In late August, he’s in the hospital. My mother calls me to tell me the latest. Earlier in the day Bob jumped out of his hospital bed, stood up, drew himself to his true height, not the shrunken size he’d become, and ripped out his IV line, loudly demanding that he be allowed to die. This performance badly scared the nurse, who sent a psychiatrist, who had a long private talk with Bob. After the talk, the psychiatrist said that Bob was perfectly sane. Bob and the psychiatrist had already had the same conversation a couple of weeks before, agreeing that when Bob knew that there was no more hope, he’d refuse treatment.
“I’ll book a ticket,” I tell my mom.
I’ve never been to Alaska, though Bob has invited us all many times before. His house is up on a hill overlooking the city of Anchorage on one side and on the other, the Chugach Peninsula’s sandy hook, curving around Cook’s Inlet. In the winter the winds blow ninety miles an hour. But the afternoon I arrive it is a sunny, warm day. Moments after I’ve carried in my luggage, a moose ambles into the yard to eat petunias from the flower borders. The dogs are kept inside so the moose doesn’t gore them. They go crazy, flinging themselves against the glass in the door.
When the moose leaves, my mom takes me to see Bob at the hospital. He’s alert enough to thank me for coming to Alaska, but he soon drifts into an uneasy kind of sleep.
For dinner we cook a salmon that Bob’s wife caught earlier in the day from Ship Creek downtown. The sun sets at eleven. The next morning, Bob isn’t talking anymore. He is deep inside himself, sometimes crying out. I can see the tumors under the skin of his chest and legs.
We don’t know what else to do, so we sing. Even though most of us aren’t religious, we sing hymns and spirituals, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Morning Has Broken, Nearer My God to Thee. I sing low, my grandmother takes the tenor parts and the two sisters sing up high. We absentmindedly work crossword puzzles. We play Bach cello sonatas on a little boom box my grandmother bought at Fred Meyer. When we feel restless, we leave the oncology wing and wander the halls, looking at the Native Alaskan artwork scattered around the hospital.
One afternoon, Petrea cries and cries, unable to stop herself. My grandmother and I leave to go back to the house to get dinner ready. On the way to the car, my grandmother is fiercely calm. “Why is Petrea crying? She needs to stop. She doesn’t know what it is to lose two sons,” she says.
After three days of watching Bob try to die, three days of going to the hospital in shifts, three days of trips to the cafeteria for coffee and sandwiches, three days of going back to the house to ride bikes with the little boys, after three days of a horrible sort of waiting, a woman wearing a flowy gown and carrying a large velvet bag walks in to the hospital room. She takes a harp out of her velvet bag.
“Would you mind if I play for him?” she asks.
“He loves music,” my grandmother says. “Can you play any Mozart?”
“I usually play something that people don’t know so they can’t listen for a tune. That way they can forget what they’re doing.” What she means is that they forget to hold on to life. She starts plucking the strings. I feel like I should stay in the room, but I haven’t really slept for days and all I can think about is going to the small waiting room at the end of the hall and stretching out on one of the vinyl couches. From the couch I can still hear the strumming and I lie there, suspended between waking and dreaming.
Then my mother is next to me. “Come with me,” she says, hustling me back to Bob’s room. Looking down at his body I can tell he isn’t there.
“Thank you,” we say to the harpist.
The woman gives us her card as she leaves. Under her name is printed her profession, “Thanatologist.”
“What’s a thanatologist?” my mom asks when the woman leaves.
“I think thanatos is another kind of time,” I answer. “There’s thanatos and chronos. Chronos is regular time, chronological time, and thanatos is something else—I’m not sure what.”
“You’re so smart,” my mom says, but she’s wrong. What I’m good at is sounding like I know what I’m talking about. I’ve only got it partially right. The counterpart to the earthly time of Chronos is Kairos, the time of the gods. Thanatos is the personification of death in Greek myth and, linguistically anyway, has nothing to do with time.
Religion
“What part of the bible did you talk to Bob about?” I ask my brother.
“We read the Book of Luke together.”
“For any particular reason?”
“According to tradition, Luke was a physician. The text of Luke is often concerned with healing and reconciliation. You can tell it has that emphasis because of how it differs from Mark and Matthew.”
“What do you mean?”
“These three gospels have the same parables, but they don’t quite match up either chronologically or in the details.”
“What’s an example?” I ask. Details and emphasis always change with the storyteller.
“In Matthew, Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke, he preaches the Sermon on the Plain because he hasn’t reached the mountain yet.”
She Began College at Fifteen
“What’s going on here?” I ask my grandmother, pointing at a close-up picture of my grandfather and his twin brother. They’re both wearing fedoras, suits and ties, but they also look a little drunk. The inscription in the album is in white ink on black paper and reads, “Union Station—Early one Sunday morning after med. school party—Taggie and D. slept at Normie’s.”
