Imagine Me Gone
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Please note that I am out of the office on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and that any messages left on those days will be returned on the following Monday.
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it seems likely that the words you are about to speak into this machine will be your last, then please know that you tried very hard indeed, and that you loved your family as deeply as you could.
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He wasn’t raised to be understood in the way people think of relationships now. He grew up in the old world of character as manners and form, emotion having nothing to do with it, marriage being one of the forms. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love me. He’s just British about it.
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Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.
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What I want to say is that we still don’t know each other, that we’re still discovering each other, and of course because it’s no longer the beginning it isn’t always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition—the not knowing, the wanting to know—but there is the wanting.
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In the fifteen years of our marriage, he’s never gone back to a hospital or come anywhere close, in fact.
Rebecca
Foreshadowing? Yikes
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He makes a ghost out of tissue paper, a king out of a wooden block, and Alec will be quieted to the point of trance, by the story, but also because his father’s attention is pouring over him, and only him, like the air of heaven.
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I remember the anniversaries of these events too, but I don’t mention them to people because unless it’s a birth or death or wedding I get quizzical looks, as in, Why have you bothered to retain such trivia, why does it matter?
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But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.
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You could say that I fathered them as I was never fathered, but that sounds awfully American and psychological.
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My father did what his time expected of him without complaint, and I have no bitterness toward him. We weren’t meant to know each other and we didn’t.
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There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast.
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He’s in that larval stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child’s body. This
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the queasy feeling I’d get in my stomach watching my grandmother show extra politeness to black people on the rare occasions she encountered them, in order to make very clear that she was not affiliated with those terrible, other white people who hated and mistreated them, success being when a black person smiled back at her, acknowledging her politeness and her goodness, thus completing the blameless circle of liberalism.
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If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world.
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When the world wants to kill you, sometimes inoculation requires killing little bits of yourself.
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Should the fact that we bonded that first morning at Dunkin’ Donuts over the work of a radical lesbian feminist have tipped me off that Caleigh would one day date women? You could argue that. But even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have done anything differently.
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When next we squabbled, he might bring this up, his having cooked and cleaned. He was banking domestic credit.
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Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick.
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the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals.
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This note or highlight contains a spoiler
Michael’s being gone doesn’t mean we stop trying to save him.