The Invidious Soul

There are essentially two grand mysteries to life that can only be answered by death. The first, and one that humans are unique in their ability to perceive, is the question of, if not desire to know when and in what form our deaths will take. I remember as a child lying in bed considering the realities of death. Even then at the age of six or seven I did not believe that death would be anything other than darkness, though I did often look to the ceiling of my room and think about my grandfather. I only have fleeting memories of my mom’s dad who died when I was four suddenly, without any warning whatsoever of a heart attack. One minute he was with my grandmother and the next he lay dead, stricken on the floor of their apartment in Philadelphia.
All that I have ever been told about him in my life is what a wonderful man he was. How generous and kind and giving he was with everybody he met; and he met a great many people. My mom and Uncle John have something of a gift for meeting people that I have always assumed came from my grandfather.
About six years ago my grandmother died at the age of 96. To me it was hardly a tragedy other than the basic and inescapable tragedy of life, which is that even the very best of us must someday die, and so I went to her deathbed not with overwhelming sadness, but love and gladness for the gift that she was in my life. When I graduated from high school I worked for part of the summer selling hotdogs and Italian water-ice for Woolworth’s in Westchester, which is the town I grew up in. At that time it was something of a dead-end place at the terminus of a long river of cement that ran out from the center of Philadelphia. It was run down and filled with cheap department stores, lonely parks that at night were inhabited by drunks, drug users and other assorted lost souls.
Working outside on the street in the downtown area of the city was something of an unexpected means for me to learn some lessons about the world that a kid who attended Quaker schools his whole life generally did not learn. Primary among them was that not all people wish you well as I was often bated by the black kids who would hang out in front of the arcade next to where I had my little stand set up. Often they would get to me by reminding me of how little they thought of me, that I was nothing other than another soft white rich white kid who had everything in life handed to him on a silver platter and never had to deal with the harshness of living life poor and suffering the pernicious legacy and ongoing existence of a Northern brand of racism. They weren’t that far from the truth.
The only modifier I would have added is that my parents did well for themselves, but they had to work for it. We were lucky to have landed firmly within the middle class of America, which at that time had not yet suffered the ravages of right-wing conservative dismantling and redistribution of wealth to the rich. Being middle class meant comfortably owning a home and being able to get cable television, which was still a relatively new thing. But at the same time, my parents worked very hard for all that they had. Both worked long hours teaching with one of the rewards being that their sons got to go to the private Quaker schools they taught at. And my dad would spend his summers as a sun burnt tennis pro; nagged at by a multitude of upper middle class men and women seeking to perfect their backstroke or serve or whatever, and who made no bones about their displeasure if my dad veered too far from what they thought he should be teaching them. For such a perfectionist as my father, it must have been hell to see these wrinkly gin-and-tonic women never really improve, but continually act as if they were on the doorstep to greatness despite, not because of, what they viewed as merely competent lessons.
Though my parents did well and did not find themselves working waitressing shifts late at night or bagging groceries at the local ShopRight, they did work hard for all they had.
I worked half that summer serving hotdogs and Italian ice mostly to the few professional men and women who saw buying such al fresco fair for lunch as something of a novelty. Sometimes I would get tips, and during the lunch hour I could look over toward the kids hanging out in front of the arcade and feel their eyes on me as if they were seeing something entirely pathetic.
The tips didn’t add up to very much, but with my hourly wage of $3.35 I managed to save enough for the trip I had talked about with my friends during my first year at Westtown as we walked from the woods after getting high in the middle of a school day. The leader of our little gang of incorrigibles was our friend Blair. He was a straggly looking kid; blond hair that looked as if it was moving in five different directions all at once, too thin, and all angles, not one of them sloping or easy, all sharp. The only bluntness was in his speech, which was a practiced slur made easier or at least more believable by his consistent intoxication on pot and speed.
Blair was not all trouble, just mostly so, and his love for the band The Doors and Jim Morrison’s somewhat mesmerizing ability to reach from the vinyl and draw a few of us lost souls into a different world was something we shared with Blair and felt in a profoundly male adolescent way. I don’t ever remember a wish to die young, but I do remember a very deep desire to fully experience a sense of freedom, of placidity, of release, of escape I could only achieve through a small purse of drugs that for some reason were all too available to my immediate group of 15-year-old friends.
The pact that we made that day, stoned, with the sun shining in our young faces on an early fall midmorning was absolutely based on a desire to feel free, to feel all day, everyday, how it felt at that moment to emerge high from the east Pennsylvania woods. The Xanadu-like place where we eagerly assumed the sun always shines and life could be lived for nearly free was California. L.A. held a certain cringe inducing and toxic feel of fastness, shallowness, and money, while San Francisco seemed like a city where people could go and just be. It was the place where Janis Joplin sang “Summertime” and the Grateful Dead described it as a city on a burning shore, an Estimated Prophet. Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsburg, Tom Robbins, and the writing and songs of so many others couldn’t be wrong about such a place. With such references, how could we not find freedom and calmness?
Given our behavior and escapism, it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the first of us would lose our place at the school. It also seemed at that young age as if it were something of a lottery as to which one of us would be left come graduation day in four years. So we vowed that whoever among us actually managed to graduate would embark to that city on the burning shore.
Of course, what I didn’t know was that of our small band, I was the only one who truly loved Westtown; who felt an immense sensation of freedom by merely being at that school. The beautiful grounds, the aged buildings, the diverse faculty and eclectic student population were all appendages of a larger being and body that I had immediately fallen in love with during my first days and to my very last. There is a texture to that place that I have always felt hard to describe other than with superlatives such as wonderful and extraordinary, yet these words seem trite, cliché, and less than fully apt at capturing my love for Westtown. It is a place with the texture of fine grain wood, but that hits you deeply and softly in the heart. I won’t lie, being high that day, and on others was part of the freedom I felt there, but there was so much more than those and a few other affectations of my teenage years. I lived my entire young life a mere mile away and had practically grown up wandering the grounds. One of my oldest memories is as a child of maybe three or four and seeing a helicopter land on one of the soccer fields. I did not understand it or know it at that time, but the man who ambled from that whirling bird was former president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Throughout my childhood the names of so many of the people I would come to respect as teachers, the people whom my parents looked up to with a sense of youthful, glassy-eyed adoration and reminiscence, were talked about with reverence in our home. People like Earl Fowler, Earl Harrison, Agnes Hay, Bob Batley, Jim Coulter, Jim Morris, and many others. They are names that resonate in my mind as being from an important and intellectually stimulating lost time.
Then there were the people I would come to know as friends. They were people from all over the country and all over the world; people who thought in so many different ways and whose life experiences were as varied as leaves in autumn; people such as Adam, Susanna, Steve, Jen, Paul, Shaka, Roger, Linny, Susan, Caroline, Erica, Mike, Harve, Ken and Keith, Dina, Jim, and of course Maiya.
I met Maiya in tenth grade on the very first day of school. I had been wandering around reacquainting myself with friends, and since everyone was moving into their new dorm rooms we were able to go up on the girls’ dorm. Westtown is many different things to the many different people and generations that have walked its halls, but one of the most enduring pieces of the school that everyone would identify as being uniquely Westtonian is the main building. It is a fortress of brick, long as probably two football fields with three floors and numerous chimneys running along its peaked roof. The middle of the building is sliced by a common area we call “Central.” It is the heart of the center of the community where the South Room with its expansive painting of George Fox upon a hill seeing the light, as it were, juts out into a tree shaded yard. It is an open room surrounded by tall, wide glass windows with numerous panes that let the light shine in so clearly that you can see the dust hanging in the air. The far end holds a fireplace and the rest is couches and chairs so thick you can sink into them and get lost in a book.
On either side of central are the boys and girls ends. The first floor on either side is classrooms with a collecting room anchoring either end. The collecting rooms were where the boys and girls met each morning for the day’s announcements. The boys collecting room, which is still as clear a memory of any place as I have, is filled with rows of a 100-or-more-year-old desks and ringed by equally as aged benches. Hearing the day’s news announced in that old, wooden room that had seen the feet and eyes and stares and laughter of thousands of young men was so much better than beginning the day in a cement block classroom with the pledge of allegiance crackling through an aged intercom.
The second and third floors of the main building are dorms—small vanilla rooms that have seen 200 years of young students attempting to give their relative living areas some sense of comfort and style. I had gone up to the girls end dorm on the second floor to see my friend Dina and found her with a few other folks. Maiya was there and Dina introduced us. They were practically neighbors and had gotten to know each other over the summer. There is no way to say it other than to be as direct as possible, in a school filled with beautiful young girls, Maiya was stunning. She was and probably remains the most beautiful woman I have ever met and known. Blond hair, blue eyes, a smile that rather than put you on your heels warms you and brings you forward toward her. And, probably most phenomenally, when I sat down and started talking with her she was friendly and interested in what I said and laughed and she became my friend from that moment on.
We shared math class and had French together in the middle of the day, and in tenth grade we were still day students. We wouldn’t board until out eleventh grade year when all of the students were required to live on campus.
Each Monday morning I would head to math class looking forward to seeing Maiya. As I walked into the room she always smiled and asked how my weekend had been and I would try and make my rather dull days off sound as interesting as I could, but it never equaled the stories she would tell me. Maiya and her mother were something of a force of nature always seeking adventure. Sometimes it would be that they went to Studio 21 in New York City where Maiya would talk of doing lines of cocaine on the bar with any number of interesting and or famous people. On other weekends it was parties with the intelligentsia and artists of Philadelphia, or trips to New York to shop and explore, or just staying at home while a parade of characters wandered through, staying for drinks and dinner and late nights of deep discussion and fun. On these latter weekends I would sometimes be invited over to Maiya’s. I would leave the plainness of my suburban home and my teacher parents and younger brother and the Quaker teacher friends of my parents yelling at the television as the Flyers mauled some other hockey team—usually only to fall short by a goal or two—and enter a world with people whose lives and jobs were about thinking and creating, making music, writing words, higher learning and academic thought or just fun and unique. It could be a delegation of Chinese businessmen, which considering this was during the Reagan years of the Cold War was a pretty exceptional thing to run into. Or it could be any one of a number of people whose lives in one day were far more complex and thoughtful and filled with more vitality and intellectual endeavor than the fifteen or sixteen I had managed to so far live or experience in my parents quiet home.
Sometimes, though, it would be just Maiya, her mother and me. We would eat dinner and go upstairs to her mom’s room with a jug of wine and some pot and just hang out. She would tell stories and I would listen. I would listen so intently to everyone and everything that happened in that house, but on those nights it was more of a relaxed listening rather than one where you had to make an effort to absorb, to actively listen. Instead, I would just let the words, and stories and thoughts wash over me and I would look at Maiya with so much longing and her mother would look at me knowing all that was in my mind. Then she would say goodnight and Maiya and I would go to her room where we would sleep together, platonically, forever platonically.
I loved her with the intensity of an adolescent boy and for the three years that we knew each other at Westtown it was something we both recognized, but something neither of us would ever talk about. I was too afraid because I knew, and I believe she knew too that if we did, it would break whatever spell existed between us. I was not the person she wanted to be with, but I was the person she didn’t want to be without, and I didn’t want to be without her, though it hurt when she would periodically tell me of some guy she was seeing. And I would get jealous of the fact that I would have given anything to spend all of my days with her, in love and all that means, and she would only describe love as impermanent, it doesn’t last forever, much less a lifetime.
Throughout those years we would sometimes drift apart and I would become ensconced with some group of kids as Maiya was off living her life of parties and interesting people, but we would always find our way back to each other and spend so much time sharing stories, thoughts and ideas of what we thought life was meant to be. In our senior year, though, we became even closer. Something between us seemed to pull tightly on us and I found my love for her intensifying despite being leery of investing too much emotion and risk being hurt as would periodically happen.
We took a trip to Boston to visit schools and stayed with my friend Henry. We went out to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, found a quiet bookstore with a café where we sat and I began to feel connected to the type of life I hoped to live by browsing and then sitting amongst the many books with this beautiful young woman. We spent hours talking and wandering, and I felt so attached to her, so connected. Each evening we went back to Henry’s small apartment, talked with him and then slept together, though we remained frustratingly and devoutly platonic.
Later in our senior year I remember our class going to a farm owned by the parents of a classmate. While the rest of the kids were playing games and going for hayrides and exploring fields, Maiya and I tucked ourselves away behind a slight stonewall. It was the spring of our senior year and the sun shown brightly on the tall grass, wisps of a breeze blew through the meadow catching the many brushes of hay grass and bending them over as an undulating sea of brown pasture. Sparrows danced across the field like kites tossed about by an unsettled wind. And Maiya lay on her stomach and we were so close and hidden away from the rest of our friends and the rest of the world and we were young and healthy, and the world was about to yawn open for us and take us in, and life was about to begin. Her shirt rested loosely on her hips and I could see the small of her back and the beginning of the rise of her bottom, and I put my hand there and felt its warmth. The sun shone across the lenses of my glasses creating a hundred diamonds of light through which I saw my hand on her white skin, and the world moved even more slowly. The breeze eased and the sparrows danced, and there was a brief moment of silence as I looked and saw Maiya put her head further into her folded hands and the slightest murmur of satisfaction, of delight, of contentment, of tranquility left her soft, beautiful red lips.
The moment didn’t last long as there was a call for us from a friend that dinner was ready and it was time to eat.
The next day the feeling of Maiya’s warm skin was still with me as I walked around Westchester with my friend Marpa smoking cigarettes and talking about the upcoming summer and the strangeness of an upcoming fall not spent at Westtown. I looked up and said we should go to California. Maiya was visiting her stepfather near Lake Tahoe and we should, no we must go to see her. We could also visit our friend Jim who lived near San Francisco and then hitch up to Tahoe and hang with Maiya. We could spend about a month exploring the state staying with friends, camping out and hitching our way from Frisco to Tahoe to Yosemite and back to Frisco.
Marpa was in on it in a second, Maiya agreed, and Jim said hell yeah.
So as I walked to the Greenwood—a small amphitheater set in a wooded clearing surrounded by flowering lilacs and dogwoods—in early June next to my friend Pinky to receive our diplomas I was thinking of all the days that had past and how it had seemed this day would never come. And I remembered Blair and my friends and walking from the woods on that one day, and I thought about traveling to San Francisco and the pact we had made. Of my original mates I was the last.
So for half the summer I steamed hotdogs and served them with cold sodas and Italian water-ice to mostly young businessmen and whoever else came by my little stand. And I saved my rare tips and modest hourly wage until I had enough to buy a hundred dollar bus ticket from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and travel with Marpa to the golden sky and shores that I had spent so many years thinking and wondering about.
Throughout the early part of the summer, since hearing of my plans, my mother tried to talk me out of it. She was probably right that the smart and responsible thing would have been to stay east and keep working at my job and then go off to college in New Hampshire. But I wasn’t listening, and part of the reason was because I was having so much fun telling my grandmother about the trip, about the places I planned to go and the things I planned to see. To her it was a grand adventure and she was filled with questions and comments and suggestions of the kinds of things I should look for and wondering about the people I would meet and whether I would see any of the many things she had witnessed during her many adventures.
My grandmother, I called her granny, had seen so much in her life. At this point she was in her eighties and past the years when she could board a train or a plane and wander off in all directions. Her life, though, had encompassed an interesting dichotomy of near inactivity and rambling adventure. She had grown up in western Pennsylvania where she killed rattlesnakes as a young girl with her fishing pole or a good stick; where she would walk with her three brothers and her mother and father from an outing to a cousin’s house and be followed by a panther hiding in the shadows and showing itself only in flashes; where her brothers, being the inventors they were, would build a single wing airplane and fly it off a mountain only to have it crash in the neighbor’s corn field nearly destroying the entire crop only some twenty years after the Wright brothers first flew their plane; where dynamite and nitroglycerine would be made to blast out the channels of the Panama Canal; and where she would learn many hard lessons after losing friends at very young ages to explosions while working to make these explosives.
I would sit with her as a young child, then a teen and finally as a young man and we would look at a photo of her fourth grade class and she would point to each person and tell me their name and who they married and when they were blown up by one blast or another. It was a sad photo to see such young children and know that many of them would lose their lives doing nothing other than trying to earn a living for their wives and babies. I think the lesson that my grandmother learned was that at age 18, after graduating from the local school that it was time to go; time to seek an adventure and a life elsewhere; away from the explosions and snakes and panthers and faltering industries. So she left her home, the only place she had ever been, and traveled to Philadelphia where she went to nursing school and won her first job working in the wards of Presbyterian Medical Center.
Then one day a young doctor fresh from medical school in Philadelphia, who before that attended college in a small rural college in Tennessee called Tusculum, would show up and develop a wicked crush on her. I have laughed more times that I can count with my uncle John over the fact that in her day granny was considered a great beauty. The two of them, Marjory Barclay and John Dugger would soon be married and begin a profoundly beautiful marriage that would survive the Depression, World War II, four children, the death of one daughter at the age of 14, and every other bit of joy and calamity that can be hurled at any two people.
There would be summers spent in a cedar house on Medford Lake in New Jersey where my grandfather would often be called away to deliver yet another baby and my grandmother would spend hours watching life slowly go by in the summer haze as her children grew older and stronger and went from being campers to counselors to husbands and wives, parents and now grandparents. One of my proudest moments was placing my very young son Quincy on the lap of his great grandmother and seeing her smile and the look of joy that crossed her face as she realized that unlike her beloved husband, she had lasted long enough to see her daughter’s son bring his child to her and share with her his measureless and naked bliss at being the father of such a beautiful boy.
And during that summer as I prepared to leave on my first big adventure, my grandmother shared with me her travels with my grandfather to Alaska, Colorado, down the Mississippi, through the South, Canada, and anywhere lese they could think to go when they weren’t taking the kids to their respective childhood homes in Sinnemahoning, Pennsylvania, and Tusculum, Tennessee. They were great stories and always included explanations of the people they traveled with and the people they met and the times she would find my grandfather yet again off chatting amicably and intently with some man, woman or child he had just met; taking in all that he could learn, all that he could find out about another person in this world that they both loved very much.
Listening to her I knew that my reasons for traveling and the people I would meet and the things I would do would be quite different from her experiences; and I imagine that she realized this as well, but she also knew in her heart that an adventure is as important as anything else a young person could find to do or should do.
Throughout, my mom tried to talk sense into her senseless son whose reason seemed to have left him. She wasn’t mean or critical or overly negative, but she was insistent that I was making the wrong choice, that I should have been preparing for college and that I should remove these thoughts of adventure from my mind until I was ready to pursue them in a more mature and thought out fashion, but I didn’t listen. My love for Maiya and the words of her own mother were far more intoxicating and convincing than anything my mom could have said.
Then one night the big trip had gone from being some far off thing to a reality where I had to hurry and pack my backpack and get ready to catch the bus and meet my friend Marpa.
I pulled my pack down the stairs and lugged it to the door. My mom asked me to come to her in the living room and she made one final attempt to talk me out of it. I remember sitting on the couch as she went through her list of reasons why I should stay home the rest of the summer and forego the adventure I had been looking forward to for so long.
She was in mid wind when my grandmother came slowly to us and said in her shaky voice, “Jamie, here is ten dollars for Hershey bars for dessert.”
And just like that my mom knew she couldn’t win this argument. She pulled back and looked at her mother ambling away and she knew and I knew that was granny’s way of saying give the boy a break and let him go for heaven’s sake.
My mom didn’t say another word and I left that night on a Trailways bus from Philadelphia to San Francisco.

