“… It is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” - Elizabeth Bowen
When I finished lunch Tuesday, I checked my phone and saw that someone had left a message for me, but no number had shown up, probably because the phone was out of juice when the call came in and it went directly to voice mail. It was the Women’s Diagnostic Center regarding my 2nd follow-up ultrasound (in regards to my cyst saga), wanting to reschedule. But it took me forever to get to the message because of all the messages I have saved, lest the people who left them die. That’s exceedingly blunt, but that, in fact, is the reason I have them. I am consciously and actively collecting mementos in advance, unwilling to get caught out again and entertaining the delusion that somehow I can make it better for myself the inevitable next time.
The first old message of the bunch is one left by A’s best friend a week before the first-year milestone of his passing, so it’s a little more than a year old. I’ve kept it, trying to hold on to people who were connected to him, people who were content to let me go. Every time I have to resave it and hear his voice, it’s a tiny knife in my heart. I never expected their friendship, but accepted it gratefully when it was offered, which left me hurt when it evaporated. We no longer have any communication, nor any connection; none but the one in my heart that will never entirely let them go, but will give up all hope and fantasy to anything beyond that. I am a practical woman, after all.
I realized that there was no comfort in holding on to that message anymore; in fact, it pains me to hear it. And I’m a big believer in (eventually) not doing things you know are going to hurt. And I was annoyed at having to wade through the saved messages to get to the new ones. So I deleted the message that I have dutifully resaved every 21 days for the last 400 or so. I actually felt more relief than loss in doing so. And then I deleted the one from my mother, and my father, and my brother, and my friend. I only kept two: one from E, and one from my friend’s mother, in case some day she might need it. But my family will call again, and I can save those, or not. I don’t know.
Try as you might, you just can’t box people and preserve them exactly as they are. They are wholly unlike summer peaches that you can put up on a shelf for some dry, cold winter night when you need a taste of something that reminds you that the world is good and beautiful. I find that the focus, the desperation that makes me want to try, creates its own grief that is subtle, but constant. I am waiting for the whole world, (or my whole world anyway), to die, bracing myself against what I know to be inescapable, what I have experienced, coming far sooner than I ever dreamed. It’s a bunker mentality of a sort. I travel this world warily, touched constantly by the melancholy of having made the intimate acquaintance of mortality.
I’ve heard it said that we cannot live fully with the spectre of death constantly in mind, which is why we all learn to carefully avoid it as much as possible, and why we are so completely unprepared when it comes into our lives. I know it’s true, because I am hyperaware of it now, and it dogs me, my own shadow a shade of things to come, and things to pass.
I want my innocence back, damn it! I am haunted, and hunted, by what I know now.
But I deleted those messages. Perhaps that is a small victory. Perhaps there is hope for me yet. Perhaps there is hope.