Be Careful

[[[[ Please be careful. Be careful with how you handle these words. Be careful making judgments, be careful to listen. Because these words are my words and I am fragile. When you read, or reread, or just skim, or skip altogether or box up and scrutinize or open up to and embrace these words you are dealing with a piece of me, and I am delicate. Sensitive. I am a human being, not just a hand holding a pen, or a set of fingers, tapping gently on rattling keys.

But more important than I am, he is. And these words are his, also. In some sense, these words belong to him, although he will never read them. But in your eyes and in your mind these words will inevitably somehow reflect him; who he is. But know that he is much bigger than these words. I write about him because I love him, and I am so scared to write about him. Again because I love him. I realize my words are inadequate, insufficient to represent him. But I remember him and I want to continue to remember him. So I write about him. I just hope that I do not misrepresent him or his importance. I hope to be fair and gentle. Please try to do the same. Be careful with him. He is not just a piece of fiction. He once had soft skin and breathed lightly and laughed heartily.

I wonder if it is crude to even discuss him in this type of writing. It feels like it is a very impersonal and inadequate context. But I’m not sure that I can help myself. Perhaps that is why I ask you to proceed reading with caution, because I’m scared.

My assignment is to respond to a story. To consider the story, to attempt to find meaning in the story, and to attempt to articulate why I found that meaning in the story and in myself. This sort of assignment intimidates me. Because I want to respect stories, I want to be careful with authors. To some extent, objectifying a story is objectifying its author. I want my explorations of literature to be like my relationships with people: hopefully conducted with humility and respect.

This is particularly the case with the story I have chosen to respond to. I can’t ignore this story, perhaps because it seems to me to be so fragile. But its fragility is what intimidates me. I hope to be fair. Please be careful. ]]]]

Amy Hempel’s story, In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, is a piece narrated by a woman detailing (primarily) her interactions with her friend in a hospital. Her friend is terminally ill and she has traveled to visit her. The narrator recounts dialogue shared with her friend, observations of her friend, and her own thoughts and memories experienced while with her friend. Her writing seems to be very straight-forward and honest. She candidly reveals her concern for her friend, her fear of her friend’s death, and her own hesitations about seeing her friend. The piece concludes with the narrator remembering her friend briefly after she has passed away.

The honest tone to this story is perhaps what makes it so powerful. The woman narrator tells her story with intimate detail. Losing a close friend or family member is a painful reality that everyone has to, or will have to, face in his or her life. This story details this experience very directly and very personally. The observations and reflections of the narrator are profound and realistic. As a reader of this story it is easy to feel empathetic towards the narrator and to, to some minor degree, experience her loss. Experiencing loss, even second-hand, reminds us of our own mortality and the mortality of those in our lives and the grief, fear, and regret associated with losing our loved ones and, eventually, ourselves.

This story resonates with me deeply because I have very recently lost a good friend to a terminal illness. His absence in my life is still fresh and my grief for him is still real and the circumstances surrounding the time leading up to his death are very similar to those described by the narrator of this story concerning her friend. Many of the details of the story and the narrator’s internal thoughts distinctly reminded me of my own thoughts and the details of my interactions with my friend since he was diagnosed one year ago. Reading this story causes me to re-experience the fear and anticipation and grief of loss in a very real way. The details of the interactions of my memories and the text follow.

In the second sentence of the story the narrator recounts her friend asking her to share useless information. "Make it useless stuff or skip it." (29) I feel in this statement a sense of hopelessness and exhaustion. Sometimes when we are uncertain of the future and tired of battling (I believe this condition applies to both the narrator and her friend) it is easier to just speak superficially. It’s not that our words aren’t loaded (as are some of the ‘useless’ facts the narrator shares with her friend), it’s that we don’t have the energy or the optimism to articulate our meanings literally. Right after my friend, his name was Dustin, was diagnosed I visited him in the hospital. It was his second night there and although he was ‘well’ physically (as in the disease hadn’t begun to actually have any visible symptoms), he was being held at the hospital as a formality. I remember walking in the door of that room for the first time of walking into similar rooms and seeing him contained by that gigantic monster of a contraption that is a hospital bed; all white and stainless steel, tubes and wires and machines beeping and pulsing and throbbing around him. It felt so surreal, like I was watching my body watch his body in that sterile room, outside of myself. The feeling never quite wore off throughout all of my visits to Dustin. Our conversation often reflected this sense of surreality; we would talk about the dent in his truck or his recent (at the time) promotion at work, or my job (at the time) as a valet. "I drove a Maserati the other night." "Really?" Really. What does it matter? I could barely find I love you in my mouth, but the make and model of a sports car rolled off of my tongue so easily.

