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• 0–9

I know—and on looking, knew—that I’d never seen the ocean’s shapes from these angles. But I was well aware that their immensity and depths would swallow anyone up without remorse. After she left me, I felt like I was skimming the bottom of the Pacific with rotting whales and polar bear bones.

I rose out of it, but was infused with the way these things decayed. I made my own home brew with this decomposition as its base. I drank cases and cases.

I floated in the Atlantic, but from the coast of South Carolina.

Now as I float, I understand why she left, but when I dry off, my dryness causes me to forget.

I have a picture in my mind, but I don’t know if the smiles we had on our faces were real. And if anything exists in 0–9, it must be true.

***

1) I’m standing on a street in Amsterdam, leaning against the canal wall, staring at row houses. I can’t discern which building was Otto Frank’s store.

“Which one is the annex?” I ask my best friend. “They all look the same.”

“No,” she says, “they don’t.” She crosses her arms. I look again.

One house has a triangular roof. Another nine windows. The last concrete steps that lead up to its entrance. The sun is setting now.

“The dusk sets over them all the same,” I say.

We stand for a minute that turns into two. I’m looking into the canal and see the building’s reflections. I’m not looking close enough. I feel I have committed a crime. This not knowing.

Looking back on this image, I realize that it comes from a postcard I bought in the gift shop. I used the postcard as a bookmark on and off for a year until I set it down in a coffee shop or the university’s library. Perhaps I left it on a patch of grass under the tree I sat beneath in the commons.

The image on the postcard was easy enough to find online. The answer to my question was easy enough to find, too. A blogger had taken the time to highlight the store in blue, the horrible blue of a highlighter. That blue revoked the sun. It revoked the water in the canal. It revoked the black and white photographs of the movie stars that Anne had hung while in hiding.

***

2) I’ve read two memoirs in my life, one being Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. In Europe, they call it If This Is a Man, and it is a man. Man is a pretty pitiful thing to be.

I’ve read Survival in Auschwitz, but not If This Is a Man. I won’t be able to read it until I can read Italian. I can guess why it’s altered. American books need heroes, and since Levi survived, he was good enough to be named one.

Our publishers wanted to tattoo the name Auschwitz on the cover. A title with Auschwitz in it is far more interesting than some philosophical meandering. We want the details that make us grimace, but also titillate us. So in the way that Americans do, the publishers pushed aside Levi’s title. This is not for us, this philosophy.

But don’t you think he earned the right to name the book what he wanted?

***

3) The second memoir I’ve read is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which she writes, “This record lays a claim to being historical—that is, much of it can be checked. If there is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right.” McCarthy is one of the few who took the time to acknowledge that there is fiction in nonfiction. She invites correction. She wants her fiction set straight.

What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction? The nonfiction writer chooses subject matter from the real world. Its defenders say that the story being told does not originate from invention, but from people who once lived and are living. These people are not characters.

But what if I take the written words, the things I have recorded, and place them in a tiger’s mouth? It is subject matter from the real world. The words that the tiger speaks are not fictional. I have them recorded on a Dictaphone.

You can have your mother speak, your abusive stepfather scream, but they are reconstructions in
your head. They are primary players. They are the actors you set in motion in your play.

The tiger speaks truth.

***

4) Nonfiction from found autobiographical moments (note: not created).

Tara, my ex, experienced suicide at the age of twelve. Her boyfriend Steven tied a sheet around the metal bar in his closet and hung himself, leaving his little brother Robbie and his mother, now half-crazed, behind. One Christmas, long after Steven died, Robbie gave Tara an ice cream scoop with a polar bear handle.

At the age of sixteen, Robbie went quarry diving. He and his friends made it through the first jump. One of them said, “Let’s go one more time.” Of course, we know what one more time means. We’ve seen this before. Robbie broke his neck. Robbie drowned.

My uncle went to a park and shot himself in the head. However, he pinned a piece of notebook paper with his name and phone
number on it so that the police would immediately know who he was. But what is interesting about a man shooting himself? Stories like this have been suffocating me since my uncle’s death. Here’s the proof of the suffocation.

Three weeks ago, a classmate of mine sealed herself in her car. She took sheets and jammed them in places where air might find its way inside. When I heard she was dead, I thought of her at the end of a rope, a bloated face, her glasses fallen off. But she lit a small gas grill and suffocated as the carbon monoxide gathered in her car. A friend told me what my classmate looked like when she found her lying dead in the backseat of her car. She’d made a small bed and was lying on her back. My friend said she looked like herself, but her face was a bit purple.

***

5) Fiction that is nonfiction.

See all of the above.

Also known as realism: Madame Bovary, etc.

Also known as This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen in English or Farewell to Maria in Polish, written by Tadeusz Borowski. The stories in the text were inspired by the author’s concentration-camp experience, “inspired” meaning “historical subject matter chosen from the real world.”

***

6) Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

***

7) Primo. Weisel, on the day of Levi’s death, informed his audience that Levi died forty years earlier in Auschwitz. If Weisel is correct, Primo Levi’s writings are the act of a living corpse. I could write this six different ways, but why bother with oxymora?

Primo threw himself down the stairs (according to the coroner and three of his biographers). He fell (according to one good friend and an Oxford sociologist). Why two possibilities? Memory, survivor’s guilt, aging mother-in-law, no suicide note, discussions of feeling dizzy, plans for the future. He was a chemist, his friend said. It would have been a hell of a lot easier for him to poison himself. “You stupid fucking bastards, it would have been easier.”

***

8) I will map out the last year.

Uncle’s suicide

↓

Grandfather’s death

↓

Grandfather’s death

↓

Classmate’s suicide…

→ → Further, my mother’s mother had a stroke right at Christmas. A few weeks later, my mom wrote me a note with two cards in it, one for my father’s mother and one for hers. On Grandma Carolyn’s write a note telling her how you are, how the weather is. Tell her to have a Happy Birthday. On the one for my mom just write hi and your name. I’m not sure she’s with it.

I did what she asked and turned back to her note. This note with a bit of commentary could make a good short-short.

I can’t write that story though. We are used to hearing that our loved ones have forgotten. There has to be a metaphorical way to fictionalize it, but I would rather meditate on what has happened. She does not remember me → I remember her → When I think about calling, I remember that she has forgotten me.

What is this gap between her erased memory and mine that is intact? “It just happens when you get old,” my wife said. “People get dementia, get Alzheimer’s.”

You can call it these things. You can provide the scientific explanation. But what is the name of that space between choosing to forget and a seizure choosing for us?

***

9) Now the question is: Does it mean more if Primo Levi committed suicide? Do his books mean more, that is? Or if he accidentally fell down the stairs, does the fall stem from the weight of memory? Did he choose to forget and only know one way to do it? Or did he want to remember and accidentally fall down the stairs? It’s more moving, more tragic, if Levi made the choice. No, it’s more moving if we listen to Wiesel: Levi died forty years ago at Auschwitz.

Elie Weisel (Night)…living. Bruno Schulz (The Street of Crocodiles)…killed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Robert Desnos (État de veille)…killed in Theresienstadt. Tadeusz Borowski (This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen)…suicide after the war. Primo Levi (Survival In Auschwitz/Se questo è un uomo)…suicide? Accidental? Suicide—

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There’s a surprise twist in this story, but I don’t want you to feel waylaid when it comes, so I’ll spoil it now: Heather dies in her sleep, at the age of twenty-five, of an undiagnosed heart condition.

It’s difficult to articulate the process by which two twelve-year-old girls with a lot of things in common—archetypally awkward, voracious readers, intellectually far ahead of their burgeoning social skills—become inseparable. It feels predestined, unfolding with the simplicity of a teen-movie montage: sleepovers, slasher movies, painting each other’s fingernails, singing into hairbrushes. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time I didn’t know her; that there are aspects of my personality that predate Heather. It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape. We like scary movies. We say “fuck” a lot. We write poetry. I learn to think of myself as strong, confident, unaffected by adversity, because that’s how I see Heather. Without her I would be too self-conscious to be the first person on the dance floor. But she is always there beside me, throwing her long hair into my face, and I’m not embarrassed if the two of us are together.

I suspect that the curious personality merging you see in really close young-girl friendships can only be achieved under very particular circumstances. You must be at that point of adolescence where you’re only half-formed, as a person, but you feel fully formed. At twelve, you are so far from who you’re going to be, but in your mind you’re all the way there. Your opinions are intractably strong and you would die for them, but they’ll all be completely different in a month. The entire course of your life can be altered by a movie or a song or a long conversation in the dead of night after you’re supposed to have gone to sleep. Everything you have in common feels magical, as though knowing all the words to “Born to Run” is a sign that your souls are intertwined, instead of a sign that both of your parents came of age in the 1970s. As you begin to sculpt yourself into the person you want to be—the person you believe deep down you have always been, were always destined to be, and have only just now discovered—someone is there to hold your hand. When that happens, there is a part of you that never lets go.

Heather and I have our own language, a creole of euphemisms and inside jokes and shared memories incomprehensible to anyone other than us. When we’re together we never seem to need sleep. We stay up for hours after midnight, watching endless parades of horror movies, or we slip out the back door of her house and make our way to the playground, eerie in the moonlight. We are ageless together, unembarrassed to splash through puddles and jump off swingsets. We drive a lot but we never go much of anywhere. The point is the movement and the radio and the windows rolled down and the night air in our faces. We cut class together, walking with our backs straight and not looking around, as though we have every right to go wherever we want, which we do. When the sun is shining and you’re skipping geography with the one person in the universe who already knows what song is stuck in your head and will start humming it before you do, every door is open and you are a citizen of every street.

As we grow up, as we emerge from the glittering cocoon of our youth, we begin to grow apart. I go to college out-of-state, get really into slam poetry, start sleeping with girls. Heather stays home, drops out of college, gets married at 20, goes to a lot of punk shows. We still talk on the phone for hours at a time—we never run out of things to talk about—but our all-night phone marathons grow farther apart. I still come home every year at Christmastime, though, and I spend every New Year’s Eve with Heather, drinking too much tequila and dancing to Spice Girls-heavy mix tapes we made in eighth grade.

Our friendship begins to seem to me like a place: I don’t visit as often as I used to, but every time I walk through the door it’s like I never left. Our friendship is wallpapered the way we used to decorate our bedrooms, so thick with Scotch-taped detritus you can’t even see the color of the paint: posters, CD liner notes, handwritten poems, set lists from concerts. Photographs of us, camping in jeans and ponytails or dressed up for The Rocky Horror Picture Show in miniskirts and fishnets. The bookshelves are full of diaries and photo albums, and Heather pulls one down, turns to a certain page, and says “Remember the time that homeless guy said I looked like Farrah Fawcett?” And even though I didn’t remember it five minutes ago, it comes rushing back: the melting snow on the sidewalk, the Starbucks hot chocolate I was drinking. Heather holds the keys to my memory, the keys to my childhood.

