I’m not telling you about any of this in order to scare you or make you feel sad for me. Quite the opposite. There are lots of reasons for you to be sad and afraid—you’re about to lose your mom forever—and I won’t deny that, but my speechlessness isn’t one of those reasons. I’m telling you about it because it’s so strange, and because I want to share with you what it’s like for me to die because, well—because I want to share everything I possibly can with you while I’m still able. And the first thing I’m really trying to get across here is that, having only just lost the power of speech two hundred–some minutes ago, I’m already finding that I’m grateful I still have the ability to write, the ability to bring (or at least try to bring) the experience across in this letter. Hugely grateful.
(I don’t know whether this gratitude is “miraculous” or horrifying. I don’t know if it’s a testament to man’s (or my) capacity for resilience or his (or my) tendency to cling to life no matter the indignity. It doesn’t really matter. Or maybe it does matter, but it’s not what I want to focus on here. Even beyond the gift horse’s mouth aspect, wondering at the line between hope and desperation is a waste of my time. Maybe of everyone’s, ever, I don’t know.)
So, grateful I was saying. I’m grateful, hugely grateful. Grateful I can write. But grateful though I am, I am equally afraid, Belt, and newly afraid—I am SO afraid—that wherever my ability to speak has gone, so will my ability to write shortly follow. Ever since I was diagnosed, I have of course known I would soon and forever lose the ability to communicate with you—that’s the first, most awful thing that death means for me—and I’ve spent the last week writing and rewriting the “second” (i.e. enveloped) letter with that in mind, a letter that I hope says everything sayable that needs to be said, yet the thought that I might, once I’d lost the ability to communicate, still possess the desire to communicate…that’s the new fear.
I guess I’d just assumed the one would go with the other, that with the ability would flee the desire. That I’d be alive, communicating, and then I’d die, not communicating. I don’t know why I assumed that. Maybe for my own sanity’s sake. It seems pretty unimaginative to me now, but that’s what I’d assumed: that once I was no longer able to say anything, there wouldn’t be anything left that I’d feel needed saying, or there wouldn’t be any I left to sense unsaidness. It really does seem stupid when I put it like that, huh? It does. I know. What’s more, it was selfish, that way of thinking. Because, you see (and this is the second—the main—thing I’m trying to get across), what has finally occurred to me, which is something that any child would know, something I managed, in- or conveniently, to put out of my mind, what has finally occurred to me is that our ability to communicate requires not only my ability to speak/write, but your ability to hear/read what I’ve spoken/written, and it wasn’t until I considered the implications of that that I realized how important it was to allow you the chance to say to me whatever last things you need to say—how important it was that you know I’m able to hear those things, whatever they might be, that I don’t rob you of that, that I allow you the chance to respond to me about my suicide.
Please read the letter in the envelope now. Please come sit with me once you’ve read it, and please say anything you need to say. I want to listen.
I love you,
Mom
PS Although a couple or three things in the second letter, especially toward the end, indicate the contrary—were I certain we had time, I would have changed these things—I want to reassure you I’m still alive. I am. I promise. I’m just downstairs, same spot on the couch as when last you saw me.
1/25–30/88
Bedroom, Basement, Living Room Couch
Dearest Belt,
The most important things don’t need saying. I am certain you already know I love you, and certain you know I know you love me. This isn’t an exercise in concision, however; it’s a suicide letter. And so I’ve just said the most important things. And, redundancy be damned, I’ll even rephrase them:
Hating my death—and, Belt, please make no mistake, I hate it—is a matter, first and foremost, of hating the fact that I won’t get to keep on being your mother.
And I won’t. Always, I will have been your mother, and, as I write this, I am still your mother, but soon: no more. I will not get to keep on being at all, nor do I doubt that even a little. Here in my foxhole, I’m still an atheist. That’s the last important thing I’ve learned about myself—that I really don’t believe in the everlasting soul, in fate, or in anything else even vaguely supernatural—and it’s the least important thing I’ll say in this letter, but I want you to know me for who I am and, once I’m gone, I want you to remember me for who I was. So to clarify a little: In saying, “I really don’t believe in the everlasting soul, in fate, or in anything else even vaguely supernatural,” I don’t mean to suggest that I haven’t wondered, “Why me? Why now? Why this?” I have. I have asked those questions no few times. However, it’s precisely when I remember that I don’t believe such questions have answers beyond the materialistic (genetics, environment, timing—pure chance)—when I remind myself that the universe is wholly amoral, that I’m going to die soon, to cease to get to be your mom, to cease to get to be your father’s wife, and that, in the time I have left, I will, intermittently, with increasing frequency and growing intensity, continue to suffer unspeakable pain for no good reason—that I see (over and again) how pondering the “meaning” of my suffering and imminent death is a waste of time, a needless distraction, something I’m simply not obliged to do, and I then find peace, or something close to peace, for I would much rather just think about you and your father, and I become more free and able to do so: to remember you, observe you, to try to know you as well as I can before I’m gone, before I can’t know anything.
Your journals have helped. They have helped immensely. I have read them all, now. Thank you for letting me. They have not only allowed me to know you better, which has helped me to determine what needs to be said here in order to leave you in as mothered a place as I possibly can, but the quality of thought (especially in this past year’s entries—oh my!) that comes through in your writing—the abilities to analyze and empathize you demonstrate—has freed me from any worries about how those things I should say should be said. I see that I can write to you in the same voice in which I’d hoped to one day write to you once you’d grown up; the voice in which I think when my thinking’s most complex and deliberate. All those em-dashes you use, and all those parentheses—all those asides and thoughts within thoughts (all that paradoxical back-doubling)—they make it sound, in form if not content, the way the inside of my own head sounds when I’m at my sharpest. And if you couldn’t tell, your style is infectious. Contagious. After just a couple hours of reading your journals, I found I couldn’t help but rip it off.