by Meghan Daum
The moment I declared this in my mind is the moment I became despicable. The emotions that surround my experience of Brian’s death are by far the ugliest and most unforgiving sentiments I have bestowed on any event of my life. I chose, perhaps for my own sanity, more likely because I was too afraid to choose anything else, to feel as if his death at twenty-two had been imminent from the day he was born. Because Brian died of no defined cause, because the diagnosis was inconclusive, because his parents allowed no autopsy, because he simply died, I chose to believe it happened on purpose. I chose to feel as if death for him was an achievement, a blessing, a trophy honoring all that he never bothered to complete. I chose to take his death as a cautionary tale, a message that, if one did not do, one would die. So I did quite a bit. I worked long hours. I swam at 5:30 in the morning. I told myself that I was going places, that I was a “comer.” Brian, of course, was a “goner.” Like the unearned Armani jackets, death became him. The turns of phrase went on and on.
Brian’s death took less than three weeks to complete. He was in the hospital for seventeen days. The day he went in was the day most of our mutual friends from childhood had flown back from Christmas vacation to the homes that were constituting the early part of their adulthoods. This meant California, Ohio, Massachusetts. I lived directly across the park from Mount Sinai Hospital, where Brian lay bloated from virus-fighting steroids and motionless from paralytic drugs. Any movement, the doctors said, would have stressed his lungs. When he lost consciousness, his parents asked me to start coming over; they believed he’d hear my voice and “wake up.” I took the bus to the hospital every third night. This was what I had promised myself: That even though his father called me twice a day to give me a “report”—“They still don’t know;” “Things are better;” “No, they’re worse;” “The numbers on the machine are up today;” “I was thinking about that time on Nantucket, did Brian ever mention it?”—I would not wreck my life by living, as they did, in the visitors’ lounge of the Intensive Care Unit on the fourth floor of the Guggenheim Pavilion.
This is also about lying.
The Peterson family unit was a tiny thing—mom, dad, kid. There were no other siblings, only a handful of relatives. No neighbors. No friends. I believe Howard Peterson received a visit at the hospital from his boss. After a few trips to the fourth-floor lounge, after a few times of seeing these parents who couldn’t speak, who couldn’t bathe, who had lost all sense of time, after a few times of seeing the faces of the nurses and medical students and even the relatives of patients who had been merely shot in the cranium or shattered on motorcycles, I realized that the only way to handle the situation was to tell lies. Though it was plain that death was something already occurring, that this hospital stay was no longer about healing but about the slow submergence of a doomed ocean liner, the game to play seemed to be a game of denial. Jan and Howard Peterson were interested in everything that was not reality. They were interested in all that their son was not. They wanted to know about his friends and what movies he liked and, as they put it, “his art.” They wanted to know who had left the pack of Lucky Strikes on his kitchen table and should that person be called regarding “the situation.”
I told them yes and yes and yes. I scrounged for morsels of truth and expanded them into benign, purposeful lies. I told them Brian liked Fellini—it was true, I believed, that he had once rented 8 1/2 from the video store. I told them he was devoted to his writing, that he planned to arrive at a masterpiece one day and buy them a house in Nantucket. To their delight, I spoke about him in the present tense. I pontificated about all that I planned to do with him when he, as they kept putting it, “got out.” I surmised that Brian would someday write a lovely prose poem about his stay in the hospital. They ate this up, “more, more” they said without speaking, though Howard spoke a lot, “needed to keep talking,” he said, whereas his wife lay on the plastic couch in the lounge and looked at the ceiling.
I came to know Howard Peterson better than I’d ever known a friend’s parent. Though I hated him for the delusional, sugar-coated approach he had taken to parenting, and obsessed as I was at the time with what I defined as reality, with the cold, hard truths of the corporate working-world, and rent-paying, and late-night subway rides taken because a cab would cost too much, I wasn’t outwardly cruel enough to express any inkling of opinion. I hated him for denying his son the postmodern rites of passage, for never arguing with Brian, for never hesitating to write the checks, for perpetually neglecting to crack the whip. Even now, it is a mystery to me who Jan and Howard Peterson are. For twenty years they lived in a small and badly decorated house in New Jersey. They drove a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Howard worked as a bond trader. Jan did nothing. They became rich in the 1980s and spent it all on Brian, invested it all in the enterprise that seemed an experiment in passivity, as if lack of movement was the ultimate freedom, as if people who say “I’m going to win the lottery and spend the rest of my life doing nothing” really know what they’re talking about.