“Are you D?” I ask. The Doctor’s Wife’s name is Doris.
“Yes.”
Who were Taggie and Normie?”
“They were sorority sisters, good friends. True blue Kansas characters.”
“What kinds of names are those?”
“Taggie was Joanne Taggart and Normie was Norma Jean Faulkner. But we also had nicknames.”
“Nicknames for the nicknames?”
“Norm the Form, Tag the Bag, Dor the—well, you know.”
One Story Leads to the Next
My family accuses me of leaving out a lot of the best stories.
“What else would I put in?” I ask my mom. “There’s the story about Bob sticking his tongue out and the snapping turtle grabbed hold of it. I could put that in.”
“Oh yeah. Here’s something. I remember when Dad was really sick with Parkinson’s and he told me that the one thing he regretted was saying ‘Swim goddamn it!’ to Bob when he fell in that water that time. I think dad thought it may have had something to do with why they couldn’t see eye to eye.”
“What did you say to Grandpa Bob when he told you that?”
“I was speechless, but then I said, ‘It’s OK, Dad,’ or something like that. Oh, and then there was the time that Bob got a shotgun out of the gun closet in the basement.”
“What happened exactly?”
“Bob joined the mountain rescue squad. One day we had a big storm and Bob got a call to do a rescue up on Mount Pilchuck. He called the office to ask Dad if he could go and Dad said no. Bob got really mad and he went down the basement for a gun. Mom called Dad and the office and then Dad came home.”
“And then what happened? What did Grandpa Bob do?”
“And then it’s hazy. That’s all I remember.”
“Anything else?”
“You have to put in the story about John’s urine sample.”
But this is a story my grandmother just let out, it’s not a family story. Once when John was really sick he had to be strapped to a hospital bed for twenty-four hours to collect urine samples. My grandparents left him overnight and then in the morning, when John was almost ready to be released a nurse knocked the sample to the floor.
I press my grandmother for details.
“So the samples were in glass bottles?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you take him back to do the tests over?”
“No, I think your grandfather decided that John sh
ouldn’t have to go through that again.”
“Were you mad at the nurse?”
“I wanted to kill her. But she must have felt awful too.”
Dumb Luck
“It’s all dumb luck,” the Doctor’s Wife says, explaining her new theory to my mother. I’ve already heard the theory.
“What’s dumb luck?” asks my mom.
“Life. It’s all dumb luck.”
“Don’t you think that genetics has something to do with it?”
“Genetics is dumb luck.”
“What about education?”
“Dumb luck.”
“That’s not what you thought when you were younger.”
“Of course I did,” the Doctor’s Wife snorts.
“It was not dumb luck whether or not I got good grades. I was expected to study. Is it dumb luck if you study and then get good grades?”
“Well,” the Doctor’s Wife says. “It’s dumb luck that you had the sort of parents who made you study.”
They work quietly for a while, cutting up the pieces of apple, getting ready for the others to come.
“Aren’t we lucky?” the Doctor’s Wife asks.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the editors of Tin House, where “The Pacific War” first appeared. Thank you to the editors of HOW Journal, where slightly different versions of several stories appeared including, “The Bone Table”; “Table Manners”; “A Nurse Doll”; “Afraid of the Dark”; “A Sense of Humor”; “More Tests”; “Home”; “Seizures”; and “There’s Nothing Bad That Can’t Get Worse.”
Thank you to my dear writing friends Alison Hart, Heather Abel, and the incomparable Abigail Thomas. Thank you to Rebecca Reilly, Lisa Freedman, Leah Iannone, Kathryne Squilla, Lori Lynn Turner, and Laura Cronk. Thanks also to Catherine Luttinger, Mira Jacob, Shelley Salamensky, Sarah Bardin, John Pappas and Sufjan Stevens. Thank you to Sara Lamm, Jon Raymond, John Reed, and Andrew Zornoza.
Thank you to Robert Polito, Hilton Als and Zia Jaffrey for your mentorship. Thank you to Helen Schulman, Tiphanie Yanique, and all the rest of my inspiring and supportive friends and colleagues at The New School. Thank you to the many students over the years who have taught me so much.
Thank you to Ira Silverberg for his support. Thank you to Dan Wickett and Matt Bell for their thoughtful edits and for being such good friends to writers. Thank you to Ethan Bassoff for his sharp eye and sharper mind. Thank you to Eve Turow for her tireless efforts.
Thank you to Nancy Mitchell, Darwin Smith, the Volpones, and the people of Lake Stevens. Thank you to my family—the Jaramillos, the Hagens, and Gildens—for their help with this book, and to Matthew Brookshire, who makes everything possible.
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