More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Can you swim?” she asked. “Yes. Technically. Not well. But yes.” “You take a lot of words to say very little.” “You’ve met my editor.” “I swim. In the mornings. Around seven. At Jacob Riis. There’s a lone, bizarrely twisted pine tree at the far end of the parking lot. Meet there.” She shrugged again. “If you want.” “Swim in the ocean? At this time of year?”
Life went on, whether we wished it to or not. Tim said, “You picked up a woman at a wake.” “I think it was more like she picked me up.”
“For what it’s worth,” he began slowly. “In my limited experience, I think we tend to flee pain. It’s natural. Physical pain. Too hot, too cold. We fix it. Mental pain. Same thing. We … drink, take drugs, obsess about sex, about food. Trust me, as a half man. I’ve tried all of it. A smart person once told me to sit with it. To stay in the pain.”
I walked toward the water, as if pulled to it. The ocean stops me in a way few things do. I watched the movement of the waves, the wind over the sand, the distant horizon, sky meeting water, the teals and shades of blue, washed-out watercolors that were changing by the minute as the sun moved higher, shining light over the waves, over the sand, the world waking up again.
“Here’s my advice,” she said as we walked toward the water. “Don’t think. Don’t hesitate. Don’t hold your breath. It’s going to feel briefly like you’re being electrocuted. It doesn’t really feel like water.” “But then it gets better?” “No. It gets worse.” “But you adjust at some point?” “No. You simply go numb, starting in the extremities, arms, legs, restricted movement, and then you drown.” “Fun.” “But after, you feel as if someone injected you with a happy drug. Also they say it’s good for the skin, inflammation, and the immune system. Also depression. Although I might be misremembering
...more
“We’re so afraid of death,” she said. “Standing in that room. A wake. It’s so awkward. What do you say to the person? I’m sorry? What a lovely service? I was in line behind a man at a wake a few weeks ago who, when asked how he was doing by the grieving husband, said, and I’m not making this up, he said, ‘Well, I’m having a fantastic year business-wise.’”
“I love this. It’s a pitch for a movie. The obituary writer who was afraid to die.” “I’m not afraid to die.” “Of course you are. Everyone is. Maybe you’re afraid to live too? There’s the movie-poster line. Learning about dying taught him how to live.”
I wasn’t particularly grief-stricken. Sad, certainly. Surprised, in the way all deaths are surprising, even when you know they’re coming. But not grief. I knew my father for my entire life but I can’t say I knew him well.
Father son relationship
Much later it would dawn on me that he was less of a father and more a man I happened to share a house with.
The feelings his annoyance elicited in me. I was suddenly twelve years old. How is it we never escape family?
Beth looked as if she was about to continue when Buckley, unable to help himself, said, “I think what Beth is saying is that we had hoped to terminate you today. Terminated is probably the wrong word, considering.” Howard sighed loudly. “Beth. Please.” Beth, after a quick turn to Buckley, a look that said I will harm you, said, “Buckley. For the love of …” She turned back to me, faked a smile, and said, “We can’t fire you because you’re dead. According to the system. The company’s system. You’re dead.”
struck me as someone desperately in need of a vacation. “I’ve been with this company for thirty-one years. Thirty-one. And this is the first time the system has told me that we cannot technically terminate a dead employee.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little confused. I’m not dead. Or I am and heaven really sucks.”
“Have you heard of Cotard’s syndrome?” he asked. “No.” “It’s a rare psychiatric disorder where a living person believes that they are dead.” “Interesting. Course the funnier version is the other way around.” “Funny,” Tuan said without smiling. “Next you’ll tell me that an anagram of funeral is real fun.”
“Let me tell you where I see you,” he continued. “But let me start at the top of the social food chain. Lesbians. I see lesbian couples as up here.” He held his long, thin arm straight up. I noticed that the nails of his slim fingers were painted turquoise with small black hearts. “Women are life-givers. They don’t start wars, commit murder. Lesbian couples are almost perfect. Their Achilles heel, of course, is an almost laughable attempt at fashion. Think a female college basketball or lacrosse coach. Culottes. Second …” “Tuan …” “Second would be gay men. Natch.” “Maybe let’s never say natch
...more
“Have you seen a dead body?” he asked. “Why, did you lose one?” “No. I just mean, like, at a funeral.” “I have.” “Yeah. Me, too.” “You have?” He nodded. “Who?” “My sister Lucy.” Children can hold a stare, not blink, not flinch. “I didn’t know that. I’m so sorry, buddy.” “Oh, it’s not your fault. It was a loooong time ago. Like maybe three years and eighty-one days. But I talk to her all the time, so it’s okay.”
