Charon & Me

"What do you think we do? We take them over a river of despair, until they can see a glimmer of hope, and then we push them out."

# # #

In August, I had one of those abrupt, life changing moments that come unexpectedly now and then. Perhaps to you it will seem a little thing. And perhaps it is just a little thing. For me, however, it was a seed crystal. You know about seed crystals - in a super-saturated solution in a chemistry lab, for example, a seed crystal is what can suddenly transform a beaker full of liquid into a solid lump. Or, though of another way, a seed crystal (say, a grain of sand) when paired with an oyster, is what gets you a pearl. For me, though, on this day, the crystallization was very rapid. And the pearl was priceless.

I was sitting in one of the far booths at Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, eating breakfast (best breakfast in Memphis, and don't you forget). I was eating there most mornings because Kira was still in Nashville, finishing an internship. I had just gotten the first issue of a new magazine called AFAR. It's sort of an existential take on the old travel magazine model. Lots of interesting articles, but most of them are pretty pedestrian in terms of, you know, life impact.

There was a one-page feature, though, under the heading "NOMAD." A brief piece, intended to focus on someone in medias res, with a snapshot of their life on the road. The nomad featured in this first issue was web designer Mark Salvatore. One page of interview was on the right, and on the left was a picture of Mark. He is sitting on a table, somewhere in an apartment he rented down in Mexico. He's sitting cross legged, and to his left and right are several pairs of pants and some shirts, folded and piled. There's a camera, a laptop, some computer accessories, a flashlight, and a couple extra pairs of eyeglasses. On the floor in front of him are three pairs of shoes, two bags, and a tripod.

The caption to the photo reads, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

# # #

Let me back up a minute.

Ten months ago, my mother died.

There's a lot I should add to that sentence. However, if you're human (and, if you're reading this, I suspect you probably are), chances are quite good that you, too have had a complex loss occur in your life. Meaning you will understand me when I simply say that Mom and I had a fair amount of unfinished emotional business between us when she shuffled off this mortal coil. So let me leave it at that, and press on to the most pertinent aspect, for this writing, of her passing. That pertinent aspect would be, of course, a rented house, full from floor to two storeys of ceilings, with stuff.

When Kira and I arrived to deal with funeral home arrangements and such, we had about four days before we both had to be back in Nashville. That meant we had a lot of very hard decisions to make in a very short period of time. Decisions about all these various items, from my mother's artwork and drawings to tchotchkies and knicknacks. Some of these were tied up with my childhood memories. All of this had had some sort of inscrutable significance, for her, in her life. It must have, right? Why else would it all be held on to?

But I couldn't hold on to it. We had one small car - a backseat and a trunk - that was all. The trick was finding the things we had to keep, no matter what. The rest, at the end of the four days, was turned over to an estate company. It had to go.

# # #

Have you ever read Anne Sexton's poem, "All My Pretty Ones"?

Years ago, maybe I was sixteen or a little after, I first read, it, and had the uncanny experience of being moved to tears by words alone. I'll leave others to recite it whole for you. For now, these words will suffice. I was thinking these words throughout those four days, and I have thought them again and often again, after:

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

What saddened me the most, standing as I was beneath that mountain of items in my mother's house, was that I had there, in front of me, all the locks, but no keys. To my mother, these may well have been treasures; to me, they were but ciphers. How to know what is wheat, what is chaff?

The answer, of course, was now dead. My mother held those keys, and took them with her to the next world.

I remember all those bad detective dramas I watched on TV when I was a kid. Remington Steele, Hart to Hart, Quincy. How many times did I watch a variation on the theme of someone murdering someone else so that they could get their things? Here I was, then, in the exact reverse situation. It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little. In fact, the things I kept were the very things I could connect, in some way, to her life, or our life together.

Only in this hoarded span, Sexton wrote, will love persevere.

But what are we to hoard?

# # #

I cried again at words on a page, that morning in August, when I read, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

I don't think my mother ever had the kind of relationship she had wanted with her family. In fact, I know she didn't. I don't think my father ever did, either, though he may still be working to correct that. But because they lacked these essential relationships, they did what many, many people do. They filled the hole with things.

I can make that claim with some authority because, you see, I am my mother's son. Like her, and like many, I also spent a ton of years (and I mean exactly that) collecting, hoarding, holding, and hauling "my stuff." Books. Records. CDs. Posters. Knicknacks. Tschotchkies. Clothes. Shoes. Hell, I even held on to broken and busted items because, well, you know, I might fix them someday.

Or maybe I was holding on to all this stuff because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed that one day Someone (who? I'm not sure. But Someone) was going to be coming around to check up on my to make sure I had kept up with all this stuff, had shepherded it and hauled it like a good little boy.

Because. Because, when you don't have actual relationships with human beings to anchor you, that's what you do. In lieu of actual praise, you anticipate the praise that will come on that day, whenever that day comes, when Someone, whomever that is, arrives to check up and sees what a good job of hoarding and hauling you've done. Well done. Well done, thou good and faithful lummox.

