Be Mine

by Richard Ford

walking the fine line between the twinned injunctions that say: “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “happiness is whatever is not bludgeoning unhappiness.” The second being more Augustinian—though all these complex systems get you to the same mystery: “Do what, now?”

A gradual, sometimes unnoticed succession through time without anything great happening, though nothing unsurvivable and most of it quite okay.

Often, when I have a new picture taken at the DMV, the woman behind the camera says, “Give us a big smile, Mr. Bascombe, so the cops won’t arrest you.” I always have to say, “I thought I was smiling.”

Her dark eyes were rounded and staring up as if she saw a specter, her nostrils flared as if breathing brimstone billows, her lips flattened together in ferocious, marshalled effort. She all at once shouted out at me, “I only have one thing to say to you, buster!” “What is it?” I said, trembling, scared shitless and full of dismay. I might even have shouted back at her, I was so terrified. “Are you happy?” she said accusingly. “Your father was a very happy man. He was a fantastic golfer. Are you?” She didn’t mean was I a fantastic golfer (I’m not a golfer at all), but was I happy? It seemed the most important thing in the world to her at that incomparable moment—important enough to bring her back from oblivion to put the question to me directly. (She died the next day after lunch.) “You must be,” she said terrifyingly. “It’s everything. You must be happy.” “I am,” I said, quaking—though I might’ve said, “Okay, then I am,” as in, “If you want me to be, I will be.” I was lying. I was anything but happy. My mother was dying in front of me—a momentous and bad thing; I wasn’t doing well in school; I had no girlfriend or any hope for one; I was anticipating entering the Marines after graduation to escape my life by fighting in Asia. What was there to be happy about? There were other things I might’ve said to her, querulous, young-man things like “What do you mean by happy?” “Why would you ask me that?” “I’m not really sure.” But she was on her deathbed, so I said yes.

On the upbeat side, I felt it might be invigorating to square up and shake hands with a few of these fellow wayfarers—none of whom I really remembered—if only because of a book review I’d read in the New York Times. This was a review of a novel by a famous female writer with three names, a novel that followed the life of a character who’d lost all long-term memory (which could seem like a blessing, but not in this book). What the reviewer said about the novel had struck a resonant chime in my brain. She seemed to like the novel in a grudging way, and to substantiate her liking it, wrote: “What kind of person can we say we are if we lack the ability to string together a cohesive personal narrative?” This was meant to be praise.

It’s widely acknowledged that people live longer and stay happier the more stuff they can forget or ignore.

Paul doesn’t, in fact, think of himself as a patient, a sufferer or a living statistic, but as an amateur “scientist” objectifying a defective body that happens to be his—all for the benefit of unnamed others. Like a car that’s broken but can still be driven. More than once he’s observed to me he was “surprised” it was taking him this long to die. Though statistically it’s not. I have so far not observed him to exhibit much fear of death’s approach. He seems more intrigued than concerned. (I, in fact, envy the peerlessness of his experience without envying the experience, itself.) Occasionally he expresses misgivings about suffering—what I most fear for him. Though sometimes I think that my son enduring an extravagantly fatal disease has not so much to do with death (unusual man that he is) but with seizing an opportunity to perform a difficult trick extremely well—a magic trick—that can only be performed once. Someone who did not know him might say he was coming to grips with life by preparing for a good death, as the Buddhists say: the white and red essences meeting at the heart. But I can say with certainty that he is all about a good life and not one jot about a good death (whatever that could be). In my solitary-silent moments, I do not cherish the thought that my son’s fatal disease may be one of his life’s high points, and sometimes ask myself: Have his forty-seven breathing years added up to enough of life? I know the standard answer. Though my heart’s answer is (s...

teen, he looked like a papoose. “Is that what’s going on in your brain? You’re thinking about Vietnam?” “Yeah.” “I’m happy I missed Vietnam.” Wipers were noisily swatting snow. “You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. You could be a little Vietnamese boy.”

“So. Are you like glad I’m here?” Inside his Chiefs parka, he fattened his cheeks since he knew my answer required artfulness. It was his way of “self-locating,” which the doctors say he should do. “Yes and also no,” I said. “I’m not glad you’re right here. In Rochester. I wish we were on a beach in the Maldives. But otherwise, yes. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad you’re alive. I mostly always have been.”

answers are his favorites. “This, by the way,” I said, still irritated, “is completely idiotic, okay? I love you.” It’s never a bad idea to include these words in case he might think being sick is a barrier to love. I wasn’t sure he heard me with his Bluetooth in. “That’s good,” he said. “You can’t let that genie out of the bottle though, Lawrence.” He is on guard against all sentimentalities, being patronized, any melodrama or matters of the heart—which he hates and can be cruel about. Since we’ve been at Mayo he has begun calling me Lawrence, for Lawrence Nightingale. “It’s a cunning stunt,” I say to end this.

Shopping malls all emit the same climate of endgame up and down their semi-cavernous expanses. (They were never meant to be places where people felt they belonged.) The mealy light emanates from nowhere. Air is a warm-cool temperature found only here, and riding it is a cotton candy aroma, like at a state fair. “When You Wish Upon a Star” sung by a cricket is being piped in on top of everything.

