Gazing at the boulder, Katherine’s face is radiant with grief. “He had an extraordinarily powerful mind that was equally powerful in illness,” she says, as tears streak her cheeks.
“We don’t have to talk about it if it’s too painful,” I say.
“Actually, it’s healing for me to talk about Brooke and I appreciate you asking about him. People treat suicide as a shameful secret—leave the true cause of death unmentioned in the obituary, just erase it from the family narrative. But talking about the ones we’ve lost keeps them alive.”
Katherine tells me Brooke wrote a letter before he died. When she reads it to me later, I’m floored: It is a rescue rope of compassion and love in which he attempts to answer the inevitable question of why. His letter, which reads almost as a living document, one that will support his loved ones in different phases of their grief, is clear-eyed and comprehensive. Brooke says he knows they will ask if they could have done more, and he assures them they did everything they could. He knows they will suffer, but he hopes it won’t be more than what he would have gone through had he stayed. He tells them that whatever happens, he has faith in their ability to continue on. He says he is sorry and that he loves them over and over, too many times to count. It is generous and loving and—mired even as Brooke was in his own pain—you can feel him reaching out to his family from across a great gulf. It’s his final way of “doing a Brooke.”
To lose a child to suicide is a devastating, unimaginable, impossible tragedy to live through, a loss I can’t begin to fathom—but Katherine’s story doesn’t end there. As we trot up the trail, she tells me about how, just four months after Brooke’s death, she was out riding when her horse fell and she broke her leg. Not long after that, she went in for her first routine colonoscopy and learned she had colon cancer. She says it was an out-of-body experience—one of those moments where you think, This can’t possibly be my life—but somehow it also felt mystically coherent. “Grieving is an emotional experience as well as a physical one,” she says. “The fact that my bones broke and the cancer occurred in my gut felt symbolically appropriate.”
When I ask Katherine how she dealt with it—how she shouldered the weight of sorrow upon sorrow—she pauses, slowing her horse. “Being stuck on bed rest was an invitation to unplug from the daily rhythms of teaching and responsibility, and to actually experience my grief,” Katherine says. She turns and gestures to a white pickup truck in the distance, parked off to one side of her house. Going home without Brooke after the memorial service was really hard, she tells me. When she traveled to Vermont to pick up his things, she decided to take his truck and to drive it back across the country. It was a way of bringing him home. Brooke’s truck had a front license plate from his volunteer fire department, and at gas stations and roadside diners along the way, people would notice it and make grateful comments. When they did, she would find herself welling up—not with sadness but pride. There was also a sense of ritual in the drive—in its great distance and its slow pace. It offered her essential time to understand that the unthinkable had happened, and to begin to accept it as her new reality.
Katherine tells me that Brooke’s death has changed her relationship to her own mortality. Her cancer has returned twice since her initial diagnosis and she recently underwent yet another surgery, this time a thoracotomy to remove a nodule from her lungs. It’s easier now to grapple with the thought that cancer might be the end of her story. “If my child can pass from this physical plane, surely I can figure out how to do that, too.” She tilts her head, then continues. “The death bit doesn’t scare me. It’s the suffering that’s hard.”
To keep going, Katherine reminds herself every day of all the ways her life has been enriched—blessed by Brooke and his life, by her daughters and her grandchildren, by Atticus and Blue, and finally by the presence of grief itself. “Ultimately, the events of the last few years have been a terrible lesson in being present—and not just being present in my own life, but being present in the lives of the people I love,” she says. “Tomorrow may happen, tomorrow may not.”
* * *
—
Later that night, once the horses have been returned to their stalls, the dogs walked, the dinner eaten, and the dishes washed, I retreat to the spare bedroom. Sprawled across the bed, I open my journal and begin to revisit all the ways I’ve tried to do the opposite of Katherine—to avoid actually experiencing pain. Numbing out on everything from morphine to marathons of Grey’s Anatomy. Denying that it’s there at all. Refusing to let people in. I see now that these tactics have not rid me of my sorrow, just transmuted it, delayed it. What if I stopped thinking of pain as something that needs to be numbed, fixed, dodged, and protected against? What if I tried to honor its presence in my body, to welcome it into the present?
I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive and yet here she is, surviving. “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
* * *
—
I close my journal and do the two things I’ve been avoiding for too long. First, I write an email to Max. Then, I call Jon. He picks up on the first ring.
“How far are you from Los Angeles?” he asks me.
“About an hour. Maybe two. What’s up?”
“I’m booking a plane ticket and I’ll be there tomorrow. We should have this conversation in person.”
The next morning I dress in my road uniform—a pair of battered boots, black Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and a favorite leather jacket I’ve had since college. I share a last cup of coffee with Katherine, who gives me her old road almanac as a parting gift, and I stoop down to give Atticus a scratch behind the ears. “Thanks for everything,” I say, as I get into the car. “You’ve helped me more than you’ll ever know.”
