Here's the sun going down outside my pantry
window. It was a pretty gruff day, cold and rainy I
think - I was inside for all of it - but then there
was this moment of utter beauty so splendid that even
Mr. Moto couldn't wreck it. Now it's so many hours
later and I have insomnia for the second night in a
row. Not sure what it is. I guess missing that
critical moment when your whole body screams
“end it now!” because you’re
reading the New York Times on line, or answering
emails, or dully flipping through websites like
television channels, and then that golden opportunity
for perfect sleep is gone, never to be retrieved. I
lay in bed with a magnum flashlight reading articles
on Gesualdo and Charles Ives, and I felt my heart
pounding from the late night soy hot chocolate I
concocted for myself and Alex, who was in a zombified
sleep next to me – she listens when her body
commands. It’s partly all the dying
that’s happening around me, though.
You’ve heard about Monty and Uncle Herbie, and
then this week the father of my first real girlfriend
succumbed to cancer, and one of my academic advisees
at school, a 19-year-old jazz guitarist, cracked up
his car and checked out. I don’t know if
I’m sitting up scared or sad. These events
bring home to me that life is a minefield, and it
really is the few and the lucky who walk safely
across, like my 95-year-old grandmother, telling me
she’s had enough – it’s ridiculous
for anyone to live so long. There is no fairness, no
justice, no sense to death, and I suppose, for that
matter, to life either. I think of Gina Brandt Fall,
the writer and force of nature Alex and I met when we
met each other, her electric personality and the
power of her words, her reading to us in Monday Music
at the MacDowell Colony, a pivotal event in the
forging of our young love. Of Gina’s incredible
“Tacos” story, about an incident in a
subway station with an undercurrent of familial
catastrophe, and of Gina’s probing and messy
and thoughtful unfinished novel, which we heard in
bits and pieces over time. Of Gina’s awful,
awful cancer, that devoured her so quickly we
didn’t have time to catch our breath, and of
our visit with her in California, and then her
gurgling voice on the phone in the waning hours of
her life, Alex and I beside ourselves with not
knowing what to do and screaming into the phone we
love you Gina. I sometimes don’t understand how
we, the living, are supposed to just laugh our way
through this existence, with all its outright
unbearability. And then I think but laugh we must.
And I think of the time my dad died, the one and only
time that happened, and sitting shiva for a week and
all the relatives and friends arriving, one by one,
with a paper-wrapped whitefish as an offering. The
whitefishes they piled up, one by one, and it just
seemed so hopelessly funny, so funny that to this day
the very word whitefish (which is a foreign word in
Maine) brings a slight titter to my throat. And each
new guest came bearing whitefish as if it were the
only hope for all of our futures and perhaps it was.
It’s my first impulse, you know, to send
whitefishes out to all the grieving, all the
suffering souls in the world, or even in just my
little corner of it. But then I think the gesture
might be misinterpreted. And so I send emails and
cards, I call, I don’t know quite what to say
and I probably laugh nervously a bit too much. What
is this business of dying? I’ve seen my share
for a young lad, and I still don’t know. I
don’t know what you say to the father of a boy
who drives his car too fast and skids on the ice,
especially when this father and I have been in email
contact for years, working to have the son make all,
or at least some of the right choices. So much
invested, so much suddenly gone. The grades were
better this semester, the future looked bright. So
much caring and love and frustration and teeth
clenching and understanding, and then what are you
supposed to do with it? “He died instantly" -
as if that’s a good thing. And my uncle Herbie,
who survives Hitler and still at 89 has so much fight
left in him and then gets flattened by a truck on his
daily constitutional. Or my ex-girlfriend’s
dad, who retired and then got a rare form of cancer
(the kind that’s too sickeningly common) and
just WENT, really, really fast. I don’t
understand how we manage not to just disintegrate.
Literally fall to pieces, implode or explode or just
gradually expand into the atmosphere, raining our
sorrows – all that’s left of us –
on the planet in a fine but cutting mist. So I lie in
bed and think of myself and all the people I love, my
friends, my family. I think of what I haven’t
said, and I think of which conversation might be my
last, and I think of which conversations –
recently – actually WERE my last, and what I
should have and didn’t say, and what I wish I
could say now, and the density of suffering that even
these isolated passings (to use a euphemism I HATE)
engender, and then I think about Iraq and I am vapor,
a prickly gaseous bog tormented by insomnia and night
frights and all the demons of this world and the next
one. My kingdom for some sleep, the only hope for any
of us, the gentlest mother. But in lieu of that for
Christ’s sake please send whitefish.