Here is something I remember: I am eight years old and at my grandparents’ vacation home in Arizona. I lie on a stiff futon that does not meet the curves of my body but rather defies them like an unemotional partner. My hair is crunchy from river water, my skin still smells of sunscreen. I wear my bathing suit, even to bed. The room is dark, and I can barely make out the sliding closet doors in front of me. The only noises are those of late night boats putting down the canals and the tick, tick, tick of an unbalanced ceiling fan circulating the air in the outdated guest room.
I can’t sleep.
I lie awake racked with thoughts of death. Later in my life, during a philosophy lecture in college, I’d come to understand this night of anxiety as what Sartre may have referred to as an existential crisis. I’d had one before, screaming in my California bedroom one Saturday morning about how God couldn’t exist because I had no verifiable proof. I cried about it with my blinds closed while my parents watered plants outside. I cried because I had no answers and everything felt deceitful and it was my first moment where I felt my faith in something slip away from my grasp. I did still believe in Santa, though. He, however, seemed more plausible than God. At least he brought gifts and ate the cookies I left out.
Eventually I gathered my soggy, tear-drenched self and had a sandwich and played hide and seek with a friend that afternoon. But on this night in Arizona, my young mind was racing and no amount of vacationing or crying could mute the thoughts.
I mostly thought of my dog, Stevie. A white lab with a penchant for ear infections and macaroni and cheese, I took him to be my unofficial pony (I’d never been horseback riding) and attempted to ride him saddleless around the living room to his dismay. He was a patient dog, so long as food was not concerned. But I understood at eight years old that Stevie would one day die. I could not conceive of myself as an adult, I could not interpret the long term future, but as I laid on that futon I knew Stevie’s imminent death would occur within the next five to seven years. Always good at math, I laid quietly and did calculations in my head. Death was imminent. I’d watch my dog die one day. And then I realized that I would watch my parents die one day. And suddenly I could not sleep, the overwhelming inevitability of the future shaking any innocence from my petite frame at that moment. The ceiling fan tick, tick, ticked all the same.
After that sleepless night, I made promises to myself. I decided to never get a pet, because getting an animal just seemed like a needless way of putting myself back in death’s scope. And I would never think of my parents dying. Ever. I would push the thought to the back of my mind and bury it with television and three-way phone calls with friends and as an adult, Unisom and Netflix. Sartre would have seen this coming from a mile away.
Stevie died when I was sixteen. He was put down at our house. I did not cry. Instead, I left before the vet showed up and went to a friend’s beach house where I stared at the water until the sun set.
My fear, I realized, was that life somehow translated to endings. Except it wasn’t just a fear, it was a reality, but one I seemed to dodge for years. When my uncle and great grandmother died within days of one another in the mid-90s, I attended neither funeral. My parents went by themselves, shielding my brother and me from a sadness we couldn’t understand. I attended my first funeral at nineteen, and could only focus on the heat that June day. As funeral guests wept around me, I thought about how we’d all be the subject of peoples’ tears at some point in the future, but I let the thought drift away in the summer weather, keeping that promise my eight year old self made.
Death only became relevant again when I fell in love. It was like unintentionally adopting a pet, something I’d sworn I’d never do. I knew I’d lose him to either a breakup or death, as my morbid mind processed things. But being in love opened up a dusty part of my brain and heart that let in fears I’d been covering up with blankets and rationalizations over the years. As I sat with my boyfriend in a showing of “Wall-E,” I wept during the credits. “Why are you crying?” he asked, since nothing on the screen called for it. I’d been set off by a date shown in the animated film – 2110. I realized we wouldn’t be alive then. He wouldn’t be alive. We’d have lost each other. And I couldn’t figure out how to tell him this, so I wiped my eyes and told him it was “nothing” instead. By falling in love, I was inadvertently exposing myself to everything I planned on avoiding that night on a futon in Arizona.
I still cannot handle thinking of future loss for more than a brief moment. My mom and I joke about what she wants done to her body after she dies (cremation? Get turned into a diamond?) and I skim the surface of the topic, I scrape the iceberg with a razor, ignoring the depth beneath. My cat Kelsey died and I lost control, but reigned it in again when another cat, Bosco died. I let my habits chug along.
Now, in late spring, I pace hesitantly towards someone new. A new relationship, filled with all of the potential fears, all of the realities of loss that I have pushed away by being single. The loss right now that seems the most relevant is a superficial one within the grander scheme: fidelity. I am not in deep enough yet to comprehend greater losses with him as a lens.
Last night, as I lied in bed with K in the dark, I asked him: “Are you really with just me?” I couldn’t see his face. All I could hear was the hum of my air conditioning and the cars driving gently by outside. “Yes,” he said. And then rolled over: “Of course I’m with just you.” I try to swallow the honesty as best I can.
With no loss in mind today, I watched a video of a couple on the New York Times website. They are elderly. The black and white video is narrated by the woman, who describes taking care of her husband as his brain atrophies. He is a ghost of his former self. Yet, she speaks with the kind of wisdom that only comes with doing what I hope to one day do – to let go in love. “I have let go of the Michael I once knew,” she says. “But that’s okay, because he’s the Michael that I know now. It’s just all there is now is the love.”
In his nursing facility, she sets up his bed. I watch the video and think about how loss can come slowly, how the pendulum of getting to know your partner on such intimate levels can swing backwards until you are with a stranger because of the brain’s decay. I thought about eventual loss, but not in a negative light. The woman crawls into her husband’s small nursing home bed and spoons him as they sleep.
“A time that I really treasure is when he and I take naps together,” she says. “That’s actually just like it was before, when we would just cuddle in bed, and I guess it’s a time when then I really don’t notice that there’s a problem.”
I think of me last night, after hearing K’s reassuring words. He sleeps wrapped around me fitting to my body in a way that futon never did.
“It’s just me and Michael. I feel fortunate that in this life I have had the marriage I dreamed of having.”
As I have come to learn, I cannot avoid everything painful. I did get a pet. I found myself in relationships. I could give away it all, to other people who can bear the burden of potential loss, but the gains have become elements that outweigh the inevitable. If I think about it too much, I’ll get upset. So I try to simply exist with what I have now, I try to not spoil the present wholeness with an empty future. I try to become nearsighted, and last night my eyes finally adjusted to my dark room and I could see K looking at me. I turned around and we spooned as we always do.
I fell asleep last night okay, and dreamed of the one beside me.
