by Liz Levine
LIZ
who me??? hahaha
Sadly, I do!
LIZ
how was it? Want company?
JUDSON
sucked. feel shitty. If you can handle it, come over.
LIZ
be there in 15.
JUDSON
mom is annoying. Nowhere to get away from her. Feeling tired. Very cold and snowy outside.
JUDSON
coming down from up north early. Gonna go straight to appt. Think you can handle me after?
LIZ
I’ll be in touch w the fam and see
you at your place this eve.
JUDSON
Just in case the fam hasn’t reached you:
they’re going to keep me here a couple days. Call the hospital room if you can’t get me 416-555-6269
LIZ
what’s going on?
JUDSON
not sure.
Blood work says I’m getting better.
They are beating the cancer but I feel like shit.
LIZ
hmmm good news. Bad news. Sleep it off. I’ll call Josh and find a time to swing by later.
JUDSON
please.
LIZ
gonna come by in the early afternoon to see you.
JUDSON
what time’s your flight?
LIZ
7ish
JUDSON
cool.
LIZ
I’ll be back soon!
JUDSON
remember that time when you snuck me on that plane to Paris.
LIZ
I remember.
JUDSON
Thanks for doing that.
LIZ
hey you. What’s up?
LIZ
Judson…? worried
JOSH
hey L, it’s Josh. Judson back at hospital same number—room 311 this time. Call and I’ll answer.
LIZ
hey. I know you can’t talk right now and probably aren’t strong enough to text. I talked to Josh tonight, again. I know you were there, listening I know you’re reading texts when you can but find it hard to respond—you don’t have to. Just know that I’m here.
* * *
LIZ
it’s so crazy to me that you’re never going to write back now.
I can’t believe it, almost.
U
URN
Poor Great-Aunt Tillie. Who would want to be stuck in that little thing?
UNVEILING
I’m not sure I’ve been to one of these before. I mean, we had a little “celebration” after Mom bought the plot and we put Great-Aunt Tillie and Katherine here, but it wasn’t a real unveiling—they had both been dead for decades.
My nieces did not come to Tamara’s funeral. They were too young. And if Poppy the dog hadn’t died only weeks before, they might have been too young to understand death at all. And sometimes the older one has to remind her little sister, “Auntie Tamara isn’t coming. She’s dead now, like Poppy.”
Now, 11 months later, Lex has decided that it’s important that his girls come to the unveiling. He just needs to figure out how to explain it to them. So he talks about the cemetery like a park. A park we go to in order to remember the people we loved and have lost. And this morning, en route to the cemetery, he tells me he stops to get roses for the graves. That he gives two roses to each of his girls and explains that one is for each of his sisters/their aunts. One for Auntie Tamara and one for Aunt Katherine, who died before they were born.
The girls nod solemnly and take the roses. As they pull into the driveway, he says a small voice from the backseat says, “I need another rose, Daddy.” My brother, ever patient, asks why. “For Poppy!” is the resounding reply.
As he lifts the girls out of the car, he gives them each an additional rose and recommends that they go find the perfect tree to remember Poppy and to leave the first of their now three roses there.
I’m driving Mom, so it’s just the two of us in her car. She’s relieved about that at this moment. Me, not so much. I’m holding my breath. Driving through this cemetery feels familiar but not comfortable. I’m starting to deeply understand the meaning of the term “family plot.” I am sad for a flicker of a moment that Gammy and Gramps aren’t buried here. I have to swallow hard. I wonder if the pain of the family lives here now, in this physical place. Like the sadness of it all is something that you could come back to and visit once a year.
We pull up near the plot, and Mom can’t get out of the car. She can’t do anything but fight her tears right now and twist a tissue in her fists. It’s hard to talk, and I can already see the extended family noticing us. I get out of the car and go greet them for her.
It feels like it is taking forever to gather everyone at the graveside. The girls are having a walk around, the uncle with the walker is moving so slowly he might be moving backwards, some cousins or stepsiblings can’t find the right area of the cemetery, and my father is on the phone trying to direct them. And I’m standing here with Tamara’s tombstone covered in a white cloth, and my mother shaking silently beside me.
As always for me, the actual ritualized event is a blur. I’m all surface so not sure of the details of what’s happening, but I know my father says a few words, a Hebrew prayer is read by my brother Peter, there’s a reading, a little talk, my stepsister-in-law reads a poem. And finally someone is lifting the cloth from the stone and it’s quiet. Really quiet.
My mother steps forward and puts her flowers on both Katherine’s grave and Tamara’s.
TAMARA ASHLEY LEVINE
Oct. 6, 1979–Nov. 18, 2016
Quadruplet
Treasured Daughter, Beloved Sister
Intrepid Explorer.
Passionate, Compassionate, Caring.
The image of my mother standing at the foot of both her daughters’ graves is one I know in the moment I see it that I will never forget. And I am reminded of Judson’s father in the swirling snow nearly a dozen years before.
