Fragments

Lessons in Mortality

I see the past two years of my life in cognitive fragments. I’d say emotional fragments but that would be less accurate; the emotional undercurrent is spastic and wild throughout. It’s the mental puzzle pieces that seem to jig and jag about, like heated tectonic plates slowly moving apart or towards each other, sometimes erupting into valleys or mountains, sometimes simply shaking the earth of my psychic realm.

I see myself in 2019, Christmastime, late December, at my uncle’s apartment on Beverley in Venice Beach, California. Then at my folks’ in Ojai, 90 miles north, where I grew up. I sense the usual, familiar feelings of warm love and freedom mixed with unceasing ressentiment towards a mother who cannot see me the way I’ve always wanted to be seen. A father who is detached and glossy, confusing and apart. I feel myself driving along East Ojai Avenue, passing hundreds of orange trees, smelling that sharp citrus scent, eyeing the snow-capped Topa Topa Mountains. I feel that serene, calming, nostalgic sensation of being Home, the town I was raised in, the town I started toying with trouble in, first with punk rock, then with alcohol, then with girls, then with fast cars, then with drugs.

Flash-forward to March, 2020. I’m back in New York City. Manhattan. East Harlem, 130th and 5th Avenue. Winter has passed; spring is here again. I have lived in The Big Apple for one chaotic year. One year of Small’s jazz club and The Comedy Cellar and Café Reggio on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and hanging out at Washington Square Park. Going to Broadway plays and seeing art at the MET.

Pandemic. The first days and weeks—the slow, shocking revelation that we are entering a sort of permanent night. The difference between shadow and light. Alone, for days, weeks, months. Writing. Reading voraciously. Walks around the hood in Harlem, along 5th Avenue or else west, down Lenox. Trudging down to 110th Street, to the northernmost part of Central Park, circling The Meer, listening to Johnny Cash’s elegiac version of the song Hurt. The clanging of pots and pans outside of Manhattan windows throughout the summer of 2020, celebrating frontline hospital workers. Overflowing ICUs, ventilators, families saying goodbye to loved ones via cellphone. Tragedy at almost cartoonish, caricature-like levels. Sleeping half the day. Grotesque heat, humidity. No work. Depression. Eating horribly. Sugar sugar sugar. Lonely lonely lonely. Spiritual collapse. The feel, the edges of death, of human dissolution.

Then the breaking of a lease, a move from Harlem to Lenox Hill in the Upper East Side, on East 70th between First and York. In Harlem, as the Pandemic worsened and hit local families harder, and after George Floyd was murdered, I became The Enemy. I was white. Privileged. A gentrifier. I was chased, spat at, cursed, followed, assaulted. Two men broke into my building and held up a tenant at gunpoint one night at three am. I moved.

More walks, now around East 70th. I see me walking north up York and entering Carl Schurz Park on 84th, moving at a brisk pace along the frigid East River, seeing Roosevelt Island across the water. To the north I see Ward’s Island, to the south I see Brooklyn. Cars rage along FDR nearby. I’d walk for miles and miles. I started getting deeply into running, which I began doing all over the city. At one point I ran 28 miles over the course of five hours, Manhattan passing in a blur of sonic and physical chaos as my machine-body pumped and pumped and pumped. No more trains. (Unsafe during Covid.) Just walk and run and write and read and survive. Zoom calls with my parents every couple weeks. A depth of loneliness and silence which seemed incomprehensible. Why was I here, in New York City? I’d come here for writing, creative inspiration, Big Publishing, agents, connections. But that was all gone now. The city was a mostly empty, urban desert.

In late May 2021, I get a call from my distraught mother, in tears, saying that my 16-year-old niece—my older half-sister’s kid—had tried to kill herself. She drove her father’s car ninety miles per hour into a palm tree in the middle of the night. She had survived, but she was in bad condition, intubated and with a broken pelvis, at Children’s Hospital in West Hollywood. I pictured her, the sweet kid I’d known all her life, the kid I’d played basketball with every Christmas season except for this past one, due to Covid. I pictured her thin, long blond hair; her innocent, bright blue eyes. How?

I flew to California in early June, 2021 for the first time since I’d returned from California in late December, 2019. I hadn’t seen family in eighteen months. I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law in Thousand Oaks for two weeks. I helped out, driving my 14-year-old nephew to football practice, playing with the new puppy in the backyard. I saw my niece half a dozen times in the hospital. She wanted to live, she said. She’d meant to leave us, she admitted, but now she wanted to live.

Next it was two weeks with my folks at their new house in Santa Barbara, where they’d moved in the middle of the Pandemic. They’d lived for thirty years in Ojai. It’s where I’d grown up; where everything had come together and then changed. It’s where I’d consumed my deepest desires, had held my hardest secrets. It’s where the hot flame of my youth had raged up. But, afraid of the recent fires in town, and wanting to whittle down the acreage and square footage (seeing as it was solely my parents and their two dogs), they chose Santa Barbara, an hour north, coastal, where my mother volunteered, and where she had close friends. My father followed her wherever she wanted to go. Mom had always been the energy which moved their union. Just like me in my own last serious relationship, which had ended on the first day of 2018, the day after I turned 35.

