Julia agreed to drive me to the airport, but there was a thick silence between us.
She pulled up to the five-minute unloading zone. “You have everything you need?”
“I think so.”
“Will you tell me one thing?”
“What’s that?”
“Forget it. You won’t say, anyway.”
She turned towards me, her face a mask.
“I can’t explain, Julia. Not now. Can’t you understand how this might happen, even a little?”
“Understand how it might happen to someone else? Or you?”
“Why is it any different if it’s me?”
“I’m not sure. It just is.”
“I’m sorry, Jules.”
“Yeah, well.” She glanced in the rear-view mirror. Her son, Will, was asleep in his car seat, his face flushed, his head resting at an angle only a small child can sleep at. “You should probably go. Don’t want to miss your flight.”
“Right.”
I gathered my purse from the floor, checking it automatically for the hard shape of my phone.
“Can we talk, you think, when I get back?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see, okay?”
“Thanks for the lift.”
She nodded and pushed the button to release the trunk. “Have a safe flight.”
I collected my carry-on, and as I walked towards the entrance it began to sink in that maybe I had lost more than Jeff.
Maybe I was going to lose everything.
Aboard my second flight, I walk down the long centre aisle to my seat, and look for room for my suitcase in the full overhead compartment.
“Let me help you with that,” says a man touching forty.
Before I can protest, he swings the bag away from me and up into a space I thought was too small even for the little suitcase I’d brought with me. I don’t intend on staying any longer than I have to.
“All set,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“It’s nothing. Window or aisle?”
“Oh, window I guess. But you—”
“I insist. I prefer the aisle anyway.” He gestures at his height, which I place at six three at least.
I slide over to the window. I tighten the seat belt against my waist and rest my head against the cold, oval of plastic, noticing a row of small holes across the bottom. I’ve always wondered what these holes are for. To release pressure, or to keep us from decompressing as we rise towards the edge of the atmosphere?
Maybe I should drill a few small holes in my brain.
The city out the window looks like any other, particularly once we’ve left the ground behind. We fly over a neighbourhood that could be mine—the same curved streets and newly built houses in pastel hues. I watch the cars navigate turns, and a few tiny dots on the sidewalks.
When we’ve pushed through the clouds, I reach into my purse and take out a battered notebook, something I threw in at the last minute, thinking I might be able to write something about Jeff to say at the funeral. To do what I was sent to do.
I flip slowly through the pages, searching for a blank one. It’s an old notebook, full of half scraps of poetry, ideas, lines, an occasional finished poem. In the last fifteen years, this is the only notebook I’ve needed, and it’s only half full.
The teenaged Tish flashes before me, hunched over one of the many such notebooks lined up like forgotten toys on the bookshelf in our study. Her hand is flying across the page, unable to move fast enough to capture the ephemeral words that appear before her at regular intervals, unbidden.
One of the pages near the front has Brian’s name and number on it, written in his physician’s hand.
When I was in my last year of college, my parents were hospitalized, a week apart, in the hospital where Brian was doing the first year of his residency.
Even then, it seemed over-the-top, having both my parents on the brink of dying, so A-Heartbreaking-Work-of-Staggering-Genius of them. But the funny thing, if there’s anything funny about it, is that I wasn’t that surprised. They’d done everything together my whole life, so dying at the same time seemed like one more thing they’d managed to do right.
Together, anyway. Not right by me.
He had a bad heart, my dad, the same heart that had taken his dad at forty-six. My mom had breast cancer that advanced beyond where it should because she was too busy taking care of Dad to notice the lump forming, separate the bone-weary tiredness from nursing him from something connected wholly to her. They should’ve been on different floors of the hospital, but my dad, Charming Billy, worked his magic until my mother was wheeled into his room and plugged in next to him.
Brian was working nights then, and I was spending a lot of nights at the hospital. Wandering the halls, haunting the cafeteria, scribbling in my notebook.
“You’re the Newtons’ daughter, right?” he asked me one night as I wrapped my inked-stained hands around a cup of half-burnt coffee in the cafeteria. I was sitting at my usual table, a small round of Formica tucked next to the windows where I could feel like I was sitting in sunlight during the day, and in the inky sky at night.
I looked up at him. Hospital scrubs, circles under his eyes, a face that was shaven yesterday. Twenty-six, I thought.
Handsome. Even in my fog of grief and words, I was present enough to see that.
“That’s right. And you’re …?”
“Dr. Underhill.” He said the words like they were unfamiliar. “Brian. Your parents are on my rotation.”
“Right. I remember you.”
“Can I sit for a minute?”
“Sure.”
He sat across from me. I watched him, wanting to ask what I’d wanted to ask all the others: when was it coming, really, the end? But I couldn’t manage it. I never could.
“Why do you guys do that?” I asked instead.
“What?”
“Insist on using your title all the time? The nurses don’t introduce themselves as Nurse Jones or Nurse Ramirez.”
He looked taken aback, then he grinned at me. A wide grin, full of well-taken-care-of teeth. “Because we’re the masters of the universe.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s this thing some of the jerks in my class started calling themselves after a few weeks in first year, but it’s kind of a pervasive sentiment.”