Also lost someone young, parallel to Bud
“What if this is a dream?” he said. “What if we’re asleep right now?” “Where’s real life then?” “That’s the mystery.” He waved, turned, and walked into the house.
“Cognitively I know that life is precious and beautiful and blah blah blah. Can we agree on that?” “Absolutely,” I said. “But I no longer feel it. The Hallmark cards and TikTok posts and insipid beer commercials tell me to feel it, plead with me to feel it. Do I most days? Alas, no. Freud spoke of ordinary unhappiness as something to hope for. I understand this completely now. An evening under the duvet, with a pint of Häagen-Dazs, watching reruns of Law & Order? I’ll take it.”
What is it we remember of a life? From those 28,000 days if we are lucky enough to live that long? Those 960 months? What was Molly Donnelly remembering as she drove home that afternoon? Surely our days are measured in small things, small connections, small thoughts. It’s not meetings and deals closed. It is our children. Talking of the day, of lunch, of coloring, of nonsense, the parent listening, half listening, not listening, because this is a thing we do, we daily do, morning and afternoon, the little holy rituals that make up a day, a life, drop-off and pick-up, an expected thing, a known
...more
“We need to open to life as it is, rather than how we want it to be. And how we want it to be this constant state of painlessness, of ease and safety.”
“Important women in your life leave you.” “Yes.” “And you blame yourself.” “No. Maybe. Yes.” “You ask, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Worse. You doubt yourself. You no longer try.”
It made no sense. The history of the world is tribes banding together behind large walls, going to war against one another, rejecting other religions, other ways of life. And yet here, on these crowded streets, the world came together.
“Do you honestly think, on days like today, that I’m not angry with God, that I’m not compelled to doubt, to swear and scream as I put these garments on? I am. And may God forgive me. Until I see her family’s faces. Know that she lives on through them. That she wills us, urges us, to live. Right now. Because this is it. The thing we’ve been waiting for? It’s right here, right now, in front of us. Do it now. Whatever it is. Do that thing that honors life.”
We forget so many details of our life. Weeks and months where events, moments, banal and meaningful, blur and then dissipate. And then there are the snippets that live on, forever sharp and alive, always there, waiting to be replayed. I remember smells. The flowers, of course. The little tree air fresheners in the Cadillac that drove us to the cemetery, how it gave me a headache.
“Is it … hard?” Now I turned and looked at him, a confused expression on my face. “Hard? No. No. Because I don’t feel a thing.” He stared at me and nodded slowly. Which annoyed me. “I wonder if that’s the problem.”
“Let’s go,” I said, standing. But his chair blocked the pew. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Seriously. Like, with your life. You watch the world go by. This … spectator. Never fully engaged, because why do that? You’re like a critic. You watch. You comment. But you don’t engage. Because to do that takes courage. It takes vulnerability. The chance we might get hurt. But you’ve had enough of that. You’re so afraid.”
“One more thing,” he said, sounding angry. “And I hope it’s not a Tim lesson. But this whole thing … It isn’t about death. It’s about the privilege of being alive. How do you not get that at this point in your life? And fuck off too.”
“Do you feel okay?” I asked. It was here when it started to scare me. Because it was here, looking at me, that I saw her eyes begin to fill. But she smiled, blinking it back, quickly wiping her eyes, and laughing, said, “I feel fine.”
Just a second ago she was alive and now she’s not. And I don’t understand. Which is when Gerry howls, a wounded animal howl, and my father puts an arm on Gerry’s shoulder and for a moment I am sure I am invisible and that maybe I have died too and in that brief moment a fear I have never known comes over me.
I felt removed from it all. So I watched. I watched their faces, how they cried, hugged, sat together. How they talked, the low hum of serious conversation, but also how it turned from my mother to asking about other things, other topics, the intensity of death too much to sustain for too long, how after a deep sigh, a look around the room, people said things like, “How’s Ginny? She’s married now? Isn’t that wonderful.” How someone else talked about their car being in the shop, a valve job that was going to cost a fortune. How life went on. I didn’t want that. I wanted it to stop, for the
...more
Outsider post mom's death
I don’t know why I did it but I reached out to touch her arm. And in the moment before Gerry pulled it back, in the moment before he hissed, “Don’t!” I felt her leaden, lifeless arm, felt how her body was no longer hers.