But my relationship to Howard during these days in the visitors’ lounge presented me with an interesting set of rules, a subtle opportunity for mind manipulation. Since Jan wouldn’t speak, and talking to Howard terrified me in that he broke down in tears after just a few sentences, my decision to “think positively” about the situation, to be optimistic and cheerful and phrase things in precisely the opposite way than I normally do, served the function of putting myself at a remove from the whole thing. As actors say, I made a choice. I made a decision to cross to upstage left, to tell them that Brian was working on a screenplay, to refrain from getting upset because, as I said, “There’s nothing to be upset about because he’s going to pull through.” My best line was this: “Brian will not die because people our age can’t conceive of death in relation to ourselves. It’s not in his vocabulary, therefore it’s impossible.”
It was for this sort of language that Howard called me one night to come visit him in his hotel room. He and Jan were staying a few blocks from the hospital at a place called the Hotel Wales. Howard said he wanted to talk about Brian. He said he “wanted to gain greater insight” into his son. I was sitting in my room drinking wine from a plastic tumbler when he called. My bedroom window was open, and flecks of snow were floating in. A news report emitted from the clock radio, something about George Bush, who was technically still in office, although the inauguration was days away. I had been engrossed in the election, smitten by James Carville, newly invigorated by politics—the campaign buses and falling-down balloons of it all. Brian had taken little interest, though he’d appeared bemused by my chattering.
So this is what it was when Howard called: the wine in the tumbler, me still in my work clothes. I took a cab to the hotel and readied myself for more lies, for more of the acting I hadn’t done since a high school performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner—a performance for which Brian had brought me flowers. I was terrified to meet Howard the way I had feared going onstage, the dread of the audience mixing with a longing for the whole thing to end in triumph, for some crowd to cheer, for a late-night cast party followed by peaceful sleep in my childhood bed.
This was a luxurious hotel, green and gold wallpaper, wood moldings polished until they were mirror-like. When Howard opened the door, he was wearing the same sweater he’d worn the past four times I’d seen him, only now there was a food stain on it. His hair stuck out on either side like a clown’s. He wanted to hear the line again, the line about death not being in Brian’s vocabulary. He wanted it repeated over and over, like a child hearing a bedtime story. I was afraid that if I flubbed the word order he’d correct me, that if I slipped into past tense he’d ask why. He said I was his favorite person to talk to these days, that the doctors were “paid to be pessimistic,” that relatives were evasive, that his wife had given up and was simply praying.
The room was not a room but a suite—living room, bedroom, kitchen. Howard made himself a glass of water, took some pills out of h
is pocket, and swallowed them. He asked what books Brian read, what programs he watched on television. I said Dostoyevsky, Doctorow and Seinfeld. I said The Picture of Dorian Gray; that one, I believed, was true. I said that Brian was a lover of the good life, that unlike the rest of us, he lived for the day, that he’d quit school because he’d realized it wasn’t right for him. I and the rest of Brian’s friends, I explained, were just robots for doing our homework, for not trying to beat the system. Brian was a rebel. He was a lover, a fighter, and a hero all in one. He would never die. There was no way it could happen.
This went on for three hours, until Howard went into the bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep. I waited ten minutes and slinked out. He’d left cab money for me on the table, which I took, like a whore. This was four days before the end.
