Love and death
I am thinking about death. The window in the kitchen won’t shut all the way. It’s behind the counter. I can’t get to it without climbing. Even if I climb, I can’t convince it to obey me. As though it’s lost respect for me, watching me fight for balance, knocking a bottle of olive oil over.
So it’s freezing inside, and only going outside and then returning can make it feel the slightest bit better. Even when I wrap myself in blankets my fingers are still so cold, and my nose is leaking.
Which is also because I’ve been crying. After reading Joyce Carol Oates’ account of her husband’s death (in The New Yorker). Which I only read because I am already thinking about this. He died in Princeton, where I grew up. In a hospital I used to drive by every other day. Her pain, like a tidal wave forming in the center of very still sea, is easy to ride. It feels close to me, like I’m standing on the edge of the water, just waiting.
I am young, and so I’m supposed to be brave. I’m supposed to have that stupid, bold bravery that you have before you know better. The kind that lets you drive recklessly, for fun, and keeps your mind on what’s directly in front of you, and encourages you to take the job, even when it’s really far away from everything you’ve ever known.
(I’m putting dramatic photos I’ve taken in this post, because they seem to fit)
But I am not brave. I am scared.
I used to be brave. Like when I pulled myself from the fence to the roof and then sidestepped all the way up to the treacherous peak. I was ten. And when I tied the sheets together and climbed out my third story bedroom window, into the garden, where I landed on a slug. I wanted to be up high, proving myself. I wanted to be freer and freer.
Now I think about falling, instead. I look down and calculate how much destruction the drop will cause. Zip lining in Costa Rica, the guide called, “Keep your feet together” as I swung back, screaming, after the plummet off a platform some terrible height above the jungle floor. I kicked him in the face. My foot just lashed out, as though scrabbling for something stable. I spent the rest of the outing apologizing to him.
Back in our cabin, I lay curled in bed while Bear tried to rescue our bags from the waves of ants.
“I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m not fun. I’ll never be fun.”
He kept saying, “You don’t have to be anything. Just be you.”
All I could think, soaring down a thrumming line, suspended over misty canyons, the world opening under me, was “I am not meant to fly. I am meant to be on the ground.”
I stopped being brave at twelve or fourteen. And I’m even less brave now than I was a year ago. Everything feels too precious, too fragile, too practically impossible to waste. I have the sense of perpetually faltering on the lip of a cliff. Like when my dad called me in college to tell me his stomach was paralyzed. He would not be able to process food any more. Like when my mom woke me in the middle of the night, years earlier, because he wasn’t responding to the glucagon shot she’d given him. He was so pale he was barely recognizable, and he tried to talk but his mind was not connecting. He’s been sick my whole life, but when I was really young it didn’t mean as much to me.
“How do you feel about being married to me?” Bear asked me yesterday.
“I feel afraid of you dying,” I said.
I want forever. I don’t just want now. I don’t just want until something bad happens. Marriage makes my life into all these slender sticks, propped up against a ball of the thinnest blown glass. And if the glass breaks, the sticks tumble inward, and there is no fixing the structure. I know from reading and listening and being alive that people die and the people who love them somehow move on. But how can I understand that?
Bear is much more real to me than the concept of recovery. His smell is more real to me. I told him, last night, “You are the only person in the history of humanity who has ever smelled like this. And no one will ever smell like this in the future. You are the only one who’s able to have this smell.” It’s a terrifying thought.
When we were dating, and I was flirting with Bear and calling my friends and my mom to tell them what just happened, and how he was definitely falling for me, I wasn’t thinking about death. But so, so quickly, he became so essential for me that the worst thing I could imagine was losing him. And so my mind rushes to that nightmare, and the world confirms that it’s founded in solid fact.
It’s morbid to talk about death. Or to think about it too much when it’s probably so far off. But love, I keep learning more and more acutely, is too tied up in it to extricate. When people check in and ask how it feels to be married for a month, I tell them it’s great. I tell them it feels good. I tell them the truth, of course. But the other truth is darker, rawer, and maybe even embarrassing. As though I’m malfunctioning. My perspective has aged or decayed inappropriately, flinging me into the company of eighty-year-olds and the terminally ill. Or rather, how people imagine these groups should feel. (Aren’t the terminally ill always surprising everyone by acting more cheerful than they’re expected to?)
