What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

  An absence of self-pity, with the exception of the mother of the young kids. She did everything “right,” this woman assures us. She never hurt anyone, she played by all the rules. She was a good person. Why her why her why her.

  An absence of humor, with the exception of one very raspy-voiced fifty-year-old man who obsesses about his epitaph. He’s heard a lot of good ones, he says, his favorite being “See you soon.” Can I use one that’s already been used before? he asks. Or would that be plagiarism?

  As if he might get sued for that.

  The Man Who Plagiarized His Epitaph. And Other Poems. My friend would have loved it.

  Bucket list comes from kick the bucket, of course. But where kick the bucket comes from no one seems to know.

  What does a bucket have to do with anything? And why kick it? And is there supposed to be something in the bucket? (My friend.)

  I always thought it was about a dying horse. It kicked its bucket when it collapsed. But I can find no source for this.

  Any connection to the Russian superstition that seeing someone carrying an empty bucket is a bad omen?

  Except for my friend and one other woman, who says simply that she doesn’t know, everyone says they believe they will see their loved ones again. Not for the first time, I note that no one ever seems to be afraid of going to Hell. Hell is other people, if you agree with Sartre. Evidently, to most, it’s for other people, never for yourself. And never for the ones you’re looking forward to seeing again. Like the extinction of life on earth as a result of nuclear war or climate change, an afterlife that includes the possibility of never-ending fear and pain appears to be a horror too vast to be assimilable.

  Paradise, California, lost. After the Camp Fire had laid waste to the town, one editorialist wrote, “That human imagination envisaged the place of eternal damnation as an inferno and that human folly has created a future of ever-worsening heat waves and wildfires might strike at least some as two hells of a coincidence.”

  I catch myself wishing—not without guilt—that the podcast was more interesting. Bored by the way they talk about themselves, and feeling shitty about it (though any honest talk therapist will tell you how often they have to fight to stay awake as patients unburden themselves), I can’t help suspecting that, rather than say what they really think or feel, these people are saying what they think other people want to hear. Meaning, what is acceptable, appropriate—becoming.

  Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

  But is it too much to want somebody somewhere to say something original about it?

  Not long after her diagnosis, my friend attended a few sessions of group therapy. Although the sessions took place at the cancer clinic, the group was for patients only, without any professional therapist or other trained person to lead them. She wasn’t surprised, my friend said, when everyone ended up saying the same things. Illness is a common experience, after all. Why wouldn’t people respond to it in like ways?

  There was one woman, my friend said, who joined the group around the same time that she did. This woman was around sixty, she’d been born in Bulgaria, and though she had lived in America since she was in high school she spoke English with an accent. She and her husband, of Bulgarian parents but American born, had been married for forty years. Retired now, her husband had worked all his life as a buildings inspector. She was a dental assistant. Three kids, all now grown. It had started out as a loving marriage, the woman told the group. She spoke of sweet memories of their early years: the wedding, the children’s births in quick succession—all healthy and beautiful—granted like wishes, one two three.

  But husband and wife had fallen out of love long ago, she said, and for most of the marriage they had not got along. In fact, the woman confessed, home was such a battleground that her children were glad when they were old enough to move out. After that, the couple fought less but led increasingly separate lives, she said. They slept in separate rooms, they did not always sit down to meals together. Whole days passed in which they exchanged barely a word. Still, they had taken a vow: for better, for worse. Plus, they were Catholic. There would be no divorce.

  It had taken a while, the woman told the group, before they knew how sick she was. At first no one said anything about cancer. Her symptoms were probably caused by an ulcer, they said, or acid reflux, maybe even just a pulled muscle. The truth came in spurts, with one test after another bringing darker news than the last. (Grave nods from the group: this was a well-trod path.) Her husband’s first response had been mostly irritation, the woman said. His wife had always been a hypochondriac, he told the doctor (not entirely without reason, his wife was willing to admit). He suffered from acid reflux himself, so what? Aches and pains—they were no spring chickens, either of them. But when a clear diagnosis of cancer was confirmed, the woman told the group, her husband changed.

  At first, she said, she thought she might have been imagining it. Her children insisted that this was so—and no surprise, they said, given what she was going through. The shock. The fear. Not to mention the well-known disturbances of chemo brain.

  But it was not her imagination, she said. Not shock, not fear, not chemo brain. Once the prognosis for metastatic pancreatic cancer had been explained to them, she said, her husband brightened up.

