I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(41)

* * *



“There was nothing anyone could do.”

I don’t know what else to say.

“Crushed.”

Crushed.



* * *



I felt dizzy, sick.

Anything could happen. A child could slide under the water. Treasured friendships could end. A dad could pack up his briefcase to go home to his kids and have his bones and heart smashed instead. All this could happen right here in our world. The big sheltering umbrellas. The little spandex swimsuits. The towels smelling of bleach. The metal gate around the outside to keep strangers out and swimmers in. The cloudless sky.

I must have looked pale. One of the women at the table asked, “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said.



* * *



My children were fine. My friendship was uncertain. (We’d resolve our issues over the next few months, retiring this argument to the Friend Fights Hall of Fame, although I didn’t know it then.) Sarah’s dad was not fine. Sarah’s dad was dead.

Should I have snapped right out of my funk over my fight with my friend when I heard about the death of this man? It did put things into perspective. “Look, neither of us is going anywhere. We’ll get over it,” I said to my friend the next time we talked, several weeks later, as the ice began to thaw between us. But I felt like the tragedy should have made the squabble disappear, and it didn’t. If anything, these two losses—so vastly different in scale—served to stake out two ends on the spectrum. That’s one of the strange things about life: Even when we know how much worse it could be, everyday pains are still pains. Losing our patience, our dignity, or our good graces with our loved ones hurts, even if that hurt is nowhere near the grand-scale pain of losing a person.

Sometimes people say things like, “You think it’s so sad that your kid is going off to college and your nest is empty? Well my cousin’s kid died.” Of course that’s more sad. But one person’s more-sad doesn’t cancel out another person’s less-sad. The fact that an earthquake took out a whole city block doesn’t make it hurt less when you trip and snap your ankle. Your neighbor’s cancer doesn’t make it painless for you to lose your job. Sure, it might help you cope if while boxing up your desk you said to yourself, “This professional setback is nowhere near as bad as a tumor.” That’s what I do when I imagine that whatever I’m going through is the lesser curse I got in exchange for some worse outcome I traded away. Bad things are still bad things, though, even if there are worse things. When you hear reports about the suffering people on our planet are going through—epidemics, drought, melting ice, corrupt elections, oppression—you might feel a little guilty for stewing over a disagreement with a family member or a roadblock at the office. But our personal concerns don’t go away just because the world is going up in flames on a global scale. That’s not how it works.

I once saw a flyer for a live storytelling series seeking performers. “No regular stories,” it read. “We’re looking for the extremes. The running of the bulls! The capsizing of the ship! The trauma you never thought you’d survive!” I like those stories—they’re interesting—but I don’t always want to hear about how someone faked their own death or escaped a fire. A sinking boat makes for a thrilling tale, but I’m also interested in how people deal with the sinking feeling of regret over an irretrievable harsh word.

That’s what I thought about by the pool that day: Both types of sinking happen all the time. The thought had been bubbling under the surface of my mind in some form or other for a while, I realized. As my children grew bigger and pulled away from me, the less I could protect them. The more you have, the more you have to lose, which means the further you get along in life, as people and places and things accumulate, the greater risk you’re taking just walking around every day. As a kid, I’d come to expect the unexpected—sometimes I faint, sometimes we move, nothing I could do about it—but now the range of “unexpected” seemed wider, scarier. One wrong step, and you could screw up something that could never be put right.

Was this the reason I’d started waking up with heart palpitations at 3 a.m.? Because I couldn’t stop wondering who would be okay tomorrow and who would not? None of us will be okay, in the end. The not-okay is coming for everyone. It’s a wonder we don’t all go around with our hands clamped, white-knuckled, around the wrists of our loved ones. A death grip, indeed.

We act like there are safe places. We behave as though if we work hard and acquire the right things, gain the right access, put ourselves in the right zones, we can arrive somewhere where danger can’t touch us—where anything can’t happen. We pretend that if we can identify someone else’s loss as greater than ours, we won’t lose. But nothing really guards our lives. Lifeguards don’t exist.





A Letter to the Type A Person in Distress


Hi.

Put down your phone and Post-it notes for just a minute. I know you’re busy rewriting your to-do list in your head, first chronologically and then in order of task magnitude and then visually like a pie chart with different colors for each slice of pie according to how long each thing will take. It takes concentration to keep the precision-tuned gears of your world-machine clicking along, but you can spare a minute.