And when Joyce Carol Oates stands in the hospital room, holding her husband’s suddenly superfluous deodorant, and thinking that his eyes must be moving, gently, beneath their lids, even though she knows they can’t, I can’t help but cry, not so much picturing as feeling myself there in her place. Or with her. We aren’t that different, despite all the decades, all her wildly successful novels, and whatever else. It’s going to sound corny. But I can’t help it: we both love.
* * *
Un-roast: Today I love the way my hands look on the laptop keys. I think computers have been in my life long enough for the scene to strike me as classic. You know, like a hand holding a quill. I might write anything. And when I do, I won’t have to white the mistakes out, I’ll just hit backspace.
P.S. Post about going to therapy over at un-schooled.
Kate on December 7th 2010 in Uncategorized
Hunter4086 responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 11:05 am #
Man! Timely! Last night I wrapped up reading Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection of stories (‘Sourland’) and after clicking off the lamp I could only lay in bed, feeling heavy with similar foreboding.
Her grief shimmers off the page. It was a dark experience, but also sort of exhilarating.
As a writer I admire how she can cut through the sorrow and bewilderments of widowhood, of being left behind, of surviving, and emerge with her articulate and devastating voice intact.
As someone “young”, and in love, my brain wants death to remain an abstraction. I also want the forever, not the just-for-now. It will never change. There is so much fundamental sorrow in life!!
That being said, I admire your site and writing style and oh for the record? I am eating a slice of cake right now for breakfast. Date cake. In Canada it also flies under the alias ‘matrimonial cake.’ Word!
Kate responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 11:47 am #
@Way to eat cake for breakfast!!
I really think that writing would be the only thing I’d be able to do if someone I love died. I’d have to try to focus really hard on making my grief into something beautiful. She does that perfectly. I don’t know that I’d come even close.
Meri @ merigoesround responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 11:49 am #
I feel this way sometimes too. It’s scary when you think about it too much, so I think it’s important to remember that we can survive things, that we are strong, and that love is important!
Meri
rachel responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 11:59 am #
You’ve gotten me think about death first thing in the morning (pacific time) thanks, Kate. Actually I live with death all of the time. I carry it around with me. Billy Collins has a great poem called “The Wires of the Night” that captures this feeling.
I think there’s a difference between living with the fear of death and living with death, the latter not being entirely for the worse. When I was very young I had a childhood disease with an extremely low survival rate. Even though I was always told growing up how lucky I was, I grew up thinking that by all rights I should have died a toddler. I think that experience imparts a special sense of purpose. Not like God saved me so I could end world poverty, but more like I owe it to the memory of the kids who died before me not to waste time feeling sorry for myself, not to over value my problems.
But that’s only the beginning of my relationship with death. Losing someone made it hard to live up to those goals, because for a very long time, I could only think about myself, about the loss that would never be filled. Death is everything you’ve heard: it’s crushing, its cavernous and its exquisite. I’ve never stopped mourning and I don’t expect to. I’ve learned that allowing that to myself is also a way of honoring the life I have.
Am I afraid of death? Of dying? Of my loved ones passing? No. When death comes there will be plenty to regret, but I know that I won’t regret being brave, won’t regret ‘living in the moment.’
Ellie Di responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 12:23 pm #
I’ve been told that it’s not uncommon for a young wife to “fantasize” about their husband’s death. Not in a way like they’re wishing for it, but in that scared, terrible way that you’re talking about. They’re frightened of what would be on the other side of the door, in lots of different ways at once.
I certainly have fallen victim to it. Without even realizing that it might be weird. I think about what would happen if my husband suddenly died in the night or if one of his seizures killed him. What would I do? What would I think and feel? I chalk it up more to my inappropriate need to plan than fear, but there is some aspect of it in there.
Loraine Elyse DeBelser responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 12:59 pm #
Your feelings are the same as mine, married 10 years, and likely the same as most people’s, if we admitted it. The same happened with offspring, imagining every horrible thing that might lead to their extinction. Perhaps an adaptive function, to be working toward their safety, while also protectively cushioning the eventual blow.
