A former coworker’s ex-wife, a woman 20 days older than me, died alone in her home of a fall this month. She was in excellent health - a marathoner and fitness enthusiast. She was home alone because the kids were with their dad; she was discovered a day or two later.
I didn’t know her well, and I’m not in close enough contact with her husband to reach out, which makes any reaction to the grief more personal, if typically uncomplicated. Unless you’re Clarice Lispector. Then it’s very complicated.
Clarice Lispector, from “The Hour of the Star”
I’m well into that milestone of middle age where people who’ve climbed the same ladder you have start falling off. I’m a pretty big NBA fan, but I was not familiar with Dejan Milojević, the Golden State Warriors assistant who recently died of a heart attack at age 46.
“A man who dies at 35 is at every point of his life a man who dies at 35,” wrote Moritz Heimann , a 19th Century German & Jewish essayist. The way an early death - or a life of absurd length - becomes becomes intrinsic to who you were, simply because it creates a narrative capper and for some evolutionarily fuzzy reason, humans love a narrative. The Heimann quote always stuck with me because of its odd tense — I wrote it down from a Walter Benjamin book, I think — implying that as with any cogent narrative, you always saw it coming.
(I’m Ben TG, the Andrew WK of sadness.)
On my drive home, I was enjoying myself. It’s Friday, I’ve got a weekend with my son ahead, I was playing “chonnchita” by Bassti, a breath mint of a song a friend sent me, thinking about a happy time in my married life when we got into pickling, I made pickled blueberries, and I learned that pickled blueberries on vanilla ice cream is literally the only time I like pickled anything. (I don’t know why we got into pickling.)
Then a guy in a Toyota Tundra and a Zissou-orange hat cut me off twice on S. 1st Street, and I rolled down my window to give him the bird, something I hadn’t done in 20 years. (I was a blackout drunk alcoholic for 16 of those years; there’s no way that’s true.) I didn’t even feel any anger towards him. I just wanted to feel the joy of flicking someone off who wronged me. I’m even planning to add it to my journal to share with my therapist as a reason to be proud of myself this week. After all, he could have killed someone! I was standing up for myself! I do wonder if its impact was blunted by the Peppa Pig Band-Aid on my middle finger.
But death is in the air. Over at The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio republished an essay about his son’s obsession with death, and I’m always taken aback at how easily my 6-year-old will state matter-of-factly that the dog died and she’s dead now, or that his mom, her boyfriend and he himself will all die someday, just like a character in a video game. Specifically the 2012 endless scroller “Canabalt”.
I once told my son this is what my dreams look like
He’s told me I’m going to live to 100, and when I reach triple-digits, I’ll become a giant and need a bigger house. I hope he’s right about the last part, since we need a second bathroom. I hope I don’t die alone.
Anyway, it’s the dead of winter. Even Texas has spent a few weeks beneath the basement gray skies of my Midwestern youth. It’s enough to turn us into Aki Kaurismäki alcoholics, so in keeping with the Nordic lands, here’s a Tomas Tranströmer poem.
Tomas Tranströmer, from “17 Poems”