* * *
Brian died around 6:30 in the morning, the time when I usually returned from my swim at the health club, my participation in the society in which Brian refused to take part. I arrived home, saw the light blinking on my answering machine, and knew. For a few minutes I avoided replaying the tape because there seemed no reason. Outside it was still dark, still dead, cold January. My chlorinated hair was frozen on my scalp because I never wore a hat to walk the four blocks from the club. Howard’s voice was steady on the machine; “Are you there? Are you screening your calls?… Brian didn’t make it.” He began to say something else but his voice cracked and he hung up. All I could think was that I wouldn’t have to go to the hospital anymore. All I could wonder was whether I should go to work. I had no inclination to cry, although I believe I tried, conjuring up sad stories, again like the high school actress to which this event had partially restored me. I tried to do something appropriate. I made coffee. I took a shower. I turned on the television and watched the news. It was inauguration day. Bush’s out, Clinton’s in. The two families passed each other on the White House steps like baseball teams shaking hands after a game. Such somber, upright civility.
I had found my metaphor. I had found the moment upon which to seize, the symbol around which to fashion the circumstance of my friend’s death. No longer a random occurrence, an inexplicable meeting with a bizarre virus no one else catches, Brian’s death became for me a national mandate, an obligatory component of a cultural changing of the guard. Just as I had delighted in the fact that the Clinton campaign’s theme song was Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” a message that had prompted me to propel my thoughts vehemently into all that the future would bring—the information superhighway, congressional term limits, corporate-subsidized health clubs for hard-working, realistic people like me—I rationalized that Brian’s refusal to ever think about tomorrow had lead to his demise. For the first time since he had become ill three weeks before, I allowed myself to spell the words out: Brian died because he refused to live. He refused to live because he refused to work. It was all out of some Ayn Rand manifesto: One must make profound sacrifices in order to live a life without compromise. Brian had attempted the latter without the former. He had seized the day so intensely that the day finally seized him. More turns of phrase. I reveled in them. I reclined back and watched my stylistic light show, curled up into my big, derisive comfy chair. In my mind, in the milieu that I had built around this event—the perfunctory hospital visits, the heading for the wine bottle the minute I returned home, the reluctance to tell other friends for fear that it would be awkward—I had set up an incident that had more to do with psychology than medicine. Brian was so drugged up, we were told, that he had no idea what was happening. He was a minor player. There was no dying involved, only the dealing with it. There was no body, only Hallmark cards. No last breaths of life, but instead cigarettes in the breezeway outside the Guggenheim Pavilion. As far as I was concerned at the time, there would be no grief, only irony.
And the sickest part about the whole thing is that I felt the irony while it was actually going on. There was nothing retrospective about this view, no longing for hindsight, as it seemed to have emerged precociously while events were still occurring. The monstrosity that Brian’s parents were being asked to wrap their minds around was more, I knew, than I could ever conceive of. The singular event of their dying son carried more horror than the worst catastrophes in the combined lives of myself and everyone I knew. What could I possibly have compared it to? Being rejected by Yale? That my milk-fed existence was now being soured by a tragedy that was not my own but someone else’s put me in the peculiar position of grieving vicariously, a condition so cynical that the only option was to shut up about it. So I faked it. I threw myself into their needs with a duplicity intense enough to distract me from whatever sadness it did not occur to me to feel for myself.
Gamesmanship is something this is also about. Verbal gamesmanship, sparring—though the feeling was more like hitting a tennis ball against a wall.
The words I said to Jan and Howard Peterson after their son was dead were even bigger lies than the ones I’d said when he wasn’t. I continued with the present tense. “Brian’s probably laughing at us now.” And “Brian, though he is sad to leave you, is probably fascinated by whatever he is experiencing now.” They loved this—especially Howard, who in the forty-eight hours between inauguration day and the funeral, had become obsessed with the afterlife, “the other side,” as he called it. I spoke at the mass. I regarded this as an opportunity to do some writing, to “be creative,” which was something my job was not allowing. I was a huge hit: People came up to me at the burial and congratulated me on my performance. My parents, though disconcerted at my use of the present tense in my speech, remarked that I was a skilled speaker. For me and the few friends who had returned home for the funeral, seeing our parents was almost worse than seeing Jan and Howard. They wore on their faces the look of having just avoided a fatal car crash. They were like people run off the road, shell-shocked drivers, breathing heavily and staring at the steering wheel while the tractor trailer ambled on ahead. “All I can think is thank God it’s them and not us,” my mother said to me out loud. I hadn’t worn a coat—I didn’t own a proper one to wear with a dress—and someone else’s mother went home between the mass and the burial to fetch me one, which she angrily insisted I wear as we stood by the grave. My father expressed his fear that I would catch Brian’s mysterious virus. Like me, he wanted to know the mechanics of the thing, how and where it gained its entry, what Brian had done to contract it, what error in judgment had been made to cause this.
