She’s Not There
The other morning, when I took the dog for our morning walk, I noticed two diseased trees on the sidewalk near the house that had been tagged for removal. By our afternoon walk, they were gone, only the stumps poking out above the dirt. Although I had been warned, prepared for their absence, it was still a shock. I felt cheated; I wanted more time, but for what? To say goodbye to two dying trees?
A long-time friend passed away yesterday. Although she had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer almost a decade ago, I never quite thought she would die. She’d been through eleven different chemo treatments and experimental therapies. She’d had a mastectomy and breast reconstruction; the cancer had metastasized to her bones and organs. Yet somehow, through sheer will or providence, she had always managed to return to some precarious state of remission and live, her pictures of vacations and a new boyfriend, her cats, popping up on social media every few days.
Even when I visited her in the hospital a few months ago, where she stayed for almost a week, getting parenteral nutrition because she could not hold down food or water, her bright eyes and healthy demeanor, her humor, even her annoyance at one of the nurses made me sure I would see her again, after she was discharged, even as I had come to the hospital in a panic, wondering whether her body had finally had enough. When she said her doctors had suggested hospice, palliative care, but that she was continuing to look for another opinion, I agreed with her. I believed in her. How could I not? She had defied the odds so many times before, even going back to her initial diagnosis, when she had been given three months to live.
We made plans to get together for a movie night at her home when she got released. For whatever reason, movie night didn’t happen, whether because of commitments, my lack of aggressive planning and follow-up, my selfish desire to spend what little free moments I had at the time by myself or with my partner. I assumed there would be more time; there always had been. Only this time, there wasn’t.
I don’t want emphasize that life is short because we already know it. And we make choices every day, walking away from someone in annoyance, or anger, betting that we will have another chance to make it right. We say goodnight without saying thank you or I love you. We make promises but don’t follow up. The odds of seeing someone again are always greater than not; it’s a safe bet, and we couldn’t live our lives with the trauma of treating every goodbye as if it were the last. And what do we say to someone we know, who we think, we’ll never see again — what summation is there, what final “business?” Why do we treat everything as if there is a beginning and end? Do trees die in the forest, on the sidewalk by my house, with unfinished business? Or, is it just a human tendency to draw an existentialist line underneath someone’s life and have to sum it up, to have solvable equations when everything in life points to the predominance of cold cases?
I don’t have any idea. I’m sick with hurt that my friend struggled for so long and got no reward, no solace, for it. But maybe again those concepts, of struggle, of battle, of victory, are entirely human constructs, perhaps to mitigate grief or guilt or disappointment. If, after I post this, I fall down the steps and lapse into an irreversible coma, is that some sort of judgment about my life? Will anyone have to make sense of it, consider it a tragedy, grieve over me?
I do grieve over my friend. I do not deny that. I do not know, at an intellectual level, why that is. Of course, we love and are attached to people, but why is loss so painful? I wonder if it is less about the concept of meaning than just a physical feeling of loss, as if literally a part of her in me has died. I wonder if we are all just one person, and we are just feeling the pain of losing parts of ourselves. (And I wonder what Bergman would have to say about this, if he had ever made a sequel to “Persona.”) Maybe, when we lose enough parts of ourselves, we die, too. But there will always be other cells that live on, in other people, parts of us in them, just as there are always other trees. Maybe one day there will be no more trees or people, and a summing up will happen. Maybe nothing will happen. I can only think about today, though, that my friend is not here, and I am sick with hurt that she is gone. That something has been taken from me, although I cannot put properly in words what it is.