Our lives are different, our living situations are different, our interests are different, but she is still the person I turn to when I need to turn to someone. When her husband has surgery, I am in the waiting room holding her hand. She is the maid of honor at my wedding. Her toast is goofy and rambling and unlikely to make sense to anyone but the two of us. We dance to Queen and Beyonce and, as always, the Spice Girls. She leaves early because her husband feels sick. This is the last time I ever see her.

After finishing grad school, I am unemployed and depressed. Heather is overwhelmed by her work schedule and her husband’s chronic illness. Her social withdrawal mirrors my own. We talk on the phone every few weeks, agreeing that sometime soon things will get easier, and we’ll have the time and energy to get together again. When she calls, I sit on my front porch in the sunlight, roll my head back on my shoulders and close my eyes. The words still come easily whenever I hear her voice, like slipping back into your mother tongue after months of living in a second language.

Heather’s death is astonishing, unanticipated, unimaginable. It happens before dawn on a Friday in December. Her husband finds her lying on the couch. When he calls me several hours later, the sky is gray-white, and I watch a ragged line of geese flying aimlessly, not migrating, just wandering. I think clearly, before the crying starts: There is nowhere to go.

As I write this, Heather has been gone for one hundred and four days. Some of those days I’ve woken up cheerful and clear-eyed, remembering the best times: road tripping to Glenwood Springs, cutting class to sit in line for a concert all day. Other days, it guts me. I sit on the floor and cry until my nose bleeds. I look through my photo album—the real one she made me for my eighteenth birthday, covered in stickers and scrawled with her absurdly girly handwriting, the i’s dotted with stars—and feel terribly, terribly old. I regret the cute haircut I got last week, because Heather never saw me with my hair like this, so now I am a person she has never seen, and the distance between us gets a little bigger.

My youth feels like a ghost town, an abandoned and dilapidated house I don’t have the keys to anymore. I stand at the window looking in, and I can make out some of the pictures on the walls, and I can see the photo albums on the shelves, but I can’t see what’s inside them. I can’t see the details. Our special language of coded facial expressions and inside jokes is useless. Our favorite movies to stay up all night watching are just embarrassing, low-budget, and trashy, now that I have no one to watch them with. No one else will ever do the dances we made up to “I’m a Believer” and “Look Sharp.” Heather—the part of me that is Heather—curls inside me like an unused and atrophying organ.

I wish I could tell you how to live through a loss like this. I wish I could tell you how to pull yourself up off the floor and wipe your nose and brush your hair and keep going. I wish I could tell you how to not cry when “Living on a Prayer” comes on the radio, because that was one of her favorite songs, and they played it at her funeral, and “we’ve got each other and that’s a lot” is suddenly incredibly fucking poignant songwriting. I wish I could tell you, but honest to God, I have no idea. All I can tell you is that it really, really hurts.

I am still trying to put myself back together, like a puzzle with some of the pieces missing. I won’t be the same as I was before. I will be much older than these few months can account for. I’ll be less carefree, less reckless, less willing to be the only person on the dance floor. I’ll move a little slower and talk a little quieter, and sometimes I’ll look like I want to say something, but I won’t, because the person I would say it to is gone. I’ll tear up when I hear Bon Jovi, and belligerently refuse to explain myself. Some of my puzzle pieces will fit together weird, because they were never supposed to overlap, so I’ll have strange jagged edges and be fragile in places you wouldn’t expect. I suppose I’ll be wiser, if that’s the kind of silver lining you’re interested in. Mostly, I think, I’ll be lonelier.

But I’ll still watch trashy horror movies and listen to the Knack, even if I have to do it on my own. I’ll still swear too much and read Stephen King and dance foolishly and drive fast and get lots of tattoos and wear sexy clothes even though I’m fat and not apologize for falling in love young. Those are some of the things that I learned from Heather or she learned from me or we both learned in unison. They aren’t things that make me feel young, not really, not anymore—they’re just part of who I am. Heather is part of me. It’s not enough. It doesn’t make me miss her less. But it’s something.

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

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“Form—it’s because there are consequences.”

—Lisa Robertson, Nilling.

I turned to the internet after my brother died.

The call came while I was putting on my makeup at the kitchen table. I watched my husband’s face drain of blood. I heard him say “Are you serious?” in a tone I’d never heard before, can’t articulate, and hope never to hear again. He hung up the phone. He told me to sit down.

That day passed in a haze of shock, vomiting and Ativan. Thank god for the Ativan.

Some time later that night, numb, medicated, breathing shallowly, unable to eat or keep down food,  I sat down and created a WordPress site. The first post that I wrote included the following text:

My name is Nikki Reimer. I was an only child for six years.

—

My beautiful, talented, sweet, smart, amazing, lovely, handsome, wonderful brother died in his sleep at the age of 26.

This is for him.

I used a quotation from the book The Outsiders as the site tag line: Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold. I chose the quotation not remembering that the band that had hired Chris as their touring guitarist throughout 2011, The Dodos, had taken to calling him “Pony.” I then uploaded six photos of Chris taken in 2010, drank enough vodka to become completely anesthetized, and went to bed.

I’m not sure what drew me to the Internet. Shock is a protective mechanism; it keeps the mind from having to process too much all at once. I stayed in shock for a long time, and while I was there I spewed my emotions all over Facebook and Twitter, neither thinking nor caring about the effects my emotional vomit might have on readers, friends, and strangers.

Most responses to my online grieving were supportive and compassionate. A community of friends and artists held me up through their words, their books, songs, poems, cookies, candles and collages mailed from all across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. I met and grew close to people who had also lost people suddenly and tragically, or who had also lost siblings early in their lives.

One poet wrote her condolences to me on Facebook, and added, “If it was one of my siblings, I don’t think I would ever stop screaming.”

I thought of her comment many times over the first twelve months, because I never did stop screaming.

Every day over that first year, I screamed. I wailed, sobbed, and tore out my hair. Chris’ girlfriend and I both started Tumblr grief blogs into which we still pour our pain every hour, every day, every week. I picked Twitter fights with strangers. Considered suicide. Committed Facebook suicide.

After one such public flame-out—I’d renamed myself “Bag of Dicks Reimer” on Facebook and changed my profile picture to an unknown woman ugly-crying—my husband, compassionate but firm, suggested that I was spending all my time inside the internet because I was trying to find my brother. That it was time to put down the iPhone.

He had a point.

However, I kept searching, I kept screaming, and I kept writing. Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project. I wrote prose poems for Chris, then collaged images, then sound pieces. And then I created an interactive website hosting a series of multimedia pieces that combine my work and his: Let’s Improvise a Bone Graft.

But before that: I was posting on Tumblr. I posted the 19 minute ambient track released by his label, Flemish Eye. I posted a green St. Patrick’s Day milkshake: “Wish you were here.” I posted a photo of the obituary I wrote for a local music monthly: “I did this for you because I love you. But I never fucking wanted to have to do this for you.” I posted songs he liked, reblogged fan and friend reactions to his death. I posted a screenshot of a Skype call with our parents: Mom’s forehead in shadow, Dad’s blue eyes deep navy with sorrow. I posted quotes I found on grief and the grieving process, and an acoustic cover an indie musician had done of Women’s “Black Rice.”

I posted from Vancouver, where I pined for my brother and the life we shared in Calgary. I posted while my husband and I packed up our apartment and loaded the U-Haul. I posted when we stopped in Kelowna, where I let some of my brother’s ashes go into the warm waters of Lake Okanagan, on the beach where we had played as children. I posted when we arrived in Calgary, while I sorted through boxes of childhood mementos. My first haircut. His first dance recital. A paper Valentine he made me when he was four.

Rifling through Chris’ bookshelf one day, I pick up a tattered copy of Ulysses I’d lent him. Out falls a postcard I’d sent him several years back: Robert Johnson with a hand on his guitar and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Moments like these feel like intratextual, metaphysical messages from beyond. I photograph my hand holding the book with the postcard inside, and it becomes part of Bone Graft. It also inspires another part of the project: a listing of some of the many musicians who died before the age of thirty. Their names and ages scroll up the screen over writing from Chris’ notebooks and a sound piece by me. It’s layer upon layer of memory and loss and object and rage and grief and love.

Now Chris can no longer be found physically anywhere, it is true.

His remains are shards of bone and ash in small memorial urns taken by his closest friends, and a larger urn that is heartbreakingly equal to the size and weight of a newborn baby, the size and weight he was when we brought him home from the hospital in 1986.

But another part of Chris, a part that is closer to his soul, continues to live, online, in the music that he wrote and played, in pictures and videos and interviews, in cached pages of the initial shocked responses to his death.

This online afterlife is somewhat ironic. Chris was deeply ambivalent about the internets, and self-promotion in general. He’d talked his best friend Marc into quitting Facebook several years ago. In the last months before he died, he’d mentioned to me that he was considering joining Zuckerberg’s empire in order to keep in touch with people he’d met on tour, but he never did.

This gives me pause, when I think of how public I have made my grief.

After he died, a small part of the internet briefly lit up with the news of his death. I would type his name into Google (piningly, searchingly), and the suggested search terms, in order, would be: “christopher reimer cause of death,” “christopher reimer women,” “christopher reimer death,” “christopher reimer pitchfork.” I screen-capped this search because it was so heart-stabbingly horrible; because it magnified the horror of the situation to me; because Chris had a minor indie-music level of notoriety, so of course when he died people would be curious, but also fuck you it’s none of your business; because I could hear Chris’ voice in my head, and the particular inflection his voice would take when he would say of something horrible,  “That’s horrible.” And that’s what I heard, when I looked at these algorithmic search term suggestions: “That’s horrible.” The image is now a part of the Bone Graft project, assembled together with lines from Roman poet Catallus’ elegiac dead brother poems.

I loved my brother with a fierceness that is not ashamed to stand howling and naked in the middle of the road, and what I miss is the material essence of him. The only thing in the world that I want, and can’t have, is my brother’s arms around my shoulders, his infectious laugh, his shit-eating grin, his middle finger pointed at me in response to sisterly teasing. His “jerkface!” in response to my “jackass!”

Instead, I am left with the objects and the digital artifacts that Chris left behind: half-soldered effects pedals and lead dust all over his bedroom. Unreleased ambient tracks on his computer. Pictures from tours. Funny drawings. Scraps of writing.

Chris and I always communicated through gifts and offerings of art passed back and forth. When we were children, he would co-star in all my overbearing older sister plays, his timing and ability to memorize his lines always perfect. When we were teens, we played a sort of word association game, building these post-modern tone poems: “Perspicacity.” “Perestroika.” “Muffin top.” “Piston engine.” We would never talk about things like this, we would just start them up spontaneously, riffing off each other’s energy.

