Wherein I challenge Ben Gibbard and Sarah to an Honor Duel

For the last few weeks, I’ve tried to return to poetry, to capture artfully the January I spent in frozen British Columbia watching Dorothy Unger die.

Art for that January is proving elusive, and I feel some shame for that; her family has turned to books of Orr, or Cockburn lyrics, or taken to writing themselves, to process through the heartache and the void they feel and I, the supposed English lit kid, all I’ve got is Christian de Neuvillette mumbles repeating “this is weird,” “we drove to the hospital,” “I love you.” It feels a cruelty. Crueler still, I find myself rejecting receipt of the art that is providing balm and biting a hole in my lip not to speak the rejection; “no,” I want to say, “no. I don’t think that’s the truth of this at all…”

I know that I’d be wrong to say it and so I don’t. I’m no one to state the truth of feeling and art for anyone else and multiple truths can be spun of the same events given separate souls doing the spinning. I think, though, that I’ve come back with the strong desire to defend voids and empty spaces and the art of blank walls. I’ve come back angry at the plays, and the monuments, and the memories of key moments.  I’ve come back wanting to be the only defender of waiting rooms there ever was.

I’m not sure I’ve ever spent so much energy, time, heartache, argument, passion, focused attention, or pathos doing nothing as that which I spent in January 2022. That statement will return an argument from my family and my therapists of the list of things I did to serve but you, stranger behind the digit wall, you’re best equipped to understand what I mean, I think, unimpacted as you were. The nothing that I did, that I committed myself to so vigorously and entirely, is quite literal, and, likely, most so to you.

“We drove to the hospital.” That’s the poetic refrain I eventually settled on in the only poem that almost got done before the “delete” key killed it too. I gave it 50+ repeats attempting to relay both the volume of such journeys and their emotional weight.

Here are the facts non-artfully:

• I drove more than 500 miles to get to British Columbia.
• In the town in which we stayed, literally everything is 7 minutes away from everything else on Google maps, except the hospital and my lodging which was only 5 (2.6km/1.6 miles).
• I set my trip odometer before leaving on the journey and found nearly 1200 miles on it before the return trip.
• We drove an hour to even more of a mountain town for respite a few times, so you can shave off maybe 130 miles from my total. We’ll say 200 miles for easy math.
• 500 miles remain.
  • 312+ there and backs to the hospital or in service of its goings-on in four weeks.

I can’t find a number for the emotional value, and this is one of those sad gaps between humans that art does best at filling but always remains unfilled anyway. It’s that “we can’t know each other’s experience of color” thing again.

Even if you care, if you can and will relate losses you’ve experienced, or your loneliness, or your anxiety at serving those you feel responsible for, or the strange sort of quiet horror you experience wrapping the corpse of a person you love in a too old blanket, to mine, you can’t possibly know, and I cannot convey, the tone and hue of those things for me. The night she died, there were four of us in the room, reacting very differently, and though we could marginally guess that “sad” was how we were all feeling, the range of response from barbaric yawps toward ether to silence to thumbs up over Zoom calls to human puddles of tears begets the reality that we weren’t feeling altogether the same thing either.

Odder still, there was no earthquake, no meteor. Several human beings to whom I bear the greatest love underwent a truly natural true disaster. You’ve endured it too, if you’ve lost those you love. Some, not real, blackhole hovers briefly in a benign space and sucks out animation and, strangely, leaves mostly survivors. It is the natural disaster not to make the news. The world outside that benign space moves on oblivious until someone makes a Facebook post. Neighbors sleep and play and fuck and fight and you can’t hear them. Deer and rabbit roam the snow drifts seeking midnight snacks. Long-haul truckers are making their way to Ottawa. Stores open in the morning.

Each of those 300+ drives had that disaster in mind, either because it was coming or had just passed. At each location, there were either chairs to sit in or tasks to perform (physical manipulations of a failing body, items to acquire, additional chairs to hunt, doctors to hold accountable, note systems to build and notes to take.) Each of those chairs and tasks had the disaster in mind. Some hope, too:  hope for more time, for approvals to do things that might help, that this day, at least, would be an easy day. This is the hallmark of the waiting room.

