Dispatch #5

Shouts and Murmurs

Novels were the first to go, then anything longer than an essay. At first, my imagination was unable to create a world outside of comprehending loss. And later, my attention just couldn’t make the leap from one sentence to another. I accumulated so many half-read things, each like a small failure, and tried to figure out who I was without words.

When I’d forgotten familiar feelings — like the contrapuntal unfurling of language against the rhythm of a subway car — my friend Roger wrote and asked if I’d like a gift subscription to The New Yorker. Essays just long enough to feel like a feat, short enough to feel surmountable, turned out to be an unexpected respite. And a few dug their way into me.

I learned of a bizarre industry that has emerged in Japan, fueled by people looking to rent actors to play the role of family members. In an essay full of the unexpected, there was also underlying predictability: renters were in the market to ease some form of pain — sometimes their humiliation, but more often their grief. “I thought I was a strong person,” said a recent widower looking to rent a wife. “But when you end up alone you feel very lonely.”

I read of a truck’s skid on black ice nearly ending life for a girl and her father, the author, who wrote of the expansion of time and mental acuity as one awaits a fatal crash. When he discovered they’d survived, he looked over and saw six Skittles: a red, a yellow, a blue, and three purples. “Their everyday perfection was somehow dumbfounding,” he writes. Two days later, as he cleaned out the truck, he found them again, but there were only five, so he asked his daughter about it. She replied, unaware of how closely they’d faced their mortality: “Oh, I ate one on the way home.”

I was undone by Siddhartha Mukherjee’s account of his father’s death and the quiet force that keeps us living, unnoticed till it’s upturned:

“These conserving, self-correcting, decay-resisting forces that contend invisible within us — in our bodies, our cities, our planetary ecosystem, even — are the opposite of nothing. … If we could measure homeostatic stamina — if we could somehow capture and quantify resilience — we might find a way to conserve things worth keeping before they failed, or, for that matter, learn to break things we wanted broken. It is easy to notice the kind of activity that drives change; stasis, on the other hand, requires a more vigilant reckoning.”

There is so much I tried to fill, to make sense of, to balance with their words.

When I found myself picking up books again, I kept looking for loss in their pages: Cory Taylor dying of melanoma-related brain cancer; Nina Riggs of breast cancer; Paul Kalanithi of lung cancer. Susan Gubar still living with ovarian cancer recurrences and Eve Ensler in remission from uterine cancer. Christina Crosby flying forward until her chin hit the pavement and left her paralyzed — all because of a branch entering her bicycle’s spokes.

I devoured their accounts as the researcher looks for evidence. But each loss teaches you only how to survive itself, and there is no gaining of experience by proxy.

Over this past year, as I watched those I love suffer at the end of life, I looked for lessons from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. In modern medicine, he writes, we so often deepen suffering to extend life that will still end. And I thought: this will be my consolation and what I will remind myself of; this will be how I can let them go.

It comforted me for a time. Then I learned I would have to let them go over and over. The memory of their suffering was overshadowed as the emptiness they left behind grew larger — there was still so much life to live without them.

My friend Madeleine Weatherhead, who also recently lost her father, gave me the last book I finished, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. One of the characters writes:

“I lie about how you died, I whispered to Mum.
I would do the same, she whispered back.”

In the margin, Madeleine had replied:

“Dad sometimes whispers back in my imagination.”

I replied too, here. The only words we have now are the ones we create.