After I moved away to Vancouver, I would send him books I thought he should read. He would gift back such creations as a mix CD with a hand-sewn brown kraft cover screen-printed with a collage of a map and our great-grandfather’s face, or a set of stickers made from his abstract sea creature drawings. When I moved out, I’d abandoned our Baba’s high school t-shirt, a white 1940s cotton short-sleeved tee with red ribbing at the sleeves and collar, and an insignia that said “Saskatoon Tech” over the breast. Chris took to wearing the shirt, which made me remember that it was awesome, so I wanted it back, and he’d always say, “nope.” So smug, eyes twinkling. “Nope.” Years after I stopped asking about that shirt, it turned up in my Christmas present.

The kid always had perfect timing.

After he died I leafed through the notebooks in his room and found a series of poems. My musician brother was writing. I was heartbroken all over again to find this because I’d never known that he was writing. Maybe he didn’t think he’d written anything good enough to show me, or good enough to show me yet, but these and other snippets of prose and poetry that he wrote have a spark of unpolished brilliance to them. And since it’s too late to tell him this, I’ve folded his prose fragments into the Bone Graft project, collaged against my textual or audio responses.

My project is extended, circular and labyrinthine. It is an electronic elegy that I do not believe could be a book, because a book is too linear. I need it to resist closure. Death is final, sure, fine, but in grief there is no such thing as closure. There is ebb and flow of emotion, and there is learning to live with the gaping wound, but there is no close. The acute distress does ease with time, and you might emerge stronger from having lived through the loss, but that doesn’t mean you are ever ok with it. A cousin asked me if I had closure the day we had my brother cremated, and I almost punched him in the face. I might still punch him in the face, if the mood strikes.

I live within a morphing, evolving digital grief, and so I am writing a morphing, evolving digital lament. I am seeking out possibilities for circuitous routing. I am searching for electrical feedback. I continue creating in order to continue living with the absence.

Though my brother is dead, I continue to follow the pictures he posts. I continue to respond to his text messages. And I hope against reason that wherever he is now, something I’ve created might slip like a postcard out of the pages, into his lap.

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Sheldon had 45s. 45s are my favorite vinyl format. I own a number of them, though I’m hardly a collector. I don’t own expensive rarities such as Roger & The Gypsies’ “Pass the Hatchet” ($60-100). I don’t care about the paper label’s condition. I only want the music. When scouring record store bins, my main concern is style and fidelity: is it Blues, soul, surf or rock and roll? Are the grooves intact or scratched? Sheldon’s weren’t scratched.

The records surprised me. During Sheldon’s life, he and I mostly discussed books and the news. We didn’t talk music. Like me, my uncle was a voracious reader. He consumed everything from 19^th century horror stories to studies of Jewish synagogue architecture, and he was a dedicated New York Times reader. Unlike me, he didn’t own a turntable or CD player, and his iPhone’s iTunes was empty. Yet the music of his childhood meant enough to him that he kept those records for over fifty years. My family and I found two bags of them stashed amid the photo albums and yellowed newspaper clippings that cluttered his bedroom.

Dust bunnies flitted inside the bags. Thick fuzz coated the records’ surfaces, their hard glossy edges dulled by ancient allergens. I blew deep breaths to dislodge the top layers, turning my head to avoid the plumes. One by one, I extracted the contents: Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” Garnet Mimms’ “Cry Baby” – exciting stuff. The Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself,” Jan and Dean’s “Surf City.” Exciting but not surprising. Sheldon was sixty-four when he died, a child of the 1950s and ’60s. Naturally, his records reflected the culture of his era. But his wasn’t just any era. He happened to have grown up during one of the most fertile periods of modern music’s evolution.

The 1950s and early-60s were an unbelievable time for music. Jazz musicians such as Horace Silver and Art Blakey were creating a new bluesy, gospel-infused style called Hard Bop out of Charlie Parker’s Bebop. John Coltrane was exploring the limitless sonic possibilities of the saxophone. Doo wop was branching into R&B and Soul, and Country and Blues evolving into rock and roll, with artists like Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and the Comets bringing the new sound to the masses. In the late-50s, inventive players such as Les Paul, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Chet Atkins explored the then-new electric guitar’s sonic potential, tinkering with new devices and techniques such as tremolos and echolettes, to gauge their effect. Fender released its Fender Reverb unit in 1961 and paved the way for instrumental surf music from its progenitors such as Dick Dale and The Ventures. In 1958 in DC, Link Wray’s instrumental “Rumble” reached #16 on the Billboard chart and created a distortion-heavy brand of rock and roll that not only led to punk rock and heavy metal, but influenced countless musicians, from Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Page to The Who. And in 1958, on the West Coast, Ritchie Valens recorded two of the most famous early rock and roll songs of all time: “Donna” and “La Bamba.”

I lifted Valens’ “Donna/La Bamba” 45 from the dirty bag. Del-Fi Records, the blue label said. This double A-side single was the only record Valens released during his lifetime. He died in a plane crash at age seventeen.

Maybe the reason Sheldon and I never discussed music was because his interest in it peaked in childhood. He seemed to have stopped buying records at twenty-two. He and my mother were born in Canarsi, Brooklyn. The family moved to Flushing, Queens in 1950, and then moved to Arizona in 1969. Sheldon bought all his 45s during those initial New York years, and he never visited the Queens house again. “There was a hardware store on Main Street where we lived,” my mom remembers. “I don’t remember why they sold records, they just did, and I remember buying records there.” Sheldon bought tons of 45s. Back then most kids did. 45rpm singles were the primary commercial vehicle for hit songs. Kids heard them on the radio, and they bought the singles. “I remember him writing songs down,” Mom said. “He did it all the time. We’d pick your grandpa up from the train station when he worked in the City, and Sheldon would be writing down the songs playing on the radio.” While cleaning out Sheldon’s house, Mom and I found a few of those handwritten lists.

We pulled record after record from the bags: The Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.” On many of them, my uncle had scribbled his name on the labels: Sheldon Shapiro, rendered in a child’s soft, looping script. Mom insisted that I take all of the records back to Oregon with me. “You know music,” she said. “You should keep these.”

I’m a huge fan of rock and roll, particularly surf music, Blues and loud, feral, stripped down guitar music. But I also love jazz, doo wop, R&B and Soul. Late at night after my parents had gone to sleep, all of us exhausted from spending the days cleaning Sheldon’s house, I flipped through the records and studied them more closely. Initially I saw Sheldon’s collection as just a cross section of the times, culture preserved in amber. Len Berry’s “1-2-3,” The Byrd’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” Gene Pitney’s “Mecca” – a sample of what people were listening to back then. I was so distraught over his sudden, accidental death that it took a few months to recognize that, unlike me, Sheldon didn’t go for the harder stuff: no Kinks, no Yardbirds, no Troggs. He didn’t go for Blues or jazz, either: no Blue Note albums, no Prestige singles. He only had a handful of Chess or Decca records, and his most rock and rolling possession was The Rolling Stones’ “Tell Me/I Just Want to Make Love To You” 45, from the band’s early bluesy period. Sheldon’s rock and roll was mostly the pop-oriented kind such as Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five and Gerry and the Pacemakers. He had girl groups, doo wop, Motown and folk, but his tastes slanted toward vocalists: Johnny Mathis, Al Martino, Dean Martin, Bobby Vinton, Barbara Streisand, Carol King. Maybe it’s because I’m so music obsessed, but it took me even longer to recognize that, for him, his collection had long ceased to be about sound. It was about sentiment. He kept these records to preserve the past and his connection to it. He didn’t own a record player because he didn’t need to hear anything. He wanted only to maintain what the vinyl represented: ties to his childhood, ties to New York. And now, his records would continue their function as connective tissue, by keeping me connected to him and our past, our shared history, love of music and New York.

Months after Sheldon’s funeral, my mom and I had a long talk on the phone. Naturally, she was still struggling with his death, trying to get over his sudden disappearance, but also, to come to grips with the nature of his life. He was single, never married, had no children, few friends, only us, his family. When he died at home, he died alone. “What I’m having so much trouble with is he’s gone,” Mom said, “and who’s missing him? He died and I don’t feel like anyone remembers he was even here—erased from this Earth. If I died, Dad would miss me. And you’d miss me. But who misses Sheldon? He’s gone, and who’s pining away?” My Aunt Debbie told her, “Well, we are,” but as Mom said to me, that wasn’t enough. “It’s eating me away. It know it sounds weird, but—” She trailed off, unable to finish her sentence, or maybe she was satisfied with it. With no end, it captured the unresolved nature of our grief.

I said, “It doesn’t seem weird, your feelings.”

“The world doesn’t feel different now that he’s gone,” she said. “You know? Like he didn’t leave his mark.”

I suggested that part of his legacy was his compassionate worldview, the way his sympathy for the underdog and marginalized people like himself always reminded us to be more compassionate. “And part of his legacy is this music,” I said. “Downtown,” “Cry Baby,” “Runaway” – these are timeless tunes, but if anything can add to an object’s longevity, it’s an emotional attachment as deep as your love for a family member. I have two boxes of records that will always remind me of Sheldon.

Recently, alone in my room, I played his legacy on my turntable, a device he hadn’t owned for over forty years. His name spun around at 45 revolutions per minute – Sheldon Shapiro, Sheldon Shapiro, Sheldon Shapiro – a child’s script handwritten in ink, a permanent reminder of my mother’s love, and a blur of Sheldon’s years rapidly spooling and unspooling, as confused and beautiful as our own.

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I was on a boat. I was on a boat leaving Mexico and if I knew that it was the last time I would be seeing my friend Steve Bridges I would’ve asked the boat to turn around and I would have gone back and back and back farther. All the way if I could where nothing was blinding and everything was dark and still in the way things are right before they go bad.

A year ago I sat on a plane, like I am as I write this, and I ordered a glass of wine as I looked through my photos of the retreat and I laughed at the videos of Steve and thought How I love this man. How I love this man.

A year ago I came back from Mexico and laid on my sofa feeling pancake flat and Steve texted me I am laying on my friend’s couch and I can’t stop thinking about our trip. I wish we were back there. Wow. I wrote back me too and in my pancake way I stood up and put on shoes to go teach my yoga class but I knew something had shifted, something was gone, and maybe that was why I felt flat or maybe it was natural after a trip like that to feel so much I want to be back. To feel it so much in your bones that they won’t even carry you. They turn you into a pancake. Pancake yoga teacher. Nothing. Flat. Pancake person.

When he died, I texted him I want to be back. I want to be back even though I knew he was dead.

