Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Calculus

(2013)

My grief has made me, against all previous likelihood, into a half-assed mathematician. Numbers were never my bag, and I've got the report cards to prove it. And yet, ever since 2002, I find myself going over similar calculations, repeatedly.

There are the obvious, inevitable examples. For instance, on August 26, 2004: This is the second anniversary of her death; it is therefore seven years since her first operation. Then, with a combination of improvisation and OCD, other variations ensue: I was twenty-seven at that first operation; my nephew will be twenty-seven when I'm fifty-seven, which is two years younger than my mother was when she died. My mother's funeral cost about (insert dollar amount here), which would buy (this many) trips to (this place). If we went to the various hospitals and treatment centers approximately fifty times over the course of five years, at roughly fifteen miles per trip, this distance would get you from D.C. to Chicago. We ate in the hospital cafeteria roughly twenty times, or enough to pay 2 percent of one of the cashier's yearly salary. And so on.

And then this, revisited on a regular basis: If I get diagnosed at fifty-four, like my mother did, that means that effective immediately I have x years and y months to enjoy a cancer-free existence (although those malevolent cells could be coursing through my oblivious veins even as I type). Interestingly, the likes of this last equation-and the scenarios it induces-seldom extend to my old man or my sister. It is, I reckon, disconcerting enough to apply these exercises to myself; it is intolerable (or, at least for now, not possible) to project them onto anyone else.

I can barely balance my checkbook, yet here I am, a poor-man's Pythagoras, my busy brain co-opting or pre-empting the confusion and consternation cancer yields. And just like the bad old days during Algebra exams, I apprehend much less than I'd like. For example: How might my mother have lived her life if she'd known she was never going to see sixty? How might I have lived? How might I do things differently (i.e., better) if I could know how far off, or how unacceptably close my own death will be?

Once again, it gets back to God, the Prime Mover with an advanced degree in these metaphysical matters. Or at least it prompts a concession to-or yearning for-some immutable force that organizes, if not explains, the mystery of being, as well as the when's, what's, and why's of how we come and where we go.

But every dog has its day, right? Take my dog, for good measure. I knew he was going to die (he died when I was thirty-eight, which was six years after my mother died...). I know I'm going to die. My friends' children will die. Puppies and kids not even born will have litters and grandchildren who will one day die, and it's not easy to predict which ones may go before their time because none of us knows how long we've got once we get here.

And up there, somewhere, that benevolent, or oblivious, or nonexistent-depending on which courses you've taken in life-entity is crunching the numbers and checking His work, using the magic red pen to cross out errors or correct any formulas that are inconsistent with the bigger picture, which itself is an open book, and always a work in progress.