I've been struggling some with how to frame my thoughts on death. I tend to approach religion as an academic exercise, so while the literature there is rich, it doesn't quite jibe with where I'm at in my head. I'm familiar with the medical definitions; years of exposure -- from the media, from life -- will do that to you. But where I'm disconnected, and not quite settled, and find myself staring at the ceiling before falling asleep each night, is in the perception of it. No, wait, perception isn't quite the word. It's the awareness or understanding of it, both by those who pass and those who remain.
I came a bit closer to my own understanding last night while reading a beautiful, painful, disturbing little book. But first, some backstory:
I almost flunked out of college.
It was freshman year, and it was English, of all things. I don't remember much about my freshman year, but I remember this: I had tested out of 001 English into 002, and our professor, Bronwyn Stein, was kicking my ass. It was my own fault: I was lost, half drunk and on a years-long slide that only really turned around when I met Kim two years later. I had foolishly signed up for an 8 a.m. English class, thinking how bad could it be? I'd been getting up at 6:30 for high school for four years. Ha, yeah: how bad could it be.
Anyway, we did plenty of required reading, and one of the tomes we tackled was a volume of contemporary literature. In this anthology was an excerpt -- I don't remember if it was the full text, but it could have been -- from a book called The Things They Carried. This beautiful, tragic story had been published the year before by Tim O'Brien, had almost won the Pulitzer Prize, and was feted as being one step closer to "the great American novel." And since I was sleepwalking through my academic career at that point, I didn't give it the attention it deserved.
In fact, it's the reason I almost flunked out of college. I had skimmed the text the night before the test, but when I sat in the lecture hall and opened my little blue essay book, I froze. Completely locked up. To this day, it stands out in my mind as the biggest blank I've ever faced, and for some reason I couldn't recall anything, even the title of the story. I still remember sitting in that hall, pencil in hand, staring at the lines on the page, and ... nothing. It just wasn't there.
So I faked it. I did remember one line from the story, and I used that. And I damn near failed out of English. I'm not sure why Ms. Stein gave me a D instead of an F, but she did -- and I narrowly escaped freshman year. My GPA was ruined, but again, it was my own fault -- my first couple of years of college were a muddled mess.
Fast-forward 20 years. 20. My high school reunion is getting organized on Facebook, I've moved out of the Midwest, I've got a wonderful wife and daughter. My mom has just passed away suddenly. My family is trying to pick up the pieces and make sense of a crazy-bad run of luck in the past couple of years. I walk into a Barnes & Noble in Washington, DC, just to kill time, under strict orders not to spend any money on books, since I always end up with something, and it's not always a good idea to be spending money. And there, on the table that says NOTABLE PAPERBACKS is a reissue:
The Things They Carried
The 20th Anniversary Edition
I think I stopped breathing for a moment. All the emotions from 20 years ago, my shame at who I was when I was 18, flooded back. In an instant, I was sitting in a auditorium chair, a crappy folding desk across my lap, my pencil poised and my mind empty. Ms. Stein's chopped blonde hair was there, her head bent over a book on the table in front of her. I picked up the book. I skimmed it. I remembered the pained, sad look on my parents' faces when I brought home my grades. I remember the yelling. I remember the fear. I remember the adolescent indifference, and the incomprehension that I was in charge of my own fate. I didn't remember the words I now read. I put the book down. I picked it up. I walked to the check-out counter.
I don't believe in coincidence.
There is a reason this book re-entered my life, and a reason it re-entered it now. It's a sad, troublesome tale of reality, memory and life of a platoon of Vietnam soldiers, and although called "A Work of Fiction," you know it's really not but you really hope it is. Because true war stories don't have morals. They just end. That's how you know whether they're true or not.
And the reason this book is so important to me now, building on the other reading I've done recently is this: Tim O'Brien perfectly captures the notion that when we die, we become an idea. This is what I've been struggling to identify for the past two months. It's easy to say that people live on in our memory, but that's imprecise. That implies that your thoughts about a person who has died are static, that they only consist of events you shared with them, stories you can tell. But that's not true, is it? How often do you find yourself saying "Oh, I wish Mom were here for this, she would have ..."? We take our understanding of that person, plus our memories, to form ideas of who that person was. It's unconscious, but it's so much more than memory, and in his essay about a troubled Vietnam vet lost in his own hometown, O'Brien has found an exacting way of expressing the essence of our relationship with death and the deceased. And though I again found myself staring at the ceiling last night, this new thought was somehow comforting, and the idea that my Mom has become has expanded in my mind.
And while comforting, it's also complex, because one of the major themes of O'Brien's work is the fallibility of ideas, of memory. And this is where it gets interesting: Memory is a work of fiction. Thoughts are a work of fiction. And while this could be disturbing in so many ways, for me it is not. As a journalist, I was trained to find the "truth." And while we all can agree on the "facts" that make up a story, the reality is that everything is made up. Everything is interpreted. Even our thoughts about other people.
So instead of being disturbing, it's beautiful. Our ideas of who Mom was will live on. My niece, my nephew, my daughter will have their own ideas of her, formed by our interpretations. Even the adults' ideas have changed in the past two months. Because although lives just end, and you know the stories are true because they don't always have a moral, ideas live on, and in ideas we find the truth.
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