I drive to Los Angeles and when I arrive at the airport, Jon is waiting for me on the curb outside the passenger pickup area, wearing a cotton scarf I got him in India and looking as dapper as ever. He spots me in the queue of cars, and though we try to steel our faces into an appropriately somber expression, we both split into dopey grins. As he gets into the car, we hug tightly, forgetting, for a moment, why he’s made this last-minute trip.
“I’m so happy you’re here,” I say.
“You are?” Jon asks, pulling away. From the stiffness in his voice I can tell he’s been hurting, and I feel a rush of tenderness toward him. I can’t imagine this was an easy trip for him to make given how hectic his schedule has been. But I’m also not surprised that he’s traveled all the way across the country to have this conversation in person. Jon has always shown up for me in difficult moments, even long before we were a couple.
We have so much to tell each other that at first only silence will do. As we drive, I think about how, when Jon learned of my diagnosis, he came straight to the hospital to see me with his whole band in tow. Jon had brought a melodica. Ibanda had his tuba, Eddie his sax, and Joe the drummer carried a tambourine. Right there in the middle of the cancer ward, they began to play for me. As the sound of “When the Saints Go Marching In” filled the hallways, nurses and patients filtered out of their rooms. The patients who could walk, walked; those who couldn’t
were wheeled to their doorways by nurses or family members. Others listened from their beds. Every inch of the ward was filled with music. Timidly at first, and then with jubilation, patients, nurses, and hospital workers began to dance and clap. The ward was breathing a sigh of relief, its inhabitants rejoicing in a temporary time-out, surrendering to the music. Beneath my face mask, I couldn’t stop beaming.
Remembering all this, I’m no longer certain of what I’m about to do. Over the last few weeks, whenever I considered actually ending things between us, something in me had resisted picking up the phone. Now that we are together I feel even less confident, but I try, as I did the last few nights with Katherine, to tell the unvarnished truth. “I know I’ve been distant,” I say as we inch through traffic. “It’s been a struggle to figure out how to be in this relationship when there’s so much I need to sort through alone. The two feel at odds with each other. If I’m being honest, I’ve spent a lot of my trip wondering if it would be best for us to break up.”
“I want to ask you something,” Jon says.
“What?”
“Do you like me?”
“Yeah, of course,” I say.
“Tell the truth. Do you like being with me?”
“I do. I love you,” I admit.
“Then why does everything need to be so dang complicated?”
We are both quiet for a while. “Listen,” Jon says more gently, “maybe it’s okay to not have the answers right now. I want to be with you. Even if that means continuing to give you space. I’m good with that. But what I do need is for you to be open and honest as we figure this out. You gotta stop shutting me out.”
Over the last few weeks, I’ve put so much pressure on myself to be either fully in or fully out. I’ve been so caught up in assessing the risks and armoring myself against them that it hasn’t occurred to me that there is a third way: to let things grow and change and evolve, to uncover who we are and what we want along the way—to live in that middle terrain. As I slow toward a stoplight, I reach over and squeeze his hand.
“We cool?” Jon asks.
“We cool,” I reply.
“Not so fast,” he says. “C’mere.” And I do.
We kiss until the traffic light turns green and the drivers behind us start honking. I’m not sure what it all means. You can’t force clarity when there is none to be had yet. But for as long as I’ve known him, Jon has been teaching me that sometimes all you can do is show up. And when things are hard, to keep on showing up.
* * *
—
Before leaving Los Angeles, I make one last stop. Through smog and rush-hour traffic, I drive to Brentwood, an affluent neighborhood with gated villas and impeccably landscaped lawns tended by teams of gardeners. It’s my first time visiting Max’s family home, and when I knock, his mother, Ari, and her standard poodle appear at the door. As we make chitchat in an opulent foyer, a very pale Max descends the stairs. He looks terribly skinny, his cheeks scooped hollow, making his blue eyes, already magnified by his glasses, appear even larger. He says hi in a gravelly baritone, explaining his voice is hoarse from the tumors in his chest, and leads me to his bedroom, where we can talk in private. He sits on the edge of his bed and I sit across from him in the desk chair, swiveling back and forth anxiously until he reaches out to steady me.
I stare at the rug, chewing on my lip, afraid that if I meet his eye I will turn into a puddle. “I know I haven’t been there for you,” I say, my voice quavering. I tell him how many times in the last weeks I’ve wanted to pick up the phone and call. I tell him I know better—that I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of silence before—and that I understand if he can’t forgive me. “There’s no excuse for how cowardly I’ve been. I’m so sorry.”
Max doesn’t let me off the hook. It’s not his style. “I’ve noticed your distance,” he says evenly. “I’m not angry. I guess I just want to understand. Does it make you uncomfortable to know I’m dying?”