We made videos the night before we left Mexico. Like little time bombs with messages on them that we planned to watch in a year’s time. When it was Steve’s turn he looked into the camera and said, That was fun. Let’s do it again next year. Hell, let’s do it again next month.

He died within the month.

This morning I got the text that I had been waiting for, the one I knew would come today or tomorrow or yesterday. Ronan died. One of my best friends, the beloved writer Emily Rapp, lost her two year old son this morning as I zipped up my suitcase to head for the airport for my Hawaii yoga retreat. His suffering is over she wrote. His short and remarkable life she wrote. I am numb she texted me privately.

I am numb too. I am on a flight to Maui and I feel nothing. I am hungry. I am not hungry. I am sad. Am I sad? I feel nothing. Where does the pain go? It’s floating up here on the airplane and I am sure will make its way up to my seat if we don’t crash. What happened? How does a mind process this? (I will have the cheese omelette and not the cereal, please.) Ronan died and it’s for the best say the very best intentioned platitudes. My friend Robert held him for an hour yesterday. I asked him what it was like. Everything, he said. It was everything.

What’s it like to hold a dying baby for one hour? One hour in a short life is like ten years in a normal life span. (What is a normal life span?) What’s it like to hold a dying baby for ten years? He got to feel his last little oomphs right there in his arms (imagine that!) and hold his small fingers (maybe he intertwined them in his own?). He got to brush a few hairs from his eyes and pass him back to his grandparents or his mom and he got to feel a life right there in his arms which would disappear in less than 24 hours into That’s it and It’s over but he got to hold that and stop time for ten years because in a dying baby’s life one hour is equal to ten years. He got to do that and I am glad for that. I love him for that. For being there for Emily and Ronan when I couldn’t.

It makes you want to stop lying.

Why lie when this can happen? When a person can be born and then just like that It’s Over, It’s done. He’s gone.

Why tell untruths as if people care?

I keep having this recurring dream where I am driving and the brakes don’t work. The other night I had it again. I was driving in Philadelphia, over the Benjamin Franklin bridge. The brakes wouldn’t work. I tried pressing my foot into the brake and it only accelerated the car which wasn’t even my car. I swerved in and out of lanes so I wouldn’t hit anyone. It was all my untruths rushing at me. In the dream I somehow made it to safety and pulled out a paper where I had put a big X through a box that said “Brakes.”

I had shut them off myself.

The greatest lie that was ever told was that you are safe. It’s the lie I still want someone to tell me though. (Say it to me?)

Say it to me.

Other lies have been both monumental and petty but with the news of a baby’s death comes a yearning for honesty. There is nothing else. I love you to all the people I love. I don’t care to all the things I don’t care about, and there are as many as the things I do care about. I am happy. I am not happy. All of it. Truths and lies and some half and half.

Once, on a road trip, there was this deer along Route 70, just outside Cody, Wyoming. His eyes the color of headlights. He recognized me immediately. (He was no stranger to regret and he spotted mine immediately ). And with his four-chambered stomach and eyes on the sides of his head, I knew his type too. The cautious, the time-takers, the digesters.

Unlike him: I am impulsive as a flood.

But we knew each other, me and that deer. For the ten years or two seconds he stood there in the road in front of our car.

A basic law of the universe: the implications of what’s been said always mean more than what actually has been said. My deer understood this algebra, this economy of language and therefore didn’t say much. Me: I spit it out as I feel it when and if I feel it. Unlike my deer, I do not contemplate my cud.

I love you!

I love you!

The lies I have told have mainly been to myself but others have been to save face.

There is no more of that. Do you get what I am saying? It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks because once you have held Ronan in your arms for ten years or one hour you see that what is important is the life we make, right here and now. You may not have been the one holding him in your arms for ten years but you get the metaphor, you get the as if. You can almost smell Ronan in his baby and old man smell. The life you make here and now. Not the lies or the I dropped out of college because I was half dead and freezing but I will lie about it so you don’t judge me because no one cares. It does not matter. It’s the life you make here and now because after you get the text that he dies you realize that all you ever had were the moments of holding him, the minutes with Steve in Mexico, the half-seconds with people you love. I don’t know how fast it feels at the end, but my guess is that it feels like ten years. Or maybe 6 months. Maybe less or more. But it won’t feel like much. It will feel like all you had were breaths and moments and a few snapshots with the sun in your eyes like that. You will squint to remember the way the light felt in your eyes, to recreate that and everything else that was blinding and bright and yours.

I love you. The words alive like velvet antlers. Words made of bone. They need a way out! I must speak them. I must tell no more lies. The life that you make here and now. Here and now.

Words: make, here, now, love. Remember them.

The old deer had made it through once more, one more near miss across an ocean of cars, a scuffle of rain, and a sky full of mistakes. He’d found a pair of eyes (mine!) to lock into before going back into the world, alone and foraging.

It makes you want to stop lying, to climb onto the wing of the plane and hang there if you knew you could and sob and swing and fall into clouds like you would if you were a cartoon and could always be safe in a cartoon world. You could sleep on a nimbus cloud and wake up and ten years will be ten years rather than an hour. It makes you want to stop lying and run into the arms of all your beloveds (you’re lucky if you have even a handful) and tell them to keep you there. Hang on to me, tight like this. Tight like this. Keep me here. It makes you want to admit that lying is worthless and dirty and that nothing matters, not really anyway, so might as well buck up and say I love you or I don’t love you or I am so broken or I wish you didn’t die or Yeah, I get that your spirit is with me forever but God damn it I want your body. Forget the spirit! I will trade it for your body and smell and fingers. It makes you want to forget everything and remember everything with equal measure. It makes you want to cry for days and beg the gods or the scientists or luck to leave you alone and leave everyone alone that you love. It makes you want to live like you were meant to all along even in the moments of self-hatred. It makes you all these things.

It makes you.

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I round a turn, and in my line of sight appears the water, glossy as stained glass. I wait for Dean to catch up. When he is beside me, I touch his face and ask, Are you having trouble breathing? Feeling any chest pain? Questions of body and of mind. He shakes his head. No. The answers I know by looking. His face is glowing, not gray.

Reaching the beach, we sit on a curved piece of sea-smoothed cypress and watch the waves. I forgot how sea foam scatters over sand. I forgot about sandpipers. We are both quiet, not asking one another, Where should we go for dinner? Neither of us exclaiming, I’m so happy to get away from work this week! Those forward ways of planning and believing our lives will be similar by evening are rhythms that may never be reclaimed. I can only count through the past with confidence.

This is our first trip out of Texas in nearly two years. The last time we saw the ocean was years ago, at Cape Cod. The May water was freezing, but Dean dove right in, emerging as though from a saltwater baptism. Cleansed. Granted a reprieve. That afternoon, there was only a small scar on his chest. He still had the heart he was born with then.

Congestive: referring to a heart too weak to pump blood through the body. Fluids slow down, pool up, accumulate in those places—organs, tissues—they normally pass right through. The system becomes bogged down in itself.

Failure: meaning the inability to perform what was once a common function. The inefficient work of a diseased heart. The end of relationships.

Interstitial: the spaces between and what fills them. When did I first encounter this word? Maybe in an anatomy class I took in college. Since then I discovered it does not apply only to the matter—and matters—of the body. Living is an interstitial event as we appear in birth and alter form, through life and into death. Loves, marriages, divorces, illnesses. Memories. Cities.

This beach is an interstitial environment, existing between land and sea. What if I could take a sheet of tracing paper and outline our figures, the shape of this ocean, and the reach of a sunrise long past? Stacking these thin pages, I could discover what edges fall between edges, into the interstices of history and memory.

Dean is a poet and a teacher. A man who had a heart transplant. Who loved long runs, beer, red meat. Who fell in love. As with any life, these desires and roles, his form, can be traced, grouped into the life of his person over time. I am a person—a writer, a photographer, a woman in love—sitting beside him on this battered driftwood, pulling words up from ground, down from air, from birds moving between the two, trying to make sense of this all.

We met six years ago, at the height of a humid North Carolina summer. It was the first residency of my graduate poetry-writing program, and over those ten days, we exchanged maybe three words. But at a party the night before, with cheap beers in hand, we started talking about writing, running, and my divorce, and found we could not stop. Alarmed—he was a professor, I was a student—my friends tried to pull me away. His colleagues, shaking their heads, attempted to distract him.

I was aware of his wedding ring, but I cannot say it gave me pause. As the party ended, we slipped away and walked through the dark, wooded campus. In the early morning, among singing cicadas, we kissed. A line from Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese,” flashed through my mind: You do not have to be good. It was not so much an excuse for my behavior as an accompaniment.

A year passed. Back at school, we met again. I was in the final lap of my divorce. He was still married. You’re taller than I remember, I said, accidentally walking out of my flip-flops. Grinning, he muttered something about my toe ring. In the sunlight, I saw his eyes were not brown, as I had thought, but a fluctuating mix of limestone green and blue.

Weeks later, when both of us were back at our respective homes, the first letter arrived. Living with a boyfriend outside the Catskills in upstate New York, I took the small envelope into the bathroom to read in privacy. Dean’s print was fierce and blocky, like a series of small, linked explosions over the page. The word heart was on the paper, but not failure. Should I respond? Faintly, I heard the Greek chorus of my friends, warning me away.

But I craved an escape. In addition to the stresses of divorce and graduate school, I juggled jobs as a Pilates instructor, a freelance writer, and a temp writer in New York City. The man I lived with had revealed himself to be an unmotivated alcoholic, heavy on promises but light on deliveries. Dean’s letter was a tractor beam, pulling me towards a place of passion and danger, but also of quiet and safety.

I wrote back, saying certainly these letters could be between any woman and any man. Romantic, but striving to be realistic. No subject was off-limits, and Dean was honest about his health problems. He was diagnosed in his forties with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, and in the years since, his condition had remained fairly stable. He wrote books of poetry. Taught creative writing in Iowa. Lived in California with his wife. Remembering his morning runs in North Carolina, I wondered if these reports of his heart were tortured exaggerations, or medical truths.

In the next six months, one thing became clear: neither of us excelled at having affairs. Although over a thousand miles usually separated us, and we craved physical closeness, it was the emotional distance—and detachment—we found impossible to maintain. During a heated phone call that winter, Dean said, exasperated, “I can’t give you anything else.” But I was not begging him to leave his marriage, or to meet up for a week in Maui. What I wanted was something he could not manage to do himself: to stop wanting our conversation to continue.

I tried to move on. He tried to stay married. Something always pushed us together—or we let it draw us closer. A text about a February lunar eclipse. An emailed picture of a newborn giraffe. Our elemental need to write one another and to hear back.