Sitting in my mother's house, that scared me. That pile of stuff scared me, because I knew what it meant. Even though I didn't have the stories, the keys, to unlock all the locks, I knew what the whole thing meant.

Mom had died alone, in a town she hated, far from a family she largely no longer talked to, in a big house, surrounded by this mountain of inscrutable stuff.

I did not want that to be me.

# # #

After those four days dealing with Mom's things, Kira and I got back to Nashville and started trying to fit what we had brought home in the back seat and trunk into our apartment. Photos, mostly, and lots of artwork my mother had drawn, and all of her personal writings and correspondence was the bulk of it. I spent some weeks sorting through boxes, organizing it and getting it re-packed into manageable containers that could be stored, and hauled. It took some time, but I got it settled.

Then a new job came up, here in Memphis. Kira and I got ready to move. We tried to pare down and weed out things as we packed. We made a lot of trips to Goodwill, and had a yardsale or two. We got rid of a lot of things. It felt good.

But on moving day, I was chagrined to find that I was still not done packing all the stuff. Our plan had been to have everything ready to go, and I was not ready. Like so many times before, little things were getting shoved in boxes without good labeling or organization. Every time I looked up from the latest sealed box, I saw the pile of what was still to be packed. It seemed huge.

(Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.)

Then there was the move itself. We had budgeted for eight hours. It took closer to twelve, and that was only because I stopped caring whether the movers put things in the right place, and just told them to get the stuff off the truck as fast as they could. I helped. Neighbors and Memphis friends helped. But there was still so much stuff. So much to move. So many things.

# # #

On Christmas Eve Kira and I went to see the new George Clooney movie, Up in the Air.

I'm not going to spoil it for you, because I think you should go and see it for yourself. Because I think it's worth seeing. So I'm not going to spoil it. But I will tell you this. Part of the way through the movie, George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, makes a speech about a backpack.

You can get the gist of it here.

Suffice it to say that I was with Bingham through the first half of the speech. In the movie version, after he talks about putting the sofa and the furniture into the backpack, he pauses, and then asks the audience to imagine setting the pack on fire. Liberating, isn't it? Yes, it is.

Imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. I have imagined that. And more than waking up to it, I have dreamed it. Longed for it. Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions. Yes.

But then the next part of the speech (you hear them blended together in the video): put all the relationships in the backpack. Feel the weight.

Bingham's answer, get rid of it all, may or may not ultimately work for him (that's the crux of the movie; I told you I'm not going to spoil it for you. Go see it). Regardless, sitting there in the dark of the theater, I had to ask myself, just what do you want out of all this paring down anyway, Dault?

Is it to get away from everything complicated, including and especially the relationships in my life?

Maybe one day, maybe in my twenties, I would have answered yes. Not now.

# # #

The other quotation from Mark Salvatore's interview, that kept me crying there at breakfast, was when he said (look - see - I have it written down here on a notecard. I carry it with me now, in my left pocket):

"I consciously decided to lower my expenses to have a higher quality of life."

# # #

Here's what I want you to do. The next time you're at a football game, or out at the big box bookstore, or shopping for groceries, or anywhere there's a crowd, I want you to pause for a moment.

Now this is going to be a little difficult, so stay with me.

When you pause, wherever you are, for that moment, I want you - just for that moment - to imagine to yourself the death of each and every one of those people you see. Not in some ghastly way, not in an accident or a massive explosion. Just imagine the reality of them, in graves and urns, all at once. Gone. Passed. Buried.

Don't linger on it too long. Being morbid is not the point here. The point is the brute fact of it all. Each person enjoying the football game, every soccer mom buying beets in the produce aisle, every bespectacled teenager waiting for the new Harry Potter book - each of them - they are going to someday be dead and gone.

And you. And me, too.

Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson? That sound is... inevitability.

# # #

It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little.

What does it mean, at the end of it all, to have had a "quality of life"? I may never get to the point where all my earthly possessions will fit around me, crosslegged on the table. That is not the point. And I hope I am never so buried by my possessions that they are, at that last breath, all that I am left with on this earth. That also, emphatically, is not the point - at least not for me.

Too much is not the point, and too little is not the point.

You are the point. You, and my mother, and my wife, and my soon-arriving child. My friends. My lovers, past and imagined. My brother. My father. My step-mother and my in laws. My cousins - even the ones I don't talk to anymore for reasons that are probably locked up somewhere in those things of my mother's that I either kept or let go. My colleagues. My students. Hell, even the folks I need to say "I'm sorry" to - even them.

The point is, in that fleeting moment of seeing where we're all headed, really and truly and inevitably, to allow yourself - just for an instant - to imagine your own death. What kind of death do you want? What, in that final breath, will be acceptable - to you - as a "quality of life"?

We're all part of that grocery store crowd. I know that. We're all goners. We're all lost. We're all going to leave such big, big holes when we go. I know that. I don't care.

You are what matters. To me. To each other. Don't forget.

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.