Counting the Ways to Live

Black rings of pigment soaked through the newsprint and rendered his astrological forecast on the opposite page unreadable. Two sides of fate unknown. On his side, the obituaries bled sadness in words like “survived by”, “gone too soon”,  “memorials” but these, too, were buried under ink. Some photographs- men in WWII uniforms, women with bee-hived coifs- remained unblemished. The wedding pictures with couples in pointed collars and polyester slacks, poufy dresses and long middle-parted hair, the ones that edged up to his generation, (imprints of the 70s in blurry black and white. His 30s) those were the ones blackened with spirals of ink and underlined numbers.

When my dad was slowly dying of an incurable, unknowable, unyielding degenerative brain disease, when he couldn’t actually comprehend much of the daily news in his hands, he reduced his search for meaning to solid numbers. Greater or less than. Or equal to. 10/03/1941. Circles for greater than. Circles for younger than. Circles for sicker than. Or run over by a truck. Or killed in Iraq (but those were the really young ones and almost didn’t count). 

People were living longer. But not him. Terminal, they said. Those guys in white coats with the listening pieces and pens scribbling on white flatness. Those guys that were the thing that he was. Doctor. That thing that seemed to his family, maybe to him, like a lifetime ago.

He was in his late 50s in a time when 80 was the new 70 and terminal only seemed to mean “try harder”. But there was no trying harder to survive, no fighting, no recovery. Just research drugs and brain scans and proven degeneration. He knew he wouldn’t live to 70. Maybe not even 60 (the new 55?).

He would lose his mind and die. That was the only certainty, they said. No why or when or how (exactly), but a certainty about an end that had been easily ignored before the diagnosis. The circles proved it true. Death could happen.They were younger. He was already losing. He stopped taking the medicine that could have slowed the progress of glucose digesting his frontal cortex. It made him feel sick. Yet which sickness was worse when death was so clearly imminent? He wanted to control something, get even somehow, even if the pills equaled zero.

I would find the thumbed-through, marked-up newspapers on the coffee table and shudder. What was the point of keeping score?

Now I understand.

There are pillows propping up my head. I have lost track of what I am reading because I am doing calculations in my mind. The author says her son is 22 and she is 44 and therefore she was pregnant at 21 or 22 and that is 16 years younger than me. My sister was pregnant two years ago at 37. My friends have newborns, toddlers, teenagers. 36, 34, 19.

Shit. 

I do not circle their kid’s names in thick black ink in books I’m reading, on baby-blocked birth announcements, on my computer screen when the posts of little fingers and toes and poop reports outnumber the political musings of the singles. I do not cut up my diaphragm to speed up a process that I somehow feel caught up in from the sidelines, unsure of whether or not to play. I do not throw around possible baby names with my partner (that is a lie. I have. I do. Not all the time. Not much recently. But it happens). But these numbers haunt me. Each moment seems to be simultaneously a lost chance and an artistic project saved. I want to have control. I want the death of my un-familied life to come at just the right time. After I have done things, become someone, published a book, sailed the world (or at least to Alaska), lived fully. Because somehow I think that a child would bury my current way of being. That I would lose a part of my mind that creates stories, that dreams in nautical miles and waves and whales, that thrives on long walks and slow drinks and sleeping in. I tell myself I am not quite ready for the death of this life. So I wait for a perfect time that I know may never come. The doctors say that I don't have much time left. Where is my courage to lose all that I know and discover something else/more? And really, I'm not even satisfied with the amount of creative space in my life as it stands! Time is running out to change, to be, to publish, to procreate! And I do nothing. 

When my dad lost his mind and even those numbers on newsprint became a jumble of incomprehensible shapes, the pictures un-tellable stories in his inaccessible thoughts, he became happy. Un-recognizably (to me) friendly. Not all the time, but more than I had ever seen. Or felt. He seemed to be another person. And even if I was embarrassed when he licked ketchup bottles at restaurants or pet every dog we passed whether or not the startled owner consented, I could see the joy and curiosity bubbling up and taking the place of all the self-criticism and grief and anger. He was at home in the present moment and did not seem to comprehend the past or have any thought for the future. He became outgoing and talkative (as he had been decades earlier) even if his speech was limited to a few words repeated over and over and over again.

Do That. Do That. Do That.

He was living a different life in the same linear, bodily lifetime. 

One where he would Do That without thinking of the outcome or consequences, where expectations had little room to squirm and disrupt the present moment in his disintegrating (enlightened?) mind. 

Like a child.  

And in so many sometimes-subtle, sometimes-dramatic ways, this is what we do: live many lives within the parentheses of this body in ways that we do not (cannot) cognitively understand. Whether or not we consent to let go of the control we think we have, we are constantly dying and discarding, growing and layering, and always carrying forward. 