Two years after we first met, Dean moved to Austin for a position as professor of creative writing at the University of Texas. I left a proofreading job in North Carolina and joined him. Though he was only separated from his wife, life was just different enough for me to believe living together would work. Graduate school was over. I was an ex-wife, and single. Dean no longer wore his wedding ring.

But though he looked healthy, over the next months his energy faded. A failing heart, I soon learned, takes its pain to many places. Symptoms unfamiliar to me—a constant, dry cough, stomach cramping, shortness of breath—indicated the heart he had coaxed along was starting to fail. His buoyant, skinny-legged stride I loved to watch from my desk window where I worked, as he left to teach class or returned from writing at the café, began to slow and shorten. Our romance intertwined with his whirlwind decline, as if we were trying to take off while preparing to crash land.

So there we were, far from being any woman and any man. I was a thirty-four-year-old unemployed poet and writer. He was a fifty-three-year-old poet and professor still married to another woman who lived two thousand miles away. We were both living in an unfamiliar city, without strong support systems. Suddenly, we were not going to poetry readings, but to heart failure clinics.

Swimming one morning, I grasped that no matter how much I helped, Dean was getting sicker. That he was married to someone who did not want to do the chores of caretaking—driving him to work because he could no longer manage the walk, taking notes as the doctors and their tests revealed the same undeniable results—but still wanted the marriage. That while he was in love with me, he also loved his wife. That I was about to be dumped by a man who was desperate to return to the life he knew before his literal and figurative hearts unraveled.

Time passed and we lived apart—ineffectually—for a couple months. A defibrillator was installed in his chest, to shock his heart with the force of a mule’s kick if it suddenly stopped beating. For six months, he reclaimed some energy, and his divorce resumed. Time passed. We were back together, but he could no longer run with me. Walking across campus, he stopped to rest more frequently. Like the body, love gets weary. Unable to find full-time work in Austin, and tired of filling a wife’s role as girlfriend, a part of me was pulling away. Despite my worry for him, the next fall I would move to Massachusetts for a job and graduate school. Leaving always gave me a measure of security. I loved, I tended, I left. Idiopathic. Meaning: with no known cause.

***

Children run through the shallow surf. Does time pass? The phrase posits the idea that we remain static while time tumbles forward, the action of passing requiring a pass-ee. A duality. We cannot pass ourselves on the highway. We cannot pass ourselves a bowl of cereal.

Yet, passing can occur within a solitary body. Twice in less than five months, during two open-heart surgeries, Dean was hooked to a bypass machine. It circled his blood through his body while a heart pump was installed; and again, when the pump was removed over four months later and his original heart was taken out and the donor’s sewn into place. Passing can involve states in the string of life bypassing death bypassing life.

Riding the waves are black birds, each with a single white spot on their bills. Coots. I saw them for the first time when my first husband and I moved to Monterey, California, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I saw them again, last summer, as I sculled on Lady Bird Lake. Me cutting over the water, sweat and sunscreen burning my eyes. Pulling the oars, dropping the oars. Passing no one as I tried not to consider other versions, wondering had Dean’s heart failure been diagnosed at the start of our relationship if we would have had time to fall out of love.

Collecting information about the heart’s function can be like mapping the deep sea floor and pinning the waves to paper. Before I left for Massachusetts that fall, I drove Dean to the Cooley Heart Transplant center in Houston for a second opinion. Which was, truthfully, closer to a tenth opinion. A refrain of what we already knew.

Reviewing the results of Dean’s latest echocardiogram, the doctor did not look up as he said, in a gentle Texas drawl, “Things could carry on for a while like this, but then there will most likely be a steep decline.” He drew a line in the air with his index finger, and it fell at an angle with the words steep decline. Then phrases like heart pump and bridge to transplant and heart transplant shot out into the air.

Like that office, hearts have no windows. I stared at the shelves crammed with the doctor’s collection of rare books, and at a muted television running a video of him working as a young medic, years ago, in Vietnam. Suddenly I remembered a quote from an essay on illness by Roberto Bolaño, written as he neared the end of his life: When people are about to die, all they want to do is fuck. True, our sex life had not suffered. Why didn’t someone map that? I glanced at the screen again, just as the camera zoomed in on a nurse’s rear end. The doctor, embarrassed, said something about the cameraman’s taste in women. Dean just looked down at his hands.

Back on the East Coast, I escaped his cough; the doctor’s appointments; the clinging, heavy ceiling that settles over households of illness. I was out of earshot of the arguments with his estranged wife. Busy with my jobs as managing editor of a literary magazine and as a graduate student, most of my time was spent in a tiny, dusty, un-air-conditioned office as I tried to pull my first issue together.

One afternoon, Dean called. Since he taught during the day, we usually talked in the evenings. Outside the office windows, orange and yellow leaves shifted in the October breeze as he said the doctors were admitting him to Seton Hospital, in Austin. He told me not to worry in a voice growing thinner with every word. Looking at the dust on the windowsills, I hoped Whitman had even the slightest clue when he wrote nothing collapses. Whether we were together or apart, he would still have congestive heart failure. How close did I need to be?

When we had broken up the year before, his wife had visited. When I moved back into the house, her pumice stone was in the shower, as though she might return at any time. I waited a month before I threw it away. This is another woman’s. It is here. Now it is not. Events gathered in a stack of tracing paper. How wide the space between Dean is here and Dean is not here? How can we know what will come to mean the most to us, until we do?

In two days, I drove back to Texas, with our dog. Pouring a cup of coffee at the nurses’ station one afternoon, I read a news clipping pinned to the bulletin board. It was the obituary of a man who waited over a year for a heart before succumbing to kidney failure.

I knew Dean’s heart was too expanded and weakened to snap back into shape. That Dean might qualify for a place on the heart transplant waiting list. That he might die before this could happen. I thought of friends I knew with sick partners, with dying parents, with chronically ill children. Everyone goes through these times, I constantly reminded myself, hoping that particular truth would diminish my fears, if only in that it made grief—and the need for bravery—less foreign.

After ten days in the hospital, Dean stabilized enough to be released home. He was now officially waiting for a transplant. As was the case for every patient in this situation, in an unpredictable range of time, his name would move up the list as his heart continued to fail. That was if things went well. No one—no doctor, no nurse—knew when a match might materialize because acceptable donors would not appear in order.

Within the next days, Dean’s divorce was granted. Immediately, we applied for a marriage license and petitioned to have the 72-hour waiting period rescinded. Cell-phone pictures from that warm fall afternoon show our faces blurry and bluish in the hallway lights of the Austin courthouse. The dark-haired judge closed his eyes and swayed as he read. I wore a cream-colored corduroy dress patterned with deer. Dean taught class later that day.

The first time I married, at twenty-five, the phrase in sickness and in health was spoken in theory. Every possible choice existed, it seemed, and all of them had positive endings. With Dean, I was deep in a different type of not-knowing. Not just in terms of our inability to predict the outcome of these days, but also in living among human beings, many of whom did not understand the body’s limitations. When friends inquired, politely mystified—Why did you pick today?—I felt unable to explain it was simply because now we could legally be married and Dean was still physically able to walk from the car and into the courthouse. Finally I saw the wisdom of drive-through wedding chapels.

In the week afterward, there were more midnight trips to the emergency room, when Dean’s lungs became so congested he could barely breathe. There was the port put into his arm, with a line connecting to a small pump, so he could continuously receive an intravenous medication that kept his heart beating. There were visits from the home health nurses to change the dressing and give us more supplies.

Some people said to me: You are brave. Some people surely thought: You are a fool. Was I brave? Was I a fool? Was there a demonstrable difference? I thought of Hemingway’s stories and of the impulse to read his work as brave because the tears and blame are kept from the page. As if bravery ever meant omission. I thought of our vows. Of how in sickness precedes in health. Of how being frightened did not mean I had to turn away.

Less than ten days later came the steep decline. During those hours in the intensive care unit, I felt there were two of me, separate but partially overlapping. Internal, interstitial distances both shrinking and expanding. This extra self observed the cardiac physician’s assistant blocking my view of my husband in his hospital bed. Watched her take my elbow and walk me to the nurses’ station so I could sign my name to various directives, indicating how far the doctors should go, if there was no time to ask. When Dean’s room cleared I sat again in a chair beside his bed, trying not to count the monitors, catheters, IV lines and other endless unnamed tubes disappearing into his bruised body. My brain could not imagine how one piece of time would link up with the next.

I did not have to wonder long. The PA came back into the room and crouched down beside my chair.

“Nice boots,” she said. A gift from Dean: cowboy with turquoise stitching. I liked them for their sharp strike against the hospital floors.

She said, “If things continue to proceed in this fashion, Dean will not make it through the night.”

For all my rational observations, my brain had not equated decline with dying.

A few moments later, one of the surgeons came in and said Dean’s kidneys and liver were failing. What I heard was flailing.

Dean himself was past hearing. As if on cue, the molecules in the room began to disperse, taking a little color, a bit of matter, with them. The barriers to his departure were rupturing, like the membrane of an expiring cell.

***

Start with surprises. It was a scene very unlike the one where he and I stood that July evening on a rainy, rhododendron-ringed patio. Far away from metal bedrails, disinfectant, and shrieking bells. Surrounded by our friends, not by worried nurses and cautious doctors.

“Falling in love is like falling through a trapdoor,” a professor said during a lecture that day. She had paused. “And so is falling out of love.”

I was thirty-two. The previous spring, I left my husband of seven years. At that point, I could not have explained, exactly, why I left, other than to say I was unhappy. Who says, “I’ve put eleven years into this relationship and I’ve chosen to fall out of love”? Who says, “I’ve decided to fall in love”?

Trapdoors give, and you can drop through. You can also push them up, from the inside. For many years, I fell, in or out. It was what I did, what led me where I went. A trapdoor opened, and Dean and I were in love. A trapdoor opened, and Dean needed a heart transplant.

Then another trapdoor opened, and another, and now I sit beside my husband and look over the ocean again, the air pushed across our faces by the motion of the waves. We are no longer counting an unknown number of days for a call that may or may not come. Right now I want to press my hand into his so that my body passes into his. Instead of stopping there, I want to intertwine with particles of sand, of salt, of water, around, above, below, and behind us. Nothing, and everything, collapsed.

Until that night, we knew nothing about BIVAD heart pumps. Because both sides of Dean’s heart were irreversibly failing. He was losing consciousness and could not wait for a new heart. Due to low rates of organ donation, in the game of transplants, a patient must be sick enough to inarguably need a new organ, but not so sick that the chances of survival are slight. Surgically connecting him to a biventricular assist device was his only chance at staying alive, if he survived the operation. It would temporarily perform the work his heart could not.

