The last time we visit, she gives us a pile of scarves she knit by hand, all slightly too short, the stitches uneven and lumpy. When we leave she says we didn’t stay long enough, and we promise we’ll be back, next time with my sister. We hug goodbye, and I can feel the curve of her spine, each vertebra bulging.
On the ride back to the city, my father and I encounter some of the “most hideous” traffic he has ever seen. We creep along the highway, and he relaxes his grip on the wheel, grows contemplative. “We should visit Doad more,” he says. “She knows we only stay for forty-five minutes. She’s not senile.”
I try something new out on him, something I’ve been thinking, or wondering whether I think: “I’m really not afraid to die,” I say. “Not anymore. Something’s changed.”
“Well,” he says, “I’m sure your feelings about that will continue to evolve as you get older. As you see more death around you and things happen to your body. But I hope you always feel that way.”
I know he loves talking about death. It just takes him a second to get warmed up.
“You know,” he says. “It just can’t be a bad thing. Because it’s everything.”
We talk about enlightened beings, what it would mean to transcend the human plane. “I want to be enlightened, but it also sounds boring,” I tell him. “So much of what I love—gossip and furniture and food and the Internet—are really here, on earth.” Then I say something that would probably make the Buddha roll over in his grave: “I think I could be enlightened, but I’m not in the mood yet. I just want to work the death thing out.”
We crest a hill in the wet dark and see, before us, a string of cars, lit up red, at a standstill as far as the eye can see. We are hours from home. “Holy shit,” he says. “That is fucking insane. Is this even real?”
* * *
1 Doris Reynolds Jewett died peacefully on December 10, 2013, having very recently drunk a martini.
1. We are all afraid of cancer. From what I understand it’s a threat that is always just looming inside your body, but isn’t a problem until it is. It could be living anywhere from your liver to that adorable signature mole on your hip, and it could either kill you or spark a memoir. I’m not scared enough to do any 10K walks, but I’m pretty scared.
2. I think a lot about chronic fatigue syndrome. Its symptoms sound awful, like a flu that will never ever end, that drains you and makes you an exhausting burden on your family and friends until you finally are just an idea of a person. (I am sure medical authorities and sufferers alike will love this description.) It gets worse: some doctors think it’s a mental health issue and its sufferers are delusional depressives. Other people suspect it’s linked to mono, which I once had so badly that I was too tired to crumple my face when I cried. Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.
3. I’m concerned that if I ate differently, more vegetables or less toast with butter and salt, I’d feel this insane burst of energy I can only begin to imagine. That a better, stronger, more productive me exists if I would take proper steps to change my life. Even when presented with evidence of my own productivity I think that the people accusing me of being productive don’t know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes. A connected fear is that if I lost twenty pounds I’d realize I’ve been going through life with a backpack of fat strapped to me and I’d be able to do cartwheels and things. That being said, a homeopathic doctor once told me that we need butter to “lubricate our synapses” and the reason the divorce rate in Hollywood is so high is because everyone is underlubricated.
4. Related: I am scared about what my cell phone is doing to my brain. And yet I have never used an earbud for more than half a day. The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.