you can't fuck the sadness out of someone
even despite your good nature and good intentions
the body wasn't meant to be a heat sink for grief
and I guess that's how arms and legs entwine
and then sever from one another over time
save for the one phantom limb
I saw her coming up the steps just as I happened to look out the front door of my house. She'd sounded older on the phone, but I hadn't imagined that the registered nurse that would be administering my shots was going to be quite this old. She walked uncertainly, as if the ground was about to buck her off like a wild horse. Her right hand extended out like a trapeze artist waiting for the high wire to sway.
I went out to greet her and I offered to carry her bag for her, which she handed to me without protest. She continued shuffling toward the front porch as we exchanged pleasantries, but stopped at the front step. Quickly realizing that it was a bit too high for her to traverse on her own, I held out my hand, she took it, and we both walked inside.
Needless to say, I was a little concerned that she was going to be injecting me with twelve shots over the next three days.
We sat down on the couch in the front living room, and she took my blood pressure, weight, temperature, and pulse. We went through the kit provided by "Be the Match"--the one that comes with each four-vial dose--looking at the syringes, the bandaids, and the instructions.
"Are you donating for someone you know, or just to be nice?" She asked me.
"Donating to a stranger," I told her. She smiled and nodded.
Rhoda grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. That's Canada, if you're unaware. Born in 1935, she went to a very small high school with a very small number of graduates. She told me that in a week, she's going on a road trip with a friend. They're going to go have dinner with thirty-five of her classmates back in her hometown, and she's going to explore the streets of her youth.
"It'll probably be the last time," she laughed, "I'm moving to Texas with my daughter this August."
The injection takes about two minutes for each vial. Her hands were strong, far stronger than I gave her credit for, and she jabbed the needle in quickly and brusquely with very little pain.
As she plunged the medication into my arm, she said that she hadn't eaten dinner yet.
"I'll probably get something on the way home," she said, "when you live alone, you can get away with that sort of thing."
She confided in me that her son had died last year of a sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-six, and that her eldest daughter had died at sixteen of a congenital heart condition.
"That's why I'm moving in with my last living child," she told me, "she worries and, you know, I might be getting too old to live alone. And I'd like to spend the time I have left with her."
Soon enough, the injections were finished. I helped her pack up her bag and carried it outside for her, and then gave her a hand back down the step again. As she was about to leave, she turned to me.
"Thank you for helping a family avoid a tragedy," she said, with just the slightest hint of a tear in her eye.
"Of course. You helped them too," I told her.
She smiled, "Yes, I guess I did."
Dear seventeen-year-old Andrew,
You're about to make a lot of really dumb choices.
It's okay. Really. I understand why. Or at least, I understand now. A little something you never learned was how to be in the water without drowning yourself; how to play chicken with the train without convincing yourself you could stare it down.
But all of those voids inside you won't be filled with drugs or alcohol or women or fantastic stories of death defiance. There's no prize for the person least fulfilled by life, despite even your best attempts. And nobody you love will ever be able to beat those demons out of you, so you better learn to raise your own fists.
If only you understood how different things become when you grow older. How fuzzier the lens and less scary the monsters beneath the microscope. I wish I could give you a hug. I wish I could tell you that it's going to be okay. That you just have to hold it together for a little while longer, and that great things would be coming your way.
At about this time of the night nineteen years ago, you were sitting on a car hood getting stoned with your friend, Rob, out at Washburn heights. I remember he turned to you and asked you if you were okay, and you said that you wanted to die. I'll never forget how livid he was; how angry and pissed off. "How dare you?" he asked me. How dare I. How dare I when she fought so hard?
And so for better or worse, here I am. And there you are, in this picture, staring at your mother on her deathbed. And we're two different people. And that's okay, too. I've learned to forgive you your mistakes because you didn't know. You tried, but you were a kid. Frightened and as alone as you'd ever been, and your world had turned upside down. Your life had become a nightmare.
Tonight I'm thinking less of mom's death and more about you. I find myself wishing you a good evening nineteen years ago, a stolid moment of silence, and a peace that has--so far--remained elusive all this time later.