Bulky and unwieldy, the pump was a machine of metal and plastic sewn to tissue. Four tubes, quarter-sized in diameter, would be inserted into Dean’s heart. They would exit through holes—open wounds, really—in his abdomen, and would lead to two pumps in clear, hard plastic cases about the size of slightly flattened baseballs. From the bottom of each ran pairs of pneumatic and electrical lines, four feet in length, to the forty-pound computer driver powering the device. Old Reliable, one of the nurses called it.

Once he recovered from the open-heart procedure, he would again be placed on the transplant waiting list. He would go home, on this machine that plugged into an electrical socket at night and ran off large batteries during the day. He could not be left alone. If the pump gave out, he would die if someone were not on hand to switch him to the back-up machine, or in an extreme case, to attach hand pumps to manually move blood through his body.

Keeping expectations in check, the surgeon told me, “This procedure is mainly a salvage operation.” Meaning: a last-ditch effort.

As the doctor spoke, I thought, Lupine. California poppies. I thought of one morning in Monterey, driving to the hospice offices where I volunteered and seeing cars pulled over and people standing in a green field awash in a sea of vivid purple-blue. It was my first spring in California. I had never seen lupine. I was twenty-five, and I did not stop.

***

Around midnight, I was allowed to see Dean. The nurses, serious and unsmiling, buzzed around the bed. My first thought was: He looks like the inside of a package from Amazon.com. Covered in a puffy green blanket, only his face, extremely swollen and shiny, was visible. His hand, pale and unusual like something from the deepest ocean washed up on land, was the single part of him I could touch.

My second thought was a line of William Carlos Williams’s: “The pure products of America / go crazy.” Imagination created poetry, and it created the BIVAD. Was this crazy in a good way or a bad way? Was it worth it, this way of waiting for a heart? One of the nursing assistants walked in, and her eyes grew round when she looked at the scene. “Freaky,” she whispered. The pumps popped like snapping fingers, the force of the machine slightly shaking his body.

When I spoke sentences of uncertain relief, the words hung in the air like half-deflated balloons. It would be days before Dean could hear me telling him over and over what had happened, gently and simply, so that he could slowly come to understand. It would be days before I could crawl in bed with him, loop my arm lightly over his stomach, and feel the surge of the pump moving us both.

Once we stood at this same beach, before I went to Massachusetts, back when Dean was still managing to manage his illness. Outline those selves; lay them over our selves, now. Suddenly, we are not the same people we were. The interstices feel wide.

As Dean is adjusting to his new heart—which at times seems like a Prius with the engine of a Dodge Charger—we are both adjusting to second marriages and new physicalities. The immunosuppressant drugs he must take, to prevent his body from rejecting the heart, cause many side effects: fatigue, frequent migraines, and anemia. Others, more serious—kidney failure, cancer—dash in and out of my mind. Though those are illnesses many face, for different reasons.

Suddenly we always know too much. When he looks at the ocean as though from a different angle, a greater distance, I cannot ask him to explain.

Memory can allow for a gentler reinterpretation of the facts, as a brain moving on from traumatic events wants to soften the edges. To believe it was not so bad, after all. Some histories, however, refuse soothing.

There is an expectation that when a loved one arrives home from the hospital, it will be a celebration. That there will be no confusion over the changes in one’s body (I was not like this when I last sat on my couch) and no frantic realizations when the caregiver understands there will be no nurse coming on shift at 7:00 pm (Dean is here, and sick, all the time).

After a month in the hospital, Dean coming home on heart pumps did not mean Let’s throw a big party! It meant the cat hid under the bed and the dog hunkered under the dining room table, her tail wagging in low sweeps. It was impossible to ignore the wheels of the cart rolling heavily over the wood floors, or to tune out the groan and beep of the batteries winding down. The click-clock sound of the pumps was everywhere Dean went.

The world of making plans disappeared as our lives grew around strange routines. Twice a day, I performed the “flash test”: using a flashlight to check for blood clots forming in the pumps. Every afternoon—eventually, every morning as well—I washed up in our small bathroom, donned a sterile gown, laid out supplies, and changed the dressings where the pumps entered his body. In our living room towered a stack of boxes from the wound care company, containing more medical supplies than most healthcare facilities in the world will see in a month.

As medically intended, the pumps gave Dean a temporary stay, a bridge, a way to wait for a transplant. The quality of his life did improve, in some fashion—he could take short walks, he was not coughing and out of breath, he had energy to write.

But the taxing physical and psychological weight of the BIVAD was always too much to bear. A temperamental Band-Aid, it said: Maybe I’ll help you, and maybe I’ll add to the list of worries you and your wife fold and unfold in your hands. It gave him constant pain, anemia, and a serious blood infection. But he had no other way through.

It is lonely to be ill and to care for someone so ill. Neither can be put aside or checked off. Outside of the heart clinic, our support network was a tight loop. I grew savagely impatient with those who said, I didn’t know he was sick or How seriously should we take this? We had just a handful of friends and family who called or visited and sat with Dean and walked with me, who listened as I cried under the pale yellow light of the street lamps.

Take care of yourself, people said. Yes, but how? There was no place in the world to stand in and forget. Any moment, the phone could ring with the news that a heart had arrived, a call we desired but feared, as it would initiate another life-threatening operation. Days passed, accumulating into months. I realized I no longer looked at myself in the mirror.

I was tired of noticing so many other things. Of gauging blood on dressings. Of watching Dean’s careful dance around the machine, making sure the pneumatic and electrical lines did not twist up. Of people gawking as we walked slowly through the grocery store, the BIVAD pushed in front of him or trailing behind. Of knowing that his wait for a heart might last more than a year.

During those months, I daydreamed of lives I left behind, outside of the dry sear of Texas. I missed the winter in Northampton, starting when friends packed up the last of my things to mail back to Austin. I mourned the loss of sitting on the scuffed leather couch with the dog and watching snow fall outside, the steam radiators whistling. Time had passed. I could not be twenty-five again.

As in my first marriage, there were many late nights with my own quiet tears in the bathroom, our dog whining in the hall outside the door. This time, I was not crying out of confusion or from fear over a fading love. My questions were not “Why?” or “How?” I knew those answers. Tumbling through my tears, what I heard my voice saying was, “Please.” Begging in the face of the fact that every body in the world is finite. That each alteration—a fence falling apart, a divorce, or heart failure—happens for a reason. We are not always privy to where the string of events began, to what caused that first nail to come loose in the plank.

Many of my friends were learning the lessons of staying by becoming parents. As always, I was out of step. I thought of the miscarriage I had at twenty-one. How, after all the losses and near-losses of the last years, wanting a child would be an understandable response. How I could not bear the guilt if we passed along a heart defect. There was once a life where I could pack a few things, grab the dog, and go. There was a life where I could say, “Someday I’ll have five kids.” I misplaced those lives. I missed daydreaming about the future and trapdoors that firmly locked. Others looked ahead with a freedom I envied.

Oh, just to get away. Because we always had to be within two hours of the hospital, in case a heart arrived, the best we managed while Dean was on the pump was a short drive into the Texas Hill Country. The machine plugged into the cigarette lighter, clacking away. Dean sitting in the back seat, so that in case of an accident, the air bag did not damage the surgery site, his heart, or the pump. The air conditioner rattling in our ears as we drove out under a piercing blue sky.

Sitting on the beach here, I think about how our dedication to one another, and our connection to our work, helped push us through those months. For Dean, writing was both habit and distraction, a focus on something other than his body. For me, it was a compulsion. I knew that if he died, I would need the solace of writing and photography. While he lived, my work was a way to demarcate the space between us, to say, “I know you are sick and I will take care of you.” To say, as caregivers must, “This is me, here.”

After nearly five months of waiting, a new heart arrived for Dean when a healthy, generous young man with similar blood chemistry died as an organ donor. The call did not shock us awake in the middle of the night as we expected, but came around 10:30 on a Thursday morning. I want to say we had some amazing epiphany during the ten-minute drive to the hospital, but living with a machine like the BIVAD makes a heart transplant a relief, despite the dangers of the operation and challenges of recovery.

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean replied. “Are you?”

I never answered. He was the one going into this new space. This yearned-for door opened because someone unexpectedly died. Even more could be lost in the next hours. There was no celebration, just muted, taut anticipation.

I thought of the cardiac PA who told me Dean was dying the previous winter. How I once saw her bringing ten bright red, heart-shaped balloons into the ICU. I thought of another young woman, an inpatient, meditatively walking a hospital corridor one evening as I left to go home and sleep while Dean remained on the cardiac unit. Eventually, memories accumulate and swirl together, refusing organization along a specific timeline. A glance, an explosive connection, or a kiss that brings on a divorce. Decisions to stay or go. A diagnosis dictating a body’s abrupt end, slow decline, or unexpected recovery. Trapdoors flying open or sticking shut. Operations that fail or succeed. In memory, they happen all at once.

***

In many ways, the months after the transplant are as blurry as the time of waiting for the transplant. Now we are no longer paused, but living what happens, as people sometimes can.

Driving back from the beach, I notice a giant rock formation, gray and heavy against the green hills. “That looks like a fist,” I say.

“I think it’s called the Hand of God,” Dean says.

An adult heart is close to the size of two fists. From here, I can’t tell whether this landmark is pressing down from the sky, or pushing up from the earth. Outline both versions. Layered together, they are what is, and what is not.

Six summers have passed since our first kiss. At times, I wonder if my actions were, in that tally-keeping sense, good or bad. What I find is that I no longer believe in or. I must live by and, the one word allowing me to be giving and faulted at the same time. Slowly, I make peace with the dissonance of possessing both the innate selfishness I used to justify having an affair, and the compassion that gave me the strength to stay and care. In the world as it is, Dean’s heart failure and path to transplantation cannot exist separately from our affair, his divorce, and our marriage. As Mary Oliver’s poem goes on to say, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Remaining with Dean, what memories have I traced? A finger sketching a heart’s decline in the air. A man sewn into a machine, who now writes and teaches with a heart born in another’s body. A woman who loved, tended, left, and returned. I gather my histories in the pet hair on my sweater, in gulls calling from coasts both west and east, and in black-and-white birds riding the waves. In the shape of Dean’s hand over mine.

Start here: love is impossible to explain. An assault on body and spirit, heart transplantation is also a matter difficult to unravel. It aims, ultimately, to be restorative. Sometimes the terms of continuance can be born, as the perils of falling in love can, and the world will open again, though on a different landscape on another night, into a new pattern of rain. In health and illness, our lives are forever a series of outlines—of interstices in time—both collecting and rushing past.

***

Listen to Laurie read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Putting the bulk of the article in second person makes it especially chilling (pun…kind of intended).

