What Should We Show Them?
On hiding. Or not.
My dad and I have something in common that no one talks about. (I speak of him in the present tense because I just do, it just comes, yes he died in 2006 but nothing of life as I know it could be without him). Both of us are known for our devotion to the sensory world and our enthusiasm for living, and we both, secretly (present, it just keeps being there) spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about mortality, about the reality and inevitability of death. When he turned fifty, he wrote a powerful song called “Half a Century Old,” each verse dedicated to a friend of his (and one of mine) who’d committed suicide heartbreakingly young.
He died that year, in his sleep. Maybe that’s what started me thinking about it, expressly not thinking about it, thinking about it some more. Then came our move to California where the apocalypse was everywhere. Wildfires destroyed so much of what we saw during our first years here, there were charred trees surrounding the roads on our drives out of the small town where we lived. Our first year in San Francisco, we saw Lake Merced go Martian, a red lake under the orangest most Bladerunner of skies. In the Southern half of the state that dreams and sexual frustrations are made of, there’s the San Andreas fault, the legendary earthquakes (no one tells you those are up here too), the LaBrea tar pits, the sexy cars cared for more diligently than people as they assure the death of breathable air.
You can’t escape the end of the world in California. Parts of LA, for a price, will render you ageless, but you will never forget that we die.
And maybe this, even more than my New Orleans birth, is why I understood Anne Rice’s decision to let us read her drunken pages of despair. As Addie and I poured through the archives, welded to her journals, and came to those moments where she lost all hope, where we were suddenly deciphering misdrawn lines that hardly looked like the alphabet ending with “I’m very drunk” Addie said, “I wouldn’t want anyone to see me like this, even after I die.”
That sounded so sensible, I wanted to agree. But I can’t. I’m not sensible. I understood Anne Rice. I’m fucking dead, you motherfuckers, what are you gonna do? If I can hear you insulting me, do you think I’ll fucking care? Don’t you know who I became? Don’t you think legends are meaningless if no one knows who you once were?
I am not dead. And I don’t plan to be so for a very long time. By the time my dad was 39 he had 11 more years to live and I often think, fervently, that is not me. But I can’t actually know, none of us can. So I would rather say, Here: this is what I was feeling, this is what this particular stretch of such a strange, strange life meant to me, this, if there is a you, is who you were to me, and if saying that right out loud which is to say silently but where it can theoretically be read hurts anyone, then for that I’m sorry, because this isn’t for hurt.
But I’ve been hurt by secrets. By weaponized lies of omission. When I’m hurt by things said, I have the dignity of anger. When I’m hurt by what’s unsaid, I have nowhere to go. “The truth hurts” is predicated on the assumption that we didn’t know we were going to hear it, that we thought truth was something else.
It’s Mother’s Day weekend in the US and honestly I wish it wasn’t. But! If that’s not an inherently difficult day for you then have a fantastic holiday, and if it is — and for so many of us it is — then also have a fantastic holiday if you can. If I embrace the understanding that tomorrow could truly, truly suck, I think I have a better chance of an actually unregrettable day. We’ll see.
