What We Lose(18)
I hated to be alone in that apartment so much that I started showering at night, to shorten my time in the mornings. I zipped straight from my bed, washed my face, put on a change of clothes, and headed straight out the door. I made sure to come home after eight, nine on days when my father had staff meetings.
Soon my father started inquiring into my plans. When will you return to school? Perhaps you should find something to occupy your time during the day. He asked the questions halfheartedly, with little interest in my answers, and I began to realize that he was doing this out of duty—some workaholic’s ideal of busyness—and not because he was actually concerned. Most days, his eyes were empty, and I continued to avoid his gaze because I was afraid of what lurked behind.
We stopped eating dinner together every evening. Most nights, our fridge was empty. We stopped sending out our annual holiday cards with a family photo, or thoughtful, hand-lettered Thank You notes when we received a gift. Holidays were a wash. The two-foot plastic tree became the norm—my father didn’t purchase a single new tree after my mother died. All the plants in the house withered away shortly after the funeral, their brethren never to enter our household.
Before, the guiding instinct of our family was strongly intuitive, compassionate, and nurturing. In a word, maternal. My father and I both became orphans, malnourished, emotionally distant, neglected. Often, when we were sitting in the kitchen eating our takeout dinners, each of us at our separate spots—me on my laptop at the island, my father paging through a magazine at the table—we seemed barely recognizable to me. I looked at us and thought, whose family is this?
When I visualized my emotions, I would picture a graph. Sometimes I would try to draw it, and it helped to see my feelings organized into a neat line, a process that connoted order and straightforward representation. When I drew the graph, I pictured the x-axis as time, the y as strength of emotion. There was a spike around the diagnosis, when I first became aware something was wrong, when the suggestion of her mortality, the uncertainty of the situation, was first introduced, and, by virtue of its newness, was especially severe. Then the line went down, when I became used to the idea, and I was too wrapped up in the details—treatments, prognoses, outcomes—to be in touch with the emotion. My return home was another spike, and after that, a steady, slow climb, at high altitude, until her death.
At the point of her death, the line circles inward into itself to infinity, disappearing into infinite fractions. It was so beyond comprehension and feeling that it wasn’t able to be captured on a plane of “hurt” or “sadness,” or any single human emotion.
Loss is a straightforward equation: 2 ? 1 = 1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia—all those emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these, in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.
My graph resembled the form of an asymptote, the mathematical equivalent of ineffability: an object attempting to approach a line but forever failing. In the same way, my mind was trying to reconcile my new reality and failing, over and over again.
Asymptote: This appears to be a paradox to beginners in geometry, who are generally unable to imagine it possible that two lines should continue to approach one another forever, without absolute contact. But this arises from their confounding the thing called a straight line in practice (which is not a straight line, but a thin stroke of black lead or ink, as the case may be) with the straight line of geometry, which has neither breadth nor thickness, but only length. And they also imagine that if two lines might be asymptotic, the fact might be made visible, which is impossible, unless the eye could be made to distinguish any distance, however small. But if the unassisted eye cannot detect a white space between two black lines, unless that space is a thousandth of an inch in breadth, which is about the truth, it is evident that two geometrical surfaces with asymptotic boundaries, such as ABC, DEC, would appear to coincide from the point where the distance between them is about the thousandth part of an inch. The idea of a geometrical asymptote is therefore an effort of pure reason, and the possibility of it must be made manifest to the mind, not to the senses.
We will see that the same cannot be said for the sublime feeling. The relation of thinking to the object presented breaks down. In sublime feeling, nature no longer “speaks” to thought through the “coded writing” of its forms. Above and beyond the formal qualities that induced the quality of taste, thinking grasped by the sublime feeling is faced, “in” nature, with quantities capable only of suggesting a magnitude or a force that exceeds its power of presentation. This powerlessness makes thinking deaf or blind to natural beauty. Divorced, thinking enters a period of celibacy. It can still employ nature, but to its own end. It becomes the user of nature. This “employment” is an abuse, a violence. It might be said that in the sublime feeling, thinking becomes impatient, despairing, disinterested in attaining the ends of freedom by means of nature.
If there is a person who has never eaten a tangerine or a durian fruit, however many images or metaphors you give him, you cannot describe to him the reality of those fruits. You can do only one thing: give him a direct experience. You cannot say: “Well, the durian is a little bit like the jackfruit or like a papaya.” You cannot say anything that will describe the experience of a durian fruit. The durian fruit goes beyond all ideas and notions. The same is true of a tangerine. If you have never eaten a tangerine, however much the other person loves you and wants to help you understand what a tangerine tastes like, they will never succeed by describing it. The reality of the tangerine goes beyond ideas. Nirvana is the same; it is the reality that goes beyond ideas. It is because we have ideas about nirvana that we suffer. Direct experience is the only way.