I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

“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.”

“It’s just … looking back … that wasn’t me. It wasn’t the person my father had raised. So, I just threw myself into work. Work, running, repeat.”

“I couldn’t get the noise out of my head. It just kept beating the crap out of me, telling me how horrible I was.

She said, ‘There are three secrets to a happy life. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’

“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.”

“Virginia Woolf.

blurted out, “So, I’m almost forty-five and I don’t really know how to live.” Tim stared at me, unblinking. “Then I would say you are officially a citizen of the world.”

“Show me someone who is great with death and I’ll show you a sociopath. I know a little bit about fear. All I can tell you is that it’s a lie. It dares you to look it in the eye. Because when you do that, when you stare straight at it and don’t flinch, you own it. These … wakes and funerals? That’s you looking fear in the eye. There is another side. I know it. And what’s waiting for you there is everything.”

I wanted to ask them what their secret was, how they had achieved what appeared to be success, wealth, self-confidence, deep happiness, and an appearance, at least, of total togetherness.

How many days do you experience something for the first time?

We should be required to take flight from time to time, to see anew, to see how small and fragile we are.

The American belief that if you travel far enough physically you can escape yourself.”

The unending nightmare of it. I’d sit there all day and just … weep. I was thirty-one years old and I felt like my life was over. And that … psychic pain and sadness turned to rage. Just … this rage. The world had screwed me and I played an endless loop of if only, of I want my life back, of this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening, this isn’t fair.”

“You have a wound,” she said. “If it was a cut, you’d have put Neosporin on it, a Band-Aid. But you did nothing and so it festers. You and me and a billion others. We walk around with these deep wounds that alter how we think and what we say, the relationships we have, who we trust, the decisions we make. That keep us from really living.”

“We hold the past in our body,” she said. “It never forgets. But it can learn to let it go.”

“Now go. Also, no offense. But I’m tired of funerals,” he said. “Me, too. People talk about how fun they are but I think they’re exaggerating.” He closed his eyes, smiling. “You’re a moron. That’s what I love about you.”

Our lives each day are a series of choices. It’s one decision over another. One person over another. One job in a new city over staying at the old job. Whole worlds of what-ifs. What if Jen hadn’t had the affair? What if we’d had a baby? What if I had never met Tim? Whole parallel worlds, parallel paths that are there for the taking. It’s the chicken over the fish, even though you had no idea the chicken was bad and you ended up with food poisoning, missing work the next day when the gunman came into the office, killing nine, and saving your life.

Lives are changed by seemingly unconnected, random decisions that change everything. So it is also the detour to get a few slices of pizza and two bottles of root beer so we could eat lunch. Which is why I wasn’t in the room when Tim died.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stanley. I know this must be very … hard. It’s just a formality,” she said. “We just need you to say, ‘Yes, this is Tim Charvat.’” Where was he, I wondered in a kind of confused shock. Because this wasn’t him. This bluish-gray body devoid of life. Where was my friend? “Yes,” I said, my voice sounding thin. “That’s Tim Charvat.”

It’s remarkable what you can do when you don’t care what anyone thinks anymore.

But I also drifted, looked briefly at Tim, then away. I looked at his hand, his ear, his shoeless feet. Where was he? Not this body. But him. His essence. That ineffable thing. Is animation, life force, just brain function and electricity? Heartbeat? Is that all it is? Is that all it is that built the Brooklyn Bridge and invented penicillin and wrote “Let It Be” and created Cool Whip?

How rude of the dead to die. How selfish. Wherever they are, no pain, in eternal darkness or wondrous afterlife. And here we are, tears streaming down our cheeks, the knotted stomach and clammy palms, a feeling akin to falling, in a dream that won’t end.

I am not a natural or comfortable speaker. I am too nervous, too aware of my voice, my tendency to say “umm.”

He says, The greatest wonder is that every day, all around us, people die, but we act as if it couldn’t happen to us.

“People can break you,” I said. “Through pain. But also … also … through love. The feelings so strong, the loss so great …” I faltered, never the good ad-libber. But I kept going. “I was broken two years ago. And Tim … he showed me grace and dignity and kindness when I had none, wasn’t able to see it, kind of gave up. Tim saved my life because he showed me how to live.”

What death dares us to do, is celebrate it. To celebrate the gift of life in its fleeting face.”

No one tells you about how, in the days and weeks after, when others have moved on, perhaps rarely thinking of the event, the passing, you sit there and think, How am I supposed to live?

Deep quiet has a sound that’s almost painful. Not even a ticking clock in the room, just a vast empty quiet.

we are never taught to understand the largely indescribable feeling that is sex when it is far closer to love.

This act has nothing to do with sex. You know that now. Because even in the early days, the heady days, with Jen, the sensation was not this. This is something different. This was what you had been looking for. This feeling of being fully alive, connected, emotionally, with someone else.