“Hey.”
“It’s wonderful to hear your voice,” I say to her. Then I realize it’s impossible for her to say it back to me.
“It’s strange,” she says. “Talking on the phone. We never talked on the phone.”
“This is so 1985.”
“Thank goodness you didn’t get my answering machine.”
It feels good to be joking, but then it feels awkward, because neither of us knows what to say next.
“I missed you,” I tell her. “I just wanted you to hear it out loud.”
“I missed you, too. I’m still missing you.”
“I’m right here.”
“I know. Exactly.”
I have made an awful mistake. I have led us to the same spot we were at before.
“I want to be there,” I say. As if that matters for anything.
“What are we doing?” Rhiannon asks. “Not to jump right to that, but every time I write to you, it’s what I’m thinking. And every time I get a response from you, it’s what I’m thinking. And most of the time in between, I’m thinking it, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Because what else can I say?
“Stop. At this point, I’m doing this to us as much as you’re doing this to us. We could spend our whole lives saying sorry to each other and to everyone else around us. But I’d rather find something else for us to say.”
Words fail me again. Because what else is there to say? I’m sorry is natural. I love you feels more like a challenge than a declaration.
“I want to see you again,” Rhiannon tells me.
“And I want to see you.”
She hesitates for a few seconds. Then says, “So get on a plane.”
“It’s not that easy,” I say immediately, reflexively.
“I know.” She sounds annoyed. “But you did it once. You can do it again.”
“Yes, but the last time I did it, it involved a teenage girl waking up in a hotel room in Denver with no idea how she got there. I tried to get back in the morning, to come up with some story that she’d believe, and to help her catch her return flight. But by the time I got there, she was gone. Hopefully she saw the ticket I left her. Hopefully she wasn’t too freaked out. But I have to live with the fact that she’d have every right to be freaked out. What I did was wrong, Rhiannon. I know I did it in order to get away, because I felt I had to get away. But that’s not an excuse. And I don’t plan to do it again.”
“So do it a different way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure! But maybe you wake up in the body of someone who’s traveling east. Or who has family in Maryland. Let’s try to figure it out.”
But will it really make a difference? I want to ask.
Only…I also feel that asking won’t make a difference, either.
The course is already set. There’s no way off of it. I tried to run. It didn’t work.
Now I have to try to get back.
MONA, AGE 98
Today is the day. Dear Lord, I know today is the day.
I have traveled so far and seen through so many eyes. Now I can hear the final notes of the lifelong hymn. I know this body is the one that will bring me up to You.
I am sorry this woman is not here to witness this, to see the grateful pain in her daughter’s eyes. She is holding my hand, Lord, and I feel You in that touch, just as I feel You in this body’s undoing, my life’s release.
I knew this day would come. There was no call for me to be an exception just because I have lived my life within the lives of others. Lately I have been feeling their pain more than their joy; as the bodies cultivate the pain, only the minds can offer the joy. I spend most of my time in hospitals or hospices or under the tender care of nurses whose fatigue nearly matches my own. (They have the decency to cover it better, most of the time.) It is a mercy to be leaving this Earth from the comfort of a home, in the bed where this woman has slept for decades, the mattress bending its springs to the memory of her shape. It is not my own home or my own bed—no such thing, Lord, no such thing—but I am still enfolded in the signs of life that a hospital room cannot offer. I am grateful to You for that.
Breathing is hard right now. Soon it will be too hard. I have been close to You before, but never this close. I hope that when my spirit rises, You will greet me with open arms and wisdom. Why have I lived like this? Were the choices I made the right ones? Was there something special I was supposed to see? Was there a special way I was supposed to help?
I have failed and I have triumphed and I have failed and failed and triumphed and failed again, but I have always kept going, even when the world gave me no encouragement, when the only voice I could hear was Yours, clear as glass and loud as thunder at some times, faint and unknowable at others.
For many, many years, I fought on the side of fairness, but that struggle took its toll. I could change people’s minds when they were under my power—but the deeper challenge was changing their minds once they were on their own again. I have endured this life by seeing the unbelievable expanse of what others can endure. I have held on to my stories by understanding that each of us contains a multitude of stories, and none of these stories end up saying the exact same thing. Each of us holds at least one story within us that breaks our hearts to tell it. Each of us holds at least one story in which we are surprised by our own fortitude. Each of us holds at least one story that never came true, the story we most wanted to be able to tell. A lot of the time, it isn’t our fault that this story never came to be; a lot of the time, we were stuck when we depended on the stories of others to match our own. All these stories—I have been honored and sorrowful and aghast and awestruck to know so many of them, in the short time You allowed me to know them.
As all of the senses are pulled back into this body, as vision and hearing and smell and taste and touch all retreat beyond, I struggle to play back the days I cherish the most. As this body shuts down, it’s like someone’s moving through and turning off the lights room by room. I am awestruck not by what I have experienced, but by my persistent desire for more. I am tired, Lord, and I am ready, Lord, but if You offered me another day, I would take it. Not to say any of the words I never got to say. Not to see someone I will no longer see. More than anything, I would like one last time to sit in the sun on an April afternoon, a good book in my lap, a song coming over the radio. To have one of those days when we get to feel the pulse of life underneath everything—that pulse a glory that reflects in every cell of our bodies, expressing itself in an inner splendor we are often too busy or hard on ourselves to acknowledge. You give us the simple pleasures because the rest of it is so hard. I understand this, Lord, because of all You have allowed me to see. It is an honor to You that I am ready and that I want more.