Speed Limit 55
We were sitting down to breakfast at Milwaukee’s own Who’s on Third, a dimly lit dive that serves mimosas made with beer (remember, it’s Milwaukee), when my sweet, sensitive, freshman year daughter, catching me up on all things college, brightened and said, “Hey, I forgot to tell you! I Facetimed with Cris!”
And for exactly one split second I thought my brother was still alive.
The problem with death, dying, and sorrow is that you can’t control when the waves of grief will sweep over you. It would be lovely if those moments happened in private, in your darkened bedroom, late at night so your puffy eyes had time to deflate before you appeared in public. Unfortunately, they come when you run into an old friend at the paint counter at Home Depot and she kindly offers her condolences. They come when your kid is accepted into a swanky MFA program and you are aching to share the news. They come when you board a plane and feel the angst over the trip to India that you talked about taking together, but never quite got around to. They come when you are sitting in a Starbucks in Milwaukee writing a blog post.
Death brings a seismic shift in perspective on time. Everything in my life now seems up against a deadline of when I reach 55. And since I’ll be 52 this year, I need to get moving. There are fifteen states I have yet to visit, so have made plans to knock off seven of them within the next year. Three are out west, easily within reach of my San Jose digs, but most of them fall in a long vertical rectangle in the middle of the country. Once I fixated on my destination, I texted my sister and said, “I need to go to Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana….and I need to go soon.”
On the day of my brother’s memorial service, I fell and shattered a couple of bones in my hand while hiking with my family. We had gone out to try and “relax” before the emotion of the day, but instead I ended up giving my eulogy pumped up on adrenaline and ibuprofen. While the initial surgery was successful, I never fully regained normal range of motion in my hand, so a few weeks ago I went under the knife once again. But before I committed to the surgery, I had a long conversation with myself. “If I am only going to live for three more years, is it worth having the surgery?” When I offered up this way of thinking to a friend or two, I was met with the sort of shock and dismay reserved for when you see someone kicking a Golden Retriever. I thus decided to keep these thoughts (mostly) to myself.
My sister has advised me that 55 is, of course, not a real deadline. Rationally I know this, but conventional wisdom holds that the first year after a traumatic loss is not exactly riddled with rational thought. And so I am a traveling, planning, frenetic bundle of grieving energy.
In addition to my need to see all 50 states, I am trying to read a book a week in 2016. (If you have not yet read Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, stop reading this and order it…right now). I am adding countries to my list of travels as quickly as I can. I am organizing my home, wielding green Hefty bags and filling them in a Marie Kondo like frenzy. I forced my husband to update our will and estate documents. I am shedding, cleaning, organizing, planning, traveling, exercising, working, emailing, texting at warp speed. After all, in my mind, I really have only three good years left. And dammit, I am going to make them count.
Please know that I come from a family of (generally) hearty Dutch and Irish folk. My parents are both in their eighties, and both of their mothers reached ninety and beyond. Aunts and uncles carry on for forever. I am as healthy as can be, but then again, so was my non-smoking, non-drinking, triathlete brother…pre-cancer, that is. Of all the people on the planet that you might predict to die an earlier death, he would pretty much be the last. As a result, I am on high alert. I have things to do, places to go, people to see. And I only have three years left in which to do it.
It’s been more than a year since my brother Chris died of melanoma. That remains an agonizing sentence to write and to speak, though I have become better about mentioning him without sobbing, and sometimes my voice doesn’t even catch anymore. I am able to say, “As Uncle Chris would say…” or “My brother used to…” and my voice is clear and strong. But there are still times when I am caught off guard and the tears come. And sometimes it happens in a bar in Milwaukee.
