The Letter

“This moment reigns as far as the eye can reach. One of those earthly moments invited to linger.” — Wisława Szymborska, from “Moment”

I wrote my wife a death letter before I came north. It was the first time I'd ever done something like that. I slipped it into my favorite first edition of Ray Carver's poetry. Then I told my best friend where to find it, so he might tell her in the event of my death. It seemed a bit much at the time, like I was taking myself entirely too seriously. And maybe I was. I'm still alive after all. I'll never ask her, but I wonder if she read it while our encounter with the bear was going on. She knew I put something in one of the books. It's a small New York apartment. She walked in on me, and I had a guilty look on my face. Ain't nobody getting away with secrets there. Plus, she's a smart lady. And she knows which books I won't sell. It's where I keep our lists of potential baby names, a stirring stick that I inked with hers a few times and the words “I love you” repeated probably one too many, and it contains the first note she ever sent me. The note was in response to that time I awkwardly and (a bit over the top) romantically asked her out (also via note); it was the first time she said yes to me.

After nearly dying the last time I took one of these types of jobs, I developed a strong desire to knock together a will. It seemed a reasonable thing and I addressed the concern clinically and in an entirely sober fashion. I even spoke to my uncle about it. He's a lawyer. Over the course of that conversation, I began to realize that I didn't really have anything worth putting in a will. We've never had much of value, beside ourselves and our relationship, nothing that might be of value to anybody else.

In the event of my death, all that assumed sadness aside, my wife would undoubtedly pack my gear and papers in a box (probably boxes) and store them or donate them or throw them out. She might keep a few books (those ones I refuse to sell), maybe my journals, my simple scribblings, maybe a few articles of clothing for the smell (I hope), or the memory (I also hope), or merely for their usefulness. So, I didn't make up that will, but I wrote this letter: something that had never occurred to me before to write. Maybe I just never had anything important to tell anyone. A bad way for a writer to be, I suspect.

I never went to war. My father did. My little brother did. I enlisted during a time of peace. Through a fellowship at NYU, I taught a group of veterans during my last year in grad school. Sometimes during those workshops, I felt less, occasionally inconsequential. Feeling like that is not an unfamiliar sensation. Somewhere inside, at those times, I know I'm wrong. I'm not a fraud or of no consequence. But perhaps I was also not the right kind of veteran. Maybe not a good enough or the right kind of writer. Certainly not the best of human beings, but shit's a work in progress, and I refuse to apologize for that. There were moments then and there are moments now when I despise the sound of my own voice. Hate my own presence in a room. Wish I could watch or listen without being there.

Sometimes I felt the same in those rooms at the Lillian Vernon House, on West 10th in Manhattan. Sometimes I did not. My peers, several perhaps as undeserving as myself, some seemingly dead already, toeing the line of what they imagine a writer should think or say, how a writer should look, what a writer should believe, rattled off rote commentary and substandard critique, passively gaslighting, covertly selfish, often phony. Sometimes they'd even parrot things I'd said in prior workshops. I'd hold my tongue because I too was a big phony and here apparently was the proof. But there were times I could not hold my spiteful tongue and said things perhaps I shouldn't have. It is strange to think now that at other times still, trapped inside my own solipsistic loop, I just sat among them and felt undeserving and less. In the Veterans Writing Workshop, surrounded by a manner of people I had not known in a few decades, those strong and thoughtful women and men sharing all their brokenness, that feeling of inadequacy was frequently amplified.

Perhaps they wrote their own death letters and with better reasons. My little brother is fairly dispassionate when he relates his experiences in Afghanistan, losing comrades and other horrors. Sometimes the neutrality of his delivery gives me pause. He is a good person at his core, and it seems to me he is coping with these horrors in his way. I don't interact with inherently rotten people, not for much longer than is necessary. My interest in him and his stories goes beyond the general demands of the fraternal. Maybe I would have digested my own terrors in a similar manner had I ever gone to war. Maybe I do for those pedestrian terrors I come across in my fairly pedestrian life. Am clinical when I relate all my stories, or perhaps overly-romantic? Hard to tell sometimes. Hard to gauge one's tone. Or how one sounds or appears to others. My delivery, like that of my father, I suspect is usually quite deadpan.

I don't think I'll ever teach another veterans writing workshop or write another death note. It is uncertain to me now why all these things are related in my mind. Perhaps it doesn't matter that they are or are not.

A friend of mine died some years ago now. He was alive like me. And wanted experience. Hardship. Pain. Pleasure. Wanted more, more of everything, perhaps more than he could safely handle. Certainly more than I could safely handle. I thought about him with some frequency when I was working down on the ice in Antarctica because I missed home and friends, and that feeling of being entirely comfortable with people who knew me at my best and worst and still, for some reason, remained friends with me. He was just one of those people. Tough-minded until he was not. I wanted to invite him down, but he was troubled. Like now, he enters into my imaginings every once in a while. One of my grandfathers died in a hospital, surrounded by people he loved. The other collapsed alone on a train. My grandmother was all ready to go when she did, said a few words to my father and I imagine whoever else was in the room and then passed on.

After recent events, I've been timid about traveling alone any real distance from station . I gathered the courage some days ago to wander out to the Temporary Atmospheric Watch Observatory (TAWO), a very small distance from station. A good start, I think. I walked on my own. Alone. And it was spectacular to be alone. Stepping just beside the large antenna, south of station, I knelt in the cold and looked out at the featureless white, tracked the clouds, tracked the wind across the snow. It hissed, snaking ripples and waves that reminded me that I was huddled atop a frozen sea, seemingly unmoving, but certainly not unmoved. The sky was a muddle of sun, and the clouds were the blade of a scythe across the bleak horizon. I snapped as many pictures as the cold allowed. Happily, I think. Happy to be small and still. Happy in a moment of awe. My brain tells me that these sublimities and these distances are not that great when we consider the cosmic. These things must be mundane in a universe as vast and seemingly endless as ours. But they were mine for the moment. And the moment passed and I walked back to station, gloriously alone, entirely adequate, and unmolested by terrors, sadness, regret, or brokenness. I'm going to destroy that letter when I get home.

“I hung the cobweb from the lampshade. Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath touches it. A fine thread. Intricate. Before long, before anyone realizes, I'll be gone from here.” —Raymond Carver, from “The Cobweb”