Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

In the Air (4)

(1980)

It had gotten worse in a hurry. Or, already awful and discovered too late, it was busy proceeding at its own pace. Their worst fears had been confirmed; the cancer had spread and was moving too quickly to contain. There's a reason, she realized, that moments like this are so unconvincing or wretched in movies-because they were the same way in real life. How do you handle that news? How do you brace yourself for something you can't imagine? What do you say when you hear the words weeks not months? How do you explain it to your children? How do you explain it to yourself?

This time her family was with her on the plane. It wasn't as comforting as she'd thought it would be. Alone with her own dread and uncertainty, she could at least focus on herself, saying and thinking as little as possible, conserve her energy, stay as positive as she was capable of being. Looking at her daughter and her son, she struggled-again-with whether it had been wise to bring them along. I'm not sure the kids should see your mother like this, her husband had said. I want them to see her before it's too late, she'd replied. I need them to remember her, even if this isn't the way any of us would prefer it. And I want her to see them, she thought. It can only do her good to be surrounded by people not wearing scrubs and uniforms asking her questions, or being unable to answer the questions she asked. She needs her family right now; she should see what she helped create. I need my family right now, she knew. I can't face this by myself.

She closed her eyes and thought about her life.

...

They were only out in Arizona for two years, but in that relatively short time (which, more often than not, seemed interminable) she had her first experiences as a wife, mother, and stranger. The first two she was somewhat prepared for, but she couldn't have imagined or prepared herself for how drastic the culture shock would actually be.

She had grown up in a large, close family, and having been the oldest daughter, she wasn't unfamiliar with the tedium of tending to infants. In fact, there was little she hadn't encountered or heard about at one point or another. And yet, in her mind-even in the days before she met her husband, when she used to contemplate her eventual role as a mother-she never once imagined raising a child away from her own parents and family.

In the course of less than a year, she'd gone from living at home, in the city, to getting engaged, married, and moving to the arid expanse of a Western state. Within a month of living in Flagstaff-before either of them had fully adjusted to the climate, time zone, or temperament of their new environment-she discovered she was pregnant. Their excitement was mutual and not inconsiderable; now, at least, she would have something upon which to focus and dedicate herself during the peculiar solitude the days presented her with.

She quickly discovered, however, that being alone and pregnant only exacerbated an overwhelming feeling of isolation and helplessness. Nothing, not even the life she could feel growing inside of her, could compensate for the fact that it felt as though she had moved to a foreign country. Being two thousand miles from home was so abrupt and incomprehensible that it was almost tolerable, the novelty and newness of it.

Each week she could assemble a mental list of the differences between this quiet city near the desert and the frenetic city where she'd grown up. The foods and spices she was used to preparing meals with were not to be found in the grocery store; the one movie theater showed a steady and exclusive stream of old westerns; every restaurant seemed to serve Mexican food (by the time she and her husband left Arizona she had completely lost her taste for any type of southwestern cuisine); the people of the town, although friendly enough, clearly were used to-and comfortable with-the slower, more predictable pace of the fledgling suburban sprawl.

She found that the altitude, combined with her pregnancy, made spending time outdoors exceedingly difficult, so she mostly stayed inside her modestly sized and furnished apartment. And since the scenery-a panorama of the mountains sprawling and stretching from left to right on the horizon-was so awesome, being resigned to view it from her living room became increasingly dispiriting. Even the sunshine began to feel boring, then indifferent, and, finally, overbearing. It never rained, and the sun's rays, the lines that slipped through the windows and dissected her carpet, began to resemble prison bars. After a while, the mountains also began to seem onerous and confining. From the perspective of a cramped and stifling kitchen, or balcony, taking in the silent severity of an uncommunicative landscape was more desolate than being ensconced in a city high-rise. Having grown up around the discordant din of an urban honeycomb, hearing noise and the unintelligible interaction of people's voices had a comforting effect. Silence, she found, was fatiguing. It was the lack of stimulation, the lack of conflict that made her feel trapped inside her own thoughts.

Having no one to talk to forced her to focus her energies on two diversions she'd to this point had only a minimal acquaintance with-writing letters and reading books. She wrote letters to her mother, to her sisters, and eventually to herself. Her journal helped distract her from the all but intolerable silence that filled the days in which she was alone, with her thoughts and without her husband. The public library down the road became her salvation; she filled her hours with all the books she'd never gotten around to reading, and all the wonderful new discoveries, all those kindred spirits who commiserated with her. They understood her, and she them. It was through this intriguing method of communication that she understood, and became convinced, that it wasn't words, but those writers' souls on the pages of those well-worn paperback novels. She could finally fathom, in a way that the church services had never sufficiently revealed, the ways in which God imbued His people with an unquenchable ardor, a solidarity that transcended words and actions-a celebration of one's soul.

...

All those souls. She opened her eyes and looked out the window, then at her children. She thought back to her childhood, the church, seeing the stained-glass windows. Those saints in their exultant splendor surrounding the church on every side, a multi-colored fortress. Time will not forget you, those eyes said. Silent, serene in their refractive shrines. And when the priest spoke the solemn incantation, in words foreign to her impressionable ears, she imagined that the souls somehow descended into those synthetic designs, gracing the assembly with their divine presence. It was possible to conceive anything in those mystical moments. Words awakening feelings, that feeling-the certainty of God's existence, proof in the soul. The conviction that there was only one way to live; the rest would be accounted for.