“Uncomfortable? No,” I answer. “It terrifies me.” I tell Max I didn’t know it was possible to have a friendship with so much depth and understanding, and odds are, I will never have that again. He’s the only person I can call in the middle of the night when I’m feeling worried about an upcoming biopsy—or to whom I can extol the virtues of Magic Mouthwash, without having to explain. He was there at Melissa’s memorial, there every day of my last hospitalization, there every evening that first week after Will moved out. “You know me well enough to show up at my door even when I say I want no visitors—especially when I say I want no visitors,” I tell him. “You hold me accountable, even now. You are the funniest, smartest, weirdest person I know, and I can’t bear the thought of losing you.”
“I get it,” Max says, reaching over and tugging me up. “I figured as much. I forgive you. But I do need you now.” He hugs me hard, with every sinew and muscle in his body, the kind of hug that crushes your lungs in a good way. Max has always given the best hugs.
When we sit back down, I ask Max what’s been happening with his health, and he tells me he has started a new drug that is supposed to be really mild on the side effects. “But we all know how that goes,” he says. “This is the worst pain I’ve been in in my entire life, and there may only be two or three hours a day when I can function. But in those two or three hours, I am Max, and it is good to be Max.”
Over the next few hours, our conversation is an uninterrupted stream. He asks me about all the different people I’ve met and the places I’ve seen. I ask him about how married life is going and we reminisce about his wedding a few months earlier. Like me and Jon, Max and his wife, Victoria, met as teenagers, at a summer program. They were close friends for nearly a decade before they became a couple. Though he was in the middle of chemo, Max knew from the early weeks of their relationship that he was going to ask Victoria to marry him on the anniversary of their first date. Max is a master of impermanence, and I remember being awed by the radical hope and optimism embedded within his decision to propose, despite his prognosis. When he asked me if I would be one of his groomsmen, I’d felt honored. The wedding was held in Topanga Canyon, at an inn surrounded by old sycamores, waterfalls, and wildflowers. His mentor, the poet Louise Glück, had officiated at the ceremony.
Max tells me he’s been reading Louise’s book Averno, and that it’s a masterpiece—the kind of book that only the wisdom of decades can bring you, something that you must die many times to be able to create. “Every time I’ve had a significant trauma, my writing has grown, I’ve grown,” he says. “I think I could have written a masterpiece if I lived to fifty. If I had more time.” There’s an edge to his voice, a hardness I’ve never heard before. “I am bitter,” he concedes. “It’s struck me recently how strange it is, being this young and knowing that I’m going to die. It’s very, very lonely.”
He pauses, looking sadder than I’ve ever seen him. He says his life has been rich and fast—the best family, the best friends, the best wife, and his first book of poems coming out in just a couple months. “It’s been delightful to see it all flower so quickly,” he says. “Nothing is missing. But I would much rather have had a slow burn.”
Max’s voice has grown hoarser still and he looks tired. “Right now, I want to roll a joint, watch an episode of The Bachelorette, and rave with you about how awful it is, but I should probably take a nap,” he says.
As I stand up to leave, I tell Max I love him and promise to call every couple of days with updates from the road. “It’s incredible to me that you can be alone with your thoughts in a car for so long, when you’ve gone through what you’ve gone through,” he says. “People have been experimenting on you for years and years, and you have the balls to experiment on yourself—to push yourself to grow. Now, that is strength.”
“Oh, Max,” I say. I clutch my heart dramatically. “I don’t know what I’d do without your support.”
“You are such an inspiration,” he says.
“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” I say.
“Every day is a gift,” he says.
With that, he gives me a last, lung-crushing embrace before I step out the door.
* * *
—
As I leave California, I cross the Mojave Desert, passing flowering cacti and yucca trees under a vast black sky prickling with stars. I don’t know what will come of my relationship with Jon or if I will ever see Max again, but I no longer want to protect my heart. You can’t guarantee that people won’t hurt or betray you—they will, be it a breakup or something as big and blinding as death. But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose. I make a pact with myself and send it off into the desert: May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.
34
HOMEGOING
UNDER HEAVY SNOWFALL, Oscar and I huddle inside the tent, sleeping chest-to-chest like conjoined twins. I wake up on the morning of Day 66 at a campground outside of the Grand Canyon. A sense of longing fills my body as I rise and fire up my stove with numb fingers, shivering as I make coffee. It follows me as I pack up my tent for the umpteenth time and load my gear back into the car. Over the next few days, it intensifies as I drive through the martian landscapes of the Southwest and celebrate my first Hanukkah at the home of a Twitter acquaintance in Tijeras, New Mexico. Wandering around Santa Fe’s snowy streets alone—the storefronts strung with pine garlands, the sidewalks bustling with families doing their holiday shopping—leaves me feeling a little blue.
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