“Because of the life-saving thing?”
“There’s that, but it’s also a way to distance yourself from the patient. If we’re not on a first-name basis, then I won’t be totally shattered when I don’t save your life.”
“You told me your first name.”
“You’re not the patient.”
“Right. Not the patients.”
I looked down at the words written on the paper in front of me. They were blurry and nonsensical. The ever-present smell of cleaning products was giving me a headache.
“Sorry,” he said.
“About what?”
“You know … the patients.”
“Yeah, well. That’s life I guess. Or death.”
I rubbed my hand over my eyes, trying to clear the blurriness away. When I could focus, I found Dr. Brian trying to read my notes upside down.
I shut the cover of my notebook.
“Okay, now I’m really sorry.”
“No big deal.”
“You write poetry?”
“Sometimes.” I thought about it. “When things suck, or when they’re really good.”
“Kind of like the doctor thing?”
“How do you mean?”
“Writing it down distances you from it, maybe?”
“Ouch.”
“Oh, man, I shouldn’t have said that. We don’t even know one another.”
I watched him again, how his face reddened, how he really did look sorry. And even though I felt terrible, I wanted to make him feel better. There was something in that, I knew. So instead of leaving, instead of giving him any more crap, I did the opposite. I tol
d the truth.
“Then how come this is the most real conversation I’ve had since my parents got sick?”
“Maybe it’s the circumstances?”
“I hope not,” I said, and he smiled.
My dad pulled through, in the end. My mom did not. When I finally wheeled him out of the hospital, pale as the ghost of my mother, who was his constant shadow, I had a notebook full of poems. I read them all one night a few weeks later, trying to decide if Brian was right about them being a way to distance myself from death, illness, from everything. I thought and I thought, and when I couldn’t decide, I turned to the page of the book I was writing in that night, saw the phone number he’d written there in case I needed someone to talk to, and decided I did.
“Were you having a bad dream?”
I start awake, feeling disoriented. The man sitting next to me has his hand on the armrest that separates our seats. It’s brushing my arm.
I move away. “Pardon?”
“You sounded frightened. I hope it’s all right that I woke you?”
I straighten myself in my seat, embarrassed that my old childhood habit has come back to haunt me in a public place.
“Did I say anything …” Odd, I guess I want to ask, but don’t.
“No. I thought it better to wake you before you became too distressed.”
Or before I said something that would be embarrassing to the both of us.
“I appreciate it.”
He holds out something. My notebook, which must have slipped from my grasp. “You’ll want this,” he says.
I take it from him, letting it rest in my lap. “Yes. I … thank you.”
“You’re a poet, then?”
“I used to be. Sometimes. I was trying to get some ideas down. For work.”
My words seem to stick in my throat. But I don’t owe this man any explanations. I don’t have to say anything, really.
He smiles briefly. “Once a poet, always a poet.”
“Poetry is for the young,” I say, thinking of my earnest Zoey. “And maybe, also, for the old. Though I’m not sure about that one. I’ll let you know when I get there.”
I cut off my babble, looking down in embarrassment. I see the one word I wrote down before I slipped off to sleep: Jeff. It’s written at the top of the page of the only poem I’ve written in the last couple of years. A poem no one’s ever seen. I close the notebook quickly, feeling a hysterical urge to laugh. I shove my fist in my mouth to stop it, biting down on my knuckles, almost breaking the skin.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what—”
“Think nothing of it,” he says, but I sense him growing wary.
I think about how I must look on the outside. My dark hair is brushed and tucked up against my neck. I’m wearing jeans, but they’re crisp and new. My cream sweater has enough cashmere in it to be referred to as such. Tasteful makeup. A few lines around my eyes. Sensible shoes. A woman in the second half of her thirties who’s the same size she was in high school, give or take some redistribution. An ordinary woman. Taking an ordinary trip.
But from the way he’s looking at me, I can’t help feeling that he’s seeing past all that. That he can see the thoughts rioting around in my brain, sense the sadness dragging at my heart.
Then he shifts away, the moment’s gone, and we’re back to being two people on an airplane, headed in the same direction, breathing the same recycled air.
The cab from the airport takes me past Jeff’s favourite golf course, one he spoke about frequently. Then we pass a restaurant he’d mentioned, and so on, and so on. It’s like all these conversations we’d had were suddenly animated, clay made into moving life. I don’t know how I kidded myself into thinking I’d be anything other than a total mess the whole time I was here. The hubris of two semi-normal days at the office? Of all the stupid things to do, of all the stupid decisions I’ve made, this is the hardest to bear. But maybe that’s fate, karma, the way it should be. Maybe I haven’t suffered enough for my decisions, and so now, in this last act, the entire bill is coming due.
I barely make it out of the cab, and the woman behind the check-in counter at the hotel asks me more than once if I’m okay. I mumble that I am, of course, allergies, the first thing that comes to mind. But I’m not, and as the heavy hotel-room door shuts me into solitude with a thud, I find myself leaning against it, sliding to the floor, almost hyperventilating the tears out of me.
