Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  I telephoned our children, one by one, first saying “Please sit down,” and listened to the empty moment followed by breathlessness and choking; and then called her parents and heard her mother cry, “But she was our star!” and then her always cheerful, matter-of-fact, graciously controlled father shrieking. And then I called my other daughters. And then I tried to set about making arrangements. An official first said I should come to identify the body and then, apologetically, telephoned to say this would not be necessary. So I continued making arrangements.

  Melissa and I lost each other to divorce. We lost each other in her death. I've never lost the history that we loved each other. She took my arm like a happy lover when we were happy lovers. Separation didn't stop the continual flow. The urgent unlost past endures, like all history; good and bad, it endures, persists, simply continues, like all that once marked the world. The vibration of the butterfly's wings over her wicker picnic basket on a sun-drenched slope of Mount Tamalpais may seem to have vanished after its brief stay with us, but the universe is changed by it, by the crab sandwiches, by the thermos of wine. When Ari grins, when Ethan casts his sideways challenging glance at me, when Nina gazes into the eyes of her baby, Melissa's grandchild, my grandchild, I see in them the restless enchantress whose wide blue gaze was as thrilling as the butterfly's brief fluttering over our first lunch on a mountainside meadow with the Pacific Ocean also glowing blue and restless below. “Why does the grass stand straight up to reach for the sun, but we're just lying here with our toes dangling?” she asked, laughing. I think I murmured, “Heliotropic,” which of course was a phenomenon she knew very well, and she tapped my mouth with a finger. When she turned her attention to me or anyone, she had that magic gift of making the recipient of her attention the center of the universe. Even if he was not. But he could think he was.

  Something this woman was in herself, a steady willfulness within her restlessness, an intention to please but no regret if she didn't, an open heart and a guarded soul, may have been as much an enigma to her as it was to others. She was available to what might come next. She waited for adventure to happen to her, expecting everything or nothing good, ready to move on as always, as she knew she could, to another career, another husband, another everything or nothing. Surely whatever came next would be better, as the not yet experienced adventure always surely will be.

  I wrapped my arms and legs around her. She was more than a handful. She was more than arms, legs, or my praise, “a statistical miracle,” could hold, but when I joined my body with hers and she clasped me close, I knew I was in possession of the universe.

  Then in the evening when she announced that life was too complicated, she had to divorce someone, she couldn't divorce our three children, it wouldn't be fair—it had to be me. She revealed that she had felt deserted when I flew to Africa to report on the Biafran civil war in Nigeria. “You didn't tell me!” I said. “You were supposed to know,” she answered, and added the proof: “I was a mother with a six-month-old baby.”

  Complete in herself, and also she hid that she was not complete in herself. Lovers may think they hide nothing, but they hide. Their arms wrapped around each other brings a completeness of two together that seems to validate and redeem everything lost and failed in the past. Embracing, they forget for a time the griefs that precede these moments and, inevitably, follow them.

  Everything that lovers have ever had seemed to me to be ours. Who on earth deserves such a blessing? No one, but I accepted it anyway. This couldn't be, yet it was, then it wasn't, and finally it forever is, like the butterfly's flutter. Others have also flown close to the sun and then fallen to earth, a place populated by perished love.

  Melissa died in a storm in a helicopter, along with her new husband-to-be. It's proper that our children don't use the word “died.” They believe it was not in her nature to die. They correct me. She was killed.

  Let's not die before we get old, as a song suggests; instead, follow the advice of another song Ethan chose to be played at his mother's funeral, the cranky voice of Bob Dylan reminding her friends, family, and former husband that it is preferable to have one more cup of coffee before we go. One more, even if that intention defies nature, one more.

  Until the death rattle vibrates in my chest, the program is to get on with living. On a hot October evening in San Francisco, winds just right, no fog, the sky glowing purplish with reflections off America's great metropolitan village, street-lamps and starlight, I climb Russian Hill after a dinner alone. There's an unaccustomed sweat stain on my shirt when I peel it off. It looks like a cumulus cloud. I wonder if it predicts a coming cardiac storm. My pulse is steady, but I feel the pressure from the climb in my legs. I slump into a chair, taking a telephone call from Ann, my eldest daughter, asking, “Are you okay, Dad? You didn't call me today.”

