I.
Nervous and unnerved this evening, alone:
Searching for solace, something not unlike prayer,
A hope that the past will not repeat itself,
Progress: a preemptive strike, this procedure
(They call it a procedure when
They expect nothing unexpected).
Precedence and percentages: our family has a history,
Meaning that some part of someone who has died
Might be alive and unwelcome and somewhere inside.
Remembering: immeasurable moments, IVs and all
The unpleasant things you can’t force yourself to forget.
Bad days, worse days, glimpses of serenity then grief,
A flash focus of forced perspective—this too shall pass.
Then, inevitably, earlier times: I recall
When doctors and dentists handled us with bare hands.
Still living, then, in a past the future had not
Crept up on, a time when the truth was believable,
Because the only lies that children can tell
Get told to escape tiny troubles they’ve created.
(I’m scared, I said.
But you know I’ll never leave you, right? I would never leave this place without you.
And I did know it. I believed her. It wasn’t the fear of being left alone (even an eight year old knows that is irrational, even if he could not explain it); it was the fear itself. It’s the fear itself, I did not say, because how can an eight year old articulate a concept he can’t understand? How do you convey the dread, bubbling up like blood from a scraped knee, brought on without warning or reason—the inexplicable consequence of chemistry? Only once it becomes established, a pattern, do you remember to expect it, even if you don’t understand it. Anticipation of a word you do not know and a sensation you cannot (yet) communicate: anxiety.
I’ll never leave you, she said. And I always believed her. It was never enough, but it was all she could do, other than never leaving my sight. Even I could understand that. Years and too many close calls to count later, I finally figured out that you had to go through that moment, alone, and then it would never be the same. The fear disappeared and everything would be okay. It was the dread of not knowing, yet knowing it was always inside, that made those moments so difficult to deal with. You had to experience it, and get through it, and then that awful, ineradicable fear subsided.)
II.
And so I am uneasy and it’s not even myself
I am thinking about: frightened all over again
For my mother, and I can do nothing for her
Now, just as I could do nothing for her, then.
A cycle: she had seen her own mother suffer
While each of them made their anxious inquiries,
Appeals entreating the darkening clouds, out of time.
Like her son, she eventually became acquainted
With the white-walled world of procedures
And all that happens—before, during, after and beyond:
Hope and fear, faith then despair—the nagging need
To believe in men and the magic of machines.
Or the things we say when no one is speaking.
(Fourth time’s the charm, I did not say, but I knew.
We all did. 1997, 2000, 2001 and now, 2002. Each previous time we’d avoided the verdict, dodged the bullet, lived to fight another day, embraced whatever cliché we could beg, borrow or steal.
This time, we knew. The surgeons would slice her open and see it. It’s in there; it’s everywhere, they would say. And then they would stitch her back together and deliver the news, all grim business. And we would bow our heads and pray for God’s blessing, as we’d been instructed in those weekly services that transport ritual and inculcate compliance. Tradition, that resilient escutcheon handed down through so many generations. They would see, she would show, and we could tell. Which is exactly the way it happened.)
III.
I’m so scared, she said, to anyone who was listening.
I know I was, and we hoped that God was,
The God who may have done this and a million other things
In His austere, always unaccountable way.
In the end: she feared the truth but not the reasons why
Awful things always happen to almost everyone.
Me, I envied the armor of her fear, I understood
I could not even rely on those lovely lies
About a God I can’t bring myself to believe in.
We were there: a child and the man
Who brought me into this calculus.
(We are made in God’s image, they say,
But it’s your parents’ faces you see when
You look at pictures and see the future.)
He said what needed to be said: nothing,
And I said what he said. After all,
What were we supposed to say, the truth?
The truth was this: we too were scared.
(How do you get over the loss?
That was the question I asked an old girlfriend who lost her father when she was a teenager. To cancer, of course. “You don’t,” she said. It’s just as awful as you’d imagine, she did not say. She did not have to; because you can’t imagine and you don’t want to imagine. How could you imagine? And, oddly enough, that succinct, painfully honest answer was more comforting than it sounded. In a way, when you think about it (does everyone think about it? Are some people able to avoid thinking about it?) there is an unexpected salve in that sentiment: you don’t get over it. Or, by not getting over it, that is how you survive it. It becomes part of you, and it is henceforth an inviolable aspect of your existence, like a chronic condition you inherit or develop along the way and manage as best you can (sometimes medications work).
This is important, because as Americans, we tend to think in terms of explanations and equations: how do I solve this riddle? We tend to inquire: how long until it’s okay again? I can handle the pain (I think) if I know how to endure it. Once you get your mind around the notion that the pain never goes away, it is, strangely enough, easier to incorporate into your life. You keep reading, you keep eating, you keep sleeping, you keep loving, you keep mourning and you never stop remembering. And, above all, you keep living.)
IV.
I’m so scared, she said, and we told her
It was going to be okay, we told her
We had reason to believe and we told her
Other things when the things we’d already told her
Turned out to be untrue. We never told her
The truth, which was that we were lying.
Fear and faith are useful if you can afford either/
Or, fear is free and lingers always, longer.
After it has served its purposeless point,
Like a stain on the street, days later.
Dying is nothing to be daunted by, it’s living
That takes the toll: living with death,
Living with life, being unprepared or unwilling
To be unafraid when it’s finally time to die.
(I’m so scared, she said, more of a whisper than spoken words.
But more than that: she was breathless with fear. It was the dread of anticipation; the fear of expectation, and the certainty of seeing what she’d already seen. The next day we would know, but we already knew.
My old man, balanced on the farthest edge of where he could allow himself to go, went into comfort mode, the autopilot of assurance spiked with insistence. “Relax,” he said (not unsoothingly). “It will be fine.”
It was his call, his place to have the final say. I deferred, and we left the room, the lie following us into the elevator like a solemn cloud. We drove away from the hospital separately and I have no idea what I listened to on the way home but I’m certain it helped.
I’m so scared, I thought, knowing we’d likely played our last hand and that we were in a rigged game the house always won. You were free to deal yourself as much hope as you could afford, but that currency can only carry you as far as the trump card the dealer is holding—the one He’s always held.
I’m so scared, she said, but I knew she’d fall asleep. She will be out as soon as the lights go off, I thought. She is too tired and too spent to worry herself into a restless night. Alone, in a strange place familiar only because of its function. The only solace an awareness that in the end, all of us go through it alone.
I’m so scared, she said, and I’ll never forget the fear in her face or the apprehension in her voice. And I’ll never forgive myself for not staying in her room to keep her company that night.)
V.
I’m so scared, I say, to anyone
Who may be listening in the silence,
Wondering if they can do more for me
Than we could manage to do for her.
There is no one left to lie to—yet
The truth, as always, is immutable.
And so, if you are out there, please help me
To absolve this dread that no one can hear.
* From a non-fiction work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.