On a normal day, sitting with your father and lover and sibling in a living room is a joy. On the surface, there is no waiting. The sitting in the room is the activity itself and you put yourself into it with whatever amount of gusto is available to you and you have the time that you have. It’s 500+ miles to the pacific coast redwoods, and I’ve driven there with a full and anticipatory heart, dread-less, to seek peace. How many of us a day go to places full of waiting to sit and chat and wait for someone literally called a waiter to bring us what we hope will be delicious, and these are somehow not waiting rooms.

I think this might illuminate what makes our cultural understanding of a waiting room different from other rooms: certain types and amounts of dread. I pose this, then: what is the difference in dread between a first date, a first date very late and not texting, and what is certain to be a last date? These are all filled with peril and angst of different qualities and volumes, and as far as I can tell, they display a spectrum of waiting. I’m nervous you may be a scumbag but I’m excited to see you; I wait and ruminate around my own effectivity and am excited for your loveliness. The angst dissipates and transforms to joy. I’ve waited so long now that I am certain I have fooled myself and my excitement and angst both turn to pain and toil. I dread what is to come fully, from the moment we’ve chosen the ground; there is hope, maybe, of repair, but there shall be none, and I know it, and so all is endurance, all waiting.

At different points on this spectrum the restaurant will turn into a waiting room, I think. We will hold that room with unique significance thereafter as the place that we waited, tied to the axe that fell or did not fall. It is likely we will lament or celebrate how much time we spent there, sitting, gabbing, doubting ourselves. Of course, not all waiting rooms are filled full of dread, but they’ve all a bit of it, and are all filled with some sort of ellipses. They aren’t the thing at hand on purpose; they get us from here to there. I showed up for my driver’s license and to drive, not to sit here waiting for one, not driving.

So, when I say that every one of the 300+ drives I made in January turned my truck, formerly a beacon of power and freedom in the truest American way, into a sullen, wet-sock-smelling waiting room, I think I am accurate. Each living room, each bedroom, each grocery store, each eatery, each meter of sinfully gorgeous woods was, per dread and hope, a room for and of waiting. And we waited, and we scrambled, and we waited, and we drove to hospital, and we waited – which really means read, worked, loved, cried, stared at nothing, listened to music, talked and talked – and she died. Then we waited for the cops and the coroner. Then we waited for arrivals, cremations, and departures. Then we waited to go home. Then we waited to hear everyone made it to where they were going ok enough. Then we waited for the crash and the resourcelessness and all the other feelings to come and, I think, are still waiting, but, then again, so are you.

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Many of us are at that age, now, where our parents all are dying. This is always true, of course. The great wheel spins and that. Right now, it’s people I was young with or at the same time as, and tomorrow it will be folks I held as babies as they and we watch their parents, and me, die.

The death of a parent, given where it happens on average in our own lives, is a sort of an alarm bell for folks attached to the act of living. It is no surprise, I think, that midlife crises happen at midlife – when you’ve been in the workforce two or three decades, when your kids are some form of adult or near adult, when your relationship is frayed from not being repaired enough during all that workforcing and childrearing, when you’ve scars of youth and dumb or fun decisions to bear, and when your parental pillar gets sucked into the vastness, all at once. “My mother is done. I am half done,” we say to ourselves, “what the fuck have I been doing? What is it I’m meant to do next?”

Here we often lie to ourselves, I think, because we take an inventory. We roll through our home movies, literal or figurative, and we recount event X, person or relationship Y, jobs a, b, and c. “Well then I moved to New York and was there for 3 years, which is when I married Eddy, so when that failed 5 years later, I moved to Spain and met Sue while she was working as a paralegal and we’ve been together since. Her mom died two years ago; mine died last month. And, oh, remember that vacation in Jamaica? How sick you got? That was crazy.”

These aren’t lies by themselves – life surely lived in your marriage, its failure, the legal system, Jamaica – but they contain an often overlooked fallacy which leads to pain. “I can’t believe it’s 10 years! What did I do for 10 years?” Based on your math, you’ve accounted for the time, no? You said all the “for n years” bits that you needed to equal 10.