  “No stroke, no heart attack, dear daughter. Fine, fine, fine.”

  Then I stand to go brush my teeth and I'm steady on my feet. That's my opinion and I'm sticking with it.

  Perhaps a person can be genetically engineered to be hopeful by an arrangement of chromosomes just next door to the genes or chromosomes for psychopathy, the character disorder of uncaring people. Without doing the lab work, in anecdotal self-defense: I read newspapers with concern, I've suffered loss and defeat, and understand that even a federal judgeship would only be a lifetime appointment. The end is in store. So: fine, fine, fine.

  Death is the reward we all get for living. Rich and poor, bad, good, and the merely okay, everyone gets it in the end. Almost everyone is sometimes turbulent with zest, sometimes becalmed, stagnant, morose. Those who bullied themselves, sulked and groped through their lives, oppressed those who were weak or needy… Finally all of us together experience this mysterious darkness, this blankness. We drink of the glass what we can as thirsty human creatures. It's both half full and half empty.

  Chagall dances with his fiddle on the rooftop; Yeats prances around on his old man's stick. Francis Xavier, Victor, and Howard from my hometown of Cleveland also do their best to preserve their charmed moments. I would forgive their foolishness, if only I wanted to. I should. I realize the glow in the windless San Francisco sky, that rich fading purple, which so pleased me, urging me to speed up Russian Hill, bringing the cloud of sweat to my shirt, was partly the reflection of light off the city and partly the result of auto exhaust, lung-eating smog.

  The Encroaching Inevitable

  Sometimes it's time to excavate the accumulation of a life in the flat I've rented for forty-eight years (temporarily, I explain to visitors). My son suggests that I hire storage space for the debris, but if I did, wouldn't I lose track of relics that emerge and emerge anew like the rocks on the terraced mountain slopes of Haiti, where peasants clear, farm, clear again? Recently I found a Photomaton strip, one of those four-for-a-dollar relics, from the time when the thrill was to press into a booth with a girlfriend, mugging for the apparatus and, incidentally, rubbing against each other for the sake of rubbing against each other. Nobody's fault; it's crowded in there. That girlfriend of long ago is now a shadow of the past, but so am I—that grinning beatnik with a freshly grown beard and much untrimmed hair.

  My hairs are, today, still frequently untrimmed. The beard is short, with white bristles. My children are engaged in a campaign to make me less of a 1950s beatnik, although they have other and more fruitful careers to pursue. “Dad, you can afford bookcases—why the planks and boxes?”

  “I like them.”

  “A rug that wouldn't show the lining wouldn't hurt, Dad.”

  “This one's okay. I got it at Cost Plus during the Blizzard of Ought Eleven.”

  “And what if there's another earthquake, Dad”—reminding me that the self-portrait given me by Zero Mostel fell in the earthquake of 1989, the glass shattering.

  “If something falls, it'll probably fall on the rug lining, not me. So far, that's how it seems to work out. I haven't been killed even once.”

  Ignoring protests, A
ri bought bookcases and fit them in while I stood by, trying to uncross my arms (Cleveland defiance) and go with the flow (California grooviness). Nina brought me a new rug and pointed out the advantages of surviving uncrippled when walking barefoot. My toes won't catch in accumulated holes. Ethan measured windows, cut cloth, hung new curtains, and carried out the burlap ones improvised by a New Age, Human Potential Movement girlfriend forty years ago. I told him the burlap had the sentimental value of remembered introduction to the guitar riffs of John Fahey. Earlier, she had taught me to dance the Twist. He held the ragged burlap in outstretched arms to limit the dust storm and mite-and-mote-induced sneezing, and muttered that forty-years-ago cuteness was irrelevant during the post-Aquarian age.

  “Actually, forty-five years ago,” I recalculated. “Lives in Bakersfield now. Married to a lawyer. Has a separate car for her two little dogs.”