About 15 years later as I sat with my mom and my uncle John as my grandmother lay dying, I couldn’t help but remind my mother of that story. She smiled and looked down at her pallid and dying mom. She patted her forehead then ran her hand down my grandmother’s stiff arm. She was unconscious and her rigid body lay still in her bed. Her breathing was a quick, sharp rasping that forced her chest up with each inhalation and caused it to collapse with each exhalation.
Her feet poked tautly out from the bottom of the covers of her bed. It was summer and she was covered by only a light cotton sheet. Her toes were white from loss of blood indicating that her body was slowly shutting down and reserving the flow of oxygenated blood only to her vital organs. Her toenails were a sickly tan brown and I can remember the view of her body as I sat at the foot of her bed looking up the length of her. I could see her chest heave upward with each breath and a small dribble of spit occasionally seeped out of her mouth as she exhaled.
At one point I snuck away and called my brother who could not be there as he was down in North Carolina where he was in residency for his medical training. I told him how pale and stiff she looked and I could almost hear him nodding on the other end of the phone as this pattern of death was something he had seen a number of times already and perhaps even facilitated. Then he asked what her mouth looked like. “What do you mean?” I said.
“Is her mouth a circle or an oval?”
“Right now it looks more like a circle.”
“One of the ways you can tell when someone is getting close to death is by the shape of their mouth. If it’s a circle, that means they still have a while to go. If it’s more like an oval then it means the end is likely getting closer. They are straining more for their breath and it pulls on the muscles of the mouth.”
After that I spent most of the time watching my grandmother’s mouth to see if I could see the change in her expression from one of labored breathing to the oval that would mean the end of her life was very near.
We didn’t so much take shifts as from time to time one of us would need a break from the scene and would wander around the Quaker nursing home where my grandmother had spent the last few years of her life confined to a wheelchair waiting for my mother and anyone else who would come to visit. Even at the end, before she slipped into unconsciousness, she was mentally together and could take the photo of her fourth grade class from where she kept it and point to each person and tell me what their fate had been.
But over the past couple of months her mental acuity began to ebb away, and her normally plump, cherubic body slowly lost its color and vibrancy. My mom said to me during our vigil that only a few weeks before, she had visited and as my mom began to leave, my grandmother pointed upward and said, “I might be going up there soon.”
Like Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah, my grandmother had a sense that mortality was only a short distance from her. She could feel her own body slipping and after 96 years on this earth, 30 of them spent without her beloved husband, she was ready to go. She was ready to let life slip by. She no longer held her natural curiosity for what would happen next in the world—who would be elected the next president, would Penn State win another championship, what new thing would her children and grandchildren do.
Rather, in the final months, and I suppose years of her life, her thoughts were on all of the people whom she had loved in life, but who had since past; the people who she had said goodbye to as they all went to that mysterious place after death. She was a religious woman, though not fanatically so. Her faith comforted her even though I can’t remember ever going to a church with her where there wasn’t a relative getting married. In her faith she believed that the place she would go to would be filled with these people—her beloved brothers who found so much joy simply exploring, experimenting and causing a little bit of mischievous fun; her sisters, one of whom I never met as she died from heart failure long before I was born and the other lived her whole life not more than about thirty yards from the house she was born in; and her sister’s husband Helga, who was one of the loveliest people I ever met. He was a Swede who talked with a thick accent even though he had spent most of his life in this country. When we would visit the home my grandmother grew up in for family reunions Helga would always amble down the hill from his house and across the railroad tracks with a clutch of small kittens following along as if he were their mother. My uncle John loved him and would call out “Helgy!” when we arrived and I could see the boyish excitement in my uncle as he returned to this very rural west Pennsylvania town where he had learned a love for fly fishing, the outdoors, and the elder members of our family.
The two of us would spend our days in the mostly played out rivers trying to catch at least one trout on a wet or dry fly before the weekend was over. Meanwhile our collected cousins and aunts and other uncles would spend their days hiking, sitting on the porch or swimming down at Wykoff Run where one day I had watched a man shoot a copperhead snake he found in his front yard near an old bridge where the road turned to dirt and wandered off up a ridge to some mysterious destination. I have never been to a more rural place in my life. The mountains were all been cut by long ago rivers, and when you stand on top of one, they are all the same size and flat. In the town of Emporium there is even an airport on top of one of the mountains. To get into Sinnemahoning you have to drive down through winding narrow roads, one of which follows the run, as there are no main roads to travel in on. When you are there the place holds only a handful of residents, less now that my great uncle Helga has died, and another handful of hunting shacks.
This is where my grandmother grew up in the early part of the last century and where so many of her classmates lived and died; most of them young and in explosions or other horrible accidents. Sitting with her on the front porch she always had a far off stare as we watched the occasional car drive by and she remembered how life had been when logging and dynamite were enough to create something of a boom for this small community. Seeing her eyes and hearing her voice and looking at the wooded hillsides I knew that the memories my grandmother conjured were long off.
As the world began to slip by and death approached with ever more sure steps, I imagine that she believed she would see these people again. Above all, though, I think she believed she would see her husband who 70 years before had summoned the courage as a young doctor in Philadelphia to ask her out and who 30 years before had died suddenly from heart failure. She had been without him for so long, too long, and she wanted to go be with him, whatever that meant.
When my uncle took breaks from my grandmother’s side, he’d go out behind the nursing home to smoke and then wander around thinking and seeking out anyone he could talk with. Returning to her room he would tell my mother and me about the newest person he had met and speak of whatever he had learned about them in a deep tone of respect, almost in awe and wonderment at how varied and amazing we people can be. They told him about their families and children, and even the simplest of things could insight his curiosity. Each time he left and came back a new layer to the story of the people in that nursing home was exposed and he related it to my mother and me as if he had found the most interesting library of human events ever before seen.
At one point, while walking with my mom and sweating from the torrid humidity of a Pennsylvania summer day, my mom broke the silence by telling me how much her brother reminded her of my grandfather. What struck her the most was his ability to go out and meet so many people and to take such apparent joy in it. And as she spoke, the words of the many people who had known my grandfather and described him to me with such love for him and admiration for his kindness and easy ways came instantly back. I realized that none of what made him unique had been lost with his death. Rather, these traits lived with my uncle and my mom and perhaps me as well. I could go and touch my grandmother’s cool, pale hand and know that I was touching the hand my grandfather held for so many years. And after my grandmother died and my uncle broke down in tears while talking to his wife, I could stroke his back and know that I was touching the same skin my grandfather had likely touched to ease my uncle from a nightmare as a young child or show affection as they walked along the river in Sinnemahoning while angling for an unlucky trout. And I could hold my mother as she wept gently at the loss of her mother; the woman who had watched over her for so many years, and I could know that I was giving comfort in the same way and to the same woman that my grandfather had doted on when she was just a child. There is a photo in my parents’ house of my mother as a six year old at some family event and she is holding her father’s hand; I can hold that same hand and touch my grandfather and feel connected to the warmth of his life and pass that light on to my own children who have held that same hand, the hand of their grandmother on walks to the pool or the library or the playground, and I see in that simple exchange of affection a connection to so many generations and the passing of so much more than just time.
In that small room, as we sat and watched my grandmother leave this earth we were not so much waiting for death as we were sharing memories and the last bits of her life. There was sadness in that room, but more than that was a commemoration of the beauty of my grandmother’s life. And since she was the last of her generation, the last of my three great uncles had past a few years before, it was a discussion and remembering of all that my grandmother’s generation had meant to us and the family legacy they passed down to us.
Under my grandmother’s bed was a suitcase filled with small remembrances, a couple of books, a handful of photos, some papers and other assorted odds and ends. To us these small things gave us a window to look through into the past and the world she had lived in and the people who had populated it. None of these things were necessarily new to us, my mother and uncle had seen many of these items before and among them was the photo of her fourth grade class, but we looked at them and talked of these people anew and shared in those few days many memories of an entire generation that had been born; grew up; lived; learned; loved; married; raised their own children; seen their grandchildren, and in some cases, their great-grandchildren into the world; and then left it quietly and peacefully with family around them. There deaths were sparsely attended, as I think they should have been, because I believe my cousins had shared the same moments I was sharing with my mother and uncle. A gathering would only dilute the experience, but word of their passing traveled through many homes and to many ears, all of whom recognized the inevitability of death, but also recognized that the world had lost just a small piece of what gave it texture and gave life value.
As we sat and thought of these people, the people my grandmother believed she was finally going to be reunited with, we talked about uncle Helga and the quarry he worked all of his life, and we talked of family friends the Purcels who lived down the street, and Dr. Ramsey who lived in a cedar house at Medford Lake next to the one my grandparents had, and I shared my memory of that house and first meeting Dr. Ramsey and how he gave me a small metal clamp to use as I learned how to tie fishing flies. I remembered walking through his home and the smell of cedar and the knotty wall boards and walking into his office where this dignified and quiet old man collected file case after file case of fishing flies tied by his own hand. There were more than he could ever have used in one life, but that did not matter as much as the effort and practice of it. The Buddhists say plant the flower for the joy of planting the flower. Well, Dr. Ramsey had tied flies for the joy of tying the flies.
And we remembered the wood mill my grandmother’s father worked his entire life and the property he owned from which he culled his trees. And my mother for the first time in my life talked about the panther story, confirming to me that it was true, and my uncle asked if any of us remember the story about granny killing the rattlesnake with her fishing pole and I said I did and told them of how she had told that to my brother and me more times than I can count when we were little kids. I smiled as I thought that despite spending so much of her life married to a Philadelphia doctor and keeping up a rather large home, the stories and experiences of her childhood never left her. We talked about the old muzzle loading gun that my grandmother’s grandfather carried from nearly the beginning of the Civil war to Appomattox. And for the millionth time we talked about swimming in the run and fishing the First Fork below the dam in Sinnemahoning. We talked about and remembered all that we knew and we did this over days as my grandmother lingered on with her quick sharp breathing. We touched her and told her we loved her and tried to ease whatever strain she may have felt, though I think by that time her soul had quit her body and all that was left were the mortal reflexes unwilling to let go.
Then late on one of those hot summer nights her breathing stopped and her chest heaved up one final time and she was gone forever. I hope that as her eyes closed on this place that she was welcomed, finally by the husband she had lost so many years before and could barely even talk about without her longing and sadness becoming too much for her. Whenever I asked about him she would look in the distance and just say, “Well, he was something.” And drift off and that would be it.
We packed up a few of her things, including the suitcase, and walked out of her room into the night and went home. None of us talked, my mother wept a bit and my uncle was lost to his own thoughts and memories. I slept that night and had a dream of my grandmother. In my dream she was as I have always remembered her, older and somewhat cherubic, but always smiling, and in my dream she spoke to me, but all I can remember is feeling comforted by it. When I awoke I could not remember her words, only that I felt okay. I haven’t dreamed of her since.
The next day I had to drive back to my job as a newspaper reporter while my mom and uncle and a few others traveled down to Tusculum and buried my grandmother’s ashes next to my grandfathers in the simple graveyard on a hill overlooking the college and small town. Before I left I handed my uncle a Hershey bar and asked him to place it in my grandmother’s grave. She would need it for dessert.

