On living and dying
To quote the writer Peter Schjeldahl, “Take death for a walk in your minds, folks”
“A thing about dying is you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.” - P. Schjeldahl
I’m sitting at the table in my living room reading through old emails I have saved in my gmail account, or I should say, Google has saved for me. Outside it’s a stark January day with a whitish sky and a pale sun suspended above the tree line. Because I was in a somber mood, I typed my old friend Sandy’s name into the search box and hit enter. Like magic, there they appeared, four pages of emails we had volleyed back and forth to each other in the last year of her life.
I hadn’t expected there would be so many, and I’m thankful to still hear her voice loud and clear through her written words, playfully scolding me as usual.
Kristopher-can you try to be on time today? I don't feel great and waiting, I know, I will feel crappy in that freezer of a store.
The last email I ever sent to her is at the top of the four pages dated Wed, Jan 30, 2013, 6:44 PM. The subject line reads: I love you.
Most of the emails make me smile, reminding me of how much we talked back then. It’s hard to read some of them now, too. I have regrets. She wanted to treat us both to a spa vacation in Lenox in November of that year when everything was still possible, but I put it off. I thought we had more time. In January, she stopped emailing me entirely. By February, she was gone.
My new friend Roger, who I met on a recent flight to Fort Lauderdale, joined me for lunch a few days ago and to see an exhibit at an MIT art gallery. Once inside, we sat on the curved concrete bench and he handed me a December issue of The New Yorker magazine. “This is your homework,” he said, pointing to a page he had marked. “It’s just wonderful.” We had been talking about this particular piece over lunch. I read the whole thing in one pass when I got home that night.
The long article, titled “77 Sunset Me,” was written by a writer at The New Yorker magazine who is currently grappling with a diagnosis of “rampant lung cancer.” It’s a surprisingly buoyant read, filled with deadpan candor and wit, as he faces his dire prognosis head on.
My cellphone lights up on the table and I draw it closer to see who is texting me. It’s my spouse Janyce in Boston making plans to leave the office in an hour to catch the next commuter train home.
“Huny, will be on 5:45… yu’ll need to pik up weester first, it doesn't get to forge til 6:54.”
“Ok,” I say, “Dinner?”
“Of course, But what?” she says.
“I don’t know. I’m in a shame spiral,” I say.
“Pauvre nnooo!!!! Wutz going on??” she says.
“Writing. And struggling with it,” I say.
“Ok, yu'r struggling, but why shame spiral?” she says.
“Ate too much. Scone. Three chocolates. A Panera grain bowl,” I say.
In one of our recent text chats my mother said,“You’re probably depressed. It’s just winter and being home is boring.” But that’s not it. This is something else. We don’t have adequate language in our American culture when it comes to death. We don’t talk about it. That’s part of the reason I find Schjeldal’s writing so riveting, “Today the little bit of death in me has sat up in bed and is pulling on its socks,” he says.
When my friend Sandy was dying, she had a hard time finding the words to explain it to me. She finally sent me an article about women who live with metastatic breast cancer. I wrote her back after reading it, “Is this true for you?” She confirmed that it was, but I still didn’t get it. She would say things like, “my doctors are trying to get me to retirement age,” or she would tell me about visiting a cemetery to make arrangements, and I would tell her to stop being so morbid. What did her diagnosis actually mean to me at the time? Nothing. I fully expected to see her alive for years and years.
The light in the house is growing dim and my computer screen has taken on an eerie glow. About 45 minutes ago, I started to see the blue silhouettes of trees like legs creeping over the snowy landscape. I imagined the shadows as long scythes slicing through whole swaths of the day to make space for the encroaching darkness.
“Who’s being morbid now?” says an imagined voice in Sandy’s signature Brooklyn accent.
I look over at my phone at another text from Janyce.
“I don't think yu want Panera again, do Yu? Unless we get some soup?” she says.
“Panera is fine,” I text back quickly, while gathering up my keys and bag to head out for the dog at daycare.
Last January, Janyce and I carried a birthday cake into my grandfather’s room at the nursing home, but he wasn’t there. We found him instead sitting slumped in a chair at a table with several other silent elders in a brightly lit dining room. I put a paper birthday cone on his head and snapped an Instagram. At 91, he was pretty much done with living, and had told all of us this fact many times. I thought it was important to celebrate his 91st birthday, though. A proud man always, he dug his plastic fork into his slice of cake, and said. “This is depressing. I wish I was dead.”
The day wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In some ways, it was actually a bit humorous. It would have been great fun to crack a joke right at that very moment. My grandfather, however, wasn’t a funny guy. I think we replied to him with, “Well, we don’t want you to die.” I have to admit, though, that I really appreciated his honesty.
He got his wish the very next month and it wasn’t a bad thing. But I lost my friend I loved much too early, way before her time, Janyce lost one of hers too, and it still hurts to think about them.
“Maybe this could be grief?” I say, holding the Panera bag and walking through the parking lot to the car. “Do you feel this way sometimes? How would you describe it?”
“I like what they called it in that movie,” she says. “like a brick in your pocket.”
“That was from a movie? I thought that I had read it somewhere,” I say.
“Every so often, you put your hand in your pocket and you’re reminded that, oh yeah, there it is, this weight I carry around with me,” she says.
For me, the sadness happens more like a gathering storm cloud that slowly slides over me, dark and brooding, prompted by nothing more than the time of year. Janyce and I celebrate our happy memories every January and there’s plenty of room for all the emotions. But with everything going on in the world right now, I’m feeling it more than usual.
It’s late morning and the sun is shining through the bedroom window. I’m drinking coffee and my computer is balanced on my knees. The tinywins email chat with my college girlfriends blinks on my cellphone lying on the bed by my side.
“What are the tiny wins today, you two?” says Leese.
“I’m finishing my blog post, but it’s not funny at all,” I say.
“We need funny in times like this. You are so funny Kris, bring it to us!” says Leese.
“Agreed,” says Lizzer.
“Well I will, but this Saturday you are getting death,” I say.
“That text alone is funny Kris!” says Lizzer.
I still have gmail open in a window on my desktop, and my pages of emails with Sandy are still visible. When she was feeling good, she could be hilarious. I glance over at one of them from the previous April before she died:
“thought I would bring you up to date since you've been gone, again, Kristopher. I won the lottery so decided to stay at the house but have strippers come by to entertain me on occasion. I also bought a Ms Pac-Man video machine.”
“I’m definitely going to try to lighten things up a bit next week,” I say to Janyce.
“Good idea,” says Janyce, “I think Sandy would approve.”