I’m here seeking to make living steal a march on dying, remaining alive so that at the moment my son leaves life behind, he will not feel alone. That is as much sense as I can make.

Until 2016, citizens could be confident it’d be mostly well-heeled white men. When Ann and I arrived in the seventies, only Stalin’s daughter lived down our block on Hoving Road—the sole celebrity curio in town. We’d see her walking her Pomeranians past our house every day and letting them shit on our lawn as if she owned it. Gone now are those days—casualties of the housing boom, the housing crash, Hurricane Sandy, multiculturalism, 9/11, the rise of the right, ISIS, the Taliban and broadband—and far beyond my powers to alter.

However, I slept fairly well—was always young in my dreams. I had no one “in my life,” and felt possibly I would never again. (I could’ve stood a candidate or two.) But I still thought about love and its good neighbor, sex, in vivid particulars and without ambiguity or conflict—just no longer as a stakeholder.

“I’ve missed you. I’ve been reading Heidegger. The body’s indifferent to him. We’re all questioners, choosers and self-producers.” “Mmmm. Wasn’t he a Nazi?” “Not about everything,” I said. “He thought a lot about human existence.”

“I’ve always loved you,” I said spasmically. “I don’t care.” “What don’t you not care about?” Ignoring the love part. “If you’re a mackerel snapper or a Mormon.”

I personally have never minded a low-grade sensation of randomness and have sought, as much as convenient, to keep randomness nourished.

“Did you ever imagine you’d live this long, Lawrence?” “No. I really didn’t.” “Your life hasn’t been hard enough. Do you ever think that?” “There’s still time for it to get harder.” Which I knew would shut him up. It almost did.

An early, now-deceased member of the Divorced Men’s Club, a North Carolina classics professor retired from Rutgers, had made a frequent habit of romancing comely coeds far into his sixties. He remarked to me once over lunch that “Sex, Fr-uh-ank, wuz always so awk-wud. But it gets a lot mo-uh awk-wud at mah age. ‘Nemo dat quod non habet.’” Which I went home and looked up, and found to mean “No one can give what he doesn’t have.” It might be a motto for my life. Both my wives would agree.

“I read online the most popular punctuation mark is the semicolon.” “That’s pretty interesting.” “My favorite’s the three-dot ellipsis. It’s the most misunderstood.” “I see.”

The only way to know what Betty Tran thinks—about me or anything—would of course be to ask her using words, which would then make heart-rendingly clear there’s no way to know. No best word there, either. If there is a next week, the best I can do is drive back to Vietnam-Minnesota Hospitality and pay for a massage as if nothing was amiss (since maybe there isn’t). The business of business is always business—’til it’s not fun anymore.

On both sides of the street (10th Street NW) on snow-crusted lawns silvered from lighted front windows, yard signage is fairly evenly arrayed. Trump–Biden. Hard to know which bunch I’d rather run afoul of—a mob of shrieking, sandaled liberals waving blue security blankets, or a stampede of tattooed muscle-bound yokels with AR-15s and redacted copies of the constitution.

“What’d she say?” one of the men asks over the chopper noise. “What does she ever say?” the woman answers loudly. “Boo-hoo-hoo, it’s not my fault. Sound familiar? She’s your daughter.” “Maybe Trump’s in there,” the other man shouts. “He’s way too smart.” “Oh, yeah. I guess so.”

“If that was any of us,” the other man says, “we’d be French toast . . .” “You’d be. I wouldn’t be,” the woman answers. “Yeah, you would. You’d be dead meat.” “I’m always for the victim,” the woman says. “We’ve noticed that,” the other man says. “Put a stove pipe up your skinny ass.” “Okay. I will. And then what happens?” “Try it.” “What if I already did?”

I’m as stymied, of course, as he is about death, of being exiled from awareness (the thing we treasure more than love). Which is why in the middle of the night, confounded by such thoughts, my mind soars often to the solar system—its mysteries, logos and lexicon. Null infinity, event horizons, nebulas bright and dark—all the ways by which things we don’t understand are consolingly contained by larger things we understand even less.

When my mother died, in 1965 in Skokie, the evening before her burial, I visited the funeral home—Kresge’s—to pay her a final call. Her casket was open in one of the smaller boudoirs. It had not been long since I’d seen her alive. When I stepped into the softly lit room and pulled up a folding chair to sit beside her, I felt suddenly and unexpectedly more alive than I’d felt in months. I was in despair that she was gone and I was alone forever (it seemed). I was in all likelihood headed to the jungles of Vietnam in a few months. I had nothing to be happy about. But sitting beside her empty presence I felt invigorated, my spirits gathered. It was no Jimmy Cagney moment in which I “talked” to my mother, promised her I’d do better, told her how beautiful she was (she wasn’t, she was dead), committed myself to a life of kinder acts and selflessness. I don’t know if I thought anything, profound or otherwise. But if I said I tingled all over that wouldn’t be wrong. I didn’t “see” anything new. I didn’t decide to skip the next day’s sad duties, drive to Grand Marais and hire out on an oar boat. Nothing was different. I wasn’t different. I stood and looked down onto my mother’s lifeless, rouged face. I noticed a small, pale scar in front of her left ear. I noticed that her strong nose made her look, in death, slightly like an eagle. Her mouth, closed tight by the embalmer’s stitchery, had at its corners the shadow of a faint, naughty smile—which I guess had always been there but w...