After the burial, I returned to my apartment in the city, threw up, and continued on with my life. I came to see grief as something I would simply never have. I perceived it as a sentiment that dwelled in the hearts of others, tucked neatly underneath a rug I’d never even owned. I became obsessed with movement, with productivity. At the time, this meant doing a good job at work, being the best editorial assistant a slick beauty magazine ever had. I wrote killer photo captions, answered my phone perkily, filled out invoices until eight o’clock at night. I did all the things Brian never did. I didn’t mention “the situation” to anyone. My parents called to check on me, thrilled when I didn’t mention the event, relieved when I seemed not to have a cold.
After about three months, Howard called and asked if I wanted to have dinner. He left a message on my machine, leaving Brian’s old number as the place to call back. When I did, Brian’s voice came on, deep and reticent. “I’m not available, please leave a message.” I hated Howard all over again. He picked up when I spoke. He and Jan wanted to have dinner with me “in order to talk about Brian.” They wanted me to meet them at Brian’s apartment where they were staying. They wanted only to eat in restaurants where Brian had eaten, so could I recommend one?
Brian had only eaten in stylish places with ceiling fans and aspiring models at the bar. I had always hated this about him. I had always been embarrassed to go to establishments I had no business patronizing—establishments Brian had even less business eating in, although he always paid for both of us and ordered many drinks and an exp
ensive entree and usually dessert. Once, while I was in college, he’d taken me to a place he’d read about in a magazine, a small club that had recently opened in SoHo. There we saw a girl from my school, a very rich girl with a famous mother, both of whom had been profiled in Vanity Fair a year earlier. This girl, who had never spoken to me on campus, came to our table and kissed me on the cheek. Brian was ecstatic. I was furious. I felt I was dressed terribly—and even if I had been dressed well, I would have been merely posing as a poseur, which was worse than merely existing in a state of delusion, which is what Brian did adamantly, with stubborn, insistent braggadocio. Still, this encounter held him for several weeks. He mentioned it repeatedly, talking about “Meghan’s friend Countess X” to whichever of our other friends managed to drag themselves back into town to see him.
Restricting my lies to the big ones—how bad would it have been, after all, to suggest to Brian’s parents that we eat at Pizzeria Uno because Brian had loved the single deep dish?—I told Howard to make a reservation at Odeon because Brian loved it and often used it as a location in his writing, which was true. When I arrived at Brian’s apartment, the Lucky Strikes were still on the kitchen table along with the December 22 edition of the New York Post, the January issue of Esquire, and the copy of TV Guide cracked at the spine. “We haven’t touched these,” said Howard. He was wearing corduroy pants and a polyester sweater. Jan wore wide wales and an L.L. Bean blouse. We went to Odeon. I scanned the room for fear of Countess X. Howard said he only wanted to order dishes that Brian had ordered. I had no recollection but told him the salmon.
It was during this meal that Jan and Howard first began to demonstrate their expertise in “the other side.” Howard had read several books on the subject and had brought with him a list of the titles so that I, too, could learn more about “Brian’s new life.” Howard had had dreams, he explained, where Brian spoke to him and elaborated on the fun he was having. They had been to a psychic on Long Island who claimed to see Brian amid a field of roses and flanked by two other people, an older man—“probably his grandfather,” said Jan—and a pretty, young girl whose name began with M. “I thought for a moment that might be you,” she said. “But then you’re not dead.”