Keeping quiet

Beth and I have been talking about John this week, of course -- she talked to S-- at some length-- and it's been very unsettling to realize that he knew he was sick but didn't want anyone to know. And was very very depressed and hard to deal with. I feel like I should have recognized some of the signs and it makes me heartsick and pissed off at myself that I didn't.

Sometimes I see patterns and have the most stunning intuition and can read people and situations with the finest calibration... and sometimes I'm thuddingly unable to see anything. Like my failure to EVER recognize when someone is wearing a wig. I have been known to say blindingly oblivious things like "how come your hair never seems to grow and always looks exactly the same?" to blushing, self-conscious alopecia victims. I also never notice when people look pregnant (unless I know they are), when they've lost or gained weight, and when people are high. "Huh, strange conversation," I'll muse, when *anyone* else would have known at the second word that the person was totally baked.

A couple of years ago, John sent me back all of my letters. "Here," he wrote. "I'm cleaning out some files and I thought you might want these. For the archives."

How did I read this? It pissed me off. I felt rejected. "Why would he send back my LETTERS?" I groused to Beth, to A. "I thought they were important to him. This is his passive aggressive way of saying 'you never write to me enough so our correspondence might as well be at an end.'" Did it even remotely occur to me that he might be sick, that this might be a little "cleaning up the loose edges" act? Nope. And when I found his letters when I was moving, I sent a whole whack of them back to him. With a letter about why I was moving, etc., which oddly, reignited some connection. But it never occurred to me to ask "are you okay?" or to make time to go visit him.

I think we all do this -- develop little blind spots, shoulder checks we never perform. It's part of how we thread our lives together, maintain momentum, create and reinforce our stories. And mostly it's okay. And sometimes there are catastrophic crashes of coherence, what was not seen is suddenly, glaringly in our faces.

In the year or two before my dad died -- after I moved to Toronto, started seeing A -- I had one of those grinding tectonic collisions. One episode after another where, in retrospect, I could have read "I know I'm dying and I'm asking you for absolution." And I never let myself read that -- uncomfortable at his pain, unable to respond to his interpretation of my sign-language-only romances with women as a result of my "hating men because of [him]," unbelievable discomfort at his panic and fear when he called me, feverish and hallucinating, terrified of Nurse Rached who was after him. My response was to cut conversations short, to tersely close in. I will always have, right under my skin, this raw ganglion of knowledge that the last time he ever called me, I was immersed in a stupid tv show -- a Q episode of TNG -- and sort of desultorily said "I'm in the middle of something right now -- can I call you back later?" And then... I didn't -- avoided, as always with the phone -- and a couple of weeks later he went on holiday with Petra and the girls, and then, died. And then, died.

Failures to shoulder check, pulling into lanes without looking, unfinished conversations. Needing to recalibrate my gaze, keep quiet in a new way. As Neruda got it, with such perfection.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death