Now about these inans. (What a transition, huh? “I wonder why she ever quit writing!” he says.) Really, though. About these inans. I’m as certain “they” don’t talk to you as I am that I can’t convince you of that. That is: I’m 100 percent certain on both scores. I hope that once you’ve finished passing through puberty, you’ll stop hearing them, or at least become certain that you aren’t really hearing them; I hope so because, that way, your life will be easier. But to tell you the truth, that you think you talk to inans doesn’t trouble me all that much. Billions of people believe they have conversations with a God they’ve never laid eyes on, and they aren’t (not always, at least) made to suffer for having that belief. And at least you can perceive the swingsets you speak to. You even have to be touching them, right? Even if you continue to converse with them—as long as that’s all you do with them—I think you will continue to be quite capable of having a good life.
Anyway (another stellar transition!), other than to note that solipsism is a perfect trap, I don’t have a lot to say about the inans, surely nothing that can match the rigor and complexity with which you’ve imagined their existence, with which you’ve made their existence impossible to entirely disprove to you, and most especially since you’ve already promised me (three times now) that you will never again destroy property that doesn’t belong to you. Sure, I can state the practical and obvious: that if you destroy property that doesn’t belong to you, you will eventually get in trouble, you will ruin your life, which will also ruin your father’s life, and that, furthermore, if the inans are “real” and they are asking you to ruin your life or the life of someone you love to help them (i.e. the inans), then they aren’t good, they certainly aren’t your friends, and anyway you owe them nothing. But I know from your journals that you’ve occasionally reflected on these things to one degree or another before and after you’ve ended up destroying private property because, ultimately, you end up thinking something along the lines of, “Well, they aren’t exactly asking me to ruin my life to help them, which would probably be unacceptable; they’re only asking me to risk ruining my life to help them, which maybe isn’t so unacceptable. If I abstract it enough, how different is it from being a soldier in a just war?” In other words, I know that, in the moment, you can convince yourself that destroying them is your duty as a human being—that it’s the kind, the right, and even the noble thing to do. It’s none of those things, and much of you knows that most of the time, but in the moment, when the inans are asking for destruction, when they seem most real to you, your intellect is less persuasive than your inner sweetness, so I’m not going to tell you that I expect you to believe what I believe the next time—or any time—an inan asks you to destroy it, I’m not going to say that I expect you to make the arguments against destroying it that you know I would make: instead I’m going to remind you once again that you have promised me you wouldn’t destroy them, and now I am going to dwell on that promise.
You have to keep it. You have to keep it in spirit, as well as to the letter. What I mean by “in spirit” is: Supposing an inan, down the line, tells you to do something else that you know I wouldn’t approve of (e.g. that, rather than asking you to destroy it, it tells you to steal something, or harm yourself, or harm another person): you must not do it. Even if you don’t understand why you shouldn’t do it, or why I wouldn’t want you to do it, you must not do it. Because you promised me, you must not do it. Because you promised me three separate times. And not only did you promise me three separate times, but the last time you promised me, I was on my deathbed. I know my power here—a mother on her deathbed—and the only end toward which I’ve leveraged that power is that of extracting that third promise from you. I want you to never forget that. The last thing I ever asked of you—demanded of you, if you must think of it that way—was that you make the promise, and I knew it was the last thing I would ever ask of you. It is the most important thing I’ve ever asked of you. You see, I don’t want you to quit writing: were I to live to see you quit, I’d feel disappointed. And I don’t want you to grow any further apart from your father: were I to live to see the two of you grow further apart, I would feel sad. But were I to live to see you break this promise to me, Belt, I would not only feel betrayed, inconsolably betrayed, but I would, in fact, be betrayed. I am going to die believing you will keep your promise. I am going to die believing you will betray neither my memory, nor yourself. Don’t betray us. Don’t make a fool of me.
Last thing, now. Last things. About me and the last decision I’ll make. You need to know that I didn’t choose to end my life in a state of rage or confusion. One major reason for writing this letter so methodically—drafted and redrafted over and again, typed up on the PC, spell-checked, justified, all but bulleted, and in what I know is, resultantly (perhaps a bit unfortunately), not exactly the warmest of styles—is to demonstrate to you just how present I am, how I’m still (when not in the throes of pain) thinking quite clearly. I’m very fortunate that way. Fortunate that none of the tumors in my head have—so far—grown upon, pressed upon, or in any way affected those parts of my brain that make me me.
When I was your age, I thought a lot about suicide. I don’t mean that I was suicidal back then—I’ve never been suicidal, and I wouldn’t even say I am “suicidal” right now—just that I thought about the phenomenon a lot. The whys and the ways. When it was rational (if it could be), when it wasn’t (if that made it unthinkable), when it was romantic, when it was hideous, the circumstances under which I might do it…I think that’s all normal. I think most everyone thinks about those things, especially when young. But after a while, I don’t know when—probably after high school, around the time your grandma died, and certainly by the time you were born—I began to accept, however fleetingly, that I would die eventually, that my life would end one day with or without my help (I’d always thought I’d believed that when I was younger, but I hadn’t, not really), and suicide seemed a waste of time to think about; it seemed like a dodge, a distraction, a way to avoid thinking about the world without oneself, a way to avoid thinking about not having a self, to think about the act of dying rather than what it might mean (or fail to mean) to be dead.
So for a couple years at least, I pretty much ceased to think about suicide. And then my father got sick. You probably remember very little of that. You were three years old, and I tried to shield you, and we’ve never talked about it, but he had cancer too. His was of the colon, and was not, when discovered, as advanced as my cancer is. The doctors tried to treat it—surgery, radiation, chemo—for, I think, three months, before they gave up. Then he held on for four or five more weeks. I’d never seen anyone in so much pain. It was worse for him during the treatment, but even after the treatment was through…it still upsets me to remember. He was so bitter, so lost, he so consistently hurt so much, and he told me that if he wasn’t afraid of never seeing the people he loved again, he would gladly kill himself. Gladly. He used that word. If he didn’t believe that my mother was in heaven, and that his parents were in heaven, and that I, if I were to accept Christ in my heart, would one day be in heaven—if he didn’t believe that, he said, then he would have already gladly killed himself because the pain just otherwise wasn’t worth it. There were moments it seemed to go away, he said, almost entirely—whole hours during which the pain seemed to be gone—but the anticipation of the pain’s return made those hours worthless. That’s how bad the pain was, he said.