I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

“You know who cares when you die?” he asked to the bustling street. “Almost no one. Your spouse. Your kids. Your best friend. The rest? After about two weeks … hell … a few days … and you know what they’re talking about? The new truffle-and-mushroom frozen pizza at Trader Joe’s. Which is fucking delicious, by the way. Which is why there’s you. To make it matter.”

I wanted to die. I really did. But I also wanted to live, by just the tiniest fraction more. I just didn’t know how. You remind me of that guy. This … person who refuses to step into his life, watching, commenting. Maybe we’re all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now.”

“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.” He was drunk, bonkers, and made complete sense to me.

She said the cause of suffering is fear and avoidance. Don’t run away, don’t escape. Embrace it. I didn’t like the sound of that. She quoted someone and said, “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.”

“I feel like … it’s like I’ve been driving, okay?” I said, yet again unaware of the words coming out. “That my life is this long road trip. I thought I was doing okay. Things felt pretty good. Job, wife, future. And then it was like someone changed the script on me. Changed where I lived and who I lived with and what the future looked like. This new script was crap. I had a very bad part in this script. I was cast as middle-aged lonely guy. I don’t want that role. But here I am. And I feel like somewhere along the drive I passed a marker, a signpost, a spot along the road. I didn’t notice the spot. It was a nothing spot. But once I passed it, I crossed into the second part of my life, the part where youth and a fair bit of possibility are in the rearview mirror. And this voice, this person who told me about the signpost, I ask him where it’s all gone, and he says, Oh, it’s at the last rest stop. You drove away, thinking there was nothing but time. And I say, why the hell didn’t you tell me?! And he says, I tried. Like, a million times. Every day. Every word you wrote for your work. Every fucking moment that passed that you let go without doing something to make it matter. Every season that passed, every holiday you didn’t spend with anyone. A million times I tried. But you didn’t listen.”

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. A bit of Spanish overheard here, a bit of Mandarin over there. Farsi, Yiddish, Italian. And yet somehow it worked. Food was ordered, diapers were bought, a flange was sold from a picture someone brought to a hardware store, neither person sharing a language. A neighborhood, a city, held together by a kind of societal duct tape, a New York shoulder shrug, a who-am-I-to-judge?

“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.”