The Descent IX

Around this same time, something in me started to crack, not in a destructive way, but emotionally, like something long held in place was finally giving way. One day I had driven my son, who was about eleven at the time, to a gym to play basketball. Most of the time it would just be me and him. He’d shoot and I’d rebound. After one of those sessions we were driving home. I was exhausted when a song came on the radio, one of my favorites, something I’d heard a hundred times and usually would have sung along to without thinking. But this time something else happened. I broke down completely. Not just tears, but deep, convulsing sobs, like my chest was splitting open from the inside. It came out of nowhere and didn’t let up. My son reached over and placed his hand on mine, quietly, without saying anything, and there was something in that moment, in the way he did it, that felt like he understood something I couldn’t even put into words. It felt like he knew it too, that our life was still too much, still too heavy. I was working graveyard at the casino, trying to keep everything together, take care of everyone, and at the same time I was chasing something I didn’t understand, something spiritual, something beyond all of this, and the song hit me like a message. It wasn’t the words exactly, but something behind them, something I felt more than heard.

What was the song? Andrew Lloyd Webbers “Next time you fall in love.” It was like the lyrics were talking to me saying, “Let it be with me the way it used to be, back when we touched the starlight.” There was a message here, I felt it in the tender way my son responded to my tears. It was almost as if the universe was trying to talk to me.

Around that time my father was getting sick. I don’t know if I had been told yet that it was ALS or if it was just a sense that something was wrong, but he had come to visit us and we had gone to see him, and without my mother around I found that I really liked him, even loved him in a way I hadn’t before. The kids did too. Then my sister called and asked us to come for Christmas. She said it was his request, that he wanted us all together again. I didn’t think I could get the time off, casinos don’t work that way, but she insisted and said it was his last request. I couldn’t accept that he was dying, not really, but I told my boss anyway and somehow they gave me four days off not on Christmas but right before. We'd improvise and just pretend it was. He paid for us to fly out because there was no time to drive. Even though life had improved, I was still living paycheck to paycheck and completely unprepared for Christmas. I didn’t even realize what it would feel like for my kids to step into my sister’s world. Her house alone would sell for close to two million dollars now, five acres, horses, space, everything stable and established. I bought a tiny fake tree at the last minute, maybe a foot tall with a few ornaments. That's what we'd come home to.

I cried the entire flight. The moment I sat down on the plane it hit me all at once that this was it, that I was going to lose him. The grief surprised me because we hadn’t always been close, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. Something deeper had taken over. I wept silently while my kids held my hands. There was no stopping it, any impulse to hold it in was gone. Those three days were the saddest of my life. My sister made a beautiful Christmas dinner but my father could barely eat, and still we went through all the motions as if the rituals meant something in the face of what was happening. The gift exchange was worse. My kids could feel the difference, the imbalance, how far apart our lives really were. On the last day my father drove us to a storage unit where everything he owned was kept, his entire life in boxes. He told us to take whatever we wanted, so we sifted through it, picking up pieces of a life that was already ending. I would find pictures and bring them to him, trying to spark something, asking if he remembered, but it was already slipping away. It was unbearable.

We flew home on Christmas Eve. Everything was closed by the time we landed and the only place open was a Sonic. I told the kids to order whatever they wanted. When we got home the house felt empty, flat, like something had been removed from it. There was nothing to do but sit in it. I took a short nap and then went to work. The pathetic little tree seemed to remind me of just how much I was failing.

Not long after that he went to Germany to visit his sister, even as sick as he was. Once he got there his condition declined quickly. My sister tried to get him back to the States but he needed oxygen and traveling became complicated. Plans were made but they didn’t happen in time. I spoke to him on the phone and he could barely talk. The words just wouldn’t come. About ten days after Christmas I called my aunt’s house from work because of the time difference. I was in the break room surrounded by people when she told me he had died in his sleep. That was it. There was no real funeral, or if there was it was small, in Germany. His ashes were placed beside his parents graves. I’ve never been back. My sister didn’t go either.

And maybe that’s when everything really began. Death has a way of making things real in a way nothing else does. That night I lay down in my son’s bed, the same place I often slept because I didn’t have a room of my own, and for some reason I put on a meditation that claimed you could contact the dead. I don’t know why I did it. I must have drifted off, or something else happened, but I woke suddenly to the sound of a wind, not outside, but inside the room. The bottom of the comforter was lifting and moving as if something wildly forceful was passing through it. Then something came toward me. I don’t know what it was, some kind of presence, something undeniable, and the moment I felt it I recoiled in fear and it was gone. Just gone. I was certain I hadn’t dreamed it. It was too immediate, too real. I pulled the covers over my head and pressed myself against my son as he slept. Nothing happened, it was gone, and never came back.

You get one life. A limited amount of time. And in that moment everything narrowed down to a single question.

What am I?