Breath rolls from you in short frosted puffs. The Jeep lies cocked sideways in the snowbank like an empty turtle shell. You think of firelight and saunas and warm food and wine. You look again at the map. It’s maybe five or six miles more to that penciled square. You run that far every day before breakfast. You’ll just put on your skis. No problem.

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***

With any death, there are questions. The first is always “Why?” The answer to that is always some version of “Because…”

***

When they found my brother—after putting him out, because he was on fire too, the whole thing just burning—he was sitting on a handful of .22 caliber bullets. There was a hose running from the exhaust pipe of his car to the driver’s side window, which was rolled down nearly halfway. His key ring had been taken apart. Some of his keys were found beneath the burning Bronco. There was a rifle in the trunk. His CD player was in his lap, and he had earphones in his ears.

***

Some people think this is all mysterious. The bullets, the lowered window, the keys, the fire in the car.

I don’t. I know those answers. What always bothers me is: What music?

***

This is why they say the Bronco burned: there was an oil leak. As the Bronco idled, hot oil dripped from the leak, landed in the dry grass. At some point, the grass ignited. At some point, a blaze grew. Caught the Bronco. The fire was what found him. For nearly a day, my brother had been missing. When they found him, they didn’t find him. They found a body, charred beyond recognition. When they first called us, they said, “We’ve found your son’s car. In it, there’s a body.” They could not say. My aunt was the last dentist my brother saw. In the night, my uncle went to her office, got the X-rays of my brother’s teeth. Drove hours across Texas to determine that, indeed, the body was Pat’s.

***

The bullets….

Here is a story my brother told me in the eighth grade. There was a boy who wanted to kill himself. He had his father’s gun. The gun was a pistol. A .22. I think my brother said he was killing himself over a girl. Maybe he was killing himself over grades, sports. Maybe he was gay and couldn’t tell his parents. We lived in Plano, Texas, in the early ’90s. It seemed stories of suicide and heroin were everywhere. So the boy was in his room. He placed the pistol to the side of his head. Maybe all the lights were out. Maybe he was crying. He squeezed the trigger. Twenty-twos don’t make a big bang. The size of the round is so small, you could swallow one without water. Supposedly, if the projectile gets inside you, it’ll swim around, bounce off everything. If you get shot in the chest with one, it might slam around off your ribs like a pinball, piercing your organs until you bleed out. But it’s not a super strong round. I’ve shot an armadillo with one just to watch it run off, the leather shell of the critter presumably keeping it safe. That’s what this boy’s skull did, allegedly. My brother told me maybe the kid wasn’t holding the gun right. Maybe the mouth of the barrel sat at an angle. When he pulled the trigger, the bullet pierced the flesh of his head, swam under his scalp and over his cranium, and exited on the other side. His parents found him, alive, in a pool of blood. After that, the family moved away.

I imagine my brother thinking of this story as he cradled a palm full of .22 shells in the dark and thought about getting his rifle out of the trunk.

***

The window…

The toxicity report found that my brother died of carbon-monoxide poisoning, but if I remember correctly, the fire department ruled it “accidental death by fire.” Some speculated murder, some said suicide. In the years since, people have struggled over the specifics of the death. The window being partly rolled down doesn’t help. Some ash was found in my brother’s throat, but there were no signs of struggle. I imagine people on fire flail from the pain, even if they want to be on fire. Sure, there are the Buddhist monks who self-immolate and stay still with legs crossed and hands folded, but my brother lacked devotion of any discernible kind. Presumably, he died from poison as his car simultaneously caught fire. The window being down confuses people. I remember all this talk with detectives about parts per million, things I didn’t understand.

The issue was whether or not the Bronco, with the window down, would have filled with enough carbon monoxide to kill my brother, but I always thought that line of logic was ridiculous. My brother was a hunter. He killed things for sport. That’s perhaps a negative way to explain hunting, but it is truthful. When it came to hunting, my brother approached the sport with reverence. He had worked for the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife. He followed the rules when hunting and fishing. But there were other endeavors. In high school, he’d drive around the neighborhood shooting cats with pellet guns. He’d set frogs on fire with gasoline, and while they burned, he’d pelt them against a fence post. Once, on a fruitless fishing trip, my brother cast his line into a flock of seagulls. He caught one by its body, and reeled the thing around as it batted its wings violently, flying it almost the way you fly a kite. The hose would have been in my brother’s mouth. He would’ve huffed and sucked on it until his vision went black.

***

The keys…

For all his faults, my brother was a thoughtful guy. At the time of his death, he was living with an uncle of ours. The uncle had two kids, very young, though I don’t remember their exact ages. My brother would’ve thought this: What if it’s not the police who find me? What if it’s some bad man? What if he gets my keys? What would he do?

My brother, in the last kindhearted act of his life, took from the ring every key he didn’t need to kill himself. He took them and hid them to keep his family safe.

***

When I was nineteen years old, my brother and I went to see Elliott Smith play. He was on tour supporting his album XO. I got carded at the door, and they put a bracelet around my wrist. My brother got carded at the door, and they put a stamp on his hand. As soon as we got in, he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the bathroom.

“What the fuck?” I said.

He pulled me into a stall, looked over the stall wall, reached down, and yanked the bracelet off my wrist. It hurt like hell, and I pushed him. He laughed. He grabbed my wrist. He pulled my hand to his mouth and licked the back of it. I struggled against him.

“Calm down, dammit,” he said, and I calmed. He then put the back of his hand against the back of my hand. He mashed them together. When he pulled them away, I had a stamp of my own. “Happy birthday,” he told me. A birthday would’ve only made twenty, but I didn’t argue.

Later, I sipped a Guinness in the crowd and sang along so loud with Elliott that a blond-headed girl turned around and looked at me. I thought she was gonna kiss me, but instead she just said, “I didn’t come here to hear you sing.” My brother laughed and laughed.

***

When your older brother dies, you get all his things. His clothes. His bike. His book of CDs.

When they gave me his CDs. I looked through them. Nothing was missing that should have been.

Pat’s CD player melted in the blaze. They didn’t know what he’d been listening to, and neither do I.

The day my brother died, I went with a friend to the highest point in Austin, Texas, and we took a picture of a full moon with a blue filter on the camera’s lens. At that point, I didn’t even know my brother was missing. We had a tripod with us, but we were on top of a rickety structure. We used a long exposure time, so when the button of the SLR was pressed, we couldn’t even breathe or the composition would streak. We stayed still and silent, the only sound the motor of the camera keeping the shutter open.

My brother’s death is that silent to me.

When I got his CD book, I found his copy of XO. I found his copy of Either/Or. I found his Floyd. His Steely Dan. His Weezer. His Chicago. Everything that might’ve been. I’ve come to terms with all the other mysteries. But it never fails. Every December, I’m haunted by that silence.

***

Second photograph © by Phil Douglis.

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(For Juliana Jones-Munson)

On my dishwasher is a magnet; one side reads DIRTY and the other reads CLEAN. I flip it around each time I load or unload the dishes, and it creates a weird sense of satisfaction in me; this notion that something can be so easily turned around, every day, that in such a simple, steady habit there exists an important reminder of the little mundane demands of life: you eat, you load the washer, you empty it, you flip the magnet. Life goes on, no matter how difficult it might be.

And each day when I flip this magnet around, I think of boundaries and how they’re marked, how they shift and morph; how they’ve changed so deeply for me during the process of grief; I think especially of how my attitudes about intimacy and sex are so different than they were even a year ago. In other words, I’ve become a bit of a pervert, meaning that I have turned away, in some sense, from what I was taught, in my Protestant upbringing, was the “right” approach to sex; namely, we don’t discuss it, you shouldn’t do it until you’re married, and you definitely shouldn’t enjoy it too much. Oh, and never ever talk about it.

Early this year I had a conversation with two good friends who are also writers. We were talking about how a person “presents” him or herself and about general perversion and who gets to draw the line and why, and we were categorizing one another. “Are you dirty, clean, clean/dirty, or dirty/clean?” The categories had less to do with actual practice than with vibe (and nothing to do with hygiene, except that if you are actually dirty, you are not really capable of being classified as clean).  But someone who presents as outwardly edgy and pervy might be secretly shy in the bedroom; someone who presents as generally a bit uptight or conservative might love trash talk in bed.  Clean/dirty and dirty/clean, then, referred particularly to a secret self underneath the surface energy or social presentation.

In other words, I’ve learned to be a switch hitter.

*

Years ago in my early 20s, when I was engaged to my first husband, I was having coffee at a Montana diner when I picked up a copy of the local personal ads. Next to the announcements for furniture and car sales were earnest requests: Old carpenter who likes to fish and camp seeks woman who can sing for companionship, long walks, more? Or Divorced white female, 42, seeks a good man who likes kids and can balance his own checkbook. I sipped my coffee and giggled meanly. How pathetic! I remember thinking, because I was about to be married to a man I thought was a super hot stud, I was young and hopeful and smart, and I would never have to look for love again. Check. Off the list. I thought about that diner – the bad coffee, the sassy waitress, the view of the mountains through the window – when my first marriage ended a year after it had begun, and I was moving my furniture and books into a sweltering hot storage unit in Austin, Texas with my sweating and worried parents helping me move boxes from the back of a rental truck.

I thought of those ads again this past year after my son Ronan was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I thought of them when I drove home from a nightclub, my hair full of sweat and smoke, my shirt askew, wondering “what just happened?” I thought of them when I looked at a bar menu on a date, ordered another gin and tonic and wondered if Ronan was having a seizure, and how the babysitter or his father would be managing it. I thought of them when I tried to pick out an outfit that was sassy without being trashy, and talked with my friends about how far it was appropriate to go on a first date. Most couples do not survive the loss of a child. My second husband and I fulfilled this statistic probability, although in the midst of our great sadness we made valiant efforts to reach each other. We failed. Grief morphs people; it dissolves direction, focus, desire, supposedly unbreakable bonds. We decided to separate and then we decided to divorce. The gap between us had become unbridgeable; the lives we imagined going on with after our son’s death incompatible.

Living on my own again, I realized that I had returned to a place I had happily abandoned for five years: the weird world of dating. At first this was exciting. I was gripped, compelled, shoved around by this desire to live, which manifested in some bad decision making and situations (late night booty calls and the kind of drunken hook-ups I hadn’t had since my 20s, only I’d end up weeping when it was all over). Some of these experiences felt exhilarating at the time – it was so good to feel something other than sadness – but they left me feeling emotionally strained, confused, and more shattered than I already was. I was “connecting” with people, sure, but it was not intimate and it did not fuel or nurture me at a time when I was already running on emotional reserves I didn’t even know I had until they were tapped out. I felt like an arrow of sheer desire, flying through the air in a small town and emblazoned with this unfortunate tag line: “Newly single mother of a dying baby.” Not exactly the description of somebody’s dream girl. And I didn’t care. I wanted to fuck and be fucked. I felt like I had a t-shirt that read TRAGEDY stenciled across it in rhinestones; I was bedazzled by bad luck. And I also had the sense that I was always about to fail a pop quiz. It’s like the dream when you imagine you missed math class and didn’t get your degree and then all of your teeth fell out. You wake up worried that all of your accomplishments are lies, your fingers groping frantically inside your mouth. In other words: dating created anxiety as much as it provided much-needed distraction. Would I ever have sober, enjoyable, connected sex again?