III

Returning back to work and life after my grandmother died reminded me that even though I had been through this incredible experience, the world keeps moving. This was made even clearer to me while working as a reporter for a daily newspaper. Life doesn’t stop for anything, no matter how tragic, ironic or joyous. Each day the paper has to go out and there are always more stories to tell than there is time to write them or space to print them. All you can do is try to figure out which are the ones that hold the most meaning for the people who wake up everyday to your stories in their mailboxes or flung onto their front porches by paperboys.
With the Internet I can go back and look at the stories I wrote in the paper’s online archive and as I read the headlines I am amazed that though I know I spent time working on these stories and obsessing over them, wanting them to be perfect, there are many that I have no memory writing. In fact, most of the stories I have written as a reporter I have no memory writing. They just seem to have happened and I look at them and read them and try and place them into some sort of context.
Of course the ones that do stand out are those where I felt there was some risk in writing them. I used to do a quite a bit of investigative journalism, and while I was extraordinarily careful to make sure that everything I wrote was completely accurate and would appear in the paper for a reason, the people on the other end of these stories often didn’t like how they were characterized in them.
I remember each of these stories, and I remember the deep anxieties I felt the night before each was published. It wasn’t because I thought for an instant that anything I was printing was untrue or unfair, everyone had equal opportunity to say their piece, but I knew what the effect of the stories would be. I also knew that people don’t like to see their actions and decisions portrayed in ways that are contrary to their own perceptions of who they are. For these reasons I was very careful about my research and writing and would often go over each word in a story ten or more times just to ensure that I hadn’t accidently embedded any hidden meanings or placed a comma where it could shift the meaning of a sentence, and so on.
Even still I always felt an incredible amount of stress and anxiety on the nights before these stories were to be published. I rarely slept more than a couple of hours and would rehearse in my mind the possible things that I would say when the inevitable phone call came as well as going through the research and writing in my mind worried that perhaps I was too strong in a sentence or that maybe there was a mistake I hadn’t seen. Then in the morning I would get the paper and look over the story to make sure that a copy editor hadn’t made a mistake that I would be held accountable for or that the headline wasn’t too loud or provocative. Then I would get ready for work and await the eventual phone calls and personal attacks. However, because of my caution I rarely had a heartburn moment and could easily stand behind what I had written.
Despite the stress and attacks I still believe that these stories were important. They shed light on the political process or in one instance prevented an elderly woman from being forced to sell her historically significant house to a nonprofit group that would tear it down. In other stories I helped people assert their rights to be heard by their local government, found exculpatory evidence during the impeachment trial of a NH Supreme Court chief justice, and more. Even though these stories didn’t reach national prominence, they did help change people’s lives and make a positive difference.
The other stories I remember are those where I had to write about something horrible such as a fatal car crash, murder or fire.
There is one in particular that I have never been able to totally let go of.
I was working late one evening covering the late shift and was sitting at my desk finishing a story when one of the photographers came to my desk and in a calm and easy manner said we had to go. It was about 10:30 pm and I had been lost in my work and didn’t hear the urgent voices on the scanner calling for one and then another ambulance and speaking in code that one and maybe more people had been killed or would likely soon die. I grabbed a notebook, a small handheld cassette recorder I used, and my coat and gloves as it was very cold that evening.
It was assumed that of course I would ride with Ryan, the photographer, because the photographers at the paper, and Ryan in particular, had a preternatural geographic knowledge of how to get to where they needed to be very quickly. Part of it was the months and years they had spent racing fire and police departments to the scenes of various calamities, but there was also an innate drive in these people the propelled them forward into these scenes. Riding with Ryan to a fire or crash or murder scene could sometimes be a fearful experience, but his calm and ability to make mental connections between streets and other shortcuts and passageways while loading and checking his camera is something that was both learned and intuitive.
I climbed into his truck and soon we were speeding down narrow streets and lurching our way toward the interstate as I tried to organize myself and buckle my belt. It seemed, though, as if this time there was a particular rush and hurriedness in his driving. As I fumbled about I asked what the recklessness was about. He told me that from what he had heard on the scanner it was a big crash and there was at least one fatality, or at least someone who likely wasn’t going live.
I could feel my stomach rise as we raced up the onramp and merged onto the interstate in the southbound lane toward the crash. A few minutes later we veered off the highway onto an exit and fumbled with change trying to get through it quickly. Already we could see flashing lights and the highway we needed to get on was closed. Ryan parked the truck on an embankment because we would have to walk the rest of the way. In an instant he was out of the truck running toward the accident, which was hidden by a slight rise on the road. I grabbed my gear and followed him.
The difference between a reporter and a photographer is that the latter needs to get to the point of activity as soon as possible while a good journalist will take a bit of time and try to notice some of the details of the surrounding area. It’s from these clues that a lot can be learned, especially about a crash as big as this one seemed. As I walked I looked up and saw a pillar of smoke eerily lit by flashing red and blue lights. I also began to notice an increasing amount of vehicle debris as I moved forward. At first it was the normal pieces of trash and debris that collects on the side of a busy highway—strips of tractor-trailer tires, cigarette packs, crushed cans, odd parts of cars, fast food containers and so on. However, as I got closer I started to see bits and pieces of cars scattered around the middle of the road. Things like the plastic corner of a bumper, smashed running lights, and pieces of metal that looked as if they had been shaved from the side of a car.
The roadway was narrow due to ongoing roadwork. Rather than two lanes headed in a single direction, the road had been narrowed by a series of cement blocks marking the inner edge of the road. The breakdown lane had been transformed into another lane so that traffic could flow in both directions. The opposite two lanes—I was walking westbound so the other two lanes should have been eastbound—were closed and traffic was forced to go in two directions along this fairly narrow corridor that had been created. If a car were to steer into you while you were driving on the inside lane you had no choice but to swerve left and hope the oncoming car doesn’t correct its course by swerving right.
After a few yards I came upon a state trooper. He knew I was from the media and he looked at me coolly. He seemed out of place as we were so far from the crash, which was about 200 yards ahead of us. I looked at him and then a few yards forward. The flashing lights just up ahead made it hard to see much, but in the darkness I could see the outline of a car stopped on the shoulder. The passenger side looked as if it had been dragged and smashed along the cement barrier. The sidewall of the car was completely destroyed. All that was left was shiny metal where it had been buffered down by the cement barricade. The windshield was a thousand cracked lines and the front bumper was completely mangled.
Walking forward I saw a middle aged woman leaning against the back of her car smoking. She held the cigarette in one hand and her other arm was wrapped tightly around her middle. Her eyes were wide and her jaw hung slackly open. I looked back to the state trooper and understood why he was there. His gaze was still cold.
I asked her what happened and she told me that some guy in a mini van had swerved right at her going about 60 mph. She jerked her car—it was a large, American-made sedan—to right so that hugged and skidded along the cement barrier. The van hit the front corner of her car and glanced off it. The woman told me she didn’t know what happened after that.
I walked ahead and there was another car in a similar situation as the woman’s. By now debris was all over the road – glass, metal, plastic bumper pieces, small metal parts and more. This car too looked as if it had been dragged by some malevolent force along the cement barrier and the front driver’s side bumper and front panel were stove in. The side panel was destroyed with gleaming metal buffered by immovable cement. There wasn’t anyone with this car and I never did find the person who had been in it, but I did learn that they had been badly hurt and taken away by an ambulance shortly before Ryan and I arrived.
Looking forward I could now see the entire scene of emergency vehicles, blinking lights, and cars pulled up on the embankment. I could also see the source of the eerily lit column of black smoke, which was an overturned minivan laying in the middle of the road. In the ghastly blue and red flashing light I could see three ambulances parked one after the other about ten yards beyond the minivan. Between the minivan and me there were a couple of cop cars and a smashed in Saab that had no front end. It had been completely caved in. The only place where there was any discernable front of the car was on the driver’s side. The passenger side had completely collapsed.
Walking closer there were about five firemen using a set of hydraulic jaws to pry the car apart. Some stood and braced themselves as they operated the large, heavy metal tool while a couple others had crawled on top of the car and were trying to protect the young man stuck in the passenger seat from any glass that could fly loose and hurt him. I walked closer, about twenty or thirty yards, and I could see the trapped man’s face. One of the firemen let go of his head for a moment and it slump over as if there were no bone connecting his head to his shoulders, just soft tissue and some muscle. Looking at his face, it was covered with blood and his entire front – mouth, cheeks, forehead, neck and shirt – were covered by blood. It was hard to see the dashboard in front of him as it was crumbled too, but what I could see was also covered by blood.
I walked a bit closer and stared at the scene for a moment. The firemen with the jaws were having trouble finding a seam in which to poke the nose of the tool so it could gain purchase and pry the roof off the car and perhaps pry open the door. In all of their faces I could see strain and frustration as they worked as hard and fast as they could to save this man’s life. His face was so shattered it was hard to tell exactly how old he may have been, but looking it seemed as if he couldn’t have been much past his mid twenties.
I looked from the car to the minivan. Smoke still billowed upward and lying about 20 yards to one side was a man. Standing over him was a cop and an EMT. The man was mostly hidden by a blanket someone had thrown over him. He wasn’t dead and he held his hands over his eyes and slowly rolled his head from side to side as he cried, “Oh God, let me die, please let me die” over and over. There were a few men standing not too far from him and I walked over to them to ask what they had seen.
One of them told me that he saw the mini van come along and smash into a couple of cars—the cars I had already seen—and then swerve toward the shoulder and back toward the road in the way of the Saab. The person driving the Saab swerved left as he swerved right and the two cars collided sending the minivan up over the Saab and onto its roof. The man I was talking to said he had to do some fancy driving to avoid the crash, and when he came to a stop the minivan was on fire and the Saab was completely smashed in. He and a couple other guys raced to the minivan and pulled the driver out. He only had a few burns, but otherwise he didn’t know how badly hurt the guy was.
“Is he drunk?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the police.”
Sitting on the bumper of an ambulance was a woman holding her hands to her face and crying. I assumed that she was the driver of the Saab, which she was. I walked carefully toward her. I didn’t want to talk to her, just to see her. She was young, and on any other night, beautiful. As I got a little closer a local cop watching over her waved me off. I waved back as if to say I had no intention of coming closer, that I respected what she was going through. She was okay though. Apparently she had walked away from the crash, though very shaken up from the impact and the surreal nature of all that was happening to and around her.
I saw Ryan standing in front of the Saab and walked to him. The firemen had begun to peel the roof off and I could see the man’s face better. As a fireman held him a couple of EMTs crawled into the car and worked to stabilize his neck and get an oxygen mask over his bloody and disfigured face. They worked quickly and determinedly as we watched the effort to save the man’s life. We were quiet.
After a moment the EMTs starting working a bit faster and more frantically. They knew that time was drawing short. Their efforts became more determined, but as they were slipping a brace around his neck something happened. Their determination eased off, the man’s body seemed to relax a bit, the firemen stopped for a moment. He had died.
The woman who had been driving—I still don’t know if she was his young wife or girlfriend or just a friend—sensed that something had happened. She stood, panicked and sobbing she cried out, “What’s happening? What are they doing? Where are they going to take him?”
The cop that had waved me off came to her side and said, “Come on, he’ll be alright. They’re going to get him out of there and take him to the hospital. We need to get you there too; we need to make sure you’re alright.”
And gently he eased her away from where her husband, lover, friend lay dead, still trapped in the car, and walked her to an ambulance.
Ryan poked me and said we needed to go so we wouldn’t miss deadline. I had to get at least one more comment and told him I would catch up. I looked around quickly and saw a fireman standing about fifteen feet away and I went to him. He was a tall middle aged man and I could tell from the emblem on his coat he was a fire chief. I could see the pain in his eyes.
I asked if I could bother him for a few questions, which broke him from his trance. He said sure and I asked if the man was dead. The chief looked at me and said if he wasn’t yet, he soon would be, or at least his death would be declared at the emergency room when he arrived.
I asked what caused the accident and he said that I could deduce from the wreckage that the minivan had swerved into oncoming traffic not once, but three times. Why he had done that the chief wouldn’t say on the record, but off the record the man was obviously intoxicated.
I thanked the chief for talking with me and I ran off down the road through the debris and caught up with Ryan. The night editors pushed back our deadline when Ryan told them on his cell phone about the crash. The scanner where they worked had also continued to jump to life every couple of minutes with small, terse reports spoken in the peculiar language of emergency responders.
We made it back and gave a brief update to a couple of the editors who made room on the front page, above-the-fold for the photo and story. I went to my desk and closed out the story I had been working on and sat for a moment trying to come up with some way to describe what I had seen. I made a quick call to the hospital where a spokesperson confirmed that the man had died. She said he died upon arrival to the hospital.
Then I sat and tried to come up with some way to describe what I had seen in only a few short paragraphs written in a journalistic style that would fit into the news-hole created by the night editors. I had about 750 words to do it, which seemed like hardly enough to tell the people who would read the story the next day that a man had lost his life in a random, avoidable car crash that was not of his own making. That the person who took his life did so after a night of drinking and I had seen him laying in the road, injured, but alive and facing a new life of his own making where he was now responsible for the death of another person.
Whenever I wrote stories where people had died or been severely injured I tried to avoid falling into the stereotypical sensationalist speech that so many reporters on TV, radio and print use to over-magnify the importance of some tragedy they had witnessed. I preferred to speak in an even tone to the reader and tell them what happened and provide information as to the cause of the crash or fire so that hopefully someone would see something that would stick with them and perhaps protect them from the same errors and mistakes.
In this case, though, it was difficult to find any such advice other than the true and oft repeated advice not to drink and drive. So I thought I could describe in simple, but accurate language how horrible the scene was that I had just come from. I began with, In a horrific crash that left debris strewn for 200 hundred yards down Route 101, a man died tonight…; and then I just described how I witnessed a random and senseless accident of fate.