The narrator notes early on in her visit to her friend that they both are being watched by a camera, "the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers." (29) This observation of being watched and associating the experience with crime feels so appropriate in this story. Our reaction as humans to a crime is often anger or fear. The narrator reacts both ways in this story to what must seem like an injustice being done to her friend; she talks about being "scared to death," (31) of anger following denial as a state of coping (31), and of anger being stronger than fear. (35) The metaphor of a masked criminal coming into the hospital room and stealing life seems so appropriate in this sort of circumstance because we see life being taken and it makes no sense to us. I get the impression that the narrator doesn’t understand how or why something like this happens, which is exactly the way that I have felt. Why are kind-hearted, productive, young men and women being taken, sometimes so abruptly, almost always seemingly needlessly? It doesn’t seem right. Dustin was one of the best men that I knew. He was very loving, very kind, very patient, and he was committed to using his life to love his wife and to make the lives of other people better. Who or what is in charge of this, of his death? Who can I hold responsible? I want to hold someone responsible. I want to find the criminal. I want answers.

When her friend asks our narrator if she has anything else to tell her, anymore ‘useless’ facts, she notes to herself that, "For her I would always have something else." (29) Later on in the story, though, the narrator tells her friend that she has to leave and feels that she has failed. She writes explicitly, "I felt weak and small and failed." She feels an obligation to her friend. "I was supposed to offer something," she writes. (38) I can’t really express how deeply I empathize with these statements. Visiting Dustin I wanted nothing more than to be able to offer him something (a hug, a kiss, some magazines purchased in the gift store in the lobby) or say something (anything, what words could I have said?) that would be meaningful, that would be profound and mean something to him and give him some sort of hope and make him better (ideally). But beyond my company I really had very little to offer him. I’ve spoken already of my loss of words in his presence, and being intimidated as I was by his room and by the hospital staff filtering in and out constantly and of the huge bouquets of flowers (all I brought was the magazines) and the world outside of those huge floor-to-ceiling windows with Dustin in that bed in that little thin gown and him looking a little skinny now that I take a good look at him (I was scared to for the first several minutes) my presence in the room was small, I offered no hope through my body language. I was scared, I was angry. I was supposed to offer something. I had very little to give, but I would have given him anything.

When she accompanies her friend in wearing a face mask the narrator observes that they look, together, like "outlaws." (30) The fourth and last time I visited Dustin in the hospital it was for his wedding. Before he was diagnosed he and his fiancé had been planning to be married in only a few months. The wedding was postponed after his diagnoses as they anticipated him being too weak from treatment to be able to go through the ceremony. They rescheduled the wedding to a date a few months out, hoping that by then his treatment would be going well and he would have the energy to get married properly. After more complications with his illness and rescheduling the wedding again, and Dustin’s condition again taking a turn for the worse a few months later, Dustin and his bride-to-be decided to be married in the hospital courtyard. He was not allowed to leave the premises and technically not even allowed outside, however an exception was made due to the circumstances, but he would have to wear a mask constantly. I remember showing up in his room and helping dress his skinny frame in a rented tuxedo, him needing to sit down after putting on each garment for several minutes to regain his strength. He looked beautiful, out of that gown and in that sharp black and white ensemble, regardless of the fuzzy half-grapefruit mask on his face. I pushed him through the beige-carpeted halls in a wheelchair, both of us dressed in suits (I was a groomsman), slowly, carefully, telling him how excited I was for him. People stared, as they will do, and when I noticed their gazes I felt like he and I were alone, almost as if we were outlaws. I wondered if anyone else knew, if anyone else cared, if they had any idea at all how special this man was and how much he loved the woman he was about to marry and how scared we all were. Nobody understands the outlaws. Their eyes angered me. They didn’t deserve to look at him, in his tuxedo, his hair thinning and his face pale.