Of course it’s not all a bad dream reenactment. I enjoy the conversational aspect of dating, the literally “going out” to have new experiences with someone who sees the world differently from you. It feels like receiving a new pair of lungs to spend time with someone who doesn’t know that they’re facing the death of their most loved one in the very imminent future. I love getting to know new people (which isn’t unlike building a life in a brand new city or country, which is also a great love – and a unique talent – of mine). But I don’t like what seems to be the necessity of subterfuge, which constitutes the bulk of recommended behavioral currency in the (truly, not-so-modern) dating world. A sampling of advice: by their nature men like to chase and are hunters; women should play hard to get, make sure they see (and present) themselves as “prizes.” I am a sad mother watching her baby die who spends a lot of time alone in bed, picking the chocolate pieces out of trail mix, snuggling my son, weeping and watching action films and yes, writing. I also like to have dinner with my friends, hike, hear music, dance, drink martinis, and I have two full-time teaching jobs. Do I want to be saved from this existence? Not really. I just want someone to be able to hear about it without getting up from the table (literally or metaphorically) and running away.

Some other dating world beefs: I don’t like that being honest and trusting has become a totally unsexy liability. I grew up as the child of a pastor, in a world where you could sit on any man’s lap with zero fear of being molested, where people were true to their word, and where most of us were poor or on the edge of being poor and the winters were long and windy, and where my parents loved me even when I was acting like a maniac, which in my teenage years was most of the time. I hate that trying not to be self-conscious about an old-fashioned Midwestern-type farm upbringing (which involved working on an actual farm) makes me feel more self-conscious and uncool in a world where we’re supposed to be slick and street smart. I don’t like being told to quiet down or that I’m “too much” when I’ve spent most of my life working my butt off to be a writer, a teacher, and a decent person with a life full of purpose and meaning. I spend plenty of my life in utter quiet, happily whirling away in my inner life, which is a secret and complicated place, a world that is wholly my own and that I will never again give up in service to a relationship. But I do not want to be a nerdy hermit all of the time. When I’m with another person I want to know them, which requires talking and listening, not just observing and trying hard not to reveal anything that suggests vulnerability. Otherwise I’d rather be reading or writing or watching one of my favorite police procedurals on Netflix. I like to write stories, but I don’t want to be one. I like to have sex, but it’s not super fun to have a lover who bursts into tears when you’ve untangled yourself from her.

“What would you want in a relationship?” my girlfriends have asked me, while gently advising me that now may not be the best time to begin one. I thought long and hard about this. Did I want to keeping having ill-timed liaisons with people who cared little for me, or who, like me, were subconsciously seeking the distraction of drama and connection without true intimacy? Should I start dating women? (Tried that. Nope). Was “sex without attachment,” as I had rationalized it, a way of proving that I could live when I’m often so sad I think it would be better to die? No. That didn’t reduce attachment; it just made me feel empty and inauthentic. And who wants to feel more shattered than we already do in this sad and wacky world? I was giving myself a nasty head trip. I was flipping from dirty to clean and back again so much I was making myself sick.

I wanted dating to feel like connecting, not strategizing, and I didn’t want to feel like I was required to buy someone else’s farm on the first date or worry that they might want to buy mine, or whether we’d soon be negotiating which parts we want back. You can have the pigs, but I want half of that cornfield back, dammit. And get those chickens out of my back yard while you’re at it. I wanted a situation that feeds my soul, not just my ego. I didn’t want to rent any UHauls or think about renting future UHauls to live in homes where I might live with future children, although I would like to be a mother again, whatever that might look like. I didn’t want to make any promises but I wanted to have integrity in thought, word, and deed. (A VERY clean and Protestant wish). I wanted to live like it might be my last day without tapping into utter wildness and irresponsible behavior. I didn’t want to decide what I wanted to do with the second half of my life after Ronan dies, because I have no idea how I’m going to feel or in what direction my desire will run. I was dancing around in my living room to candy pop music one moment and the next I’d be catatonic on a friend’s couch weeping about how the future is a black hole of hopelessness. My emotions are not predictable; and frankly, I don’t think anyone can calibrate how they’ll feel from moment to moment unless they’re heavily medicated or trying not to feel anything at all, or anesthetized by a drug or an activity of choice. The only way, I think, to live on after an almost unfathomably shitty situation is to actually experience it, and that’s what I’m trying to do, and it’s messy. But I’m human. I want connection, true connection, for however long it lasts, and I want space for my complicated and deeply sad but also full and happy life. I’ve realized that people have trouble holding contradictions when they think of “dating.” They have a checklist of criteria to match up against a list of their own fears and phobias and issues, only this latter list is often invisible to them, even though it dictates their actions. Oh, it’s confusing. I’m vulnerable. In this social arrangement, who isn’t? To not be seems a much more frightening concept. Why can’t we just be as clear as possible?

I don’t expect anyone to love my child the way that I do, because nobody can or will. I don’t need anybody to fix my big fat broken heart, because nobody can or will, although that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be happy. I do. I want to live. I want to be, quite simply, accepted and desired for the sum total of who I am, and who I might become, and for the experiences that have contributed to both. I don’t want anybody to feel as though they have to prop me up, but I also want – and need – support. And yes, I want romance. Long walks, maybe more?

I would never judge those Montana ads now. I would hope the best for those people. I would hope that they got what they wanted without giving up an essential part of themselves, as so many people do, as I have done. I would understand that none of us knows when we might be abandoned. I wish I could meet them and say, “Hey, Other Human Person, you’re so great! Hold out for what feels good! And just remember that nothing lasts forever!”

This newly found compassion doesn’t mean that being the mother of a dying child has made me a better person in the superficial way we have come to understand that phrase, which is usually meant to describe someone who does the “right” thing, whatever that means. As Nietzsche would argue, our notion of ethics and morality stem from a source that itself might be completely bunk and doesn’t provide an appropriate baseline for assessing our activities as right or wrong, because these words don’t mean anything on their own or when randomly applied to real-life scenarios that are not just abstractions. Mothering a child who will only live for three years while being robbed of all his faculties has made me edgier, but also softer; it has made me more authentic and less judgmental, but also less tolerant of superficial concerns. It’s made me totally fearless and absolutely shit scared. It has dissolved the person I thought I was and helped me find the girl who used to write in the closet with a flashlight without thinking about if what I wrote was any good, just loving the feeling of creation, the sound of the words in my fingers. I’m 38. My life is over. My life is just beginning. I feel like a two thousand year old teenager.

I find that my previously quite detailed dating criterion has disappeared. I don’t really care about finances, or occupation, or education, or age, or a particular “type” of look or even a series of common interests or “shared goals” or “deal breakers,” these last two being overused and pointless phrases that people throw around in therapy and in casual conversation. I care about how I feel; it’s taken me almost four decades to understand that I don’t need a checklist, I need a heart match, and this latter requirement is not quantifiable and its physical manifestation cannot be anticipated. But if I say that on a date, I feel like I’m quoting dialogue from a Lifetime movie, or sound like a new age hippie, or maybe have a secret drinking problem that I’m afraid to admit. As if having a dying baby wasn’t enough of a melodramatic plot that makes people want to run from the room.

In my previous dating life, long before I went through anything from which I might have needed saving, I wanted to be saved: from uncertainty, from the possibility of loneliness, from the inevitability of loss. In short, I didn’t want to die, and I thought yoking myself to someone else’s life would stave this off. Unpacked in this way, such thinking is completely idiotic but all of us do it unconsciously all of the time. Of course I only made this connection fifteen years later. I look at my son and know that I am more yoked to him than I have ever been to anyone, that I would kill anyone if I thought it would save him, that I would die with him if I thought it meant I could go where he’s going and help him out in that place that nobody has visited but hope exists. I don’t believe that you don’t know love until you have a child. Love is not quantifiable; to say so is to demean both its power and its mystery. I do know that I’m capable of loving more deeply now than I was before my son was sick and dying. Why? Because I am bereft of certainty, cleaned of at least this one misguided desire to be saved by anyone or anything. I’ll never be okay again, mothers of children with terminal illnesses often write to me. But are we ever?

So, if not salvation, which most people are subconsciously looking for, what is there to want in a romantic relationship?

I want a witness. I want to be held while I weep like an animal and not be told that I’m strong or that things will get better. I also want to cry on my own and sulk with a good book and bad television. I don’t want to be lied to. I want big-hearted accompaniment in this wild and frightening place of grief that is unexpectedly beautiful, shimmery, weird, and unpredictable; which is to say, it’s just like life, only magnified, deepened. I want someone who can see me in the ultimate moment of weakness and view it as an expression of human strength, because that’s what it is.

Every year, the citizens of Santa Fe build a giant puppet – Zozobra – and watch him burn in a public park in the middle of town. Everyone is invited to place their gloom, whatever it might be, in a box, and that, too, is set on fire. My good friend is the mistress of gloom, and being late to the gloom table, I almost didn’t get mine into the puppet. Break the rules! I begged her, but I wasn’t the only one. She slipped some gloom in the pot for me, texting me from the stage I wish I could see you. This is what grieving people truly want – to be seen. In all their mess and humanity and roaring, groaning, rock-back-and-forth sadness.

Most people think they don’t want complication. But it comes anyway.

*

To let go of the thing you most want to hang onto is to experience desire with all its unmatchable threads, its sharp and feathery edges, its weird geometry and turbulent mathematics, its dark corners and wacky, spontaneous bursts of light. To say that someone is the love of your life is to admit that if they are taken from you, your life will be unfathomably altered and there will be a hole that’s impossible to fill. What I’d like to say on a date: “To love is to burn. You dig?” And then wait for the answer before asking (or not) for the check. I do not want solutions, platitudes, or promises. I want to cry in the dark. I want to cry in the car. I want to pound my fists against a surface and scream. I want to listen to the rain on the roof, that slow and steady rhythm that is so like the beating of a heart, so unmistakable, so easily changeable so ready to stop. Everything still stop. The heart will stop: Ronan’s, mine, everyone’s. So here’s my ad:

SWDF, both dirty and clean, depending on the day, seeks someone to put their arms around her and say, “I’ve got you.”

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• Improvising a Bone Graft
• “Infinite Ache”
• Show Me More Funny Books Please