As I stood in my little cubicle after my colonoscopy looking up through a small window at the darkening February sky, and having just heard from my very soft spoken and kind doctor that I had cancer, I thought about the death of my grandmother and of the young man and how different the two were.
For my grandmother, it was a shared journey with my uncle, mother and me watching over her, touching her, stroking her and holding her as she slowly slipped past us. In my memory, everything seemed to move slowly and deliberately. She was not taken by surprise and in her final days we were able to sit and remember her from the earliest memories of my uncle and mother to those of my own. And we had the suitcase of her life to sift through. It allowed us a glimpse into her early life and what her experiences and world may have been like. We could wonder at the strength of this woman who left her rural western Pennsylvania home to go to Philadelphia and become a nurse. The girl who became a woman, and who married a young doctor of whom I have never heard any thing but the highest praise for the man he was. Together they would craft a life around their four children and in its simplicity it would be a beautiful thing.
And then I thought of the young man killed one cold night by a drunk driver.
In my memory, his death happened very quickly. One moment alive and vibrant, the next his dead body lay flaccid as rescuers worked to free him from the car. Everything around his death happened with a sense of urgency and speed that never approached panic, but seemed frenetic and blurred. He died not in the arms of the people he loved and who loved him, but with his head held in the hands of the men who were trying to pry his body from the mangled wreckage of that car. They are people who gave so much to save his life and obviously cared deeply as to whether he lived or died, but in the end they were strangers. He died away from his family.
As I think back to that night I am struck by the poem “The Draft Horse” and Frost’s use of the word Invidious. A drizzling of rain fell and despite the commotion and flickering lights, the world around did not take heed of what had happened. Fate had literally come crashing into the body of this poor man and with one stroke took from him his life. I imagine that for the woman crying by the side of the road watching as he died and later for his parents and brothers and sisters, fate had appeared from the forest without any warning whatsoever and struck their draft horse down and had done so with an invidious disregard for all that he loved and lived for as well as for all those who loved him and hoped that his life would be filled with so much more than a lonely death on a roadside after being struck dead by a drunken man.
So I thought of these two deaths and to my unending surprise, in that moment, the moment I had found out that I may be facing my own impending and slow death, I felt a sense of ease and peace with it. That would not last, but for a little bit of time I was somewhat assured that if I were to die from this cancer that my bed would be surrounded by the people whom I love very dearly and who love me. I would be allowed a long and sad goodbye, but at least I would be able to express it and prepare for it and pick up any of the loose ends of my life and finish them off so that I could leave this world with the belief that my children would be okay and they would know that their father loved them very much. They could carry that each day through their lives; my father loved me very much.
I then thought of my grandfather who had been struck down so quickly while I was too young to appreciate the man I had been granted as my grandfather, the man whose life and deeds and goodness would follow me like some blessed chimera, whom I could never hope to fully know, but whose life, because it was so good, acted as a guiding light available to me even when I chose not to follow it. I thought of him and my grandmother and I hoped that my grandmother was right when she pointed to the sky and told my mother that she was going up there to be with him. I wanted and want to believe that despite my imperfections, and there are many, that the two of them are watching and seeing the person that I have become, and in that small room as my cancer became real I hoped that at that moment they were there, because I needed them. I needed to remember them and I needed to remember the dignity of my grandmother’s death and the honor of my grandfather’s life because I needed to follow the path they had lighted for me.
And I remembered how when I was a child and even a bit older, I would lay in bed at night aware of death and afraid of it because it would mean not only the loss of consciousness, but also the loss of the people whom I loved so dearly—my brother, mother and father, grandmother, uncles, aunts and friends. I remembered how in those lonely moments as sleep was too slow for me and my mind too active and full of bad thoughts that I would pray to my grandfather and ask him to always be there with me, because I truly believed that he was. I believed that as I went through my life, the days and nights, the good things and the scary thoughts, that he was never far off, always watching and always filled with love for me. It gave me solace to think of him at those times, and now, as I stood looking out that window knowing I was about to face some very difficult days and nights I thought of him, and wished I could see him just one more time.

Louis met me in the waiting room of the day surgery area. There were a few people seated in the wooden framed, but cloth cushioned seats, leafing through magazines waiting for their husbands or wives or friends as they finished what would likely have proved to be a routine test.
Louis and I walked out the solid, polished oak door and into the glass enclosed hallway where if I wanted I could look over and see the lobby three flights down below us. I didn’t say a word as we walked across the concourse to the elevator and waited. Louis is a very polite man and I knew that he did not know the doctor had found a tumor. He probably thought I was still groggy from the sedative and was giving me a bit of polite distance before asking how it went.
The elevator doors opened and we stepped into it and pushed the button for the lobby. There was no one else in the elevator.
“So, how’d it go?” he asked.
“They found something.”
“What do you mean?”
“They found a tumor, I have cancer.”
Louis was the first person I had to say that too and it felt awkward and strange, but not for the reasons one might expect. I have never thought of myself as so special that foul luck wouldn’t befall me. Nor did I feel like cancer is something other people get. The words felt odd and different and new, but they didn’t feel all that surprising, which is what I found so awkward and strange. Somewhere deep inside of me I have always felt an inevitability toward cancer.
Through my life I had not had to face death in any sort of immediate way other than the distant passing of a few elderly relatives. My grandmother who lost a sister when she was 50 and a young child who was only about 12 years old, and then my grandfather when she was in her mid 60s. By contrast, my brother and I had never lost an immediate family member. I knew that odds are something you can’t outrun and it seemed inevitable that at some point death would catch up with us and either my brother or I would bear the burden of it.
I also just never really expected I’d live long. Call it pessimism or the ability to foreshadow, but I never once imagined myself past the age of about 40. By this I mean that whenever I thought about my life and my future or had dreams or contemplated in any way the coming years I never once imagined or thought of myself beyond age 40. Life beyond that seemed to not really exist for me.
There were also the dreams that I had been having over the last few of years where I was told by a doctor that I had cancer. It felt so real and my fear of cancer had been so sharp that I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic thinking that the dream may have been true that the visit to the doctor really had occurred and that I was merely waking up remembering it.
But now it was real and as I walked with Louis to the elevator I wondered for a moment if I would have a cancer dream and wake up in the middle of the night and mistakenly think my way through the panic and go back to sleep believing it had all just been a dream.

