I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

The thing is, though, when you listen too carefully, too closely, day after day, to that pain, to that keening, it can take a toll. Because to really listen is to feel it, isn’t it? Therapists are taught not to own the pain, not to take on the pain, but instead to simply observe it, at a distance. And you do, for a time. And then you don’t. Then you begin to let it in, to live it, if only for a moment. How can you not feel it some days? There’s a person on the other end of the phone and you’re asking them to talk about the most painful thing that’s ever happened.

while trying to let go of someone else’s death, wondering why the world doesn’t stop when someone dies. Stand out on the sidewalk on Broadway, smoking, hating yourself for smoking, looking at the faces, all those lovely faces, all those lives and friends and families and loves and thinking you are all going to die one day and wondering what we are going to do with that knowledge we daily ignore.

Maybe we steel ourselves to stare at the face of a person who just a few days ago was alive and talking and laughing and thinking about soup for lunch. Maybe we walk to the edge of the knowledge that this will be us someday. Maybe we live, for just a moment, in that rarified space when we are fully, terrifyingly, wonderfully alive. And then, in the next moment, we go find someone to talk to about our new car lease and how we got a complimentary roof rack.

You can’t kiss a stranger but you can want to.

“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.”

“Why would someone want to do that?” I asked. “Because it’s the only way to make it go away.”

“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’m not afraid to die.” “Of course you are. Everyone is. Maybe you’re afraid to live too?

knew my father for my entire life but I can’t say I knew him well.

Those cold early-spring afternoons, the wonderful, earthy smell of woodsmoke staying on my clothes for days, a deep comfort I can’t name.

My mother would come out to pitch in or simply bring him hot tea, standing and talking while he sipped, her arms held tightly around her chest, never quite warm enough. I can see it so clearly, this nothing moment, this core memory. Why? Why remember that when I’ve forgotten so much of my life?

The feelings his annoyance elicited in me. I was suddenly twelve years old. How is it we never escape family?

Gerry turned and looked at me. Maybe it was my imagination but I felt he knew, felt he knew everything, knew I was ebbing confidence, that I was lost. It seemed to me he was trying to decide whether to say something. Instead he reached his arm around, hit my back, a kind of pat, his hand resting briefly on my shoulder, my big brother.

She struck me as someone desperately in need of a vacation.

“I’m a little confused. I’m not dead. Or I am and heaven really sucks.”

“For all intents and purposes, you are dead to the company. Which is why you have rights.” “But if I were alive?” “You’d be fired and we would end your COBRA due to negligence on your part.” “So I’m better off dead?” “Certainly in terms of health and dental, yes.”

“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.”

an anagram of funeral is real fun.”

I was too involved with my own pain. It’s a strange thing to have your life upended, to go to lawyers and pay a lot of money and not speak to this person you were once married to. To part with half of your life savings. To become bitter and angry and no longer trusting of people.

“So what have you been doing?” “I told you, going to the wakes and funerals of strangers.” “How incredibly weird. Like Harold and Maude. If memory serves, Maude took her own life at the end of the film.” “Let’s hope I’m Harold.”

I think the relentless bad news—pings, alerts, this just in, breaking news … I feel I’m lost in my own sentence, but you know what I’m getting at.” “Absolutely,” I lied. “For me a deep fatigue has set in,” he continued, staring at the bookcase. “An exhaustion full of questions. Why are we here? To make children? To love? To eat and sleep and defecate regularly?” He moved his drink to his mouth but stopped. “Is there a God?” he asked. “What if there isn’t? What are we to do with that? If it’s just lights-out, eternal darkness, a world that goes on as if you had never existed, disappeared, like an ocean wave over a footprint in the sand.”

“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.

Pachelbel’s Canon in D,

They played and we sat in silence as the music, composed three hundred years ago, was made new again, here, in this living room, among this small band of friends, reaching out across time, a distant past, fully alive now.

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?

The duct tape that had been holding me together of late had begun to lose its grip. I felt I was watching myself, not really in control of the script.

