LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME

     One may wonder at the advisability of reading a memoir about death after someone close to you has died.  Of course that's the point of those kind of memoirs, to help us know we're not alone just at the time when we are sure we are.  But you don't read them when the death is fresh, when you're still so raw there's no words for what you're feeling, you're not even sure that you are feeling, there's just ache and void and the unimaginable stretch of life ahead forever without.



     I picked up Gail Caldwell's memoir of friendship, Let's Take The Long Way Home, before my father died.   Maybe I knew where this was headed before the call, the rush that would be ultimately useless the way those last-minute, 'he could die any minute' rushes always seem to be.  I don't know if I believe in precognition and even if there is such a thing, I'm not sure it matters.  We do what we do, even if we know it won't work, that we'll never make it, that somewhere along that ten-hour drive the phone will ring, the news will come, and a life will be over.

     I didn't read the book though, until I returned home, weeks after my father's death,  weeks after his funeral.  I suppose there are those who might question why I would read about the death of a friend, from cancer no less, so soon after my own father's passing from colon cancer.  I can't really tell you why I reached for the book, but it called and alone with my grief, no one really to turn to, no one experiencing this death as I was experiencing it, I turned to a book, this book.  Of course, if you knew me, you'd know I was, if not born bookish, raised bookish.  They were my friends, my most constant companions.  So in hindsight, why not a book?  What was the inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes?  Medicine for the Soul.

     I finished the book last night.  I could only read it in small doses or risk a flood of tears.  The beginning wasn't hard, even knowing how it would end.  The middle I could manage, knowing where I had been, where this was headed.  It was the ending that caught me, twisted me, turned me, brought me to tears at last, the tears that started and stopped and now flowed freely.  What got me was the talk of suffering, what we can know and what we can't and the relativity of such a word.  This is what hit me with my own father and the people who told me "at least he didn't suffer."  Who are we to say?  How can we know, what suffering is, how much is too much?  It's meant to console but such words cut me deeply.  For two weeks my father couldn't eat, fitfully slept.  He could not keep food down without intense vomiting.  He had endless bouts of uncontrollable diarrhea that required a diaper.  He experienced stomach pain that they tried to ease with heavy pain meds, so heavy he didn't wake during his last radiation treatment.  The last day, he had seizures that racked him.  Who's to say he didn't suffer, or that a short span was somehow less?

     Here is the passage that broke me open:
     That great heart - of course it took her a long time to die.  They had put in a central line of morphine within the first few days after the bleed, and so I want to believe that her pain was contained enough by the drug to let her float somewhere insouciant and free.  I cannot know this, any more than we can ever comprehend the next-door universe of the dying.  But the question was that haunted me most, then and for months after she was gone.  I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter.  Suffering is what changes the endgame, changes death's mantle from black to white.  It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crushing weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death. (p. 143)


     Having watched my stepmother second guess the doctors, I understood this passage. The death was one thing but it was this question of suffering that haunted all of us, that made us decide to take him off life support, even when by the neurologist's reckoning my father was brain dead and beyond feeling any pain.  Stopped at the Mercey Hot Springs exit of I-5, trying to wrap my head around the fact my father was all but dead, I found myself sobbing, wondering, but it was the talk of suffering and ending his that decided me against prolonging good-bye.  He was already gone, so let the body go.  I would find my own way to say good-bye to my father.

     I knew how to let my father's body go.  I was less sure how to handle the loss of him.  Again Caldwell helps: I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder creatures.  Sometimes I think that the pain is what yields the solution.  Grief and memory create their own narrative: This is the shining truth at the heart of Freud and Neruda and every war story ever told.  The death mandates and gives rise to the story for the same reason that ancient tribes used to bury flowers with their dead.  We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow. (p. 182)


     Day by day I'm coming to my own particular understanding of grief, of loss, of death.  I know it takes us places in ourselves we would never go otherwise, beautiful, dangerous, wild country.  I know we can embrace the exploration, like Lewis and Clark, or keep to the familiar plot we call ourselves and pretend we are nothing more until at last we believe it.  For me the exploration, the wilds, the unknown.  This is my journey, T. S. Eliot's journey: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time."