On asking questions

and wondering about the answers

Is this really it? This right now? And if it is, how are we going to make the most of it? How will we make it matter?

We’re sitting in bed on a Friday night. Janyce has her laptop open, and the dog is beside us, having won his barking argument in the kitchen just now to usher the three of us to bed. He is sprawled out sideways and rubbing his snout into the comforter. It’s 8pm.

“I think I fell asleep right at this point last time,” says Janyce.  

We’re watching an Amazon series called Forever. The montage is playing, and this will be the third time I’ve watched the same scene. The two main characters are going about their days in the afterlife— a shuffleboard game, a walk around the neighborhood, a holding-hands conversation on a park bench, then another walk while waving to the same two neighbors who are doing the same two things, one mowing the lawn, the other trimming the hedges, over and over again, day after day.  The cuts get faster with only the main characters’ clothing changing. It’s a brilliant sequence in a funny quirky series we’ve decided to try mostly because the episodes are a mere half-hour long. I can usually get Janyce to stay awake with me for a half hour.

“Kind of feels like our life right now in lockdown, doesn’t it?” I say. 

I’ve only just returned to the idea of considering our lives back in lockdown after reading the news in The Washington Post and The Atlantic over the past few days. I was more optimistic about life a few weeks ago when I urged my youngest son in Tennessee to come home for a visit. “I’ll make a reservation for the six of us at a favorite restaurant in Medfield that just opened up,” I said. The restaurant has recently expanded to an outdoor lot of distantly spaced picnic tables under an open blue sky and a string of lights. But the thought of all of us—having lived in our separate pods for the past four months—sitting inches away from each other jammed together on the same picnic table, laughing and talking loudly while we drink beers and cocktails for a couple of hours, started to keep me awake at night. 

“I’m going to downgrade the reservation to just us,” I said to Janyce earlier in the week.  “I’ll space out chairs in the yard for Saturday night and we’ll try gathering together this way instead.”     

On Thursday of this week, the two of us put on real clothing during a workday and took the morning off to attend a family funeral. “Do you know what happened?” I said to my uncle while we were standing under the spindly white pine trees at the edge of the parking lot, trying to duck out of the midday sun. People were still arriving even at this late hour and an attendant in a full black suit would slowly saunter over to the arriving car to hand out an orange paper with the word “Funeral” for the rear-view mirror. Others were milling about the outside of the building in their masks, pulling them down to smoke a cigarette or to talk to someone they just recognized walking toward them. “We think it may have been a heart attack, said my uncle. He was complaining about chest pains. But we still don’t know. He was doing so well recently, too. He had finally gotten his life together,” he said. 

My attention drifted to two sparrows that had landed on the pedestal bird bath that was awkwardly positioned on a corner of the parking lot by the grass. The two birds dipped their beaks into the water and took a sip. I watched their heads drop down and up a few times before both of them flew up in a burst and out over the stretch of asphalt. A small gathering of people on the other side of the lot lifted their heads up toward the sky in unison, shielding their eyes from the sun with their hands, as the shadow of a jet passed over.  

“We were all doing so well recently,” I thought to myself as we followed the others back into the funeral home to listen to the speeches from a few friends and family members.

“Those men who got up to talk were really moving,” I said to Janyce, while sitting in the car back in our driveway at the end of the long hot afternoon. “He was really making a difference for all of them, turning his life around finally, and then he died. What is the point of everything?” I said, looking straight ahead, eyeing my dusty garden, the summer drought starting to take hold in the yard, and the pile of brush I’ve left in a heap in my parking space.

“I think that sometimes people die after they have done the thing they were meant to do— and have learned the thing they were meant to learn. You know, in this go around,” said Janyce.

“Do you really believe that?” I said.

“I do,” she said. “But I don’t necessarily think you are predestined to die at a certain age, I’m not saying that. But maybe his death paved the way for those other men to do something about their path. An opportunity for them for them to grow now, without their mentor holding them up,” she said.

“I don’t know what I believe,” I said.

But this is the difference between me and Janyce. She has an endlessly optimistic outlook on life, while I brood daily like Maya Rudolph playing June in Amazon’s series Forever, wondering if this is all there is. Are we simply playing out the same joys and problems in the afterlife? Or are we a soul with something to learn, advancing forward to a new life on earth once we’ve learned the lessons we’re meant to learn?

Or is this really it? This right now. And if it is, how are we going to make the most of it? How will we make it matter?

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It’s Saturday morning and the air conditioner repair man is on his way to check out our unit that stopped working last night. Janyce has just walked by me in her workout clothes holding a bowl of yogurt in one hand.

“You ready for me to take a look?” she says.

On the Rotten Tomatoes review site, I read this mini-review when searching for something for us to watch yesterday and I read it again now.

“With a distinct brand of pitch-black humor, surprising cliffhangers and an eight-part season of 30-minute episodes, Forever is an easy binge.”

I’m planning to watch the rest of the series this weekend. I’ll let you know what I find out.