None of us gets out of here alive. Death is with us always. The only thing that is unique is the time and reason. When you are committed to a person, you are also inevitably aware that one of you will go first.
Your post today makes me happy that I am not the only one. Thanks for your insights.
Christin@purplebirdblog responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 12:59 pm #
I can be quite morbid and often have a borderline unhealthy obsession of thinking what would happen if __________________ (person I care about) died? I try to pray to have those thoughts removed, that I can celebrate more in the here and now, but that doesn’t always work. I have already dealt with the loss of my mother, which was (is) incredibly hard, but a significant other is a different ball of wax entirely.
Dana Udall-Weiner responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 2:42 pm #
I had many of the same thoughts after I was first married and my husband would go on business trips. Now that I’m a mother, I have them even more. For me, the anxiety is related to the fact that I know I belong to others, and they to me. I no longer have the psychological freedom to practice bravery by taking risks. I’m mostly fine with this, but at times I long to have a little more excitement (though not of the death-defying variety) in my life.
Kate responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 2:45 pm #
These responses are making me feel a lot more normal. It’s reassuring 🙂
Cindy responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 3:00 pm #
I don’t let myself think about it.
my husband obsesses over it.
He’s preparing me…living with one foot in the grave and one on the banana peel and I am crying, mad at him for making me think about it.
Trusts, wills. we still have managed to ignore it because I simply cannot deal.
He’s the realist and I am the one who cries and gets mad because he makes me think about us not being us.
so you are not alone.
Ana Marai responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 7:16 pm #
I just found out that Elizabeth Edwards died. She was way too cool a lady to suffer from such a horrible disease.
Amber U responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 8:32 pm #
I don’t often think about my fiance dying, but when I do it hits me like a wall. Last night was one of those nights, so you can imagine my surprise to wake up this morning and read your post!
Something else I have thought about lately is the fact that I will never live my life in the selfish, risky, independent way that I did when I was single again. It sounds strange, but I have a stronger sense of responsibility to be safe, make smart choices (whether it’s not running that yellow light or eating healthier so I live longer), and be accountable to someone. It’s a strange feeling. I can imagine that feeling intensifying by a zillion when children come into play. Scary!
As much as this is all overwhelming, I still would rather deal with these fears every once in awhile than be alone and not be afraid. Life is meant to be shared!
Just Josie responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 9:20 pm #
I think that’s perfectly “normal” (whatever normal is!). =] I remember when I was like, probably 7, I, for some reason, got really freaked out by death all of a sudden. For several months, actually. And I would cry and cry and cry about it at night. Mostly just trying to imagine what it’d be like if my mom or dad died. The thought of them dying doesn’t frighten me as much now. I think it’s because…
I like to think of myself as a rational person. And of course I’m in no way saying that if you worry about death, you’re not rational — not at. It’s just that, I’ve caught myself feeling perturbed about death many times, and then I realize how utterly absurd I sound. I’m not religious, I’m not spiritual. Death is as big and looming and real a part as life as the living part is, and I feel totally out-of-control and irrational being all freaked-out by it. I mean, it’s gonna happen, and I don’t believe in the “hereafter”. Which is why I’ve promised myself that while I’m here I’m going to (not necessarily in this order of importance): 1) cause as little harm as is possible in modern society; 2) have as much fun as I can without causing harm; and 3) do as much as I can to change society before I kick the bucket.
I’m always so, so inspired by those brave cancer patients who can stand up in front of whole crowds of people and announce that they’re dying and that they’ve accepted it and not seem at all ruffled. Just, completely at peace with how they’ve lived and totally not fighting it.
That’s dignity, I think.
And I used to think suicide was romantic, just because it was the ultimate form of control — YOU deciding when you leave the earth and all. But then I reflected upon it and realized that many (most?) people commit suicide because they’ve been driven to that point, and that’s not empowering, they just makes me want to big society up by its collective shoulders and shake some sense into all of us.
