Saying Goodbye

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

BY JOHN UPDIKE

They will not be the same next time. The sayings

so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.

Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in

the more securely to the worldly buzz

of television, alphabet, and street talk,

culture polluting their gazes' pure blue.

It makes you see at last the value of

those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells

of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces

like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)

who knew you from the start, when you were zero,

cooing their nothings before you could be bored

or knew a name, not even your own, or how

this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

I've been having trouble saying good-bye. It's not just love, not just friendship, it's the history, the loss of someone, perhaps the only someone who knew me almost from my start, and who taught me first hand how this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye. Of course he would do it again. It is his lesson and mine to learn. I have such trouble with them and so they must be forced upon me with the hope that maybe, given enough experience with them, someday I will grow to accept them, endure them, although I'm not sure I'll ever come to love them.

I wonder if that's why I had to be broken open. Maybe I believed too much in bone, in hardness, in whole. Maybe I had to face my own ending, my heart and lungs stilling under a machine hand, while someone desperately tried to patch me since they could not cure me. I had to face leaving this life, these loves, all the things large and little that bind us to this miracle called earth. If so, then perhaps it is time to learn not just brave hellos but brave goodbyes too. Perhaps we need to love the party with all of us, but be prepared to leave if it must be so. I don't know, but I'm finding out.

Getting My Bearings

Bypass

by Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Pudding House Publications.

When they cracked open your chest, parting

the flesh at the sternum and sawing

right through your ribs, we'd been married

only five weeks. I had not yet kissed

into memory those places they raided

to save your life. I could only wait

outside, in the public lobby

of private nightmares

while they pried you apart, stopped

your heart's beating, and iced you

down. For seven hours a machine

breathed for you, in and out. God,

seeing you naked in ICU minutes

after the surgery ... your torso swabbed

a hideous antiseptic yellow

around a raw black ladder of stitches

and dried blood. Still unconscious,

you did the death rattle on the gurney.

"His body is trying to warm itself up,"

they explained, to comfort me.

Bypassing and Bypasses

For a while after bypass surgery, you focus on survival. You try to get through your day, bear the pain, run through the cycle of pain meds and the "medicinal therapy" that now will mark the rest of your days. You watch the water they pumped you with, slowly drain. And the tubes and wires get pulled out one by one until you leave the realm of medical miracle and move into the brave new world of survivor.

Next you focus on physical healing, the closing wounds, the knitting sternum, the numbness giving way to tingling, everything distant as if your body belongs to someone else. The enormity of what you’ve been through hovers at your edges and you don’t ignore it as much as tell yourself, “not yet.” I suspect there are people who never go past the physical. They take their new lease on life and go on their merry way, never once harboring dark “what ifs” and “why.” And it’s the whys that get you every time.

My first inkling of this alternate reality, this "what if," came in a hospital dream, the kind they say is inspired by anesthesia. It had the bright, bold, feel of a movie by Tarsem Singh. Surreal doesn’t fit as much as fantastical, true, the way you imagine the world would look if you could tear away the veil of everyday and see it as it really is. I was walking across a landscape, an orange-gold sand, more beach than desert, except for the lack of ocean. Before me, then beside me, then behind me was this enormous, squared monolith that seemed stone, but wasn’t. It was a gateway and I knew if I touched it, it would give way and I would find myself somewhere else, somewhere truer even then where I was. I knew too, that I wasn’t ready for such a place, even as it patiently waited for me.

I circled the block. I walked past but then found myself walking toward. “Not yet, not yet,” I chanted, was still chanting when I woke up to the 3:00 AM nurses call for vitals. The block understood the promise implicit in such a chant, the if not yet, someday, perhaps even soon. The block can be as patient as stone, as patient as space. It knows we have a date, I’ve promised.

They tell me the first month after bypass surgery is spent healing. The second month, they say, is more emotional. I think they might be right. Every now and then I find myself crying, slow thick tears, not at all sure why I’m crying. It ends not long after it started. I come up to the why, feel us touch, but cannot quite bring myself to enter, at least not yet but soon, God help me, soon.

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

I told you my dream, although I know you don't remember. It's funny, I remember everything you say, everything you did, and you remember so little of me and mine. But I did tell you the dream, the morning I had it, and other times. I told you shyly, knowing it's importance. I probably explained there is a history in Jungian work regarding the power of the first dream, how it charts a course, sets a tone, tells the story even before we know there is a story to tell, let alone what is and how to tell it. I had a dream at the beginning of us, a first dream, and I brought it to you like a child brings a present of handpicked wild flowers, sweet but already wilting.

I believe dreams. I believe them more than I do “reality,” all the stuff that makes up the waking world. We are our truest, our most open, our most trusting in dreams. We are more real in the night time hours then we ever are in the light of day. To say, “I had a dream...” and “I have a dream ....” is to reveal the very soul of us.

So I told you my dream. In it we were old but young and we ran everywhere, exploring a world that wasn’t ours and yet was so much more ours than we ever imagined. A hotel, huge, magic, with thick wooded grounds, dark, shadowed halls, rooms brilliant with light, attics, cellars, everything. I held your hand and you held mine and there was nothing possessive in it, no mine, no yours, but an unspoken we and always. And no matter how the externals changed, the internal, the essentials, the core of us was this young pairing. We ran, we walked, we flopped and slept, we talked, always talk, and our bodies touched in all the un-self conscious ways children do, drawn to one another, following one another like dandelions the sun. I have held this first dream close, all these years, believed in it completely despite any and all evidence to the contrary. I have guarded it and treasured it and loved it fiercely even when I was the only one.

The hardest thing is to give up a dream, to think it the stuff of fantasy as opposed to the real and true. The first to come, it’s the last to leave, what you hold onto when there's nothing else. But leave it I think I must. Give up too. Let mother ocean wash the sticky remnants of it from my fingers, leaving salty residue with only me to know whether it is sea or tears. There is what I dreamed and what is and between them a chest split open, a heart broken, detours around blocks we can't get around any other way, bypasses so that we can live and perhaps even love again. Shakespeare was right. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.