And though I’ve already spent a day like this, though I thought that would be the worst day, it turns out I was wrong. At home, I had the familiar sights, sounds, and distractions of my life to pull me from my grief, to stay the tears and the dark thoughts. For Zoey, for Brian, I could make the effort. There’d be moments where I’d forget, whole seconds, sometimes minutes. At night, I had the stolen Ativan, broken into halves to make them last, to wipe my brain clean, to erase even my dreams.
I was surviving.
But in this anonymous hotel room, I have nothing to hold on to. And outside lies Jeff’s world, a world that’s familiar enough to me to wound but not enough to know what streets to avoid, which people might suddenly speak of him, where it’s safe to cry.
So I stay in my room, and I make myself breathe, and finally my body’s so worn out by the effort I’m able to crawl under the covers of the thick, white duvet and fall into a fretful sleep.
CHAPTER 12
Rites of Passage
In a sense you could say I’ve already been to my own funeral.
It all started when our friend Rob died.
I was in my second year of college; Tim was about to graduate. Rob was in the grade between us during elementary and high school, a mutual snow-fort builder, Woods-player, rule-follower.
We found out he was dying when we were home on break. Tim and I were feeling restless a few days after Christmas, and we decided to make the snowy trek across town to the small house Rob had rented when he’d dropped out of college the year before when his mom died.
We showed up as the sun was setting behind his house. It was a half-cloudy day, and the sky was streaked with orange and topaz. His street was full of mature trees, their leaves gone months ago. The air smelled cold, even though the sun had been warm earlier. I looked up at the brilliant sunset as Tim pressed the bell, so I wasn’t looking ahead as the door opened.
“Hey, guys,” Rob said, a mixture of surprise and fear in his voice.
My head snapped down and I took a step back before I could help myself. Rob was standing in the doorway, but I barely recognized him. He was thirty pounds thinner, had black rims around his eyes, and a yellow tinge to his skin.
It was pancreatic cancer, he told us when we were seated in his gloomy living room, untouched beers in our hands. He’d taken a leave of absence from work when he got the diagnosis and, as far as I could tell, had holed up in this fourteen-by-fourteen-foot room since then. A film of dust coated everything, even him, it seemed.
The cancer was terminal. He was, for lack of a better phrase, waiting in that room to die. He didn’t say the words—he didn’t have to. The pills on the coffee table, the makeshift bed on the couch, the pile of DVDs of all his favourite movies stacked up like a Jenga game next to the TV all spoke for him.
What they couldn’t say was why he’d kept it to himself. How he could have kept it from us all this time. He never knew his dad, and with his mom gone, we were, for all intents and purposes, his family.
I asked, once, but he acted as if he didn’t hear me. He kept on washing the dishes in the sink, slowly, rhythmically, and just changed the topic.
We spent the rest of the holiday with him. We took him on a slow walk around the block, filled his fridge and freezer with prepared food, and bought him a dozen more DVDs. I taped my numbers on a piece of paper near the phone and wrote “In case of emergency” above them. Rob saw me do it, shook his head slightly, but didn’t say anything. We talked sporadically, letting him set the pace, and when it was time to go back to school, we hugged goodbye, so
mething we rarely did. His bones felt like a bird’s against me, so fragile, and my brain shivered.
He died six weeks later. Tim and I both spoke at the service, telling funny stories, trying to keep it light. What else do you do when a twenty-one-year-old dies? You say he lived his life to the fullest, whether he did or not, that you were sure he had no regrets, no things left undone.
But, of course, everyone has regrets. Loose ends. Things they could do if they had more time.
Everyone does.
Afterwards, we gathered in the church basement, a depressing room with ceilings so low anyone approaching six feet had to stoop. The adrenaline began to drop, reality began to hit, and I’m sure I would have lost it completely if Tim hadn’t chosen that moment to put his hand on my shoulder and suggest we get out of there.
I agreed readily, and we moved to a dingy bar down the street with a group of our childhood friends. I remember an old jukebox, a bar-food menu, the smell of half-rotted oats and cheap detergent. We ordered pitchers of beer—a local brew that’s thick and strong—and we continued on, telling every story we could remember about Rob, even the ones whose endings had been consumed by alcohol molecules or time.
When the stories petered out, Tim said how much it sucked that Rob wasn’t there. That he couldn’t hear how much he meant to us, what a hole he left behind. “People shouldn’t have to be dead for them to hear that shit,” he said, his words slurring, though that didn’t blunt the ring of truth.
The idea was born from this. We should have a funeral for all of us, one we could attend. It would be a celebration of our life till then that wasn’t tinged with anything other than love, brother, love.
Maybe it was because we’d reached the I-love-you-man part of the evening, but we agreed to a date there and then. A date we kept, six months later.
Our families thought we were crazy, but we didn’t care. We were doing this for Rob. We were doing this for us. We were doing it.
Despite people’s doubts, the town hall was packed and, pretty soon, laughter clung to the rafters. Each of us took a turn speaking of the other; the good, the bad, the funny. Tim even put together a slideshow and set it to schmaltzy music. I’m sure he was doing it to be ironic, but halfway through Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we were all wiping tears away.
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