He’s told me about a friend at Hallmark who “did it.” A gregarious, older Cuban-American woman who worked in the “care card department” (sympathy, new babies, wedding showers) not the humor department where the geniuses work. This woman, he said, simply got tired of writing goopy cards all day and pretending to “care” when she didn’t really give a shit. She didn’t inform a soul or pull a long face. One day she just stopped her car on the Heart of America Bridge and jumped in the Missouri River, leaving behind a note that said, “If you get out of life with one friend left, you’re probably a kiss-ass.”

At 74, with a modest laundry list of ailments and sorrowing memories, I think of killing myself no less than once a day. Probably I, too, lack the nerve and would get balled up with practicalities and let the moment elude me. Which is probably why most people fail to kill themselves. Not that they wouldn’t like to be dead. The small stuff just gets in their way. The bigger mystery, of course, is why more people choose to stay alive.

Valentine’s has actually “lost ground as a holiday, demographically speaking,” he says. Mostly only Republicans care about it.

“What do you think you are?” I say, pulling us to a stop out front of the office. “I’m perfectly normal. I’m the poster boy for death with dignity. I could do ads on TV. What could you do ads for?” All-suffering fathers. I don’t say that. “Nothing, I guess.”

Dr. Bog Down’s list of hard discussable topics also includes—and we can both answer: 1. Does dying have a bright side and possibly make other things better? 2. Will it be funny or sad when we die? 3. What are our worst secrets we won’t want to take to the grave? Possibly there will be moments—when I’m not three vodkas ahead—when these questions will seem more apropos. Though my son might enjoy them if he knew they gave me the creeps.

“Do you think if we lived in an ancient civilization it would die out because we aren’t smart enough?” His voice is thin and reedy.

“Armadillos carry leprosy but they don’t die from it. I guess you knew that.”

“Okay. Tell him I love him, please.” “Your sister loves you, Ted. She said so.” “Tell her I’m filling my cooler from the ice machine,” he says. “And that’s the way it is in the loop. Loop. Loop.” “He says he loves you, too.” She is already off the line. Not waiting to hear his answer.

For a time I turn on NPR, something I normally never do since I hate the honied, insolent voices. Only I can’t find a sports call-in out here in the middle of nowhere. This afternoon, there’s a story from Penn State’s Sensory Evaluation Center. A statistically appreciable virus is being watched at the CDC in Atlanta, which can cause—if you’re unlucky enough to contract it—dramatic smell and taste distortions in ordinary humans. Coffee smells like garlic; peanut butter and feces both smell like burning rubber. All meat tastes putrid. There are podcasts, training kits, support groups and therapists in thirty languages, aiding sufferers to regain “sensory integrity.” “I’d give anything to smell real urine again,” a woman in Hershey PA, says. Rumor is the virus started in France, but it’s not 100%.

Before I started into Heidegger, I read around in avuncular old Trollope—who really is a hoot. In his Autobiography, Trollope notes there exists in life a sorrow so great that sorrow becomes an alloy to happiness.

“Do you want to know where I am on the Kübler-Ross scale?” “Not so much. But okay.” He pauses, knees pulsating, right hand trembling. He extrudes his mealy tongue bottom, then the spasm leaves him. “I’m stuck on escape.” “Okay. If escape was one.” “It should be. They need to add more levels. Five isn’t enough. I’m the expert, right?” “Okay.”

“You have to not forget about my hidden virtues,” Paul says. “I’ll tell you yours. And we can both have a laugh.” “We’ll do that,” I say. “You have a lot of virtues.” “Am I a change agent?” “Yes. I’d say you are. Are you still fighting the sky and winning?” “Yes. I’m not worried about anything,” he says. “No complaints. Okay?” “Right. That’s good,” I say. “That’s good to know, too.” “In case you were wondering.” “I was.” “Do you think they’ll remember me at the Clinic?” “I’m certain they will,” I say. “Am I still a presence, do you think?” “Very much a presence. Yes.” “That’s good.” Paul says. “I was hoping I was.”

My son Paul Bascombe died—in Scottsdale—on Saturday, September 19th (International Talk Like A Pirate Day—a fact he would’ve enjoyed). One of his last wishes was to not die after dark, and by the luck of the draw he did not, but in the early afternoon.

I decided that if death is a means to communicate, the message is about life; that the most important thing about life is that it will end, and that when it does, whether we are alone or not alone, we die in our own particular way. How that way goes is death’s precious mystery, one that may never be fully plumbed. Again, all I feel I know is that when Paul departed his life, I did not depart mine.

I hear my name called. “Where are you, Frank? I’m coming. I have something you’re going to like. Something very different and new.” I turn to see who it is. The empty time I’ve missed has gone quietly closed from both sides. “Okay,” I say, “I’m ready for something different.” I smile, eager to know who is speaking to me.