Mom comes back to stand beside me. Lean on me. She’s coming apart. Lex gestures to his girls that they can now place their flowers on the graves. They take this very seriously and walk slowly and carefully place their flowers on each of the graves, one at a time.
And in the moment of quiet that follows this grand accomplishment, my niece begins to skip across the lawn into our waiting arms and announces in her loudest and proudest voice, “This is so much fun!”
U-TURN
I’m packed. I’ve been home so long I brought the car with me, so now I’m driving back to Vancouver alone. And leaving Toronto feels like another loss right now. All goodbyes feel like losing to me—it’s something I’ve noticed. But maybe this can work. This new shape—the Judson-shaped hole in me. And the Tamara-shaped hole, the space I didn’t even realize she took up until she was gone. Maybe there is a way to refill parts of them.
I’m looking for the clues just north of Toronto on a stretch of highway that burrows into the heart of the Canadian Shield. It is beyond depressing. It’s hundreds of miles of jagged earth, looming pines, and rocky outcrops that could otherwise remind someone of cottage country, but to me, on this day, I am stunned by the sheer space of it all. The space between us. The spaces we need to travel to connect and become whole.
I’m heading home, but I have the sense of a journey. I don’t have a fixed deadline. I could do the drive in as little as three days, or I could take two weeks. I think I’ll see how I feel.
And I have been feeling. Not thinking for once.
I spend my first few hours driving away from Judson and crying about him. It’s more than a decade overdue, and it hits me hard. I’m not crying about the end but finally and honestly grieving the losses of him: I cry for the way he looked at me. I fight traffic north towards Sudbury and on to Thunder Bay, and I cry for our history, a story that would never be written. I cry for all the things I knew that I’d already started to forget: the sound of
his voice, how the skin lay over the muscles in his forearms, how he went a perfect golden brown in the summer with soft blond hairs on his arms and legs, how he smelled like chlorine and sweat and a hint of Dolce & Gabbana.
I spend the next few hours crying about Tamara. For the first time I’m not crying for the tragedy of it all or for the horror of it. I’m crying for her. For how short her life was. For how much she had left to do, for how much she had yet to live, and how much she suffered in her time here.
I stop to fill the car with gas, and the kindness of the man who fills my tank has me in tears. I am so raw still. I stop crying for about 15 minutes at a time, but anything can set me off, from the Beach Boys song on the radio to the price of gas. I’m a mess.
For the first time in my life, I have no control over the tears that I’m shedding and no idea how to help myself. It’s scary. And the only thing I can think of is go through. I resist this with every cell in my being. Why? Why pain and torture and hurt? Why can’t I just ignore this and add it to my brief history of death? There must be a purpose or a point.
I’m clearly having an existential crisis. And I waver between striking pain and giggles over how ridiculous this all is.
I hurt.
I hurt from the inside out.
I lie on the bed in a dark hotel room that night and google the following: “crying, pain, loss, sadness, depression?”
I start my second day in a swirl of new language, ideas, and thoughts. It feels like a long time since I’ve spoken to anyone. It feels like a very long time to be alone in my own head. The road is eating away at me. I need to get out of Ontario, out of the dark, windless roads and into the sunshine of the prairies—as though passing that invisible line on the road will put me somewhere instead of this nowhere.
I can’t look back.
But looking forward is like staring into the abyss.
I am haunted by grief on this drive. Not by the grief I have felt, or even the loss I have experienced, but by the idea of it: how vast it is, how dangerous it seems, and why I’m so compelled to go as far as I can. I’m tearing myself apart, and I’m doing it on purpose.
I’ve been thinking these thoughts for hours.
Go gently.
I need to stop driving immediately, but I feel like I could do this forever: wake up in a strange place, all alone, get in my car, and just be as ephemeral as this life. Just move forward towards nothing and from nothing. Live in the understanding that I’ve lost everything even in the moment that I have it all.
It’s like present-tense nostalgia. Essentially, the happier I am, the sadder I am.
It’s a fucking depressing idea.
I’m doing this to get through, and I’ve moved so many miles into it that something is forever different now. There’s no gravity in this existence, nothing to hold me here. Nothing to hold everything I care about. The new normal is about letting things go.
So I’ve been letting things go for the last five hours with the warm wind whipping across my face. I have finally found a place where I can use the idea about the alphabet. I will risk feeling it, and freeing it, one letter at a time.
My alphabet isn’t a history of death. It’s a collection of the things that make up loss. It is about defining the abyss. It weighs it and it measures it and it looks for the edges, so I can break it down. The things we have lost.
Innocence.
The generic highway rest stop has a volunteer program offering free coffee. It’s not bad. I sit and smoke a joint, brush off the ashes and gaze at the endless horizon. I’m almost through Manitoba. The air is starting to feel different.
I feel weaker and stronger and more disconnected and more connected than ever. I’m so far from everything and closer than I’ve ever been before.
I don’t know what to do at the hotel. I’m in a small town I don’t even know the name of. The only thing holding me to the world at this moment, ironically enough, is my iPhone. I text a couple of people, and I google: “grief and trauma?”
