Emerson developed the pneumonia that took his life after walking too long in those woods. He was nearing eighty. “April 1882, a raw and backward spring,” wrote his son Edward, the doctor—my great-great grandfather. “He caught cold and increased it by walking out in the rain and, through forgetfulness, omitting to put on his overcoat.”
I picture each of these moments like cells—growing, dividing, multiplying. Emerson in the front hall; Emerson in the rain of the garden; stumbling in the woods; wet feet, forehead burning with fever by the fire, drifting in and out of sleep, pushing the embers in the grate—unsteady, a few sparks crackling and jumping forth to maybe join the greater fire—the one reaching from earth to heaven; Emerson in his bed upstairs, his body growing cold, waiting, knowing what he already knew nearly fifty years ago, and then his bones carried out through the entry.
“So what are they?” I say to John. “The three best ungulates?”
“According to Benny they are donkeys, pigs, and Spanish ibex,” says John.
My chest twists with how badly I want to see them, even though it’s been less than a full day. It is clear there will not be enough days. “I can’t do this,” I tell John. “I’m coming home tomorrow. I’m such a wimp.”
“You’re not though,” says John. “I get it. Maybe you needed to go there to really cry.”
“Maybe,” I say. “And to realize I don’t ever want to be away from you again until I have absolutely no choice.”
“I have no problem with that,” he says.
The next morning as I race toward home in the car, I feel like a spring of relief has been unearthed—a flood, the forceful waters of a birth.
28. The Ride Home
Throughout the fall, John and I take the kids to a family support group at the cancer center. The parents all meet in one room, and the kids go off for activities in another. The parents are a mixed group: lung, brain, bone, stomach, blood, skin, breast—different stages. We go around the circle and we all basically say the same thing in different ways: We are terrified. We are double terrified by how we are supposed to deal with this with our kids.
One woman, whose husband was given a few months to live but is doing well at the moment, says, “People don’t get it. They think our nightmare is over because he is feeling better. But we know better. We know we are just riding the crest of the roller coaster right now.”
When we meet up with the kids at the end of the night, they are hyped on new friendships and new information.
“That was awesome!” they both say, bouncing off the chairs in the lounge. “We got to learn how cancer cells grow by blowing bubbles! And we got to see real cancer on a real X-ray!”
“Did you talk at all about your experience with my cancer?” I ask as we walk to the parking garage.
“Sure,” says Benny. “I told them it was really bad at first when you were sick all the time, but now you are much better.”
Freddy stops walking and looks straight at me. “Is that right, Mom? Are you much better?”
My head is full of thick curls and I no longer am constantly going to and coming from treatment, since the trial I am on uses pills instead of infusions. I don’t look like an obviously dying person—other than the cane. I’ve been wondering about the effect this might be having.
“I’m okay right now,” I say. “But you know my cancer won’t ever really get better.”
They have forgotten that part. As we get in the car, I can see they are both trying not to cry.
So I climb in the back seat between them and pull each of them close to me. I haven’t sat like this—John driving, me in the back beside them—since they each came home from the hospital as infants.
It’s late in the evening, and we have an hour drive back to our house from the cancer center. John reaches back and squeezes my knee and then turns the music up. The boys each lean their heads on me, and we hurtle together down the dark interstate toward home.
29. Memento mori
Remember, you must die: that’s the phrase that rises with me from the depths of sleep as John jumps from the hotel bed to shut off his iPhone alarm and I lie staring into the darkness while he showers. We are in Orlando, awake a half hour before sunrise. Remember you must die. From the Latin: memento mori.
John stumbles around filling water bottles and fumbling with the zippers on the backpacks. He brings me thin coffee in bed from a Styrofoam cup. I take a handful of ibuprofen and oxycodone. We decide it’s time to wake the kids, still dead to the world in the queen bed beside ours.
*
Outside, the sun begins to push up over the harbor: Portofino Bay. Shapes of quiet skiffs form in the water where they have been moored for the night. A heron swoops silently over the bow of one, and then moves on.
Nuclear troupes much like ours emerge from the shadows along the empty waterfront: a mom and a dad, a couple of kids. We are quiet, mostly, shuffling toward the launch at the docks—although some, particularly the kids, are starting to pick up speed now.
We pass through security, and as we wait on the teak bench—wet and glossy with morning dew—my fingers grope through my bag and find my wallet. Inside the clasp: a stack of small cards that my fingers sort—then re-sort—by feel: park passes, early entrance passes, Express Passes, resort keys.
We are headed—like all of those around us—into the park at Universal Studios. It is the day after Christmas. It is just over a year since I was given the terminal diagnosis: a new way to mark time. Memento mori, I’m still saying to myself.
We have been told it is essential to be among the first to the park in order not to be stampeded by the hordes of visitors to Harry Potter’s world in Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade. Freddy’s plan is to purchase a wand from Ollivanders. Benny wants to track down a purple pygmy puff to go with the pink pygmy puff he has at home. They both have been told by friends that they have to try the Butterbeer from the red carts parked along the main drag leading up toward Hogwarts. We must hurry.
*
Memento mori is a term I probably first learned in one of my art history classes in Florence: the subtle skull lurking in the corner of a drawing of fruit, reminding us of our frailty and inevitable death. Both the memento mori and the vanitas—a similar concept that juxtaposed worldly things (books, wine, musical instruments) with an image of death—became hugely popular in seventeenth-century art, during a time when everyone was pretty certain that the whole point of living at all was to get to the afterlife.
The American Puritans loved the memento mori, too: my crossed-armed ancestors, who otherwise rejected art because it was considered a temptation away from God, appreciated the depictions of skulls and other deathly representations as a way of embracing the notion that even in life, death is near—and getting closer.
*