in the back near the edge of a pond. I felt a peace I hadn’t felt in the desert.
Marilyn and Conrad and I had embraced in a triple hug like old friends, standing in the small Adirondacks airport. People drifted past slowly like souls floating, unlike the way they scurried quickly to baggage claim in other airports, and it was in that moment that time stood still. I would not see them again. There was no past, no future. Only now. We wept like infants after one of us broke, like a strong dam set free.
The last words she said to me were catalogued in my brain, right below the last words Boo had said, and then Lacy. I was keeping a list now, an electronic rolodex of last words, of those who’d travelled on to the other side.
‘I love you, Daddy…’
‘How’s our baby girl?…’
And then standing there in the airport, ‘Some people who have decades to live, are already dead inside, Jonathan. Right now I feel more alive than ever. Be alive, Jonathan, not one of the walking dead. Lessons of this sort cannot be taught but come from one’s own struggle to find truth.’
I walked across the hard wood floor, my bare feet feeling the rawness. How’s our baby girl? I felt a sense that I’d been there before, but I chalked it up to the comfort I’d felt when I had visited my grandfather’s cabin on the lake, decades earlier. I love you, Daddy. Some things remain in your DNA for ever. I opened the door and walked outside, stepping onto the small wood porch. I observed the way some trees swayed deep, while others stood rigid. Like humans, each one moved slightly differently, changing with the shift of the wind. Be alive, Jonathan.
I sat in the chair and imagined those who had done it a hundred years before, imagining the lives and messages we receive like one eternal thread, connected. I thought of my brother who had loved hunting and fishing in the mountains with our grandfather when we were young, while I was content to skip rocks in the stream, unable to stomach the thought of killing a deer. I considered calling him, but there was no telephone and even if there was, what would I say? Everything was different now. He’d be unable to understand my desire to escape. He’d want to talk me into coming home, talk me back off the ledge of this new journey and into the normalcy of my abnormal existence. But what would I go back to now?
I fell asleep again in the chair sometime after 4 in the afternoon and when I woke it was dark and the wind howled through trees. I had much to do, but couldn’t. Much to say, but couldn’t. Much to feel, but couldn’t. The shrink back in California had said I’d entered a ‘dorsal vagal shutdown’, which in plain English meant that I was frozen. The answer, she’d said, was social engagement via the ventral vagal nerve by laughing, or connecting with others.
Everyone it seemed, had an answer.
My Christian friend Bob had told me that isolation was the tool of the devil. That although it seems like a gift, it’s also a curse when we become too inward, withdrawn from life and disconnected. He’d said that the enemy can get to your emotions only after you’ve been isolated, a strategy used by the greatest generals of all time. Isolate, then defeat.
‘How long you staying?’
The voice startled me, and I turned.
The man walked with a limp, one leg obviously shorter than the other, with high rubber boots over jeans and a flannel shirt. He shifted his weight to the good leg as he ambled up the path towards the cabin, stopping to catch his breath.
‘I