The next morning, my first thought is that I just want to get in my car and get back on the road and keep moving through these ideas and getting closer to home.
Then my phone bings.
It’s Facebook, reminding me of some death-iversary or another. And I’m laughing: hysterically, tears rolling down my face, laughing until I’m crying. My head is buried in the pillow and my first thought is: It is two hours until I have to check out, still barely 9 a.m. I could just lie here. My second thought: I could just go to the desk and extend my stay and lie here for 48 hours and tell no one.
The third is less a thought and more a realization: This is a luxury. Grief is a luxury. It’s a luxury that I am privileged enough to take. And I’m going to. I’m taking a grief-cation in Nowheresville, Saskatchewan.
The woman at the front desk is lovely. She extends my stay. We talk about things to do. It’s not a long conversation, but it’s a good distraction.
I head out from the hotel on a walk. It doesn’t sound like there is actually much to do, but maybe just moving along with my thoughts is a way to start. It’s a low-lying town, sad from some angles, but there are glimpses of something else here: the small white covered bridge against the brilliant blue sky and blazing sun looks like something out of a fairy tale, and somehow appropriate for this strange and impromptu holiday. As I walk I see more of them: a rusted orange metal bridge for cars over the river, a small red wooden bridge for pedestrians.
At the local coffee shop, I overhear a conversation on why the bridges here are covered. Apparently, the sloping roofs are so the snow can slide harmlessly off into the river. I also learn that wooden bridges that aren’t covered only have a life span of 10 to 15 years.
Can inanimate objects have life spans? I guess so. Periods of time during which they exist.
My tears are slowing to hiccups.
I’m seeing it.
I’m understanding something on a visceral level. Somewhere beneath the grief there is a new kind of joy starting to bubble to the surface.
I walk back to my room and google: “joy and pain.”
UNRAVEL
…It’s a feeling. Like waiting for a sentence to begin or end.
V
VIOLENT
What it feels like on the inside.
VALIDATED
I needed it for so long, but now… It comes so close to the end of her life, and so close to the end of the alphabet. And it’s not worth anything. Being right doesn’t matter anymore.
From: Allan
To: Liz, Michael, Lex, Mom
March 6, 2016
To all:
I feel the need to document the outrageous behaviour exhibited by Tamara at dinner that wrapped up a short time ago.
Mom had invited Tamara for dinner since we hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks and we wanted to hear about her trip to Vancouver.
All was quite normal before dinner, chit chat about things; Mom bathed Poppy and prepared dinner. Dinner was served, all normal, all 3 of us chowing down a great meal—salmon…
There was a lively and warm discussion about Tamara’s impending move, jobs, travel, Spain. All normal, so far.
When Tamara had almost finished her meal, she excused herself to go to the bathroom (I knew what was coming since I have seen this play many times).
After about 10 minutes, she came down from the 3rd floor and had been transformed from Ms Jekyll to Ms Hyde: she launched into a furious, irrational rant accusing Mom of poisoning her (laxatives in the food), that Mom had served her a meal different from what we had eaten, that Mom was lying to her and that she would never come here again because Mom was part of the manipulation and conspiracy.
Among other “signs” of our participation in the conspiracy: we were accused of intentionally removing all the toilet paper from both of the third floor bathrooms and, in addition, that Mom had used a purple towel to dry Poppy.
Tamara was irrational and hysterical and left the house in a huff, having
demanded the return of a loving letter that she had written recently to Mom. This behaviour is part of the “I love you; I hate you” mantra that Tamara frequently repeats; that kind of love she can shove!
Now, I am on a rant and I should end it here.
I wanted everyone to understand and appreciate what a toll this nastiness takes on everyone and how tragic it all is. I doubt anyone needs a reminder of how ill Tamara is.
Allan
W
WE
Plural pronoun, possessive, ours. Judson and I were a “we.” Tamara and I were never a “we.”
WEDDING
He did it, Jud.
Your little brother Josh—he really made it. Not just survived but is doing it happily. He bought a little place in Cabbagetown. It’s cute. It used to be messy, but…
…then he met a girl.
And he liked this girl enough that he started working more hours so he could fly to Australia and stay with her for three months. And then she moved to Toronto.
And he proposed to her! And while you would have smacked him in the head for kneeling down in a rain puddle, you would have loved that he proposed over the holidays in the Distillery District in front of a giant, beautifully decorated tree.
Her name is Chloe, and she’s wonderful and kind, and they’re getting married in May, near the cabin, next to your tree. So you can be there, the best man.
X
X
It’s about variables, about solving something. Trying to make the numbers balance out so that these losses have a value, something tangible, and aren’t just an endless hollow absence. Even with the emotional pieces of them left scattered on the highway and the physical pieces of them buried six feet deep, there is still so much unresolved. And there are so many pieces of the formula yet untouched: the forgotten variables, the temporal flux, and the mystery of infinity.
