You’ll turn seventy three a week from this morning.
You like to joke about death, especially now, including me in the bargain.
“G’night,” I might say. “See you tomorrow.”
“Hope so,” you’ll say.
I am trapped at home with my 14-year-old daughter during a virus outbreak. This pandemic is forcing us on lockdown but we aren’t as quarantined as our Navajo neighbors to the north.
In the dream he shook with anger, opening his mouth and screaming in silence – sweat dripped across his brow, the veins at his temples throbbed with each beat of his racing heart. She woke so startled it took a few moments to catch her breath.
I also have movies in my mind of Russell swatting dingers at the tournament’s home run derby. Then he swatted me like a heavy bag, with my pants around my ankles.
Don’t think about how much you want to get in your car like you did when you were twenty-three and drive down the highway until your gas bleeds half dry, then drive back just for the hell of it.
The thin paper dome surrounding my sheltered world began to shred, and as the rip widened, I stuck my head through and looked around. What a vast, complex world I’d just woken up to!
No one will ever know the me before. The one that loved all-night sex with the lights on. The one who had smooth lines and a mother’s belly. Now, I’m just covered in scars.
Manya had forgotten the sound of the ocean. That thrumming like an endless world-size heart, hurling the water onto the sand and then, repentant, taking it back.
My brother, Bill, did not die of bone cancer at fifteen. He died of liver disease and kidney failure at 53 after his body rejected a liver transplant made imperative by alcoholism.
What stops me cold is the what-if. What if she’d gotten sick two weeks later? I picture her in the hospital, allowed no visitors, her confusion and agitation mounting. She’d ask for me. And I wouldn’t be there. Yet this is exactly what so many have had to endure. Is it normal to be grateful that she got sick sooner rather than later?
