Remembrance

The day dawns.  I waken and sag, the life force rising and descending in me like an elevator going in two directions.  The downward motion comes from the Walgreens SleepMore, or whatever it's called.  An off-the-shelf slumber remedy, effective yet unsubtle, the stuff leaves me in a sort of stupor for the first few waking hours.  I have things to do.  The nature and extent of the stuff is unclear, and the day's advance isn't bringing much clarity.  Passport.  Can't forget the passport.  Has it expired?  That is to say, has it expired since I last looked at it, a week ago?  One never knows.  Things can creep up on you, transform themselves, dates appearing one way in one light, another way in another light.  Better have a look.  2015.  I can go anywhere until 2015.  I cannot go from Israel, to say, Damascus, but I can go almost anywhere else.  So many passport stamps, so little time.  And while my brain is occupied with such trivia, the conviction grows that the important thing, the absolute priority, has slipped out of my consciousness altogether.  There are the shoes.  They are in the hands of Mr. Lee.  I know Mr. Lee.  He needs leeway.  I'm going to pay him a visit today and discuss the shoes.

How about Friday morning, he asks, as we both regard the shoes that have sat untouched for a week on his shelf.  I hear sounds of grinding and stitching from the back, but Mr. Lee denies that he has an assistant.  All on own, he says.  I tell him that Friday morning is out.  It is completely out.  I am out and riding the jet stream eastward.  He doesn't need to hear this or care.  Still, he tries to be helpful.  Okay, he says, Thursday.  Thursday morning, I say, narrowing the target area.  Okay, he says.  I don't actually need the shoes Mr. Lee is repairing, not for the trip.  But new soles are on my list, and I might as well get this done.  

I have no sense of priorities, these days.  Things have equal weight or are equally weightless.  It doesn't seem to matter much what I do.  Which also applies to the trip.  I'm not sure why I am going, just acting on blind faith.  Events will take over.  SuperShuttle either will arrive or it won't.  The plane will be on time or late.  The Queen Mary will dock in Brooklyn or sink.  And if it sinks with me, I will have my memory stick.

Someone suggested that I buy one.  There's no better way to load up one's laptop computer with junk, a.k.a., data, it seems.  This is true.  Within an hour, this silly little thing on a key ring has ingested two years of my life.  With my own memory failing, the idea of inserting a replacement appeals to me.  In it goes, the memory stick, and out it comes remembering everything.  The problem is there seem to be things I don't want to remember.  I keep forgetting the Remembrance Evening sponsored by the hospice organization that nursed Marlou in her final months.  It's tonight.  The hospice, someone told me, has hundreds of people dying at any given moment in and around this end of San Francisco Bay.  Will anyone remember Marlou?  Will we all drown in each other's sorrow?  Who will be there?  One of her nurses?  Her doctor?  What will we do together, except cry and look at each other's photos?  Everyone contributes a picture of the Loved One.  If I'd had the nerve and inclination, I could have contributed Evelyn Waugh.  I check my watch.  Ninety minutes until remembrance.  I have to drive to South Palo Alto.

Odd how I am channeling Marlou these days.  Rolling about Menlo Park's shoe repair shops and espresso outlets, I have returned with a few crushed leaves on my wheelchair tires.  I find this most exasperating, the cleaning lady having only been at it with her vacuum cleaner hours ago.  Crushed leaves here, crushed leaves there, and pretty soon it's autumn.  That's why I asked my brother and sister to resurrect the handheld vacuum cleaner, shop vac.  I grab the thing, I fire it up like a chainsaw and maneuver the crushed leaves into its maw.  The latter disappear, out damn spot, and the Marlou Memorial Carpet has returned to its pristine glory.  

Too bad that, having forgotten the remembrance, I will be attending the evening alone.  Yet I am alone.  Single.  I've certainly been here before.  It's just that I don't like it anymore.  I got used to socializing as a couple.  There was something comfortable about being with Marlou at gatherings, dinners with friends, almost anything.  Now that comfort is gone, and it's me who will roll up to the ship's dinner table Sunday evening alone.  I've signed up for this.  One can eat in any number of places aboard the Queen Mary, but I like the idea of meeting people, strangers.  The practice will do me good.  The experience might even be enjoyable.

I prefer 'An Evening of Collective Grief' to Remembrance Evening.  But having forgotten the remembrance, I have also forgotten to invite someone.  The general advice to the grieving is to avoid doing things alone.  Get help.  Get company.  But this seems different.  Marlou's absence is the whole point.  So I will turn up alone, get on with the remembrance and get out.  Overall, I hope to remember more than Marlou.  Memory is playing strange tricks.  I remembered last week's Su Hong Pine Nut Chicken in plenty of time, placed the aluminum take-away container in a slow oven...even slowed the oven down to a comfortable 250° until black smoke wafted out of the kitchen.  The metal container's cardboard lid had ignited.  I stared at the scene dumbly, pulling ashes out of the toaster oven.  Paper burns.  I must remember that.

Anger burns too.  It burns rather steadily these days.  Only yesterday, rolling into the sunlight after a Vietnamese manicure, it hit me in the parking lot.  How could this have happened to us?  Marlou and me.  But now it hasn't happened to any 'us', but to me.  And that realization makes me want to do something drastic.  Something that matches the force of the event.  But there is no match.  Nothing comes close, not in terms of suddenness and totality.  

Somewhere south of here, at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church, hospice people are setting up for the Remembrance Evening.  Marlou's picture will be on display.  And there she will fade into the multitudes.  I want to see that happen.  I want to see that my dramatic loss is actually routine, the most predictable of life events.  I want to see how many of us there are.  People from Sunnyvale and Palo Alto and San Jose and Cupertino, all of them freshly ripped from someone.  The Loved Ones.  They are all around us, have always been, and all cultures make a place for them, present informed by the past, the past informed by the present.  I want to see how we are together tonight, the living amid the dead.  I want to see if I am still so angry.  What lies behind my anger is a mystery, but it's a mystery I want to solve.