I remember as a kid sometimes wishing my father had died before I knew him better. I’d make shit up that would seem cherishable. A firefighter, or more often something just decent and quiet, a putterer, a factory worker. Someone really nice and kind of remote, for whom I’d been a daddy’s girl. And I’d fantasize of mourning that father terribly, missing him always, while my real one raged through the walls at my mother and broke shit and scared everyone. (There’s a theme around here somewhere.)
Sooner or later, the cable has got to go…expenses I can’t maintain now and used to live without (like food). But not yet. After all the cleaning and clearing and divesting and reassigning spaces/bedrooms and obliterating to rebuild activity, we’ve no energy left for more deciding/doing and it’s just as well. Sooner or later, the to-do list is done, and feel your losses is what you’ve got left to do. So while we still have cable, we’re watching this show, The Leftovers, about the sudden disappearance of a bunch of people, each one a loved one of somebody, and nobody knows what happened to them and nobody cares scientifically speaking. Which is good. Plotlinewise, I mean, because what the fuck difference would it make if they were abducted by aliens or eaten by a superfungus? Dead is dead, get over it we need the bed, right? Everyone is who is left(over), two years on, has decided: it meant something or it didn’t. Meaningful or random acts of loss, which would you prefer? You want to be run over by a car driven by a drunk driver or by a car that just came out of park and rolled downhill for no reason? God or no God? A minister character is dead set on proving that it was NOT the rapture, and thus NOT meaningful, in order to maintain faith in a future rapture in which there will be meaning. He goes about this by proving that all the people who disappeared were mostly assholes, or at least deeply imperfect, not “taken to heaven” thus. They were just people, who drank too much or spent too much or were mean to kittens. Or committed adultery. There is a wife character, who honors the dead by remembering the little things, gives speeches that include such things as sharing a bed with her husband while they both had the flu. At one point, the minister character informs the wife character that her husband had been cheating on her, with the pre-school teacher, sometimes at their house sometimes in hotels…… ……. And the wife character, who has put her life back together in pieces around honoring the memories of the little things, she leans forward, shoulders curling inward, for long long seconds as the camera hangs on her and she tries to breathe. Tries again. The minister character just doesn’t understand why the loss of NOTHING wouldn’t be a relief. Surely disillusionment is better – right? Then she didn’t really lose anything after all – right? The camera hangs on her as memory pours silently out the front of her face onto the floor, that her husband had noticed she re-used tinfoil thrifty-like and thought it was cute, and he hadn’t been real like she thought, and is gone too besides. Gone Gone.
Would I have actually preferred that Aaron die that day in a car crash on his way home, before the call came, before I knew? If you had asked me that day, I would have said no. For weeks of knowing, I still would have said no. But now, after the last bout of it – again - yes, yes I would. I would feel lucky to have buried him dead and now be honoring the memories of us instead of sweeping them off the floor like worthless trash.
(So I called a shrink.)
