that photo
It’s so harsh, I can’t look at it often. The naked reality of your impending death unmistakable. There is nowhere to look for relief. In it, you hardly look real to me - you look like a drawing of yourself, a self literally drawn by pain. The catastrophic changes to your face but your eyes the same, one eyebrow bent in pain, physical and emotional.
Your mom sent it months after you passed. Then, just yesterday, she sent another, taken on the same day, your last breath just hours away. I don’t know why she sent it, it just sailed into my texts out of the blue, knocking the wind out of me. She has bookmarked my public goodbye to you, the one I started writing the day I wrote you that last letter, the day I realized, sudden as a slap, that I hadn’t heard from you in a few weeks and your last scans were ‘not great’ meant you were in decline. Thank you, she writes. Thank you for still caring. It helps.
The new picture is terrible to see. You are talking to your mom, captured in mid-sentence. It’s a bad picture, in terms of composition - your eyes closed, mouth open, the ledges of your cheeks so sharp they look like they might break through the skin. This, I think, is how you looked when you drew your last breath. And there it is, under your left elbow, the towel from our bathroom in Austin, the one I picked because it matched the walls so well, the one we found out not only did not absorb water but seemed to actively repel it. I don’t kid myself it is there for sentimental reasons. But maybe, just maybe, you remembered me for a second when it was handed to you. I have one that matches it, it’s in my bathroom here in San Francisco, and will soon make its way to my new home halfway around the world from where I now sit, where it will continue not doing its job until I die.
About that - I’m moving, something I would have written to you if you were still alive. You would have been surprised and pleased to hear of it. “Interesting,” you would have said, drawing the word out, a smile in your voice. It always pleased me so much to surprise you. It still does.
Your mom has asked for your last email to me, again. I told her (again) that I’d send it when I could stand to open it and see it again. She says that, though she spent many days with you towards the end, you never opened up, except for the time you called her in the room to thank her for taking care of you, and to tell her you loved her. Now she is hungry for any detail of you, any scrap of information she can jigsaw into her picture of you.
You were not withholding things you wanted to say. After 20 years with you, it’s something I’m sure of. You never expressed yourself with words. Music did that for you. Music, and of course, your actions. You weren’t one to say I love you much, but you called me affectionate nicknames and if I ever expressed a want, need or desire you almost immediately fulfilled it, without comment. You observed, and you acted - it was your way. When you told me, by letter, that the diagnosis was devastating, financially and emotionally, it struck me hard. I guess that’s why your mom wants to see the letter, read it for herself - for you, saying something like that was really opening up. I knew then, despite your hope, and all the treatments, that you’d already recognized the inevitable.
Mom called. Dad is declining. The new diagnosis isn’t surprising, but it’s emotional for him, and us, though less so for mom which is also not surprising. Remember that house you tried to buy on main street in their town, next to the tavern? And the guy wouldn’t sell it to us because we weren’t local. He hated us for being from California and didn’t even seem to notice that we’d both grown up in the same cornfields as him, and you standing there in a DeKalb hat, his own hat with the John Deere logo. They tore it down, and the house next to it too. Mom is hoping the tavern will expand with an outdoor patio. That will be good for the town, she said. But I could tell she was sad about that house being gone, that she would miss that little reminder of you every time she drove by it. Now there is only a construction site, and soon there will be something new, and she won’t even feel a tug when she goes by, or remember that house was ever even there.
And so the touchpoints of you in the world disappear, one by one. Dad will forget you too. Why this should make me cry I don’t know.