Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Staring at the Sun

(2000)

I look down at my mother. (As I lay dying, I do not think.)

The second surgery. We're used to this, I thought. It won't be as bad as before, I hoped.

It's worse than I expected. (You don't expect anything; you worry and fear and anticipate and dread and delay and avoid and if you're the type of person who prays you hit your knees early and often, but mostly you prepare yourself as best you can for what you never can prepare yourself to see.) I didn't expect this: I saw my sister, only a few years ago, just after childbirth and while, of course, that was an occasion to celebrate, it was also serious business, she'd undergone a Caesarean just as our mother had with each of us. And, of course, I saw my mother the first time, only a few months after my sister's C-section, in 1997. That was different, as we didn't know it was cancer until after they got inside her. This time is different.

I expected, I suppose, something similar, not thinking (not allowing myself to think?) about the difference between local anesthesia and going under, the real differences between a by-the-book medical procedure and a search-and-destroy kind of surgery. She isn't yet able to speak (they wheeled away a frightened woman and brought us back an infant, uncertain how to talk, breathe, or think; that's what those first seconds are like when they let you into the room) and the force of my shock hits me like a sucker punch below the belt. The wind rushes out of me-an innocent bystander anxious to leave the scene of a crime-and the water spills out of my eyes as if someone has flipped a switch. It's not crying so much as a chemical reaction (chemistry? physics? biology? all of the above, including the algebra of anguish), and I'm mortified that my brave, smiling face (Everything's going to be okay!) has betrayed me in less than five seconds.

Look at her: spread out under oppressive white sheets like an etherized lab experiment (biology again). Tubes threaded through her nose into her stomach to clean up the mess they make while saving your life. Tubes and wires connected to machines that blink and breathe, electronic chaperones keeping guard over carefully administered fluids. It's all at once impressively state of the art and appallingly primitive. Look how far we've come; we've only come this far? And, inevitably: Is this what she saw when she visited her mother, almost exactly twenty years ago? How much worse were the conditions (the prep, the prognosis, the recovery) then? And twenty years before that, her father's father and the colostomy bag he wore for the last decades of his life. Old school: It was unfortunate, but it was miraculous; twenty or so years before that he wouldn't have had a chance. This is progress, this is medicinal intervention being refined before our eyes, stitch by stitch, drip by drip, second by second, each patient another specimen, another insect laid out on the table to be scrutinized, tagged, and, whenever possible, saved.

Where are you?

Did I actually almost faint just now? Are you kidding me with this cliché? (Get used to it, kid, I finally find myself saying, not without a little appreciation at the ways situations like these turn unbelievably personal and possibly profound moments into scenes that couldn't even bribe their way into bad movies.) Do I really need to leave the room and splash cold water on my face? Yes, I do.

I rush out into the hallway, past the white coats scurrying here and there, somehow frowning and smiling at the same time, as only doctors can do, and find the bathroom with its sterile, brightly lit sink. Take some deep breaths, just as I've learned to do at times like these. A few moments ago I felt hot; now I'm chilled (the physics of chemistry?). And tired. It wouldn't be a terrible idea to get some fresh air, I think, heading toward the elevator.

On the way down to the lobby it stops and a tall, older man gets in (if I saw him today, ten years later, I'd probably say he was later-middle-aged and maybe, if he had grandkids, they would say I was middle-aged). He looks at me and we exchange a quick, cordial nod. It's a gesture that stops short of being formal, or friendly, but it's considerably different than the look strangers customarily give one another in a public place. The difference, to anyone else, would be all but imperceptible: this exchange of empathy, this implicit solidarity. It's a communication given and received exclusively in hospitals, where no one entering or exiting is free from the peculiar burden compelling their visit.

As I'm walking out I pause and hold the door for a young woman (if I'd seen her ten years ago I would have said she was middle-aged) wheeling an older man (her grandfather? her father? her husband?) hunched over in his chair. She's smiling and she's beautiful. She's beautiful because she's smiling; she has the unforced look of assumed control masking whatever concerns lie beneath. Or maybe she's on her way to figuring out (or has already figured out) the appropriate equilibrium between care and acceptance. Whatever it is, she's beautiful and I hold the door while she slowly slips out from the real world into the sanitized field of dreams and secrets where destinies come to be realized around the clock.

"Thank you," she says, the smile spreading.

Don't go, I want to say, because I've fallen instantly in love.

Strangers can become unwitting saviors to someone who's in crisis. It's not something you (or they) can control; it has to do with the formula that occurs when our biology feels chemistry and does physics. We're scared and in need of assurance; we're vulnerable and desperate for consolation. We're people and need to grasp whatever hands might be reaching out in the dark; we're hoping to be saved by that human touch.

And so I find myself suddenly in love, just as I fell in love with the oncologist in '97 and would fall in love with the nurse from the night shift in 2001-the one I actually sent flowers to (or at least I meant to; I actually wrote down her name with a note reminding myself to send her something to let her know I appreciated her efforts, that some of us realize what a difference people like her make, and that even if all our efforts are ultimately in vain the type of care and concern she provided was never without meaning, and above all that I loved her). The exact opposite of the way I would despise the surgeon in 2002 for laughing (she wasn't laughing at us; she didn't know I could see her, so I had no choice but to forgive her even though I can never forget that moment, in the hallway, seconds before she and her colleague-the one she was laughing with as they walked toward us-delivered that final verdict, the one we had waited for and been able to avert for a little under five years).

...

Outside, at last. I can feel the sun, that unblinking life force. At once imperious and impervious, a warm-blooded bystander to our exigencies, however fervent and fleeting.

I look up, cautiously: You learn not to stare into the sun; it's dangerous and even worse, it's unhelpful. What is the sun going to tell you, even if it cared to acknowledge you, even if it could? It's enough that it's there. I'm grateful, at least, for the clarity of its glow, the fact that it does its dirty work during the day, and is kind enough to go away long enough to let the other stars operate under cover of darkness. These stars don't say anything and they don't need to; at least we can see them: They're there, no matter where they came from. They were there before we got here and they'll be there long after we're gone. Humbling, maybe even horrifying, but there's nothing we-or they-can do about it. It might not be enough, but it somehow has to be.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

You learn not to talk to the stars, or you eventually realize it's senseless to hope they can hear you. Yet enough people need to have their actions explained that we made a science of sorts out of animals in the sky, lit with meaning and the ability to govern our affairs the way the moon turns the tides.

Many of us are taught to talk to God, and some of us actually think He's listening. Those one-way conversations are enough for enough people that we sanctify that shot in the dark, that wish upon a star. Enough people need these mysteries explicable that we invest the sky with spirits and wish them into being: They make sense out of what we can't explain for ourselves, and suddenly the senselessness yields salvation.

If all else fails, enough people come to understand and possibly take comfort in the fact that you can always talk to yourself. You know who you are, and you'll always hear your voice, even when you don't want to. Even-and especially-when you're not sure what you can tell yourself, when you're not at all certain what you can or should or may say.