  Suddenly he was always in a good mood around her, she said. Oh not that he enjoyed seeing her suffer, she said. He wasn’t a monster. He was not the best of husbands, no, but he had always been a decent man. But he could not hide his feelings, she said. Not from her. In the hospital, she said, I would look at the other people visiting patients on my ward. I looked at their faces, and I looked at the faces of my children and my other family and friends, and I saw the same sadness and fear. But never a look like that from him, she said. And never tears. Once when he thought I was asleep I was actually secretly watching him, she told the group. He was sitting in a chair by the window, his legs crossed, swinging one foot. He was staring out the window with his face turned up toward the sky, and the look on his face was the look of a man contented, a man quite satisfied with the way things were. Then he stretched out his legs and leaned back with his hands clasped behind his neck, she said. Now he was studying the ceiling. After a few moments, as the woman described it, he breathed a deep sigh and broke into a smile.

  According to my friend, the woman told the group that she had wanted to tell her husband to stay away, she did not want him to come to the hospital anymore. She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t fooling her, she who knew him better than anyone—as if after forty years she could not tell what he was feeling. As if I could not read him like a book, she said. As if I could not hear his heart singing Freedom.

  But she couldn’t do it, she said. She did not have the courage to confront him, my friend told me the woman told the others in the group. The truth was, she felt bad for him. I was so ashamed of him, she said, that I pitied him. Though I hated him for not at least trying to hide his feelings, I thought maybe the truth was that he wasn’t able to. I thought it was possible that he didn’t even know this about himself, that he was in denial about his feelings (which would have been just like him, she said), and he would have been outraged if I—

  And here she paused, needing a moment to collect herself.

  Thinking about our life together, the woman resumed, what a misery our marriage had turned out to be, how little happiness we had to look back on, I had to confess that I understood. Perhaps, had their roles been reversed, she would have felt the same, she said. Perhaps many people trapped in bad marriages felt relief when the other one died. Perhaps they couldn’t help feeling that way—and perhaps they couldn’t hide their feelings. And terrible though all that was, the woman said she asked herself: Was it a crime? When you think about it, she said, what was I saying? That my husband s
hould have been a better actor? A better liar?

  She needed him, the woman went on. She was sick, she was flat on her back so many days, helpless. She didn’t want to be a burden to her children, she said, each of whom had jobs and families and plenty of struggles of their own. She needed someone to take care of her, and her husband did take care of her, though God knows it wasn’t always easy, and he did it without complaining.

  And, as I say, the woman told the group, he is always in a good mood now. Always cheerful, only too happy to be doing this and that for me, sometimes humming under his breath, or whistling. And all along he has no idea what I’m going through, and that I know the truth. He has no idea, repeated the woman, that I know. I know.

  According to my friend, the woman told her story in an oddly stilted and monotonous manner, keeping her eyes downcast, as if reading from an invisible script, auditioning for a part she had no hope of ever getting. But she had everyone’s full attention, my friend said. You could’ve heard a pin drop, and of course we were all aghast at what we were hearing. When the woman finished, the others started talking. Not everyone, my friend said. There were some, like me, who didn’t say anything (I confess I hadn’t the faintest idea what to say to this poor woman), but the ones who did speak were in agreement. The woman was mistaken. Surely the children—who knew their own father, after all—were right, and the woman, who in their opinion must be completely wrong, should listen to them. There was another explanation for her husband’s behavior, a perfectly obvious one, which was that it was just his way of coping, they said. And didn’t it happen all the time. Isn’t that what people did, they put on a bright face, they tried to act normal, to act cheerful, they hid their tears—and why? Because they thought this would make it easier for the patient and help her keep up her own spirits, that’s why. And that’s what her husband was doing, the people in the group explained to her. Nothing sinister about it. And hadn’t she said herself how well he’d been taking care of her, that he was always there for her, that he couldn’t do enough for her, and if that wasn’t solid proof of his love—

  The woman didn’t argue with these people, reported my friend. In fact, she made no response to their comments, except to nod now and then, her eyes still always downcast, a crooked half-smile fixed on her face. She knew.

  Now, here was this woman who’d gone and done the difficult thing, my friend said to me. She had looked at the truth, and she had not flinched. She had spoken the unspeakable. She had named names. And here were all these people, gaslighting her. They weren’t being honest—not with her, not with themselves. Because they could not accept the truth, they had to bury it under a load of BS.

  And it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened in that room, my friend said. Always the same inane advice, the same clichés about the power of positive thinking and miracles happening and not giving up and letting cancer win. And all it did was remind her how hard it was for people to accept reality, my friend said to me. Our overpowering need either to stick our heads in the sand or to sentimentalize everything, she said.

  All of which reminded me how irritated my friend used to get when other people insisted that, although her daughter never showed her love, it had to be there. (All children love their mothers: everyone knows that.)

