Alexandria

Emmy Lou Harris, singing the song the song that sustained me through what has been, and likely will always be, my one and only stay on a psych ward, twenty-five years ago:

Some of us are lucky, and get fully better from such things, and so have I, twenty-five years later, and medication free for nearly that long. Others, like most of the people I know through Joel’s support group, don’t see such remission.

A little over five years ago, I sat in a hospital, waiting for Joel to get an angiogram that would tell us what might be wrong with his heart (it’s a congenital narrowing of a coronary artery, for which he needs to take medicines that keep his blood pressure and cholesterol in narrower bounds than those permitted the rest of us), and worrying that I’d lose him as well as Dad. It was the first year I’d see Dad’s birthday without Dad; yesterday was the fifth time Dad’s birthday passed without his being alive. Brian Sayre died the day after Dad’s birthday, so these anniversaries fall in close proximity (just a few days after that anniversary of more national significance – the one that now matters so much, but that, by the end of my life, will be noticed by younger people as faintly as most people now notice December 7th, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor). It’s now exactly twenty-five years since Brian died.

At the time Brian died, Madge Seaver, an older member of Palo Alto Friends Meeting who had recently lost her husband, lent me a book titled In the Midst of Winter: Selections from the Literature of Mourning. One of the poems I remember from that book was by a woman who, like myself, had lost to an accident a man she loved when she was about college age, and was now looking back on his death decades later, when she was perhaps old enough to be the mother of a man the age he’d been at his death. I remember a line that went something like, “how I wanted the whole world to die, once you were dead.”

So, now I’m that woman. If life had gone a little differently, if all my daydreams from when we were together had come true, Brian and I might have a child just about the age we were then, the age at which he actually died. Oh, probably not. Most such early relationships end, whether you stay friends or not. But I’m technically old enough to have that child.

It’s strange to me, in some ways, that Brian’s death was so much more devastating for me than Dad’s. After all, I only knew Brian for two and a half years, and Dad for all my life. Dad was the first person I always turned to for career and financial advice (Mom’s a good person to talk to about these things, too, but she worked in academia, while Dad had the corporate computer field career), and of course there are so many other things, shared songs, childhood games. I wonder sometimes whether I was just that much stronger by the time Dad died; will I survive Joel’s death (and he’ll almost certainly die before me) as well? Or will I fall apart, then, as I did when Brian died?

But the other part is, when Dad died, after seven years of cancer, there wasn’t much left unresolved between us. His life ended, to my mind way too soon (he wasn’t much over 70), but still with its full arc. Brian died just as we were reconciling after I’d broken up with him, and I will never be sure, even now, whether we were getting back together as friends or as lovers. I can remember some of those last times with him: Brian standing by the side of the road, his arms open, to greet me for the first time in months, Brian on the phone, talking with me about Eli Wiesel’s Night, Brian driving me to the park, telling me about a coworker who was all wrapped up in her baby boy, and he could see why (and I’m thinking, but not quite able to ask, would you want a child, Brian?), Brian up with me in my apartment, after the party, and we’re on the couch, and I’ve put my head in his lap. And I should perhaps be able to tell, really, on what terms he wanted me back in his life. I could tell the story either way, since I’m the one who lived, and there’s no one left to contradict me.

In fact, though, I don’t know, and never will. For Dad, I know just where I stood, and was back just a couple of weeks before he died, to trade a few last songs, a few last I love yous, and get the real story of how Uncle George lost his hand in the Greek Civil War that followed World War II. For Brian, there’s simply a memory of a short guy with striking blond hair, different colored eyes, and one of the most distinctive laughs I’ve ever heard, with whom I once sat up all night talking about the Bible and Alan Watts, and who was one of the students most active in pushing environmental issues and peace education at Stanford.