But the gap feeling persists. The trip to Jamaica was 2 weeks. The actual moving to New York was a two-day event. Meeting Eddy took a night and marrying a month or two of planning. Breaking up itself took 15 minutes, if that –mostly you knew you were done in the bathroom. Meeting Sue took a night too, and she’s always at the office so you only see her on Saturdays. Suddenly the 10 years you’ve calculated has dwindled down to what feels like a handful of vacations and memorable dates and so, if your life has been jam-packed with events and adventures, 8 or 9 years of actual time go unaccounted for.

To try and explain a different way: my brother and my niece live 3000 miles away, which isn’t crazy far in the age of flight, but add several jobs, raising said niece, a global pandemic etc. and he’s far enough away that I can see them maybe once a year. Given mortality averages, that means I get to see them 40 more times before he or I or both of us are dead. If I count my and our time via those, that number is mighty small: life is 40 weekends. I should be there, no? In his living room, embracing, 24/7 because I know even that won’t feel like enough? Make my 40 years actually 40 years, instead of weekends?

I won’t be because there are folks and things here to embrace too. So, there will be just the 40 times (no wonder the conservatives were so pissy about being asked to skip Thanksgiving for a year eh?) What the hell am I doing in between that’s so important where I accept the number 40? Insert midlife crisis and an internal values war trying to figure out if I should increase that number as a good uncle or ever catch up on the sleep I clearly need or move to Spain to write the novel. Eat pray love, sort of a crock of shit.

It’s a crock because there is a legitimate actual answer to the question “what the fuck was I doing all that time?” and you may have already guessed it. In answering that question – here’s where the lie lives – with a recounting of the memorable beats (that show, that lover, that birth, that catastrophe) you place a “yada yada” at the intervals between them as though, somehow, those intervals were not your life. Accept this and extend its scope a bit to “recovery” and you see, too, that most of those yada yadas were the same thing – waiting – and that waiting is your life.

You measure time by the birth of your child, but leading up you waited through the pregnancy, you waited to finally get her pregnant, you waited to see if you could make the relationship work, you waited, alone, to meet her. But even this is too epoch-driven, and we are only looking at the easy beats: the meeting, the sex that equaled something more than itself, the pregnancy, the birth. What came between those beats?

Even when you met her parents, as anxious as you were about that meeting, you waited for her to finish packing and you drove the 8 hours to Minnesota to meet them. Meeting them looked like sitting in the living room while Papa bongled around looking for the photo album to show you and Mama fussed over not seeing her girl in so long and dinner. You pet the dog and didn’t watch the clock much, but it was dark when you stopped petting him and light when you started; cats and dogs are good measures of waiting. Before or after sex and between work, again before or after, you waited on some chair or sofa watching “The Bachelorette” or some game or other, which would have been a measurable event for you had it not been one of several thousand nearly identical events that you use to move from afternoon to night and Monday to Sunday, the very definition of waiting, and what Esther Perel makes a career warning us about. (“We’ve got amazing plans on Saturday and nothing the rest of the week, so pass me a beer and the remote until then I guess…”) When everyone was too tired or disinterested for something else, you curled up in some form of ball and your brain cleaned itself and your body waited for that to finish. You took the subway to the office which is waiting to get somewhere. You waited for the workday to end, finished, as you were, with actual work hours ago.

This is what we mean by both the regret of our lives and the lie when we recount events and adventures. “I did do something, just not enough.” And we trick ourselves further by seeking to fill the time more so: I’m going to take more trips; I’m going to write that novel; I’m going to leave my partner and get a new one or ten; I’m going to leave this dead-end job for another. I’m going to replace my TV watching with Yoga. There’s always someone nearby waiting to sell you something to fill this concern, be it Expedia, Goop, or a political candidate.