Things only get harder from here. That's just the nature of life. That's just the way you've chosen to live. You've defied and refused to be consoled in favor of holding the truth in one hand and a pen in the other. It doesn't matter where it takes you, it doesn't matter the beauty you write or don't write; it doesn't matter the fires you burn or the ones you extinguish--so long as you know why you chose to go that way.
Love,
Future Andrew
we monsters tend to darkness
lovers of stars
moonlight
heavy rain and
a sort of velvet husbandry
and simple unappreciated pleasures
but the fires in a far-off sun
will no sooner warm your skin
with passion and remorse
than the cold and distant moon
and I guess that's why
we never have sense enough to run
when the villagers come
with their torches
"He'll have the same blood type as me after the donation," I said to Karen, my psychologist.
"You mean he doesn't already? They don't check for that before a bone marrow donation?"
"No, apparently not. He'll be type O positive from now on, regardless of what it was before. And his blood will use my DNA and not his own. We'll be blood brothers. He'll be a chimera."
"When will this all happen?"
"I donate on June 25th," I said, "and he'll be receiving my bone marrow on June 26th. Which is..." But I trailed off.
"Your mom's birthday," she finally said, nodding, "it sounds to me like the universe is trying to tell you something."
* * *
I sat in the grass staring at the two tombstones: my mother's on the left, my grandfather's to the right. The roiling blue clouds threatened rain, as if the sky was reaching for the Earth in its longing and agony, and I felt the pressing sadness wash over me like a wave.
"I'm thirty-six mom," I sighed, tears running down my face, "and you died at thirty-six. And it all seems so incomplete. It seems so savage. So unfair."
* * *
I stood on the lake shore and stared out at the water. The anniversary of her death is coming, and I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it the way an old man feels a storm brewing out at sea. I guess that's why I came back to my hometown, in a way: a storm seems easier to withstand when you remember the places where you once hid from monsters.
I drove past my old house, and I wondered at the echoes and memories that haunted the upstairs; the closets I shoved as many skeletons in, and the walls that were eventually broken by the words that they heard.
I walked along the edge of the old train trestle, the one that goes over the river at the outskirts of town, and marveled at the jump I used to take without considering the danger. It seemed so much higher than I remembered, and the water so much more shallow and narrow. I held myself against a steel beam and felt the dizziness of fear pass over me as I ignored the sudden realization that I wanted to fall into the darkness below.
* * *
"She's dying. She's choosing to die, and there's nothing I can do. At least my mom fought," I told Karen, my psychologist.
"You're right. There isn't anything you can do."
"But I'm saving someone I don't even know, for fucks' sake!" I was angry, furious, "I'm saving a fifty-four-year-old that lives in Spain. I'm saving his family the grief that I can't prevent in my own life--"
"Andrew," she said softly, "you can't just be angry at death. Or God. Or no-God. Or whatever. You already do everything that you can to fight against death. I've seen you do it. But as humans, we always lose. Always. We don't control fate."
"So that's it? I give life to a stranger, and I do nothing for someone I love? That's fucking awful."
"It is whatever you make of it. Life or death."
* * *
She closed her eyes when the music played. And I realized how envious I was, how jealous I was of the look on her face. There is a solace to be found in something as simple as a melody played in darkness, even over rumination. The gentle sway of a note and her eyes closed and I remembered what I once called that feeling: church. It's a prayer.
Even for the faithless and hapless. Even for the damned and angry, like me.
* * *
"I'm saving someone with the life that you gave me," I told both the tombstones, "with the life that you nurtured within me. I don't know if it's enough, I don't know if it's fair, and I don't know if I'm doing right, but happy birthday. To both of you. I'm trying."
The wind blew, the trees shook, and the rain withheld its fall from the sky. But this is no Hollywood story. This is not the point where there is sudden sunshine and rainbows and our character is overjoyed and knows that his loved ones have not left him. It was still just an empty field with stones reaching up from the ground like broken teeth. It was just as empty and dead and barren as it was when I arrived.
I went back to my car, turned the music up as loud as it would go, and sang my way back down the mountain.