Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

In the Air (1)

(1996)

This story begins with a plane flight.

Or, it begins with what a son feared, watching a man who could have been his father on that flight. He envisioned his father dying first, on a plane. Which made him think about his mother, who had not at that time felt those initial pains that would require the first surgery. Six years later, after he and his father and his sister found themselves still alive, he would remember the plane flight, and what it had told him about his father, his mother, and himself. And maybe how that story should have been about his mother, after all: about the fears and premonitions she could never quell, having seen her own mother die too young, also of cancer (brain vs. colon, the head vs. the gut, different, the same). In a time-not all that long ago-when they didn't tell you how much time you could expect, because everyone knew what to expect: the worst. And after, the grief while preparing for her own inevitable, whether it was the same sort of sickness or the more mundane handiwork of old age and infirmity. Her son saw all this, and how, he would think, could this not color his consciousness? Was he already fated to think the way his mother did? Was he already dying inside of the disease she didn't yet detect?

Maybe the story begins before any of this. Or after it all; always thinking about what had not even happened, in some undetermined, unknowable future.

Perhaps this story begins with the stories: the ways he experienced things and how his imagination would render them-in memories, daydreams, and especially stories. Seeing the world; seeing his life; seeing the stories through other sets of eyes; immortalizing incidents that never actually happened-all in an effort to avoid being forgotten. (Please remember me when I'm gone.) In order to remember any of it there needs to be a story, and every story needs to begin someplace. So, for this story, let it begin with a young man who is actually me, sitting on a plane, watching a man who could have been his father-in another life, in a different story-and contemplating what had happened and what was going to happen.