The point is that my mother’s obituary was only seventy-four words long. I counted. I counted when I saw it in the newspaper. I didn’t understand how her life could be reduced to seventy-four words. Words that made no mention of how she loved the beach or how she did a little hip shake when a song she liked came on the radio in the kitchen or how she hummed when she was happy, how she leaned over the toaster on cold winter mornings as she waited for the bread to pop up, the warmth on her face, the smell of slightly burnt bread, turning to me and smiling, raising her eyebrows twice, our little
...more
She grinned as the wind blew strands of hair across her face and she moved it back, behind her ear. Don’t move, I thought. Stop time. I want to remember this, whatever this is. She stared and waited for my answer.
Wants to freeze time just like when his mom died
“Do you ever visit your mother’s grave?” she asked. The question surprised me. “No. Not for a long time.” Something about it, here in this place, made me feel guilty. “What was her name?” “Louise. Louise Stanley. Why?” “I read this thing. I think it was the ancient Egyptians. They believed you died twice. First when you died, and second when people stopped saying your name. So, then. Louise Stanley.”
“Let’s say hypothetically you’re insecure. Well, when someone calls you on your insecurity, points out a fault … you get angry at yourself, but if you’re immature, you take that anger out on them because you know there’s some truth in it.”
know the meaning of this thing, this event. I watch the faces of the people in the church, in the line at the wake, around the grave. And words appear in my head. Sad. Awful. Tragedy. Loss. But I can’t feel those words. It’s like if you said, ‘Alexa, explain tragedy,’ she’d define it. But it wouldn’t explain the feeling of tragedy. Is this making any sense?” “Of course,” she said. “You’re on the outside, looking in. I know the feeling.”
“The script is unfinished. But we believe the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads. The story isn’t written yet. Your life. You know?”
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” “Who said that?” I asked. “The Spice Girls.” She grinned. “Virginia Woolf. We can change. Now maybe it’s just a bit. But that little bit is … everything.”
didn’t expect to like you.” I forced a smile and nodded. “Five days,” I said. This cocktail of disappointment and unfairness. “Okay, my turn. How much do you know about mayflies?” I asked, a little gift from my buddy. “What?” “Mayflies,” I said. “A friend of mine told me a mayfly’s entire lifespan is just twenty-four hours. That gives us, like, five lifetimes.” She smiled. “I’d like that.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you are dying, in a way. Jen, the job. Maybe it wasn’t just a whiskey-induced accident that you wrote your own obituary.” “You’re saying I’m dying?” “In a way. We all are.” “You should come out with a line of sad greeting cards.” “We die and are reborn all the time. We just ignore it. About three hundred thirty billion cells are replaced every day. You’re different today than you were yesterday.”
“So … if I overstep, if I give advice and sound like I know what I’m talking about, it’s because you matter to me. That’s all. I have a hard time seeing the people I love unhappy.”
I had explained to the company, on the phone, that we would need to lift him in. They had a mechanic who had played college football, they said. They were waiting for us. That’s the beauty of New York. If you pay enough, anything is possible. I couldn’t afford this, but that’s what high-interest credit cards are for. They led us out to the helicopter and an unusually large man named Tony lifted Tim up and into the seat as if hoisting a toddler. Clara and I got in the two seats behind him. We put on comically large headsets with microphones attached so we could speak over the noise.
Well this feels random
How many days do you experience something for the first time?
Like yes but why this
The city small and quiet below. We should be required to take flight from time to time, to see anew, to see how small and fragile we are.
Clara looked over at me, eyes wide. “George?” “It’s true,” Tim said. “George Nicholas Stanley.” “You look like a George,” she said, smiling. “You do look like a George,” Tim added.
“Yes. Teaching English. Change of scenery. The American belief that if you travel far enough physically you can escape yourself.” Tim liked that. “I know the feeling.”
Tim shrugged. “Of course. I did more than think about it, actually.” Tim’s expression didn’t change. He nodded and pulled the sleeve of his sweater back, turned his wrist over, and showed her the thick keloid scar running crossways along the inside of his wrist. He’d told me once he’d gotten it in a boating accident. “I lied,” he said and shrugged, looking at me. “I tried twice. Turns out I wasn’t good at it.”
Tims attempt scars
“To fully describe what it feels like to be imprisoned in a seated position … when you look at me and imagine it … it’s way worse.”
Clara reached her hand across and touched Tim’s hand. He looked up at her. She lifted her glass. “To failed suicides,” she said. Tim swallowed with difficulty. We touched glasses.
sat and waited. A world at night, unseen if you are lucky, of waiting and hoping.