  “Congratulations, Dad,” Ethan said, and stuffed wads of burlap into a trash bag on the sidewalk, a brown haze rising above it.

  Ann painted a trompe l'oeil pencil on a table, signing a corner of it. Judy suggested actually hanging the Haitian painting of funeral devils that was leaning against the wall, atop the rusted steamer trunk in which I store, the bones of adverse book reviewers. I expect my grandchildren will again refresh my dwelling décor on Russian Hill when I turn a hundred or so and need another makeover.

  Funeral precisions are usually not exact; funeral processions are supposed to be stately and slow, because what's the rush? But in Haiti, the body on its litter or in its box is sometimes raced through the countryside with zigzag dodgings on the backs of sweating friends and relatives, so that the crowd of evil spirits—they only know how to move in straight lines—can't take possession. In nature, nothing grows in a straight line. Although evil spirits lurk everywhere, they are unnatural.

  The peasants have a good point there on the mountain-sides of Haiti, where rocks seem to grow through the night, no matter how often they are gathered and hauled away. We are works in progress as long as we are alive, trying for control, sometimes convinced we have control—some control—over who we are and where we are going and what might lurk on our path. We are also works in progress when we're dead, revised in the memory of those who remember, forgotten by those who forget, dodging oblivion as long as time continues, eventually disappearing into the gently sifting dust of other forgotten bedeviled souls. It's still a kind of joining, isn't it?

  When the Messiah comes, some Jews believe the dead will rise and roll to Jerusalem, which is already crowded enough with Christians, Jews, Arabs, and a headquarters of Baha'i, including a busy cafeteria, without a sudden ingathering of every Jew who ever lived, clamoring for lox with their bagels. Aside from this earthly reward, the concept of a future heaven is weak in Jewish tradition, which is why we have to do the best we can on earth, tikkun olam, to heal the world and create the best approximation we can of heaven on earth, for others and incidentally for ourselves. When my old Aunt Anna in Cleveland spoke of rolling to Jerusalem, I practiced skating on wooden wheels on the streets of Lakewood. I'm no longer waiting for the Messiah, roller-skating, or wondering if I can reserve a room at the King David Hotel.

  This earth and this life are what we have, and sufficient. (In my opinion.) Perhaps we can make our Jerusalem, our heaven, by living in decency and kindness (not always possible), enjoying the appetites that nature has given us (and sometimes takes away), helping others, who also deserve decency, kindness, and appetite (except for those upon whom we need to exact revenge). Tikkun olam is what a person seeks, not merely forgiveness for sin and an eternal parole among angels. I believe my half-Jewish children have somehow absorbed this idea. When we hike in Muir Woods, they scramble off the path and down gorges to pick up trash, styrofoam and beer cans, even at the risk of poison oak.

  Beyond survival, we mean to sing the song of our lives, make life shapely, fill it with feeling and meaning. The iPods in people's ears, the ducking and weaving to music, the rhythms of lovemaking express our hunger. Many die without achieving song in their lives. It's sad to see those whose days drone on and then just stop. They are not only unfulfilled; they are unfinished.

  Death is the final masterwork achieved by everyone, but before the everlasting night, we look for love. Imperious, the moon hides itself. Sometimes it rises through pollen and pollution, yellow-gold and huge, seeming to burst with color—pollution part of the deal—before it rises further into cold white light.

  Friends die. The “statistical miracle” became another statistic. Awake and asleep, in dreams and when I think I'm not dreaming, I remember that wife I loved, others whom I cared for and who are now gone. Unless there's a heaven where they stay forever, they don't remember me. If they are elsewhere, not in heaven, they are too busy to tend to fond recollections. When I remember them, I believe I'm keeping them alive. I can't expect the statistical miracle to do the same for me.