We learn to read, we learn to write, we learn how to drive a car. But we never really learn how to deal with our feelings, unless our parents taught us or we figured it out. Unfortunately neither has happened with you.

She said everything changes when the heaviness goes out of living, that I needed to put down the heaviness.

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.

“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 ...

“‘I’m not afraid,’ she told me at the end. ‘I don’t want to go yet, but I’m not afraid. I wouldn’t change a day of my life. I’d just like more of it.’” He paused and looked down. “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.”

Something had happened here just moments ago and now it was over and soon she would be buried. People would go back to her home, drink coffee, sit together, eat sandwiches that neighbors had brought. And after a time, they would leave, go back to their homes, their lives, leaving the Gutierrez family alone, lives changed, trying to make sense of it all, to go forward, when all they really wanted to do was go back, to change it, to have it never have happened.

How do you pray? What are the words? How do you not make it sound selfish? Is anyone listening?

I do a thing when I’m overtired, in a bad mood. I speak without thinking, the words tumbling out too fast.

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. How people looked at me and faked a smile and looked away. How cold it was. How it wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, would be made better … later.

“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.”

Children do a thing. They watch their parents in a way others can’t, at close range, unnoticed, day after day. Keen observers, they know a parent’s moods, know the meaning of a prolonged sigh, can decipher a clenched jaw, a change in intonation.

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 world to stop, to recognize this death and this moment. Pay attention to this. They did, briefly. And then they didn’t, slowly filtering out, to their homes and lives.

We kneeled on the hassock, Gerry bowed his head, and I looked at her, her face two feet from mine, this wooden stranger. 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. Where was she? Her, I mean. Her essence? Where did it go? How does it just disappear?

I stood and waited for the next person, a brief lull, I would look to my left, to the casket, to all the flowers that stood around it, the gold crucifix on the silk bunting, at her face, at her sewn-together lips, at the heavy powdered makeup, and wonder who was in there. Because it wasn’t the woman I knew. Sit up! I wanted to shout. Smile! Wink at me!

What no mourner ever said, what I wished they had, was the truth that this would be the day that would define the rest of your life. I would come to learn that much later.

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 secret.

Clara had texted and asked if I wanted to go to a funeral. The way one does.

“It’s amazing how the words flow out of your mouth but mean almost nothing.”

“I’m only forty-four.” “That’s almost fifty. The best years of your life a distant memory.” “You should be on morning TV. You have that upbeat vibe.”

Don’t move, I thought. Stop time. I want to remember this, whatever this is.

“When I read the news, no,” she said. “When I see small children, yes. When I listen to talk radio, no. When I fly on a plane, yes. When I take Amtrak and go through North Philadelphia and see how people have to live, no. When I sit in my kitchen in the winter with coffee and watch the sunrise, yes. When I volunteered at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the children’s unit, no. When I see the parents who sleep next to their children for weeks at a time in that unit, yes. When I make the horrible mistake of glancing at the New York Post, no. When I see some tough-looking kid on the subway who I’ve mentally judged based on how he looks give his seat up for an elderly woman, yes.”

“Well. They did this thing in the nut bin. They said we should ask ourselves, when the thoughts get weird, is it true? Is the thought true?” “Then what?” “Ask what happens when you believe that thought. Then ask who you would be without the thought. The thoughts, the stories and narratives … they’re lies. But we live every moment as if they’re true.”

“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.” “I like that.”

It cost a lot and I’m not sure who I was trying to impress. The old floors were fine. The kitchen was weird but fine. The bathrooms were ugly but fine. I feel like this is a new thing. Going into a house and gutting it and making it … perfect. Farm sinks. What the hell.” “You have a farm sink.” “That’s my point. That sink cost two thousand dollars. I’m an idiot. It’s a sink. The sink in my parents’ house was just a sink. It worked. It did what sinks are supposed to do. All I did was blow two thousand dollars.” “It’s a nice-looking sink.” “This isn’t even the longest conversation I’ve ever had about sinks.”