Finally, it was a trip after two weeks with Mom and Dad up north along U.S. Highway 101 to The Bay Area, where, before New York, I’d lived for a decade. I’d moved there in 2008, with a red-haired, pale-faced, freckled Irish woman I’d fallen for in San Diego. We had lived in San Francisco and then broken up. I moved to various parts of Oakland. In 2013 I met Sara and we fell for each other. Now, I stayed at an Air BnB in West Berkeley. It was lonely but in a good way. It was warm during the days, cool and foggy in the mornings. I stayed a block from Fourth Street, and I often found myself strolling down there to sit outside at the Peet’s Coffee and write or watch the people pass by.

I got the second phone call from my mother out of the blue around one pm on a random Wednesday in July. She was distraught and emotional just like before. Could it be my niece? She was still in the hospital…what could have happened? Then my mom said these words: Your father went to the doctor. He has a tumor. In his lungs. Cancer. Stage four. I remember my eyes getting blurry, staring at my open laptop, the prose I’d just written still there on the white glowing screen. This is what it’s like when your life gets turned upside down—you’re finished writing and you’re sitting on the couch in your Air BnB and it’s summer in Berkeley and everything is just fine. And then. Boom.

I see myself going back to my parents’ house, a week before my time at the Air BnB was up. Dad had a cough. He was tired. He suddenly looked 75; for the first time in my life I thought of him as being old. I realized how much of a pillar he’d been all my life; not an emotional one but a financial and figurative one. The two pillars of my mother and my father; those pillars were supposed to stand tall and strong for millennia.

Next were the months filled with doctors and nurses and hospitals and acute rehab, the final diagnosis of not lung cancer, which we’d initially assumed, but stage-four Melanoma. Medications. Fatigue. It was, emotionally-speaking, back to Covid, back to March, April, May 2020. That slow, syrupy fatigue; the bizarre glimmer of slow/fast time; everything blurry and not quite normal. Then the cancer spreading to his brain. Surgery. Chemo infusions. My father sleeping much of the day.

What would happen to me? I wondered selfishly. Would I stay here indefinitely? Would I leave New York? Would my literary dreams be cracked open? Would I go back to Manhattan, abandoning my father? The opposite of nostalgia: Ripe, hard, futuristic panic.

The chemo worked…too well. Dad developed a very rare neurological condition called Myasthenia Gravis. He stopped being able to swallow (literally). He could barely see (his eyes were almost closed shut). His voice became garbled and nasal. He slept often. We took him back to the hospital. He got a peg-tube inserted into his stomach and we fed him via liquid food. He lost weight, a lot of it. His lower lip sagged which made him drool. He struggled with diarrhea. They threw every med they could think of at him. Mestonin. Rituxan. Penicillin. Diflucan. Flomax. We did Barium swallow tests. Plasmapheresis blood treatments. Solaris infusions. Nothing worked. He became more and more physically tender and thin and unsteady. He used a walker, a cane. He looked not old now but ancient, as if an old man from classical antiquity somehow existing in the modern world.

I left my apartment in New York. My landlord let me out of the lease. Friends packed my possessions and shipped them. I didn’t even fly back. It all happened remotely. I found a little studio above a house’s garage in Santa Barbara.

It's now 2022. I am almost forty. Time passes like brutality, slow and then in short, fast, nasty bursts. Time is a wicked, cruel thing. But at least it’s consistent. I have been in California for nine months now. I’d originally left my apartment on East 70th, in early June, thinking I’d be back by August, maybe early September. It is now March. My father is most certainly dying. We all are, as Camus would point out. Nobody—least of all myself—ever expected me to take up this duty. But you never know until you’re in the situation. You never know what you’re capable of until you’re in it.

My mother carries a heavy load, emotionally, spiritually, practically. She is watching the man she has been with for almost half a century crumble and fall to pieces, like the late Roman Empire.

I do not know what comes next or why. Maybe I’ll travel, once Covid is at last under control. I am weak, as a son, as a man, as a human. Flawed as nothing else can be. A rusty, confused sense of love. A broken heart. A zigzagging sense of self. A wayward life path. A freedom I do not yet know how to handle.

But there it is. That elusive, untouchable glass separating life from non-life; the known from the unknown; the shadow from the light. I am aware of myself, of my limitations and desires and fears. I want only to live.

And I am still alive.  

*Note: This piece was written in March, 2022. My father is now doing much, much better, thankfully. For a while we thought we were going to lose him but then he began to improve. Now, September, 2022, he is more or less the best he’s been since he first started showing symptoms of the cancer in July, 2021. Life is a mystery!