To be a facetious asshole as I walk to my point, please bear with me:

1. Trip – I’ll wait for the day of my departure 2 weeks from now; wait for my workday to end the day before; wait for the uber; wait in the uber; wait at the airport; wait in the plane; wait for the next uber; wait in the hotel lobby; and then fall asleep on my hotel bed because I am exhausted from all the waiting. Then I’ll do it all in reverse for the next trip. All our most intrepid explorers and warriors just sat around or strolled for huge stretches, no?
2. Novel – I’ll wait for the chance to write it; wait for my agent; wait for a publisher or none; I’ll write until my knuckles and fingertips bleed and must wait for them to heal
3. Partner – I’ll wait to meet someone; I’ll wait for the right one or for it to work out; I’ll wait at the restaurant with them for our food; wait in the same bed I waited with you; wait for it to fail; wait to recover; wait for the next one.
4. Let’s skip the job. It’s boring and the same as the others plus Zoom interviews.
5. Yoga is the art of waiting in elegant (you hope) positions, and good yoga is accepting that.

The existential elephant in the room, especially at the midlife crisis, is that it doesn’t matter what you do. Not because somethings aren’t cooler than others, or leave more beauty in the world, or are sexier and more fulfilling, but because, no matter what you do, most of life happens in the in-between spaces of whatever it is you say you do, have done, or are planning to do. Our perpetual fixation on “right things” fed to us as the epochs that count have us doing and measuring and enjoying and valuing some of our lives, and ignoring all the beautiful, formative in-between bits that we’re also doing, as though they are non-events. Chasing and regretting and never feeling a ground beneath you follows.

~~~~~~~~

I say this to you because I want you to accept it, in no small part so I can accept it myself. Accepting it or not doesn’t change the fabric of reality or loss or hard choices between which coast to live on. Those burrs stick. But can it reframe our view on values, on time well-spent, on achievement enough for a free breath?

In looking at actual waiting rooms I’ve been in, I see something funny: if I’ve regretted anything about them it is always why I was there (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and its thievery for example) and how long I was in them, but never that I was there in the first place. I’d always chosen to go.

I spent January in the largest waiting room I’ve ever been in when I could have stayed in my apartment instead, and it woke me to the fact that my apartment is one, my truck always was one, and every attempt at suicide I ever made was an attempt to leave one. I wanted to say to the folks enduring with me “I sometimes regret how long I’ve been in this painful place – a natural response to hospitals and small Canadian towns. I regret that you are in pain and that we are here in this room together at this moment waiting for that to subside. But I do not regret the many times I’ve been blessed to put my nose and beard on your neck. I do not regret that I am here with you in this truck heading to the battle or on the hospital chairs trudging slowly to the crematorium and then back to the truck. I hate the drive to the hospital; I do not hate driving you there.”

These were the silver-linings of my January. I grew closer to some rad people, my love tripling and quadrupling as I saw their soft bits and skills. I enjoyed a thousand hugs and sad smiles. I learned more about myself and why I might not be a pile of shit. I met a lake I never met before, frozen, like the rest of us, as it was. I took confession from an old woman and reminded her middle-aged kids that the last half of their mother’s life was the best half objectively, and that she’d say so herself, because that was the 40 years they were alive. I learned the sin of the yada-yada.

What have I done with my life? There have been plenty of adventures and scars to recount but, if I’m honest, not much. I’ve waited. I’ve asked workers to bring me cocktails; I’ve waited for some o’clock so I could go home from my work; I’ve read or played or heard the art of somebody else in that moment where their waiting coalesced; I’ve waited hours for the five-minute fight to start; I’ve slept a great and troubled deal.

But, also, what have I done with my life? I waited with you. I smelled your sweaty skin and perfume long after I moved my face from your neck (the secret joy of the bearded); I watched you bongle around achieving nothing; I heard you sing to yourself as you prepared in the other room for another Wednesday; I listened to you have the same argument with yourself about your purpose that you’ve always had, pretending you were talking to me; cookies take 15 minutes bake time and so I set timers in your interest.

I want to defend waiting rooms because our language regarding time is violent or capitalist and leave us wanting: to grow up already when we still have all the time that we will; to be something large and historical no matter the cost to the small and ordinary and more enduring; to have done more, or less, or different, in our lives as we die, no matter what we’ve done – a plague of shoulds and should-nots; to have all of our values balanced all of the time, an impossible gymnastic; to extend this shift indefinitely. We need to kill time or save it. We need to spend it or buy it or save it like coin too. We throw it away. At our best, we pass it, but not to one another, more gastro-intestinally.