  Group therapy made her feel the opposite of supported, my friend said. It made her feel alien. After the meeting at which this woman had told her story, my friend said she’d had enough. She never went back.

  And later, when I heard that this woman had died, I felt all that anger surging up again, she said. It seemed so terribly wrong, the way her feelings had been denied, how none of us had come up with a single thing to say that might have been of any real help or comfort to her. Sick with shame was how my friend described what she felt whenever she thought of this woman now. And I kept wondering, she said, if there ever came a time before the end when someone actually saw this woman. Saw her.

  This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

  About this woman I myself am wondering: Did there ever come a time before the end when she changed her mind and confronted her husband after all?

  * * *

  —

  What do you think is the meaning of your life?

  “Family.”

  “Love.”

  “Doing the right thing.”

  “Being a good person.”

  “Staying positive and following your dream.”

  The meaning of life is that it stops. Of course it would have been a writer who came up with the answer. Of course that writer would have been Kafka.

  But in your own words, the social worker says.

  Those are my words. I’m agreeing with Kafka.

  But the question is what is the meaning of your life.

  That it stops, my friend says. Just like Kafka said. (Brittle little laugh.)

  * * *

  —

  My wife and I have lived a long time, the owner of the house told me. And believe me, we’re no strangers to tragedy. One of our children died of meningitis when she was just a tiny thing. At our age we’ve seen many of our friends and relatives pass, and, between the two of us, we’ve been through a few serious illnesses ourselves. A flooded house is not the worst thing in the world that can happen. If it’s the worst thing that happens this year, I’ll count myself lucky. That’s the risk you take when you rent out your home, and of course that’s why we have insurance. And it’s a blessing that it wasn’t the upstairs bath, in which case the damage would’ve been much worse.

  We were on the phone. Before we hung up, something prompted me to ask him about the painting in the living room. (Watching over us—ha! said my friend, giving her the finger as we were vacating the house.) He told me that they’d bought it at an estate auction. We were both quite taken with it, he said. At first we thought it was a mistake, the way it dominated the living room. Then it turned out to be a good conversation piece. But my wife—no, she never looked anything like that, the man said. And he chuckled a bit.

  Is that you? the water damage inspector asked me when he saw the painting.

  II

  If I’d kept a journal, I could tell you exactly when it was that we stopped speaking. By then, we were ensconced in my friend’s apartment. After the house, the apartment felt small, but, again, I had my own room. I unpacked and settled in—again not knowing for how long—and took up the same routine. I did the grocery shopping and whatever other errands needed doing. The weekly housecleaner had been let go when my friend left the apartment for what she’d thought was for good, and so that job now also fell to me. I threw myself into it until she begged me to stop. The noise of the vacuum cleaner, the odor of disinfectant—these and other such ordinary stimuli had become intolerable to her. Her skin was now so sensitive that even silk could rub it raw.

  But when she discovered her bedroom window fouled with pigeon splat she insisted that I wash it right away. That done, we decided I should wash all the windows, much as the ammonia smell revolted her.

  She was glad to be home, my friend said. She held on to the idea that going away had been a mistake, a surrender to faulty thinking, for which she’d been punished.

  Now that she was back home, she would never leave the apartment again. Even when she was feeling well enough, she did not want to go out—not even to the park just across the street from her building, which had long been a favorite place of hers and was now, in midsummer, a haven of deep green shade. She had started having trouble with her balance and was terrified of falling. And there was something else: having reached the next—the final—stage of her journey, she had turned in on herself.

  Returning from some errand, I sometimes stole a few minutes in the park before going indoors.

  Usually, as soon as I sat down on one of the benches, I would cry.

  Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Ev
en if it strikes me now as having been inevitable. But doesn’t love always feel just so: destined, no matter how unexpected, no matter how improbable.

  Coincidence: in a new book I’ve been reading, I find someone comparing the experience of watching a person die with the intensity of falling in love. And you know, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in some other language there’s a word for this—like the word for that particular kind of love that in the language spoken by the Bodo people is called onsra.

  I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams. I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much of our vision of the past. Why should so much that has happened feel as though it had not truly happened? Life is but a dream. Think: Could there be a crueler notion?

  Memory. We need another word to describe the way we see past events that are still alive in us, thought Graham Greene.

  Agreed.

  Agreeing here also with Kafka. And, at the same time, with Camus: The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.

  Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Dying, Christopher Hitchens asked himself how this bit of Nietzsche could ever have struck him as deep. Clearly it wasn’t true to his own experience—and it hadn’t been true to Nietzsche’s, either. It was having cancer that had brought about this rethinking, Hitchens said.