As the words I have cancer slipped from my mouth I could see the expression on Louis’ face alter and then stumble a little bit as he searched for the right words to say. At that point I wasn’t really aware of what the perfect response to such news would be, but later, as I was forced to tell more and more people, I found that Louis gave an answer that is elegant in its simplicity.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too.”
We both paused for a minute as the elevator door slid open. Then we walked into late afternoon sunlight reflected off a variety of shining metal fascia and gleaming natural wood finish. There was a slight hum to the lobby as assorted people walked, lost in their own thoughts, in and out of the hospital. The women at the information desk talked quietly among themselves. Over by the entrance parking valets chatted with each other as they waited for the next person looking for one of them to go fetch their car.
To my left and down a short hallway—another glass encased passage with shining metal and gleaming wood finish—there was a door with a sign above it saying “Oncology/Hematology,” and I knew that soon I would be walking into that part of the hospital.
Louis and I walked out of the building into the sharp winter air. The sun was beginning to set and the clouds that I had watched earlier through the small window in my cubicle could be fully seen as they wandered across the sky toward the ocean only a few miles away. I liked going to the beach at all times of the year because it is an impressive thing to see an ocean and put your foot into it and feel its coldness and smell the salty air, and think that you are now connected to something that simultaneously touches far off places where its waves crash into other continents and a whole other set of languages, cultures and scenery. I also like to look up at the sky and watch as the clouds leave what may feel like the safety and security of land to meander out over the waves and continue across the water.
I looked up at the clouds, now dark with a pinkish hue, and thought it would be nice to be able to follow them along.
“Are you okay?” Louis asked.
“I don’t know. I suppose I’m in shock a little bit, plus the sedative they gave me for the colonoscopy is still kind of messing around with me.”
“Did the doctor tell you anything other than that you have cancer?”
“Well, he said that it looked polypoidal, which means it may be an early stage tumor.”
I looked away from Louis as we walked into the parking garage and tried to remember everything the doctor had said, but I couldn’t. All I could remember is that I have cancer, the doctor needed to wait for the biopsy results to tell me more than that, but that he was hopeful it was an early stage. Since it was Friday I would have to wait through the weekend to find out the results of the lab tests, which that following Monday did confirmed it was indeed a cancerous tumor that was in the middle of the scale as far as how aggressive it was. I would also learn that more tests had to be done to ascertain the exact nature of the tumor, whether it had grown through the wall of my bowel and entered into my lymph nodes and traveled to my liver and/or lungs. If it had, then I would die and the doctors could only prolong my life.
For the moment, though, I was still absorbing being told that I had cancer and only starting to comprehend the enormity of the change this meant for my life. I had no idea what the treatment would include, but I assumed, correctly, that chemotherapy would play a big role. What I didn’t know and couldn’t have guessed was that treatment would be far more than just chemo and would last for nearly a year. Even now, nearly six months after finishing treatment I am in pain and fighting to fully recover from the ordeal of it.
Louis and I climbed into his truck and rode the rest of the way back to his place in silence. I wanted to talk and I sensed in Louis that he wanted to be helpful and supportive, but being the wise man that he is he didn’t try to force any conversation other than to ask if I needed anything. At that moment I didn’t. I wanted to open up and share what I was feeling with him and reach out to him for some kind of help or support, but I couldn’t think of what to say. I didn’t have the words to express what I needed so I just sat in silence.
We had to stop on our way back to my place to pick up my kids at Jay and Nancy’s house, which was literally around the corner from Louis’ home and less than a half mile from my apartment.
Jay and Nancy live in the other half of the duplex I lived in while I was still married. They own the entire house and are still my ex-wife’s landlords. They also have three kids around the same ages as my two and they all get along quite well and have been great friends since we first moved in. I remember when Quincy and Violet went next door to play with them for the first time. I sat and chatted with both Nancy and Jay talking about work—Jay is a painter and Nancy provided child care from their home for a handful of kids from the neighborhood—as well as town gossip—Jay grew up in Newmarket and knows nearly everyone in it as well as their stories, and as we talked we got to know each other and easily became friends.
As we talked I could hear the kids laughing and having what sounded like a very good time. After awhile their oldest son came downstairs to get something and told his parents what a crazy girl Violet is, which is true. Violet has a very strong and unique personality. As they played the kids often broke out in laughter and invariably one of them would say in a loud, but very innocent and child-like way, “Violet, you are so funny.”
Throughout the evening we could hear loud thumps as they ran around pretending and playing and being exuberant kids. The entire time I lived there I could always hear their kids laughing, occasionally bickering, and always thumping around, which I enjoyed very much. Our previous home had been in an apartment complex filled with college kids and a few of retirees. It was quiet most of the time, except for weekend nights when there would be the sounds of a group of kids hanging out drinking and laughing. I didn’t mind the noise, but the near constant quiet that pervaded the complex the rest of the week caused my ex-wife feel intense embarrassment if either of our kids made even the slightest noise. She would express her frustration at the kids and her anger at me.
Moving into the new place with Jay and Nancy and their kids was a liberation that allowed Violet and Quincy to play more intently and let their personalities develop and evolve. The sound of the kids next door always made Violet just about leap out of her skin wanting desperately to get outside and start playing or to go next door and join in whatever good things were happening at the neighbor’s. Our backdoor was constantly slamming shut with her and sometimes Quincy rushing out to join in on the fun.
In the summer, Nancy made sure the yard was filled to brimming with beautiful flowers and plants in a number of gardens laid out around the house. The backyard in particular was like a sanctuary where the kids could swing and we parents, feeling old before our time, could sit and talk and referee the occasional spat and absorb the beauty of the gardens Nancy spent so much time tending.
Off to the side of the house was our shared vegetable garden, the entrance of which was guarded by a couple of rose bushes that always seemed to be in bloom. I liked the feeling of the thorns as they scarped my skin when I passed through the narrow entryway into the garden that they formed. I liked holding the spindly limbs back so the kids could pass without getting their clothes snagged. Violet always looked up at me and smiled because she knew I was making the effort, as a dad should, to keep her safe. Quincy always shot off a quick “Thanks dad,” as he passed to go look at what had grown during the night, though his peculiar sensory issues prevented him from getting too close to certain vegetables, leaves, dirt and other objects that would offend his unique nature.
We tended our small plots framed with railroad ties filled with good black, loamy soil prepared during the early spring when the first warm spells would thaw the ground and melt away the snow; the warmth invigorating the kids and I, and impelling us to venture out and scratch at the yard thinking of what it would slowly become. And we would talk and watch the kids play and mess around and Jay and I would wonder if the Red Sox were going to have a good year or not. It felt good to be with them, to see our kids playing, to believe that spring and summer were going to arrive soon and that the vegetable garden would begin to show some life.
I am a lover of tomatoes. Growing up just outside of Philadelphia, near New Jersey I always loved the taste of the large red Jersey tomatoes we could buy at the many farm stands that dotted the urban and suburban landscape of my home. The tomatoes I grew in our little garden never seemed to approach the flavor and size of the ones I remembered eating as a kid, but they were fresh and real with a deep red color, juice and seeds oozing out of them when they were bitten into or sliced open, and they tasted fragrant and sharp and acidic as compared to the sweet melancholy of basil I flavored them with.
Thinking about the tomatoes made me smile as Louis pulled his truck into Jay and Nancy’s short driveway. I wanted desperately to see the kids and hold them even though I knew I couldn’t yet tell them what the doctor had found primarily because I really didn’t know how to handle the situation. I mean, books such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting and How to Handle the First Years don’t really prepare you for telling your young children that you have a very serious disease that might kill you. Do they even have a concept of what death is beyond the facile images presented in movies or cartoons? They don’t know anyone who has died; they haven’t lost grandparents or friends from school and they don’t really know other kids who have lost anyone close to them. How are they even going to understand what it means when I tell them I have cancer? This was long before Elizabeth came along with her one-cell-that-fucked-up explanation for the why and how of cancer. How could I even contemplate explaining to them the meaning of a cancer diagnosis when I couldn’t even figure out what I was going to give them for dinner that night?
Stepping out of the truck I took solace in the fact that I wouldn’t have to say anything yet. I could take just a little bit of time to protect them from this thing in my body and leave them be for the moment. I could stick with the predictable and as Louis’ truck came to a stop, seeing the recognizable features of this house that I once called home and seeing the friendly and always accepting faces of Jay and Nancy rather than the always skeptical and unfriendly look of distain on my ex-wife’s face felt somewhat comfortable.
In its winter dormancy the house had a recognizable comfortable to it. It is vanilla white with two doors on either end that open into small porches that are screened during the summer, but glassed-in during the winter and ideal as mudrooms for boots and coats tossed off by kids and parents coming in from the cold and wet of winter on New Hampshire’s Seacoast. The ocean acts to temper some of the moodier extremes of New England’s weather, though not by much. In the summer it will get very hot, but not quite as hot as places further from the shore. In the winter, it will get very cold and snow, but not quite as cold or snowy as areas further west. Spring and fall are generally quite wet, which means one has to get used to the idea of wearing raincoats most of the year and dealing with mud tracked in on the bottoms of kids winter boots.
Inside are hardwood floors both upstairs and down. Within my ex-wife’s home are all of the furniture, beds, sheets, towels, shelves, carpets, kitchenware, and every other item that we used to call “ours.” After our final fight, the one where in front of the kids she yelled at me how much she hated me and wanted me to move out causing Quincy to run up between us begging her to stop, I decided staying in the marriage was no longer in the best interests of anyone. Two days later I told my ex-wife that I was moving out and in that instant all of our belongings became hers. She dared me to take her to court for them, but I was tired. I couldn’t fight back anymore. I had long ago given up the faint dream of working toward resolution with her on any issue, and just wanted out. I just wanted to start over and build a home for my kids where they could they could live in peace and experience emotional, if not financial, stability.
I also wanted to be able to show my kids what a healthy and loving relationship looked like. I didn’t want them to carry through life the perception that love is supposed be some sort of competition where the loudest and angriest voice won and dictated how life was to be led. I wanted them to see and experience and learn the art of compromise and resolution and that two people can give to each other even when perhaps it is not in their individual interest to do so because they realize it is in their shared interest. I wanted them to see affection and know that it can be given freely, without condition or threat. Most importantly, I wanted them to see and be part of a functioning family, free of hostility, resentment and anger.
I suppose that in Jay and Nancy’s home they had seen such an example, which would explain Violet’s near manic need to be with her friends next door as much as she possibly could.
Walking from Louis’ truck, I was relieved not to have to deal with my ex-wife and cancer, yet.
To my right, along the side of the driveway were remnants of a pile of gravel Jay and I used to build a little patio in the backyard. One Saturday morning I could hear the noise of activity outside our kitchen windows and I looked out to see Jay setting up an electric jackhammer that he had rented. I love jackhammers and all forms of equipment like that. I like the noise, the power and the pleasure of digging into some physical work where you can actually see the product of your labor.
There was a cement walkway leading from the backyard to the front that had probably been there since the time Jay’s grandmother lived in the house and it needed to be hammered and shoveled out. I asked if he wanted any help and he said of course he did. I was happy to do it and glad to spend some time with Jay.
We set to work on the cement, which I thought would be easy to pound away at with the jackhammer, but whoever originally put it in obviously didn’t want anyone to take it out too easily. They had put rebar in it to reinforce the concrete, which was also poured deep into the ground. It didn’t give in to the jackhammer all too easily, which made what should have been a fairly simple thing into a much harder job. We kept at it for a few hours taking breaks every now and then to chat or tell the kids to stay back. For them the appearance of a jackhammer and watching their dads work together was too irresistible not to try and get in the middle of.
When they are attracted to something kids are a lot like horse flies. You can shoo them away and they’ll take their distance, but as you get back to work and begin to concentrate more and more on the task at hand, they both start buzzing a little too close until you have to stop and shoo them away again. Neither Jay nor I ever really lost our patients with the kids. Or at least if I started to, Jay’s easy nature would take over as he would tell the children to step back and watch out because the work we were doing wasn’t entirely safe. I think that may have been the first day that I really noticed Jay’s easy going manner. When most others would have been perturbed and probably yelled, he was firm, but calm and eased the kids away from the work. He did allow them to hover a bit and join in somewhat surreptitiously.
That is how he is. Despite having some very rambunctious children he is always at ease with them, always steady and calm as they race around him. This isn’t to say that he is indulgent, not at all. He just has a good sense of proportion and allowing his kids to be kids.
Nancy is as equally as descent a person as Jay, though she is more easily frustrated by her kids, which I think is in part due to the hours she spends with them acting as sole arbiter of their disputes and trying to find ways to siphon off some of their energy in the winter when they are not as free to go outside and play. But she too does not yell at her kids and does not yield to her anger. She is a manager of chaos allowing the kids space to be kids and does not find embarrassment at their exuberance and energy even when it tips into misbehavior.
Finally, Jay and I finished hammering out the cement and hauling it to a small pickup truck he had borrowed from a neighbor up the street. Once that was done we began to dig out a somewhat oval space emanating from the side of the house where the patio would be set. We leveled the floor of dirt and then headed back to the rental store for a gas powered machine to tamp the dirt down into place to create a solid base that we could layer gravel on. After tamping we cut a clearly delineated edge and used flat mid sized rocks to build a small rock wall around the patio to contain the gravel and act as a border. Later, Nancy would dig out around this border and plant small, low to the ground flowers as further decoration.
The next day Jay picked up a load of gravel and we began to shovel it into a wheelbarrow and dump it into the space we had created. All the while we talked and told stories and debated the merits of the Red Sox relief pitching, and he told stories about the town and some of the characters in it and buried up in the graveyard only a couple hundred yards up the road. Before long we had finished and spent that Sunday afternoon sitting out in lawn chairs in our patio as the kids buzzed about the yard playing and feeling, I think, a sense of pride in what their dads had managed to build for their home. I know I was proud.
Despite the perpetual anger of my ex-wife, I have many fond memories of living in that house and the neighborhood, which was filled with kids and parents. There were Christmas parties, football games, pre-Thanksgiving meals and a neighborhood celebration of Halloween. We went to the graveyard on Memorial Day to watch as the Cub Scouts and veterans paraded the flag in to pay homage to the many men, and a few women I believe, who had served their country. We cooked out, sometimes jogged together, and took the kids on walks through the woods in the winter and sledding on a small hill by the side of the house.
And then, of course, there were the gardens, especially the vegetable garden where we generally could be found summer evenings picking away at the weeds and encouraging the tomatoes and beans and everything else to grow. Kids playing and swinging on the swing set, laughing and yelling and sometimes bickering. We adults swinging at mosquitoes as we worked a little bit and talked a lot, and felt the sun ease down past the horizon. In the background a voice would rise above the quiet and it would invariably be Violet saying, Daaaaaaad! When are we going to have dessert?
Hearing the gravel under my feet as I walked to pick up my kids I couldn’t help but think how my life had changed in such a short amount of time. Six months ago I was a member of this wonderful neighborhood with friends and where my kids seemed so content, but now live in a small tan/white two bedroom apartment because I couldn’t take the ever-present anger in my former home. I don’t regret my decision, but I had escaped from the loneliness and torment of my marriage into a new and pervasive loneliness. On top of it all, now I had cancer.

