I Think We've Been Here Before

by Suzy Krause

It feels like forever ago that he and Nora were little and loud, constantly underfoot and always asking questions. Hilda misses that. Then again, she misses everything that happened prior to now. They hadn’t known how lovely it had been to be bored, inconvenienced, irritated, sleep deprived. How lovely it had been to be alive and able to ignore death.

Hilda was in the book, and he hoped she didn’t read too much into it that she died in the end. He was trying to make a point with this: simply, that everyone dies, that his death wasn’t going to be special or particularly unfair. It was meant to be a tribute to their family, a commentary on grief, on love, on relationships when time is short. A love letter to a lot of people, but especially to his wife. In this way, he processed his own demise well before that day in the doctor’s office, and in doing so he has processed the end of the world, accidentally, as well.

When do you do something if now is too soon but there is no later?

Now she’s sitting in the kitchen, thinking about all of it, about the apocalypse, about people leaving when there’s limited time left to be with them, about how feelings that aren’t anger feel exactly like anger.

“Are you still upset that I wouldn’t let you tell her about my cancer?” “No.” “Really.” He leans forward, trying to get a closer look at her face. “I don’t believe you.” Hilda flushes. She’s always loved this about him, that he calls her bluff when she acts like she doesn’t care about something or isn’t upset. He gives her that look when she starts to shut down, and she can’t help but open up again. She’s glad that’s still here, that he’s still perceptive. “I’m not upset,” she says. “I just don’t understand why the two of you think it’s your job to save everyone else’s feelings.” “That’s not why—” “Yes, it is, Marlen. You didn’t want to tell her you had cancer over the phone because you wanted to be there to control her reaction. And she doesn’t want to talk to us right now for the exact same reason.” Marlen’s quiet for a moment. “Well, if that is what we’re doing, is it so bad—” “Yes, actually. Because the people around you would like a little autonomy, Marlen. Nora would probably like to be treated like an adult, and I know I would like my daughter to answer her phone when I call her, and I want her to give it to me straight even if all she has to say is, ‘Mom, I’m stuck here, and I don’t think I’ll ever see you again,’ and if that is what she says, well . . .”—Hilda’s mouth wobbles, and red splotches appear suddenly around her eyes—“then I will head straight to the ocean and start swimming. As it is, I just feel so—why are you looking at me like that?” He’s smirking a l...

What a gift, one he doesn’t take for granted, the ability to interact with reality and actually take pleasure in it.

He stands and reaches for her hand—that’s one of the tricks of three-legged races, isn’t it? Holding hands. Physical connection that leads to mental connection. Not trying to move independently of your partner.

He wishes he could edit his book and add these details in. This is the problem with trying to capture a real person inside a book—no one fits. It’s something that should be immediately obvious: people are quite a lot bigger than books.

People are very good at offering up the wrong words, and this is never more apparent than when they are faced with a tragedy.

how he hates Elsie for no reason. It’s not nice to come to the end of your life and suddenly realize that you’re possibly not as good as you thought you were. He feels foolish and wonders if the people around him realize that old age doesn’t automatically confer boundless wisdom and goodness upon a person, though he remembers believing this once, that everyone older than him should by virtue of their age automatically act better than him. At every stage in his life, he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.

she realizes she had expectations too—just, instead of marriage, kids, and a big house, it was more abstract, things like good mental and physical health. Enough money to get by. People in her general vicinity that she could count on, an unexploding Earth to live on. Life, the base model.

How unfair that time only goes one way, that by the time you understand how much you will miss something, it’s only because you’re already missing it.

it. To his surprise, he’s disappointed. Maybe he had believed her, a little. Maybe, though you can’t choose what you believe, you can also believe something without knowing it, even while believing something contradictory at the same time. Maybe the entire concept of “beliefs” is just something too complicated to be understood by human beings.

They wonder if they’ll feel anything at all. Sometimes the mind wonders about things because it wonders, and sometimes it wonders about things because it knows.