On my visits I would walk into Dustin’s room and he would smile, weakly, and tell me that he was glad that I was there. I would pull up one of those generic maroon padded chairs, with the curved plastic arms, next to the bed and kiss him on the forehead before sitting down in it and tell him that I was even more glad that I was there, and that I had missed him. I remember those smiles, they are burned into my memory. I held on to those smiles then, when I would leave the hospital from my visits and sit in my car in traffic on the way to work or home or wherever I was heading and wonder what Dustin was thinking, if he was scared, if he was nervous, if he felt loved (I sure hope that he felt loved, I always did) and I hold on to them now, the way the narrator in this story hung on to her friend’s laugh. "I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope." (32) With a sense of urgency and desolation, I hold on to the memory of those smiles.

When Dustin did smile, when I spoke with him and held his hand, somehow he felt far away from me. This mystery of life and death and sickness and health stood between us and although neither of us would mention it to the other it was apparent that we both felt it, and both couldn’t put our respective fingers on what it was to identify it and overcome it. It was all a part of the whole experience being so surreal; I was dying to connect with him yet somehow could not help but feel disconnected. I watched his mouth smile, as the narrator watched her friend’s mouth laugh. (33)

The narrator in the piece shares memories of her friend, memories of time in college and traveling together. The accessibility of these memories to the narrator make it seem almost as if she can do nothing but remember her friend. In recounting these stories from her past with her friend, the narrator notes that she "misses her already." (37) Watching Dustin lying in his hospital bed when I would visit always reminded me of him laying back on his bed at his house, his guitar on his lap, him looking up at the ceiling and moving his fingers up and down the neck. That image seemed so real to me, sitting next to him in his hospital room, that I always wanted to bring his guitar to him when I visited. I remember distinctly thinking that I would miss listening to him play guitar before he was even gone, and I caught myself, and I was ashamed. I was scared.

Nearing what would be the end of what seems to have been her only visit to her friend, the narrator tries to leave early, telling her friend that she needs to go home. (38) She doesn’t really elaborate on why in the immediate context of the passage, but it surely had something to do with the anger and fear that she was feeling. This is another element of this story that I think I understand. Although I wanted nothing more for Dustin while he was going through treatment than to offer him my support, it was always so difficult for me to visit him. Parking my car in the hospital parking lot was fine, but as I made my way up the sidewalk, examining the rows of windows on the side of the building trying to find his room, and would approach the silver and glass automatic doors to the hospital lobby, I would freeze. My stomach would knot up and my palms would get sweaty and I’d look around at the landscaped hospital lawns and feel a tremor in me. I’d push past it, pass through the doors and past the receptionist’s desk (I knew where I was going), and make it to the elevator and up four floors and down the hall to the fifth door on the right and I would slowly turn the door knob and make my way into the room. But it wasn’t easy, and I hated that it wasn’t. He was the one who was sick, what was my problem?

Finally the narrator reflects on grieving after her friend has passed. She continues telling in her piece a story that she had started telling to her friend while visiting in the hospital, before discontinuing the discourse as it was becoming heartbreaking. She tells of a mother chimp who had been taught sign language and who attempted to sign messages to her dead baby, asking only for a hug. She posits that perhaps then the chimp was fluent "in the language of grief." (40) I don’t know what I would say to Dustin if I was next to his body. I might make a joke, or tell him that I missed him, or I might ask him for a hug. A couple of nights ago I opened my coat closet for the first time in a week or two and noticed a green windbreaker hanging near the back that had belonged to Dustin. I couldn’t move, I just stood there with my hand on the handle of the closet door, staring at the jacket, thinking about the man that at one time had filled it. I didn’t know how to think about that jacket, and after several moments I closed the closet without taking out a coat, leaving Dustin’s windbreaker exactly where I had found it. And that’s the thing; I really don’t know what to think. About jackets and about the whole situation. I think about what I remember of his illness (as the narrator does), of the details I can include in telling the story (as the narrator does again), I think about his wife and how she must feel but it all feels very inadequate. I wish I could think more now. I think he deserves it, but I only have so few faculties and so little understanding.

I couldn’t ignore this story, In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, because, to some extent, it is my story. It is Dustin’s story. I understand it and it breaks my heart because it is honest, it is real, it is true.

[[[[ These are only pieces of my story of Dustin. Shards of broken pottery, slivers of split kenneling. And only fragments of a story that is only a fraction of who he was. He was so much more than words on paper and seemed even to be more than a man. Perhaps this world couldn’t contain him. But these words are still him, in that tiny sense I mentioned earlier, so please be careful. ]]]]