The story is not over, even when the numbers stop making sense. They are always just incomprehensible squiggles on a page even when we think we know what we are looking at. Maybe that is where the next story begins. We are not a chapter but a novel. None of this is calculated. No amount of adding or subtracting, comparing ages, comparing lives will mean anything. I know this. Or I think I know this. He was 61 when he died. I was 25. I am 38. 23 years to go. All numbers, all dreams, pages to turn. What if I let go of the concept of knowing and figuring and simply breathe into this day the desire of my body to live, to give life, to survive and be survived?

Who will I (we) be then? More than a photo circled in ink, more than a number filed into a hospital database, more than a ma.ma.ma? Or less. Greater than, less than. Equal to what? 

This is not an equation. There is no formula to figure out dying, birthing, living.

There is only space and time and body and love. 
>Do That. 

Layers

I sink my teeth into the layers.
Flakes of fragile white and slabs of dense darkness fall onto my tongue.
The lightness melts instantly, the cloying shadow lingers.

I try to remember the last time I have allowed myself this treat. I try to remember the last time he brought me here after the zoo or Sea World, Balboa Park or the Bay. It is not a secret place but back then it was a warehouse full of mystery at the edge of downtown.

The shelves of Cost Plus held biscuits and soups and spices with foreign writing and cute little bears on the wrappers. My dad would wander around, past the kitchen displays, picking up little bells or bamboo whisks. He would browse through the coffee section then head straight for the only thing he would buy: the hazelnut wafers. It became a ritual. We would share a few packages, my sisters, my dad and I, as we drove home in the stationwagon smelling of dogs and wet carpet on lazy Sunday afternoons, sun slanting through the Eucalyptus on the 163.

Did he find comfort in the escape into sweetness? Or was it the recognition of labels on spices from Africa, cookies from Europe, reminding him of travel, of freedom?

I know it sounds silly, but now I wander through Cost Plus when I'm in a funk and feel a sense of relief and excitement. It feels familiar. I pick up candles and mugs, sit on ottomans, flip through rugs I will never buy.

And I know exactly where those cookies are, even though most of the time I pass them by.

But I am wandering a lot these days, maybe not for the same reasons as he did, but wandering just the same.  And I am willing to explore what I used to know. So when I let those layers of wheat and chocolate dissolve into nothingness between teeth that contain his DNA, I smile. I savor both sweet and dark. I forgive.

Burnt Pancakes

I sit and eat grease-burnt pancakes at a table you haven’t seen in a room you used to know. You kicked down the door once or twice, I heard. At that time you didn’t know my face or the fact that I would be a girl not a boy like you wanted.
I climbed trees!
I played with toy guns!
I wanted to be a Top Gun pilot!
It wasn’t enough? I wasn’t enough.
To keep you happy. To keep you sane.
I feel the weight of the massive door against my palm. I push it open to walk along the bay and think of your birthday and how I should care.

I eat burnt pancakes covered with butter and syrup and break off pieces of blackened bacon to chew quickly as I talk about you. I don’t want to talk. I resist, I stall, the words building up behind my brown eyes (like yours) and my freckles (you blamed them on her). I have your chin, her frame. Your temper, her passive aggressiveness. The stories begin to tumble out and a mixture of sadness and pain fall onto the sticky plate in front of me. I want to wipe them away, compost it all into something more beautiful.
I think of eating tomatoes as a child, gagging on the slimy seeds encapsulated in blood red flesh (your favorite color, your favorite thing to grow) trying to like something you said I should. I told you I hated them. You took it personally. I couldn’t help being a child. Honest, blunt, unaware that each sullen word, each action could affect the child in you. I now see that you were just a young boy wrapping himself in a well worn blanket, shielding himself from words falling like blunt arrows at his feet. A thin shell between you and the hurt.
We were both on guard and defenseless.

I swipe my finger across the ceramic plate, think of mornings in the mountains, woodsmoke pouring from the pipe chimney, burnt pancakes in a cast iron pan and a smile on your face.
Hiking all morning, trout fishing all afternoon. Those were the only times I really I saw you.
I think of the blue jay that followed me for miles through the woods of the high sierras years after you died. Hopping branch to branch, singing out as I passed, you seemed happy then too.

I wash the last crumbles of bacon and soggy bits of dough from the plate. I think of all the times you grounded me for not washing the dishes before rushing off to school, the residue of toasty dust and jam on white plates stolen from IHOP. Of how helpless and lonely you must have felt as we all left the house, all left you alone. We thought you needed space, that we annoyed you. How could I have known that a blanketing of love, of understanding, of quiet empathy could mimic the peace of that wood cabin and childish (crucial) need for comfort?

I wash and dry the plate. My stories for the evening are done. You curl up once again in the corners of my mind where you know you are safe and can visit me (without yelling, without crying, without arrows) in dreams.