Must be remembered (2019)

For years after my father died, I met people who took me aside to explain what a difference he made in their lives. Many of these were his patients. Some of them sent my mother notes in the days after he died. “Clint helped me hope when I was hopeless,” one patient wrote, “try again when I was defeated, and laugh at some of the ridiculous aspects of life. I am but one of many whose lives he helped unscramble, and I will never forget him.” Another remembered: “He was so committed to life—he helped me to value again things I was in danger of losing, even little things like noticing the crocuses just coming up. No person can do more for another than give back life . . .” What people said to me in person or wrote to my mother in these notes was also what I missed: His ability to help you value being alive.

Chemotherapy and radiation were such blunt instruments at the time. He stopped working once these treatments started, and then he was often not home. For weeks on end, or so it seemed, we only saw him in the hospital. Then he would reappear in our house. There he would be one day after school, sitting at the kitchen table, with a wig now and his clothes fitting ever more loosely. But it never felt like he returned. So weak and exhausted, so deeply preoccupied with the course of his disease, he could not reclaim his place among us. When he tried, success was brief—an eerie, half moment which gave point to what we had already lost. Then he disappeared again. Each return growing fainter, each absence lasting longer before another return even fainter than the one before.

My greatest loss was simple. I lost his friendship across a lifetime. This first loss seemed to have the greatest impact on me then, before embarking on my lifetime, but this wasn’t what shaped me most as a teenager. It was watching him be forgotten. So vital, so passionate, so present, yet he sank from sight as we learned to live without him. Life flowed above and below and all around his death, closing over him like water.

All of who he was and what he learned, my father expressed in the moment. His wit and wisdom was improvised—a reply to what you just said, a variation on what someone said before that, a response to the demand you were about to make of him. It was a performance piece. He was himself a performer. Think of the ladder against the motel railing or him imitating Mandy. All that depth of joy and understanding existed only in the exchange between you. It never happened the same way twice. You couldn’t return to it even when he was alive, but you could always return to him. But then to witness this tossed and scattered on the surface of the days and months and years following his death—that was the origin of my horror.

Why should anyone fear death? Lucretius asked. You won’t exist anymore so you can’t suffer. Why fear what you can’t suffer? And anyway, you didn’t exist once already. The oblivion that preceded life doesn’t bother you. Why fear the oblivion that follows? But what Lucretius doesn’t consider is the effort life requires. Before we are born—when reclining in Whitman’s phrase “by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors”—we haven’t yet started the work of living. And it was the hard work of living, the toil of becoming a particular person at a particular place and time, that impressed me as a teenager. I thought about my father. The effort it took to become who he was. I thought about myself. The effort it would take to become who I was. I could not accept that all that skill and understanding, so painstakingly acquired, would simply disappear.

In my grief and confusion, death seemed a failure on his part and so did being forgotten. Failed, forgotten, must be remembered. Must be remembered. But how? In those years when his death shaped and reshaped me every day I dreamed that I could rescue my father and compensate my mother for his loss. My grandiosity began as a gift idea—for her. I can’t do what you asked, but I can deliver on what you never expected. I can rescue who he was and what he learned, that wit and wisdom, before it finishes decaying on the drifting days.

This ambition, my interest in art and literature, intensified beneath the crushing weight of failure. What is chaos? It is an order you did not choose and do not welcome. Death was the orderly and expected result of malignant melanoma at the time. It didn’t surprise his surgeons. Rage and grief and confusion were predictable reactions to his death, intensified by my personality and my mother’s. But none of this was her order, the order we both craved and imagined, the order I could have restored if I could have done my duty.

The world is always beautiful. It is never a place we control for long. What we make beautiful, in the end, is what we control. Aesthetics is the appreciation of what someone else controls and how they control it. My aesthetic began in the chaos of loss. When I first dreamt of what I might write—when people first began acting and reacting in my imagination—I dreamt to reclaim the order I could not claim in life.

It is easy to dream. It is hard to start. In most parts of my life, as a friend at work describes me, I have a bias toward action. Like my mother, I want to start moving. I want to get things done. But I wasn’t this way about my writing. I was more like my grandfather, closing his eyes against the rabbit and returning to prayer in the woods. I prioritized my own internal conversation over any actions I could take. Long after I began imagining what I might write, I continued to find reasons not to start trying. I didn’t write easily. I didn’t write often, and everything I wrote disappointed me.

In those days before chain bookstores and then the internet, there was a store in New Haven—a cramped little store on the first floor of a house—that sold used paperbacks. It was called the Paperback Trader. You could bring in two paperbacks and trade them for one. You could also buy a paperback for a dollar or two. I would ride my bicycle there with a dozen books and return with six. Later, I drove my father’s old Jeep, and the books would slide around in the back with hay and broken branches and a bent screwdriver from the farm or maybe a saddle and bridle.

I preferred the Paperback Trader to the library because I could keep the books for as long as I wanted, and because it was only three rooms of shelves, small enough for browsing, but most of all because it reflected what people were actually reading. A person had made choices about each book there. Someone had bought it and read it and decided to trade it. As titles appeared and disappeared and appeared again on the shelves, you could feel the appeal, and I liked to imagine each reader. Curious about what held their attention, I also had an intense love for almost any kind of story. I brought home hardboiled detective novels in my stack of paperbacks as well as thrillers about spies, arms smugglers, and professional assassins. I read love stories set in New Haven and sweeping historical sagas about wars, immigration, and life on the frontier.