In this we acknowledge only the get-togethers, only the spectacles, only the battles and conquests, only novelty. We depreciate the periods we’ve chosen in between our next get-together to increase its quality, to have more to discuss, to make it special by anticipation and delay. We depreciate the cycles of growth and death as managed by the farmer to create histories of the bloodshed that destroyed her field too many seasons. We depreciate that the way we spent the last 8 years was waiting together in rooms or in the other in-betweens, and how much that small talk, shop poking, dumb joke, lazy Sunday of lingering and banana pancakes actually meant because we choose to measure our time by movement to rented beds and circuses.

We “sure, but” most of our humanity and replace it with a striving that refuses to check the facts first. Life isn’t at all meaningless and striving to find/create/have meaning is amazing work, but to be “meaning”, it must be found or interjected in the inevitable. There’s more line on any graph of points than points and, yes, I do understand the irony that a line is just infinite closely placed points of interest and that’s part of my point.

And this is the other truth of my horrible January.

The “timeline” looks like this:

1. Race to middle of nowhere because people you love are suffering
2. Drive to hospital hundreds of times
3. Try to make the health system work on behalf of an illness no one can do anything about and watch it fail miserably
4. Fall in love again and again
5. Transition to driving to the house as it has become the hospital
6. Watch dear Dorothy lose at least one major human function every single day i.e. going from solid food to liquid to none in three days, going from talking to whispers to no speech in three days etc.
7. She dies.
8. Fall in love again and again
9. Disperse, her into the vastness of the universe, us into trucks and planes
10. Every minute between these points

Shortly after, watching videos of Russian conquest in the Ukraine, I realized one reason why we continue clawing at the sides of the beaker, on the heads of other rats, instead of addressing the beaker phenomenon. I don’t know what January consisted of for you. At first, I was a bit pissed off because Dorothy, who I called Mama, died and you motherfuckers didn’t even know. You went about your business, no parades, no news coverage. I witnessed this gangster disease shatter hearts and have seen more response for a broken window.

But, with some space, I realize that I, focused as I was on the events which asked for my hands, and having neither sent nor received invitation into your home (except for this blog), your Mama could have died any time in January, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

Your heart could have shattered for a hundred different reasons and, antidote-less for that issue, I could have at least listened. You could have had a gun to your head screaming toward a non-listening sky for someone to be your friend and I could have called you and we may have vibed. You may have been too tired from a long day working two jobs to get up to feed your crying baby and I have arms and could have held him.

Death in North America is a private affair. Death, a part of life as it is, illuminates for us that Life in North America is a private affair. We live in silos, build our little pods, call it personalization and freedom but not prison for some reason. I’ll drop dead after writing this and inconvenience maybe 5 people in this city, and the downstairs neighbors won’t be among them. Vice versa.

We sit in our waiting rooms, for the same reasons, watching the same shitty TV, pretending to read the same magazines but mostly looking at our feet wondering what on earth we could do next, shoulder to shoulder, fully alone. And so, when it comes time for some scientist to pour water into the beaker, we climb on each other’s heads desperate to get out, or desperate to get a gold star for being the most accomplished rat. There can be no comfort in the waiting room if we won’t look at each other.

Mortal and limited and values-based, I cannot serve everyone or every endeavor for the duration I might like to. I won’t pretend to have more ability at that than I do. I certainly do not ask you to prioritize me or my clan. I would, though, if we can, high-five each other as we pass in recognition of inhabiting this grand waiting room together, only so that the lining is a bit more silver:

I was here. I’m not quite certain I ever or always wanted to be, but I’m damn certain I didn’t want it to end. But, also, I got to meet you. And that sure was something.

This is the only poetry I have for Dorothy, my family, and I’m truly sorry for that:

Mama, I was there until the end. I’m not quite certain I ever or always wanted to be, but I’m damn certain I didn’t want it to end. But, I got to meet you. And that sure was something