Going On

I have eased my way east from New Hampshire to where my life in Maine is usually. I’ve walked into my office for the first time, and now a second. I have put meetings and projects on calendars, emailed my student employees. Overall, I feel a like a lowly-evolved sea creature, living in some other species’ larger abandoned shell. I’ve visited the storage unit that Hannah encouraged me to rent in June when the house I was living in was being sold and I had a grand plan of taking advantage of my lack of summer responsibilities to go travel in Scotland for a month. She helped convince me it was okay to be a gypsy for a while, that I wasn’t a screw-up to not be buying houses and having babies and getting married the way everyone else seems to, that it was a kind of awesome to do what I wanted to do, even if it was weird and scared me a little to give up the façade of being more conventional.

I lasted two minutes at the storage unit before I burst into tears and came home to the friends I am staying with. Everything is there, just as I left it, which doesn’t make sense to me. How do my possessions still sit in the boxes, how has my hair not turned pure white, how is the world still in brilliant color, how come everything has not stopped?

Because it does not. 

My mother’ friends showed up, early in the loss of Hannah, with the words from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot:” I can’t go on, I will go on. This is what I have been saying to myself for days, because I do not want to go on in a world without my sister, but I also cannot seem to help that every day shows up and we get through them. I have no death wish—I love the world and my people with a ferocity equal to Hannah’s—but I resent the days that pile up between a world with Hannah, and the world without. I am stunned and annoyed that I can and that I will, almost without my acting one way or another. It’s like being pulled by the tide, no matter how hard I sink my feet into the soupy sand and try to stay. “I can’t go on,” says the petulant tantrum. “I will go on,” says the quieter wisdom, resigned to the obvious forces of biology and the spinning earth and the bureaucratic demands of living through a close death.

The Beckett words work for me. Perhaps they would not for another. People mean well, in all the things they say to the bereaved. Mostly, I try, very hard, to not listen to the words but to the sentiment behind the words that people give me. After all, there are very few things that can be said that give comfort. To say anything is something, to say something valuable is a gift. 

In those many words, some people have complimented my and my family’s grace and fortitude, our strength, our willingness to share the different sides of Hannah we all knew with those who knew other facets of our best person. I am not saying this to brag—I feel neither strong nor graceful, and I don’t want to be either, because those words give the false impression that I am stoically holding my shit together, that any of us are okay. I contemplated curling up in fetal position in the grocery store today. I want to be catatonically sobbing in a corner with Hannah’s dog, because that is how I feel inside. That we can get through anything is because we are hollow and numb, not because we are resilient. I would rather not be resilient than have come to it like this. I am not thoughtfully sharing my sister, I am bleeding out and some people are close enough to be splashed and learn more about who I love. I find myself wary to receive the love and care of others, because I am afraid that where they are soft, I am raw and feral and may accidentally bite with acidic teeth into the kindness they offer, and I'll drive them away and be even more alone. I am tired. I am tired of carrying a gray ache in my chest that I am afraid will both never or ever lessen. I am tired because I do not want to wake up another day without her. I am tired and cannot sleep while memories of Hannah crowd my head and I cannot understand how all that she was, mentally and physically, is so molecularly reconfigured as to be unrecognizable. When we were little kids, we had bowl cuts and put tights on our heads to pretend we had long beautiful braids for playing dress up. She fell off her bike when she was ten and skinned her chin and cheek so badly we thought her freckles might not come back in that patch. They did. She had one freckle in the exact center of the tip of her nose. Her smile was radiant, and the towel Mom put under her head to catch Hannah’s drool the first miserable night with her braces and headgear was moss-green. The week before Emily's wedding we stacked firewood and danced in the yard to cheesy pop music and I brushed bark out of her hair and told her to take a shower and she laughed. And all of that…I deflate like a balloon at the thought of what is gone and that I have no idea where she is gone to. 

I feel fragile, knowing that, really, any of us are alive by luck alone—that we can go from life to memory in the blink of an eye, the snuff of a candle. Not very many years ago, Hannah visited me in the New Hampshire mountain town I lived in. It was winter, and the house was full of some raggedy collection of the mountain rats who are some of the dearest friends of my life. We were talking that night about the Holocaust and some theory that maybe a deep combination of grit and soul was in those who were able to survive, versus those who did not.

Hannah, ever the smartest person in the room, called bullshit. Plenty of the people who perished had the same grit and soul and fight, she said, but they were on the train that went to straight to the chambers, they were shot in the head as they tried to run or as they were trapped in a van, they were simply not in circumstances that would allow their survivor gene to shine. This may have been the first time I heard her articulate something she came to often say: “expect all things from all people.” It's either the most inspirational or the most cynical way to look at fellow humans, both the ones you know and humanity on a conceptual level. I think she knew enough to mean it all ways.

It is that luck, that bad luck, that randomness that flies in the face of so much of the insufficiency of words trying to bring comfort and peace around death and grief. She died for a reason, but it was a geologic reason, relating to weather and pressure and balance and time and erosion and gravity. I am not obstinately refusing to see cosmic sense or deep meaning in her death—there simply is none. It was bad luck, which doesn’t mean that any of us deceptively fragile little dolls wandering the earth have anything other than good luck, at the moment. If humans survived on an alchemy of grit and will to live, I would not be writing this tonight, because I would be talking to Hannah about seals and 100 mile races and how Saco's swimmies were today. Instead, there was the worst luck, and here most of us are.

And all we can do with our current luck is go on, even as my heart lies panting on the floor of grocery stores and storage units, and as the sun rises and sets, tides ebb and flow, and time that I do not want to pass, passes. I know there will be a time when I jump back into life with some fevered idea to live as much like Hannah as possible—to run all the places, hike all the trails, ski all the mountains, pat all the dogs, and I am looking bittersweetly forward to that renaissance of wonder—but for now, simply going on is as much as I can handle.