Someone important to me is dying as I type this. She is the mother of my best friend, and I have spent the last few days in vigil with her family as she approaches death. It is a hard journey to bear witness to.
There is also something deeply right about it, a beauty that I don’t think I would have been able to perceive before I moved to Mexico. In that in-between space, the passing minutes fall like marbles against our skin, not painful but relentless, soft bumps saying, each one, “this moment is precious,” “this moment we’re alive,” “you’ll never get me back.” Our skin becomes numb, counting breaths and gasps becomes repetitive. Here in the mouth of death, we worry about our bladders, our calorie counts, our unanswered emails. Grief hits like a tide, and when it recedes, it leaves our trivial concerns wriggling in the sand like stranded fish.
And then her eyes move and a gasp after three seconds of breathlessness catches us like a hook, and we realize that the person passing this time with us has gone just a little further away.
We die in pieces. I watched it happen to my puppy as she got sicker. Her enthusiasm, her bark, her game of gripping the broom when I swept: they each died by marble drop, until eventually she had nothing left but her last heartbeat, the shape of her emaciated body, its imprint on the earth.
I know that this will happen to me and to everybody I love. I find it slippery to contemplate sometimes, a sort of error message issued by my profoundly solipsistic brain, incapable of believing in a universe that does not require its own perception of it.
My dad was like that, now that I think about it. He did not allow for the existence of any realities but those he had currently dreamed into existence. No matter how far his realities differed from our own senses, his remained the true states, the imperceptible reality. In fact, the more his view differed from our perception, the more divinely inspired he proved himself to be. Our only measure of spiritual self-worth was the degree to which we had convinced ourselves to believe in his lies that day.
But death is not a lie, and we are a part of the universe with or without the ability to perceive it. We are tiny miracles before our births and after our deaths and in that bubble of time in which our consciousness suds itself into astonished selfhood.
I was just reading about new evidence accumulating that might point to a different understanding of dark energy. Instead of it being lambda, the cosmological constant representing the fundamental energy of the vacuum, which is the current best understanding, it might actually be the leftover scalar field from inflation, very slowly “thawing,”—possibly all the way to zero or a negative value. In that case, after untold billions of years of expansion, the universe would slowly begin to coalesce again. All of the light and matter that had passed beyond our event horizon of perception would come hurtling back inside, telling us stories of where it had traveled and who it had seen—all of the uncounted variations of our selves and our stars that might exist in the reaches of an unbounded universe. Everything we had once been or could be would eventually shrink into a space so tight and dense we would all touch one another, illuminated in the timeless eternity of light.
In the meantime, the sun keeps going and coming, like it has some pressing business elsewhere but is trying to squeeze us in. I’m feeling my heart breaking, but I’m not sure when or where or which version of me is grasping broken glass. Sitting in this kitchen is like sitting in the heart of time. There’s the computer where my friend and I spent hours chatting over AOL with that law student who had no business flirting with her. Here’s the desk where I always saw her mother working quietly, glasses on her nose. She never had much need to make conversation, which I appreciated. I was constipated with resentment back then. I had so little room for anyone else. She must have known some of it, must have recognized that feral edge to my laughter. Maybe the most astonishing about her was that she knew I was safe even before I did. She trusted me before I knew I could be trusted. This kitchen is filled with her, filled with the grace of her, even as the sun goes down.
Thank you for reading A stranger comes home. I’ve had a hiatus for a number of reasons, one of which is the subject of this essay. But I’m back and will now be posting regularly.
All my love to you. I've sat both my parents' deathbeds and it's the most terrible and beautiful thing we can go through. Very hard to describe what it's like to those who haven't done it. A long, long vigil. A sacred watchfulness.