VII

I walked onto the porch and looked into the window to see Nancy walking around picking up toys, clothes and other assorted debris from the kids playing. I could see Jay in the kitchen cooking dinner, which seemed to be his role most nights.
Nancy saw me on the porch and yelled for me to come in. Since it was usually stuck, I gave the door a little extra shove to get it open.
“Well, how’d it go? I bet you’re glad to have that done,” Nancy said.
Jay looked in from the kitchen where he was sautéing some meat.
“It didn’t go so good,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I could hear the kids upstairs playing.
“I have cancer,” I said for the second time in my life.
The expression in both Jay and Nancy’s faces fell. The next words were questions as to what kind, where is it, do the doctors know anything about it, and so on. Nancy asked if I had told Holly yet and I said I hadn’t. For a moment I considered telling them not to tell her, but then I thought it would probably be better coming from them. That way I wouldn’t have to hear whatever craziness would come out of her mouth.
After essentially repeating what I said to Louis there really wasn’t anything left to say. I shared all that I knew, but for the moment it was just waiting for Monday and the biopsy results to confirm what I already knew. Both Nancy and Jay offered their sympathies and I thanked them for that. They also offered to do whatever they could. I had to push my emotions down so that I could thank them without losing myself to fear and sadness.
I still didn’t know anything about what the treatment would be or even if I would live or die. It was just assumed that I would go through chemo—the ubiquitous cancer treatment. Nancy in a quiet acknowledgement to how chemo treats the body offered to cook and clean and watch the kids for me, but I didn’t really feel comfortable having someone else clean my apartment and I didn’t really know what I was going to need. The child care sounded good, but I didn’t have any idea what a cancer patient’s schedule is like. I assumed I would need some time off from work and that I would be pretty sick, but I couldn’t anticipate what it would all be like.
There is also something within me that makes it very difficult to accept help from anyone outside of my immediate family. I don’t know what it is, but it is so much easier for me to offer my help than it is to receive any help. I feel uncomfortable and like I may lose some sense of my independence whenever anyone offers help. As time went on my feelings toward receiving aid would change, but grudgingly and not completely.
I thanked Nancy for the offer and told her I wasn’t sure what I would need, but that I would talk to her about it a bit more. She rubbed my arm and said she was sorry. I looked at Jay and we both sort of immediately looked down at our shoes in some sort of dog-like submission to the moment.
Jay walked to the stairs and called up to the kids who were still playing and having fun. They answered with the ubiquitous “Aw…” of all children who have been told it was time to stop having fun and go on to the next thing. Soon enough Quincy and Violet came almost tumbling down the stairs in their socks. I asked them to collect their shoes and say thank you to Nancy and Jay, which they did slowly.
They put their shoes on and we grabbed their backpacks and walked out to Louis who was still waiting in his truck.
“Where’s Regina?” Violet asked Louis as she climbed into the short seats behind the front bench seat.
“She’s with her mom Violet.”
“Can she come over and play with us?”
“Probably not tonight; she has some things she has to do, plus it’s late.”
“Yeah sweetie, I think we should head home and have some dinner. Would you like to order Chinese for dinner tonight?” I said.
“Yeah, okay! Can we get the chicken I like?”
“Sure,” I answered, wanting at that moment to give her anything that would make her happy.
Louis started the engine and we headed to my apartment. It all felt so normal and so usual. I felt as if I almost could have just let myself slip from the reality of the day and be carried by the routine of taking my kids home and cooking supper and then helping them with their homework, easing them into bath time and then to bed in their very small room that was almost completely overtaken by their bunk bed.
But I couldn’t. As the time passed the effects of the sedatives started to finally wear away and the reality of hearing the doctor tell me I had cancer became more persistent. Until then I had remained stunned and nearly emotionless at the thought of my diagnosis. It felt as if time stood still and I could float in that moment uninterrupted by the reality of anything. I could not last forever in that state and as I went about the normal acts of being a dad the protective quilt I had pulled over me was slowly being pulled back. Instead of some comforting image being revealed as it slid away, there was something very scary and dark and unforeseen and unknowable. Something that is truly dangerous, that is lurking just beyond my sight. As I came back into my own mind and I looked at my beautiful children and thought for the first time deeply about what it would mean to die and leave them behind, fear crawled up my spine. I started to think of my kids coming to me for the last time as I lay dying. I could see their faces filled with tears and my own streaming as I said goodbye to these two people whom I love more than anything in this world, more than I even thought possible until the moment I held each in my arms moments after their births. Now I had to face the very real possibility that I would be saying goodbye to them forever. And I considered for the first time what their lives would be like without me. Meeting new friends, falling in love, graduating from high school and then college, living through various adventures, finding a career, getting married and then having children of their own, all the while explaining to the people sharing those experiences how they wished I was there, how they had loved me and knew without any doubt that I loved them. I could feel their loneliness begin to descend upon me as I also began to consider the mistakes my ex-wife would make. I wept as I thought of her anger and lack of patience, and how I would no longer be there to temper her behavior. Already she had flown into a rage and taken my daughter’s favorite stuffed animal and thrown it into the trash and left it there for days while Violet pleaded for it back only to see the garbage men haul it away with the rest of the garbage. I can fix those things, but only if I exist. I needed to exist, if not for my own desire to live, but for the difference it would make in my children’s lives.
Arriving at my apartment the quilt had now been completely pulled back and I could see for the first time with great clarity what the ugly thing was—an invidious draft. And I could feel the fear and sadness and desperation begin to build within me to the point where I was barely keeping it together. I needed to unload this weight and I needed to speak to someone close to me. My brother, my parents, I had to immediately call them.
I herded the kids up the stairs to our small home and set them up in front of the television and told them I had a call to make. It was Friday so there wouldn’t be any homework and I could forgive myself for not giving them baths that night. Violet and I would order Chinese while Quincy, whose sensory issues do not allow him much of a choice in what to eat, would have his usual pasta and cheese.
I grabbed the phone and disappeared into my bedroom and dialed my parents’ number down in Georgia where they spend a portion of the winter to get away from the cold and snow of their home tucked away in a valley in the Adirondack Mountains. Their phone rang a few times, but then I heard my moms voice and all of the fear and all of the sadness for my life and my children forced to grow up without me burst out in wide, watery tears and I could barely speak the words, “Mom, I have cancer.”