Also: “As though it’s lost respect for me, watching me fight for balance, knocking a bottle of olive oil over.” There’s not a thing in that sentence that I don’t like, lol. …And that picture is really pretty — it reminds me of a giant doughnut! *And* I really love the slender sticks/finest blown glass ball… thingie, and the “You are the only person that’s ever smelled like this.” Aha, and NOW I’m done complimenting you! 😛 You’re just so honest though, I love it!
Un-roast: I kind of like that my back is a little fuzzy. I like to think it’s slightly endearing, that’s all.
Just Josie responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 9:22 pm #
*THAT just makes me…
Sorry, couldn’t leave it — ‘s the grambotarian in me. > . >
Denise responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 10:33 pm #
Oh, my dear girl. You’ve been given an incredible gift. You GET it. You’ve learned something that’s almost impossible to learn without losing someone you love.
My 42-year-old husband died suddenly a month ago. We were together for 15 years. Yes, it’s been horrible, as horrible as you imagine. I still can’t believe he’s gone.
And yet, everything is so beautiful to me now, so precious. I feel I’ve woken up to the reality of the way things really are, after years of sleepwalking. This moment–this moment right now–is all we know for sure that we have. It’s terrifying to know this, and yet knowing it frees you to live with just one priority–love fiercely, love unconditionally, every moment of every day.
I don’t want to go back to sleepwalking, ever again. Don’t live in fear. Live in love.
San D responded on 07 Dec 2010 at 11:31 pm #
When I was diagnosed with cancer in the hospital, waiting to be operated on, and for further diagnosis, I saw fear in my husband’s (and parents for that matter) eyes. All I saw were their sad, scared faces with terrified eyes hanging over me as I was being wheeled into the operating room. All that you speak of was on their sleeves and deposited on my heart. At that seminal moment I knew I wasn’t going to die, even if I physically did. Their love for me would keep me alive in their hearts. I have a healthy respect for death, but don’t fear it. I have lost both of my parents, and in fact was by the side of my father and sang to him as he passed. I can’t imagine my husband’s death, but will be there for him should he need me.
Anna responded on 08 Dec 2010 at 1:55 am #
Lovely and amazing post. I lost my mom to cancer 5 years ago and have been what some people would call “morbid” since then. I think it’s important to recognize that everyone dies–that everyone you know or have ever known or every will known is going to die. It makes things in the ‘now’ precious. (I’m having the Flaming Lips’ song “Do You Realize” as my processional song.)
I felt what you describe for a while after I got engaged in September–terrified that I would come home after a totally average day, expecting everything to be normal, and find that W had died in a car wreck. I still worry about that–with everyone I love, but especially my W. I’m wary of reading the story by Joyce Carol Oates that you describe–I’m afraid it would make me more anxious and would re-awaken grief from the loss of my mom. Maybe someday.
Thanks for this post.
Kate responded on 08 Dec 2010 at 11:18 am #
First of all, @Denise, I am so so so so so sorry. I never know what else to say. I hope you heal the way I know people can always heal, even when it seems impossible.
And Christin, Rachel, and Anna, I am incredibly sorry for your losses. Talking with Rachel has helped me understand the slightest bit better what it means, but of course coping with death is always incredibly personal, and so I don’t know what to say yet again except that I’m sorry.
Reading many of these comments made me realize that I hadn’t thought about having kids, and how that will impact the way I think about mortality. Sheesh. If I’m this bad now….It’s not going to be pretty….
Wei-Wei responded on 09 Dec 2010 at 4:26 am #
“It’s morbid to talk about death.” I think about death all the time but I don’t talk about it. It reminds me to live. I’ve accepted death, and I know I’m lucky because I haven’t had anyone too close to me die before. I wish I could celebrate death like the Mexicans do with their Dias de los Muertos (we studied it in Spanish). Death, like everything else, is a natural phenomenon, and like life, I think it should be celebrated.
That’s not to say that I am inherently selfish because I want everyone around me to live forever. People are so wonderful.
MWN responded on 11 Dec 2010 at 12:35 am #
I hate checking my voicemail because I worry the message waiting for me is telling me that someone in my immediate family is now dead. I have no reason to feel this way, nothing in my past to suggest this. And yet…
Ophelia responded on 11 Dec 2010 at 9:18 am #
What a wonderful, insightful post.