  I lie awake before dawn and watch the sky brighten over San Francisco Bay, gulls swooping and honking their breakfast noises. Some of those who knew me, asleep in their own beds, still alive, liked me or didn't, disliked me or didn't, are now diminished into the struggle for mere existence, no more discovery or adventure in their programs, grateful for sleep, no more appetite for active liking or disliking. Without the reverberations of passion that keep us alert to others, my life today is not the life I remember. I also miss the presence of those who were indifferent to me, whom I thought I cared about not at all. I miss the departed who resented or despised me and to whom I returned this variety of caring. Perhaps I despised first, before their own invigorating snarls appeared. I miss a betrayer to whom I wished a state of permanent diarrhea, just another sweet dream I had—buried, he has no digestive rumblings at all. I miss our mutual spite. I even miss my first wife, from whom I fled for my life. For the aged, it can be lonely out here.

  One night I dreamed of trying to lift the coins from my eyes, but of course I couldn't, because I was sealed by them, I was dead. That was vexing. They were gold coins, a joke about my name; I was supposed to spend them, not use them to press shut my days and nights. The coins were heavy and cold. How could I be dead, even dead in a dream, if I was able to make a schoolyard pun about my name, the one my father took because he had heard there was gold in the streets of New York?

  I woke and there was only orangish nighttime conjunctival discharge sealing my eyes, to be washed away in warm water and not exchanged for goods or fun. Sleep is a dark hiding place pierced by flashes of light which blind as much as they reveal. We can't see much of what the dream shows us, and anyway, the dream may, like a friend or enemy, be lying. Dreams are just another part of real life, which also frequently deceives, part of the carnival midway down which we wander until we melt into the crowd, into thin and thick air.

  The smells of the backyard after rain in Cleveland, the smell of verdant rot in the gardens of Canapé Vert in Port-au-Prince, the smell of fog fresh blown from the sea, sweeping over San Francisco in thermal turmoil, the smells of Melissa when I breathed her as we fell together into sleep—the smells of being alive, even if I'm no longer a child in Cleveland or a nosy wanderer in Haiti and Melissa is gone. When I leave the world, ashes packed into a container and then, like my brother Sid, distributed in handfuls in Muir Woods by my daughters and sons, I trust the ruling smell will be that of redwood leaves, branches, mulch. What a pleasure it is to breathe deeply of those smells. I'd prefer to be still there, but others will carry forward the privilege of gratitude and praise for delicious deep breathing.

  Samuel Beckett, who understood about age as did his colleague Shakespeare, praised a randy impatience. “I can't go on. I'll go on.” He took a somber pleasure in his grudging consent to living. A person might pretend to give up, and some do, but better if it's a feint, really, a fake-out. Just continue. Despair is okay if you employ it to compose a fine suicide note because you'll be too busy composing it to jump from the chair with the noose around your neck. Might as
well predict the inevitable, accept it wholeheartedly, but take your time about finishing the long farewell which begins at birth. Like suicide intentions, many embraces end in not embracing. Terminal, I'd like to sit in the garden of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, lemonade to my right, notebook in front of me, reconciling myself to the imminent. I'll eat a papaya first.

  We can't imagine a drop into nothingness, what happens to insects, animals, or fruit falling from the tree, without consoling ourselves with a dream of everlasting heaven, as some do, or everlasting memory, as I do. When I look into the eyes of my children, I believe something of me will endure. When I looked into the eyes of the wife I loved, I knew it absolutely. But then life teaches us to stare at doubt, pain, loss; deal with it. Joy lurks somewhere. I discover a less oblivious zest than that which I found in moments of ecstasy. All must be saved, or maybe not.

  A good weep, curled in the fetal position, tight in bed, sobbing noisily for lost love, followed by a dizzying bellyache crisis of laughter, rolling on the floor, in danger of letting go sphincters and valves—what's not to like about living? How not to be happy with the ebb and flow of things, even with the inevitable losses, even if they lead to the full stop?

  When I asked my father how he was feeling, during lucid moments at the end of his long life, he regularly answered: “Fine, fine, fine.” His aging and death were matters to be neither fought nor denied; they were merely facts in the world; he was fine. We who still live might learn to collaborate with a future of absence, dealing life into the picture, making a story or song of our passage, winning a less than full stop after the inevitable full stop. We can hang on, hang in there, creating our music and tumult, until the full stop in silence. Our pleasure and love may mark others remembering us.