VIII

“What? What do you mean?” she said.
“Mom,” I said trying to choke back my tears, “I didn’t want to worry you, but I had a colonoscopy today and they found a tumor, cancer, mom they found cancer.”
“Why did you…”
“I had some bleeding and went to my doctor and today was the day.”
“Mike,” my mom yelled to my dad, “get on the other phone, it’s James.”
“James, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say. I…”
“What is it?” my dad asked breaking into the conversation.
I was having a harder and harder time holding back my tears so that I could speak so my words came out almost in choked sobs.
“Dad, I have cancer, I had a colonoscopy today and they found cancer.”
“Oh my God,” my dad said.
My dad felt fate reach out for him once again. Fate can be particularly cruel to children and my dad bore the brunt of what fate can deal out to a person and not actually kill them. He was born in 1930 to parents on the very edge of their childbearing years. They already had two daughters, the youngest one of which was maybe 16 years old. My grandfather was well into his sixties and my grandmother was in her mid forties, I believe. I am not exactly sure because my dad has never really talked to me that much about his childhood other than to share bits and pieces. Sometimes funny stories such as when he and a friend went to see the Red Sox as young boys wearing boaters—those straw hats with the ribbon around them—and latched onto some older gentleman on Boston’s version of a subway.
But mostly his stories are very brief and painful, and he usually mumbles them as if he needs to be able to talk about his experiences, but he just can’t seem to let it out. He has always been such a reserved person about his emotions and unpredictable in his anger, that my brother and I have never really pressed him on these things. We cringe at hearing his low whisper describing one painful experience after another, such as being told by one of his sisters that his mother had tried everything she could to abort him. And then that’s the story. He will look up from his pained posture and that will just be it.
Obviously he survived his mother’s attempts to wrest him from her womb, but he was born into a very tough life even though he came from a family of wealth. As best as I know, the collapse of the world economy in the late 1920s did not treat his family well and not long after my dad was born his father died of pneumonia. He was left with his mother and two sisters, but soon his mother disappeared and all he was left with was to be raised by his sisters. He was told that his mother had died, which at his age would have been a very painful thing to hear, but easy to believe since the entire concept of death to a boy about the age of four or five is not that easy to grasp.
For a time he lived with his sisters in England, but around the age of seven or eight Hitler was getting ready to drag Europe and the rest of the world into the fire. Seeing the warning signs, my father’s aunt, who lived in Connecticut, traveled to England where she picked him up and brought him to her home. She was a woman of wealth with something akin to an estate with gardens and a house servant to cook and do the cleaning. For the most part my dad ate his meals with the servant and worked in the garden.
His aunt believed in education and despite not treating him well, she ensured he was well educated. My dad went to private schools where he played on the football team and worked hard, and generally eased into life as an American. After graduating, as his American friends were drafted he kept up with them by joining the military.
It was while he was in the army in the early 1950s that he received a telegram telling him that his mother had died. She hadn’t died as he had been told as a child, but had been taken to an asylum where she lived out the rest of her life. He had no idea until that telegraph arrived.
From there, he gathered himself and worked his way through college to eventually become a teacher, meet my mom, have my brother and me and become something of a fashion disaster throughout the 1970s. He worked hard all of his life and has more than earned his retirement. He also has more than earned an easy retirement without having his son call to tell his dad that he has cancer.
“Are they sure?” he asked, and I could hear all of his years of work and all of his past pain expressed in that one question.
“The doctor says he is 70 percent sure, whatever that means. I mean, yes, I have cancer. I can’t imagine he’ll get the test back and it would all have turned out to be a big error.”
My dad was silent on the other end as the meaning of it all began to sink in with him. I thought of his childhood and grew even more fearful that my children’s lives may come all too close to mirroring it.
“But there is a chance,” my mother said.
“I suppose, but not a very good one. Mom, I can’t go there, I can’t hope that it isn’t when I feel like I know it is.”
I felt that if I allowed myself that hope; that if I allowed my parents to talk me into believing there was a chance that I would be setting some sort of dangerous precedent. I knew the biopsy would only confirm what I already knew, and to think that there was a chance it could come back and have been just a simple polyp would lead me to start depending on hope. To hope that it isn’t cancer only to be crushed on Monday when I found out that it was definitely cancer. To hope it wouldn’t be terminal only to find out that it had traveled to my lungs and liver. To then hope that I would still have years left only to find out that it would be months. Or worse, to enter into the fantasy of hoping that the fucking thing would just simply go away; that some preacher or accident of fate would intervene to come and take the tumor away. There was and is no amount of hope that could wish cancer away. It won’t happen and it is a fool’s errand to even think you could try and take your mind someplace where you could ignore the reality of your situation; to hope that fate would take it easy on you. Why would fate do that; why would fate choose me to give an exception to. Why would I be the one whose story ends with, “And it turned out to have just been the result of too many jalapeños from the garden.” I’m not that person.
I knew intuitively that hope was something that could be dangerous. I allowed myself to hope that the cancer wouldn’t be so serious so that I wouldn’t die quickly. And I thought about my boss—I call him my boss, but since being hired by him to be the managing editor of the magazine that had been his brainchild and ambition, he and I and his wife had become very close friends. His name is Brent and his wife is Linda. Mornings at work were usually spent wasting time talking first with Linda, who came to the office much earlier than Brent who is a late riser, followed by Brent himself. He and I talked about the latest news, issues with the magazine, and then tell each other whatever jokes we had managed to remember. Our favorites were one liners by people such as Henny Youngman, who I credit with the best line ever, “A women scantily dressed with her cleavage fully expose walked up to me on the street one evening and said, ‘I’ll do anything you want for fifty bucks.’ I said great, paint my house.”
I thought of my boss because his older brother was dying of prostate cancer. He had been diagnosed about six years prior, but unfortunately his cancer had progressed to the point where it couldn’t be cured. As I write this now, his time is short, but he is still relatively healthy and pain free. He will die, but it hasn’t been a short affair. He has had plenty of time to say goodbye and live a bit more.
So I allowed myself the hope that I could hang on like that; dieing, but with the knife’s blade moving very slowly allowing me to share some significant time with my children. To help them through their early life and die knowing I had protected them from the worst their mother could be and that their futures would be secure. That was the hope I allowed myself.
“Well, I hope it isn’t,” my mom said.
“James do they know anything about it? Did the doctor say whether it’s advanced or anything like that?” my dad asked.
I told them basically everything that I had told everyone else. They listened and we talked some more, but soon the conversation just sort of reached its conclusion. My parents told me they love me and will be thinking of me. Then we made some tentative plans for what to do when I got the results back.
My brother was in New Jersey that day with his wife Lee and one-year-old son Andrew visiting Chris, Lee’s sister, and her husband George. They have two daughters both of whom are under the age of six. I asked my parents if they knew the number, but they didn’t. My mom did have Lee’s parents’ number and she gave me that.
Van and Polly are probably among the most New Englandy people that I know. Van was a college professor and Polly, well I’m not sure what she did, but I am sure that whatever it was she was very active while doing it. They are both Unitarians (Lee is a Unitarian minister) and are classic New England liberals, which is to say that they believe in supporting efforts to alleviate poverty and that sort of thing, but they also believe in self-reliance and the virtue of work. I like them quite a bit.
Polly also has the tendency to spend time worrying about things. Some of her worries are valid, such as the northern migration of mosquito borne diseases, but others are simply the product of a very active imagination.
Unfortunately, one of her very valid worries is that Van’s cancer will come back. Van had been diagnosed with melanoma, a very dangerous form of skin cancer, a couple of years before. The treatment was to remove the tumor from his skin as well as the surrounding lymph nodes and check them for involvement. The lymph nodes came back clean, but the doctors still felt it would be wise to treat Van with interferon for a year. According to my brother, the treatment was almost more than Van could handle. It caused him to take on symptoms not unlike dementia and to develop a temper. Terry says that Van doesn’t even remember much of that year, but I remember seeing him periodically at Thanksgiving and other occasions and I could tell that he was out of it. I wasn’t sure at the time what exactly was causing him to have lost so much lucidity, but I did know it was related to his treatment for cancer.
I was hesitant to call them because I didn’t want to have to explain that I had cancer. They were far enough outside of my circle, the circle of people I felt an almost uncontrollable need to speak to, that I just couldn’t bear to say it again to anyone other than my brother. It is a hard feeling to describe because I was desperate to talk with my parents and I was desperate to talk with my brother, but I was equally as desperate not to have to talk with anybody else about it. Louis, okay. Nancy and Jay, okay. But not my brother’s in-laws.
The desire, the need to speak to my brother, though, was far stronger than my trepidation, so I called them. Van answered and I told him that I had to speak to Terry, but that I didn’t have Chris and George’s number.
Van must have heard something in my voice, a lilt that let him know I needed the number and nothing else; that I had to call right then and there, but it was something I couldn’t talk about yet. Van immediately asked Polly for the number and recited it to me. His only words were to ask if everybody was okay. I took it to be his way of making sure no one was desperately ill or had died. I told him that I had something going on and left it at that.
I walked out of my bedroom and checked on Quincy and Violet. They both were happily watching TV. Violet asked when dinner would be and I told her she would have to be patient, but that it would be soon. I looked at them both lying on my couch with cartoons blaring and I was overwhelmed by the thought of dying before being able to see them grow up. I choked down my tears and hoped that things this evening hadn’t been too much for them. I assumed they could sense that something was going on, but if I could keep them happily unaware for another couple of days then that would be good.
I went back into my room and shut the door and dialed Chris and George’s number. George answered and it seemed as if he knew immediately that if I was calling then something was up. He is a very intelligent and pleasant man and said hello. I asked how he was and then in almost the same breath asked to speak to Terry. He asked me to hold and I could hear him asking for my brother.
Terry came on.
“What’s up?”
“I have cancer,” my words came out choked.
“They found something?”
“Yeah, I have a tumor in my rectum.”
“My God.”
He followed by asking me what the doctor had said as well as a number of medical questions that for the most part I didn’t really know the answer to. I told him basically the same story I had said to everybody else, including that I felt the 70 percent chance of it being cancer was more like 100. Of the people I had said that to, Terry was the first to agree and not try and get me to hold out hope that it could just be some large random growth in my rectum. Doctors know when they see cancer, but they also know that they have to hedge just a little bit in case for some reason it is the random thing.
Terry asked the name of the doctor and the hospital and said he would be back in touch.
As with most professions there is a certain level of acceptance among peers. Police officers don’t give each other speeding tickets and doctors are allowed to call other doctors and ask what’s going on with a particular patient.
After I hung up the phone Terry called the hospital and asked for the lab where my biopsy was waiting to be examined and a report issued on what kind of cancer it is and how aggressive it may be. If the tissue was not essentially rectal tissue then it would stand to reason it is a tumor related to another cancer, which means I had a metastatic cancer in my body. It could also come back as rectal tissue, but a very aggressive tumor, which means it is growing quickly and may very likely have escaped the confines of the bowel wall. Even if it hadn’t, a more aggressive tumor would increase the likelihood that even after treatment and removal, the cancer could come back. There is no shortage of stories for the ways that cancer can kill.
However, I didn’t know any of that as I walked into the living room and looked at my children who were deeply involved with Sponge Bob Square Pants. I told them that dinner would be ready soon, and if they wanted to they should put on some comfy clothes so we can watch a movie together while eating. I then walked into the kitchen and called the local Chinese place and began boiling water for Quincy’s pasta.
A few minutes later the phone rang and it was Terry again. He said he was able to get hold of the lab, but that they wouldn’t have any results until after the weekend. We would just have to wait it out. He also said that he would call my doctor on Monday and try and learn whatever he could. All of which made me feel a bit better because I had such a skilled and good advocate helping me through what I believed would be an immense medical bureaucracy. I also felt a little guilty knowing that I had this advantage that most people don’t have. It felt like being the rich kid among a summer camp of poor people, but in this case I was the privileged cancer patient among a crowd of people who didn’t have nearly the resource that I did. They couldn’t get the numbers to the backrooms where nurses and doctors pick up and will talk with you. They didn’t have a human dictionary/encyclopedia of medical terms to turn to as they tried to sort through the language barrier between doctor and patient. They just don’t have the same kind of advocate to help walk them through the maze that is cancer treatment; particularly in the early phases after diagnosis where no single test has the ability to tell you if you will live, but each can more than certainly tell you that you are going to die. It is also difficult to always understand what the various numbers, figures and expressions of each test mean. Being able to talk to someone with the training to decipher them and provide context gave me something of what felt, to me at least, like an unfair advantage.
I thanked Terry for his help and concern. I told him I loved him and he said the same and we hung up.
In the living room my kids had come back from changing into their pajamas, the water for Quincy’s pasta was boiling and the delivery guy was knocking on the door with our food. For a moment life felt something like normal.

