To See Feelingly

It is lovely outside today. 62 degrees and sunny. Piles and piles of leaves still stiff enough for you to crunch through. Today you and Daddy and I walked around in the grass behind our house. It's not really our yard, more a wide open stretch of green that connects three different town home divisions. You pulled a flap of bark off a tree and chased a lady bug over the back of your hand. Across the yard, in a town home with big, low, windows, another one-year old girl pressed her face to the glass and waved at you. You toddled over (tripping once in a patch of slick, dry pine needles) and pressed your face to the other side of the glass and put your hand up to her face.

Rich, a colleague of mine at St. Olaf, has cancer. His liver is failing and on Friday he decided to enter home hospice care. This Friday also would have been his daughter's 21st birthday. She died years ago, before I moved to Northfield or met your father or had you. Rich's wife, Karen, also teaches in the English department. Last Tuesday she offered to hold you while I tried to scribble in ovals on my voting ballot. She is always dressed to the nines. Always asks how I am. Runs miles with a running group every weekend. She is Catholic. She believes then, theoretically, in God, though I have no idea what she believes right now. I don't know what I would believe if I lost a child and then had to face my husband entering hospice care.

I have been something of an insomniac as of late. I lie awake thinking about Rich and Karen or about cancer in my own bones. I wonder if I've locked the door and I try to decide what I will wear the next day. I hear you cough in your crib and imagine you've stopped breathing. And my rational side keeps my body from getting up to check, but my mind doesn't stop, continues to play out the scene, finding your blue body, calling 911, calling my mother, finding the insurance card. What else would I take to the hospital? What would the realization of your death feel like? What would it be to have my mind simply freeze? I go on and on like this, not sleeping, filled with worry. Then thinking about God keeping track of the sparrows and the lilies being clothed and all that shit. Then I lie on my back and try to take deep breaths. I imagine the color lavender filling up my body. Then I remember that my cell phone probably needs to be charged.

Daddy and I watched King Lear last night. The version with Ian McKellen. Sir Ian was talking about the play, about the character of Lear in an interview after the movie. The play doesn't have a back story, he said, so I had to invent some things about King Lear. I decided that he'd been married twice. The first marriage produced Regan and Gonneril and ended--I don't know exactly--in divorce or the wife getting run over by a carriage, something like that. The second marriage was the love of his life. But that wife died giving birth to Cordelia. And so Lear raised Cordelia on his own. This is why they are so very close.

Then he talked about Lear's relationship to the gods. This extreme devotion to them at the beginning, the way he calls on them to curse his daughters, and the progression, throughout the play, to a kind of unbelief. A reliance instead on human relationships--friendship, love, filial connection (not obligation) to understand the truth of human existence.

I hadn't noticed this shift before, somehow, though I've now read the play a dozen times. I realize, though, that this is perhaps what makes it so devastatingly sad to me. That truth and love are knit up with unbelief, that human and divine are never reconciled, that they spiral away from each other and we are left only with what mortals can offer--jealousy and resentment and greed and deeply flawed offerings of love.

Writing well, acting well, can be a powerful practice in empathy. I have been trying to think about what it means to be Rich right now, what it means to be Karen. To really enter their fear and grief and pain. And I can't. They are, of course, not characters to be inhabited, but still I want to understand, want to know so I can share this walk in some small way. But I feel wooden, feel like if I let myself really imagine that, I would crumble. You are still so new. Your absence would be an abyss that I don't know that I could recover from.

Maybe this is why I practice death and disaster in my head every night. And why I want to remember today and every day. Your small finger pointing to the pickle car in "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," my cheek pressed to your temple so that I can smell, slightly, the banana and egg you had for lunch. The accumulation of detail as a defense against death. Or so you can remember me when I go.