But after patronizing that store for a couple of years, usually the only kid in there, my choices started to change. I began to find other kinds of books on the shelves. Now more of the books sliding around in the back of the Jeep were literature. I found Jane Austen on those shelves and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, as well as what must be the worst book William Faulkner ever wrote. Once I brought home both War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the same stack. I was becoming intensely curious about which books people continued to read long after the author had died.

But college stunned me. Stunned by everything I didn’t know, I staggered through the first two years. Reading deeply and broadly still seemed like the path forward, but I couldn’t follow it. I remember raging at the books I couldn’t understand, like someone pounding on a locked gate. I burned my copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in frustration. I still had the same literary curiosity, but these were no longer books I could just find on the shelf and read. I needed to work at reading them, and I couldn’t make myself do that work. I needed skills and a certain amount of knowledge to read them, and I didn’t have either.

An expository writing teacher opened the gate. He used to wait for me with four sharpened yellow pencils lined up like darts next to the page I had written the night before. Every point would be dull by the time we finished talking. Word by word and phrase by phrase, he taught me the mechanics of sentences and paragraphs in a way no one else had. Learning to write taught me to think, and this unlocked the texts I had not been able to understand. I bought another copy of The Faerie Queene, which I read without burning. Certain authors remained excruciatingly difficult while others—Emerson in particular—seemed like an uncle I had known all my life. I drove myself to read more and learn more. When each semester started, I complained about the course catalog. There were never enough of the classes I wanted to take, and my friends used to mock my intensity. After a rant one night at dinner, someone drew a cartoon and started a weekly series named after me.

cartoon by Michael Mellor

The project of being remembered is the task of creating something different. We read certain people across many generations because they offer something no one else does. But the more I learned, the more impossible it seemed that I would ever be remembered. So much had been said already, and so very well, and where was there sunlight left for me? I was hardly writing anything but academic essays. Whatever else I wrote—stories and poems—seemed spindly and feeble, like a seedling beneath the canopy of gigantic, thriving trees.

All this happened a few hundred yards from the Paperback Trader and a mile from the house where I grew up. I still drove the Jeep. My mother saw it parked all over downtown New Haven, the windshield covered in parking tickets which I never paid. My father’s friends used to stop me on the sidewalk and ask about my classes. I went to the same barber I had used since before my father died, and I would appear at home, usually without warning, to watch television with Emily.

And so my mother watched me graduate in the same town where she raised her children and lost her husband. In line for my diploma, I fidgeted and paced, continually checking my watch, because the ceremony was dragging on and I wanted to catch a train to Chicago. The ceremony ended and the two of us ran for her car and she rushed me to the train station. Wiggling out of a suit and tie in the back seat, I left the diploma on the passenger seat beside her. I finished changing as we flew into the parking lot. The car was still rolling when I grabbed my suitcase and opened my door and thanked her for my college education. Then I sprinted to the train. She went directly home and sat down at a typewriter.

May 28 1984

(15 minutes after you barely made the 4:00 train to NYC and then Chicago)

Dear Doug:

I do not feel I adequately responded to your thank you for your years at Yale; it took a while to sort out what I wanted to respond.

You are certainly most everlastingly welcome for any part of it for which I was responsible.

I have found myself wishing mightily that Daddy could have been around this weekend—for all the sentimental reasons you can imagine. I have truly missed his perspective throughout your (siblings included) adolescence—probably almost as much as you have! I know he would have been as proud and tearful as I was (am) at the conferring upon you of all those Rights and Responsibilities of a Yale degree. He would likewise be proud—as I am—of your seriousness of purpose, standards to strive for, and your ability to set out after those standards in a progressive, systematic way.

I think he would be saddened only by the effects his death had on you—the anger, the bereavement, the isolation and aloneness that seem to have become a part of you. Obviously they sadden me also. Neither of us knew how to soften the impending blow when it was imminent, and certainly I didn’t after it had fallen. I only hope that as you chug along, you will not let your isolating-alone tendencies get too much in the way of weaving the network of contacts—personal and professional—that you will most certainly be needing.

I love you, and I want you to go off into the world prepared for whatever. My job is nearly done, but in a way it is never done as long as I am competent and functional. You and your siblings are all in a kind of no man’s zone now, where my customary control of things is no more . . . nor is it wanted or needed . . . . but no one is yet “home safe” to the other side of the zone. Everyone seems to be on their way to getting across, but not yet landed. If there is any way I can help, you know I will.

In any event, keep up the steady pull, be a little joyful as much as possible, have the grandest of perspective—and humor and the very best of luck . . .

. . . and once again, you: are most welcome!

Love,

Ma

Her letter was waiting in an envelope on top of my diploma when I came home. I am sure I read it quickly and carelessly at the time, maybe even embarrassed or at least self-conscious. She never talked this way and had never written to me like this before. Now I imagine her at the typewriter in the back of our house, overlooking the garden, reflecting on the whole enterprise of being a parent. Now her letter makes me cry. I stand at the same stage of parenthood she did then, and I have these same thoughts about my children—the mixture of pride and regret, the sense of them being out of my control but not safe to some other side, a job done but not done but finished nevertheless.

Scrambling out of the car at the train station and racing down the tunnel between the tracks felt like a launch. I told myself I was starting. Here was my beginning. But I still wasn’t doing what I dreamed. When you carry a dream for that long, you identify more with the fantasy than any reality. Just the vision of success—of myself writing something and being remembered somehow—had become a comfort and a companion. Actually pursuing the dream presented an enormous psychic risk. I might succeed. But I might not. And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the reality and I wouldn’t have the dream either.