After our movie I started to put the kids in their beds, but the thought of sleeping alone and inhabiting only my mind, which had never left thoughts of cancer, was more than I wanted to do. I have always wanted my kids to feel comfortable with me and in my room. I remember that as a child my parents’ bedroom was always an off limits place; verboten for kids to wander into and climb into bed with the warm company they would find. Sleeplessness, colds and nightmares were dealt with by my mom, who came into my brother’s and my room to ease whatever affliction was causing the sleeplessness. Though she was always sympathetic and good at getting either, or sometimes both of us settled again, there was never an invitation to come into bed with her and our father for even a treat.
The thought of sleeping with my parents, or feeling comfortable in my parents room with them curled up in bed was so foreign to me that it came as almost a shock when in ninth grade I went for a sleepover at a friend’s house and my friend wandered into his parents’ room, climbed on the bed and kissed his mom goodnight. She looked up at me and wished me a good night as well. Seeing her so easy and comfortable in her nightgown in front of her son and cuddling him in bed made me think for the longest time that she must have been an alcoholic.
So with my kids I always wanted them to feel comfortable in my room and I wanted them to know that they could climb into bed and get comfortable, and that sometimes when they were sick or had a bad nightmare or just for the sake of doing something different or fun, they could share my bed with me. I wanted to develop that kind of closeness and comfort and ease with them so that later in life talking about difficult issues such as sex or friendships or drinking and drugs, and all of those things that kids must deal with as they pass through puberty, would be easier. We would have a level of familiarity, trust and comfort with each other. I knew, and know that sleeping with me periodically is not the be all and end all to make that happen, facilitating that level of communication requires honesty and openness and many other characteristics to develop trust and mutual respect between a child and parent, but I believe it will help and will make us closer and I know it already has.
So as I got my kids ready for bed that night it wasn’t so unusual for one of them to take a turn sleeping with me. What was unusual, though, was that I let them both sleep in my bed. I can’t be sure if they noticed it or not as they didn’t betray any reaction to the switch in the line up other than to show a bit of excitement that the whole family would be sleeping together. It was unusual, but it was fun unusual.
I tucked them in and wished them goodnight and that they have butterfly dreams. I kissed each and sat with them for a moment to watch as they curled up against each other underneath my large soft quilt. I told them I love them and walked out of the room, gently shutting the door behind me.
I sat in front of my TV for a while, but I couldn’t shake my mind from the certainty and reality that today I had been diagnosed with cancer. It was no longer the figment of a dream or some long born anxiety that I carried since childhood, but a reality, a fact an inescapable truth. I knew that my life had changed and that there is nothing in the world that I could do to remove it. I began to see having cancer as something that was most certainly fearful and very deadly, but also as a new, albeit unwanted job. It was something that I would have to work through and that each day I would have to wake up and prepare for the work of cancer in much the same way I dealt with any other job. Appointments would have to be scheduled. I would have to deal with making room for sickness and most likely pain.
I was tired, very tired, so I turned the TV off and walked around my small living space turning off lights. I grabbed a magazine as I walked into the bedroom and turned on my little reading lamp. The kids were asleep still curled against each other. I took my clothes off and put on pajamas and eased Violet’s small, cherubic body over so I could make room for myself and climbed under the covers. As I lay in bed I could feel the warmth of her body pressed against mine and smell her breath as she lightly snored, deeply asleep. I leaned up and looked at Quincy. His blond hair was tussled and a small bit of drool seeped from the corner of his mouth. As usual, his arms and legs were scattered about in a disorganized array. He was breathing softly.
I spent a few minutes looking at both of these two wonderful people and remembered a line in a movie that when I first heard it thought it was a crock of shit. It was Bill Murray, I can’t remember the movie, but he was talking to another man about his kids and he says something like, “Then you have these two most wonderful little people, and they grow into the most amazing people you have ever met.” I thought it was trite and cliché, but now as I looked at my two little people I realized it was true. I still think it is a trite and cliché thing to say, but looking at them I truly believed it to be true; and I still believe it.
I laid back into my pillows and picked up the magazine and flipped through the pages. I couldn’t focus on reading as my mind was still wildly wandering in a number of different directions. I tossed the magazine to the side and turned out the light. I then slid Quincy and Violet apart to create a space between them for me and lay down. Almost instinctively they both curled up in my arms. I could hear the wind shake the windows and periodically one of the many people who lived in my apartment complex pulled into the driveway. The lights from their cars crawled across the ceiling of my apartment and then immediately disappeared. A car door shut and I could hear a person or a few people walk into the building and find their way home. For them, all was normal and it was just the end of another day and another week.
Shadows of branches illuminated by streetlights swayed across the ceiling and I pulled the kids in a little closer. For the first time in a very long time I was laying in bed feeling scared and, despite my company, quite lonely. I thought about my grandmother and my grandfather and though I am very much an agnostic when it comes to religion, I hoped they could see me.
I wondered too about a recurring dream that I thought might hold some deeper meaning, and wondered if it held any relevance. In the dream I walk through the front door of what appears to be a fairly large and very old house. The reason for finding this house and feeling impelled to walk through the front door varies with each dream. Some nights I am led there by another faceless person while other nights I find myself at the front door and almost gliding through it. But in every dream the scene that I emerge into is always the same. It is a very large entry room with a set of wide wooden stairs leading up to a landing and long hallway. The ceiling is high and peaks above the steps. The walls are stained dark and fine grained. Stile & rail frames rise up to where the ceiling abuts the walls. The banister and balusters are the same dark finished wood with ornately carved end posts. There are dark, aged windows on the bottom floor and the landing at the top of the stairs. To my right is a doorway that I have never passed in any of the dreams. To my left is an entryway that opens out into what looks like a 1960s-style, mid-modernist designed and furnished living room.
In the dream I will sometimes walk directly into the living room, but I often will go up the stairs to the landing. I walk along the hallway, which is composed of horse-hair-plaster walls and there are a number of doors.
Sometimes I walk past the doors to the end of the corridor. There is a right turn that may lead to another hallway or sometimes will open into a large bedroom. If I take this path I usually meet a person in that room in an Alice-in-Wonderland sort of way. I can never remember what exactly happens in these encounters other than the strange and disjointed sensation it creates within me even after I have woken up. Usually the characters are outlandish women that lead me in a number of different directions and act as if they have known me my entire life, though I only sense a spark of the hauntingly familiar.
Often, though, as I walk down the initial hallway a door will open as I pass. Looking in, there is usually some familiar person from my past. We look at each other in total recognition, in some instances no words are exchanged because I move on, while at other times I will be drawn into the room where events and discussions play out. I often don’t remember the next morning the specifics of these interactions, but I awake with the sense that I visited with that person. The image of the interior of the house is still vivid in my mind.
Not long before being diagnosed I had walked to one of these doors and sitting inside the room next to a bed was Maiya. She looked at me dispassionately, but she also seemed to beckon me in. As I walked into the room it immediately expanded and transformed so that we are outside in a place that feels like a garden. We are instantly sitting together, very close. I remember reaching out to touch her and feeling her skin on mine. I don’t believe we said anything, but I kept my hand on her back and soon she curled into me and we remained like that for some time.
When I woke from the dream, the sensation of having been physically very near her was with me, and all of my memories of Maiya drifted to the front of my mind. I thought of being in school with her and the time we spent together in the field at Sam’s house shortly before we graduated. The dream and the sensation of touching her brought my feelings about back in much the same way that catching a familiar scent will ignite long dormant memories. It wasn’t that I still have the same longings for her, but that my mind and body, particularly my skin, were in the process of remembering a desire for a person that hadn’t been experienced for 20 years. It is dream as sensation.
Then I remembered the trip to California. The first night on the bus talking with Marpa and feeling as free as I ever felt in my life. I remembered sitting on the cold slate steps of a bus station in Omaha, Nebraska, smoking very early in the morning, a few hours before the sun would rise. I remembered a couple of kids who were also sitting on the steps asking to bum a smoke. As we sat talking I noticed there were about four or five cars continually driving past us. I remembered asking one of them if he knew why, and him saying the men are pedophiles looking for some young boy’s body to buy. They pointed to one car and told me that he pays twenty bucks to do pushups naked in front of him. And another car where the driver pays fifty bucks to cut a kid’s hair while he’s naked. Another driver liked to just hang out and stair at a kid’s dick. He paid more than the other two, especially if he jerked off.
I sat listening to him talk and shared my cigarettes with him and his friend. The sun started to climb up out of the eastern horizon and light dawned on that very flat and endless land like an eyelid slowly opening to reveal the world before it. I looked at both the boys and their odd haircuts and we talked and smoked some more. Marpa didn’t say much. He just looked off into the distance, probably too tired to really have much to say.
Soon it was 6:30am and back on the bus and off to the next stop and meeting the next round of people and learning from them what their lives were like. There was the guy who worked with cows his whole life and talked to me about cows for nearly four hours. There was the hippie from California returning home and telling everyone that one of the virtues of being a vegetarian was all you can eat buffets, It takes a fuck-load of vegetables to fill up, he yelled at us above the noise of the diesel engine. There was the guy in Chicago who tried to rip us off by selling us a fake gold chain, and then there was the guy in Denver who did rip us off selling us fake hash and acid.
Three and a half days later we arrived in San Francisco after riding across the Oakland Bridge in a dense fog. We gathered our backpacks and walked out onto a street scene in a strange new city nearly 3,000 miles from home. I put my backpack down and pulled my cigarettes from my pocket. There was a heavy fog and a slight drizzle. I thought of Blair and Chris and the others from ninth grade and wondered if they had made it this far yet as I pulled a smoke from the pack and went to light it. Then I felt a tug at my backpack and looked down to see some homeless guy trying to steal my sleeping bag. I kicked him away and realized I was in a place that was very different yet very much the same as the one I had left.
We walked to our friend Jim’s Dad’s office and sat with him until Jim came along to meet us. We were tired and the first thing his dad asked us is if we brought any drugs. For some reason he had heard there was good pot on the East Coast. We said no and told him about being ripped off in Denver and he laughed. Then Jim showed up and off we went.
We spent the next two days crashing at their house and exploring the city. I was overwhelmed by it all, but throughout I wanted to see Maiya. I felt as if by traveling such a distance and with all that I had experienced that she would see me as more than just the boy who had been her friend at Westtown; that she would see me as someone with a story to tell, someone who was interesting and cool and perhaps more of a man worth her attention. The memory of placing my hand on her back and the light, voluptuary exhalation that came from it was like an enduring and sensual aroma that constantly followed me. I wanted to experience that again. I wanted to be with her and see her and be alone with her in some sylvan place exploring the small of her back. San Francisco was wonderful and beautiful and different and interesting, but it still couldn’t compare to the image I had drawn in my mind of being with Maiya.
Jim gave us a ride out of San Francisco and dropped us off on the highway that leads up to Lake Tahoe where Maiya was staying with her step dad. We thanked him and headed off with our backpacks on and thumbs out. Normally the drive from San Francisco to Truckee is about three to three and a half hours, but the first few rides we hitched only took us short distances and it felt for a while as if we were going to have to walk the whole way.
Soon, though, we were picked up by a guy in a VW Bug who as it happened was traveling to Tahoe and even knew the café where Maiya was working. I squeezed into the backseat with the packs while Marpa wedged his tall, narrow frame into the front. With a lurch the VW pulled out into traffic and we were finally on our way. The man began to talk with Marpa by asking him where we were from and what we were doing. Marpa was always good at this sort of thing. He has an easy way about him and a positive spirit that made just about anybody feel comfortable. The two of them soon started going back and forth about some thing or another and I sat quietly looking out the window as we first past through Sacramento and drove toward the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, the heart of which is Lake Tahoe.
I spoke up once to ask the driver if he minded if I smoke. He said yes and then lectured me on the evils of tobacco and the companies that cell cigarettes to which Marpa eagerly joined in and the two of them were off again. I looked out the window and watched as we passed through flat, open farmlands of the Sacramento Valley. It could have been Iowa or central Pennsylvania or Ohio or any other state.
Flat farmland slowly turned over to foothills and the road pointed up to ever higher elevations. Periodically a BMW or Saab or some other sports car would fly by us with people from San Francisco or Sacramento on their way for a weekend in the mountains. Drivers with sunglasses and beautiful women sitting idly as they let the wind and the miles pass by. Some smiling as they chatted and others just simply staring straight ahead looking self important as they traveled to Tahoe. Sometimes a family with kids in the backseat drove by and I wondered what it would have been like to live in a place where you could wave goodbye to the ocean and hello to some of the tallest and most beautiful mountains, lakes and rivers in the world in a mere three hours. How would my life have been different? Who would I have become? Perhaps much the same person, but there is an inescapable truth that landscape and scenery play a role in determining the people we will be.
We entered green coniferous woods and soon could see large, peaked mountains surrounding us. Rather than the dull bumps endemic to the east, these are spires of rock with large swaths of green forest climbing up them only to falter and fail at the higher altitudes leaving the chest, shoulders and tops of these mountains bare and exposed.
It was surreal to have everything you see, do, hear and smell be for the first time; for each one of your senses to experience something fresh, and to meet people who grew up in this land and have their psyche, id, ego and sense of self etched out by the landscape.
As we climbed even higher and then crested a shoulder of this massive ridge of mountains, I had the sensation that we were getting close, that we would soon see Maiya. I didn’t really know what to think. I looked at myself and my dirty, tanned fingers and there was nothing new about them. I looked at my legs and shoes and arms and there wasn’t anything different about them. Riding on a bus and traveling by thumb and doing all that I had done really hadn’t changed the person that I was. I felt as if I was still merely James, but in a different place, in a different context. I had changed my surroundings, but I hadn’t yet changed myself. To be more accurate, I was in the process of growth, but being able to sit back and tell this story and learn its lessons was still many years off.
Soon we reached Truckee and the small café where Maiya worked. Marpa and I left our friend in his VW Bug to continue traveling on to Reno. We walked to the door and set our packs down rather than bring them inside. Marpa was smiling and telling me how lucky we were to have gotten a ride from that guy and how interesting he was and wondering if Maiya would actually be there or not when we heard someone inside say, Oh my god, you guys made it!, and Maiya came out and hugged Marpa and then me. We looked at each other and she was even more beautiful than she had been the last time I saw her. Any lax flesh had been worked off and her skin was about as healthily bronzed as any I had ever seen. I was in awe.
“I’m so glad you guys made it. I have been telling Jason my boyfriend all about you guys! You’re going to love him!”
A day later after meeting Jason—a tall, lean, longhaired Californian—I overheard Maiya say to Marpa, “Have you noticed how quiet James has been?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“He’s been that way since I told you guys about Jason.”
“Yeah, weird, too bad.”

X
In my dream I held her close and she nestled into me. I could feel her skin and her hair on my shoulder and I could feel the weight of her body leaning into mine. I leaned down and kissed her and she kissed me back easily and willingly and put her hand behind my head. But then, as always, in almost an instant I was back in the dream-house walking alone. Sometimes I looked into more rooms and ran into more people from my past, such as a kid from one of my little league teams, or a young girl I went to elementary school with, or a college friend that I haven’t thought about since graduating, or sometimes it would be Amy who I lived with for a portion of my 20s, or some person I felt some sort of an emotional attachment to, but had no sensation of knowing.
Often the dream would take me from room to room meeting and engaging with a panoply of people I had some intimate or vague association with, but always I returned to the entryway at the foot of the stairs and walked through the doorway to my left into the living room. Sometimes I was alone, while other times I was accompanied by one of the people I had run into upstairs. Always the room opens out into a sunken sitting area with a fireplace. There are bookshelves along the far wall. At the end of the wall, the room opens out into a dining area with a table surrounded by a few chairs. Set behind the table is a large picture window. Looking through the window I can see past a hedge of rhododendrons into a deeply green and darkened backyard. There is a large hardwood tree such as an oak or maple in the center of a yard. The grass is long and a deep green as if it had been heavily watered. Surrounding the yard are more shrubs making it impossible to see beyond.
Always, I walk through the living space to look out the window and I am amazed by the depth and size of the house. And always upon nearing the window I would see another hallway to my left that leads toward another living room of the same vintage as the first, but instead of bright, vanilla colored furniture and décor, this one is leather seats and sofas, and there is dark stained wood trim. I walk through this room past bookshelves and nice furniture and art to find a kitchen area toward the back and more of the wide frame windows looking out into the same yard. Throughout, the breadth and size and diversity of the house inhabit me in the same manner as a strong and resonant emotion. I then wonder whose house it is, and in each dream I think that perhaps this is a space meant for me. In the dream it feels so real, yet I can’t quite figure out what it is I am supposed to do.
And then I wake up with all of these feelings and emotions still registering deeply within my psyche and body.
As I lay in bed with Quincy and Violet curled next to me I thought about the dream and wondered if, as a friend suggested once, that it may have something to do with the dissociative state described by Carl Jung, where a person compartmentalizes emotions and memories as a means to deal with very difficult traumas and anxieties. The mind separates various elements that are in tension as a means to reign in the brain and its tendency to fall into an anxious state. In my dream each element is in a state of resolution—Maiya and emotional and erotic tension are brought into harmony, for example. Then there is the other half of the house, the mid modernist design and décor and feelings of emotional peace mixed with wondering as to what I am supposed to do once I have seen this part of the house. Is this is my subconscious trying in a not so subtle way to seek resolution?
But then I have to wonder what the hell Jung knows about my mind and subconscious? Why would his theories hold any semblance of understanding to my current state of mind and why if I find resolution in my dream, or at least perhaps the appearance of it, can’t it also translate into my conscious mind. Why am I still so embarrassed by so many things I have done in my life such as decisions I have made sober and actions I have taken while drunk? Why is my conscious mind so unable to forgive me, but I can find, with some regularity, peace within my subconscious mind? And what about the times when I have the dream and all that happens is that I walk through the house?
I have wondered if maybe the dream is simply a metaphor for life. Is it that life starts as one thing, something that seems predictable and controlable, but then evolves and changes and takes us into strange and different places and experiences as long as we are willing to follow?
Lying in bed watching headlights from another car slide across the ceiling and listening to Quincy’s soft breathing and Violets muted snores; I wondered if the dream represents what it is like after death. I have never been all too convinced by religious arguments for life after death as being the construct of some mystic being sending our souls either to heaven or hell. It’s easier to rationalize that if there is consciousness after death, it would be something like wandering around this very big house, the many rooms and meetings, the unexpected broadness of the house and feelings of emotional wellbeing. However, it has always seemed odd that if this were to in some way represent consciousness after death, I never meet anyone from my life that has actually died. Other than my own anxiety, there is nothing within the dream to solidly indicate dieing.
But that is something, after all, that is one of the two significant mysteries of life, which both become known when we experience its end.
That night, though, I felt Quincy and Violet’s warmth next to me and knew that this is real—right now I am cuddled with my two little ones, and I am sharing this night with them, watching them and enjoying their presence and grace in my life. Fate has placed this growing, scheming thing within my body, and in one invidious draft it has invaded my consciousness and will change my life forever and may even eventually end it—but not tonight and not tomorrow. The fear is not gone, but I have time and I am not alone. If my grandparents are not watching me from on high, then my children most certainly are. I will enjoy this moment right now and look forward to tomorrow morning.

Contact: James@orchardwriting.com or 603-580-2042

Orchard Writing

The Web Home for the Writing of James Buchanan

Home

My Bio

Contact

Reviews & Media Stories

My Ghostwriting

Essays

Short Fiction

Magazine Features

Abraham Lincoln Brigade

James Buchanan's Resume

Photography

My Blog

Links

Administrivia

The Invidious Soul