Ship of Theseus
by Kara Westerman-Grimshaw
You arrived home as newly fired ash last spring. Richard collected you from the funeral home in your black Toyota with the top down. I heard the crunch of his footfall in the gravel driveway and then his steps on the porch. Inside, he handed you over to me in a thick black plastic box, the size and density of a large brick. Were you still warm? No, I think I would have remembered that. Suddenly here were all of your particles gathered tightly to be reckoned with. I had the weighty weight of you again in my hands.
“Oh my God, I’m so glad he’s home,” I said, holding you against my chest. I surprised myself at the relief I felt in your proximity, even in this form. But I also knew in a flash: if this is possible, then anything is possible. If you could come home in a box, then I knew less than nothing.
Your Toyota sat in the driveway for nearly a year after you died. The black paint bleached in the sun, especially on the parts of the body that had been repaired and painted at a discount shop up island and weren’t quite as shiny. I intended to learn to drive the Toyota with its manual stick shift. I told Richard that I couldn’t possibly let it go, but finally, he convinced me to sell it to his mother. She could wear the dress shirt of yours I gave her, and ride with the top down and the wind in her hair. Then it would still be in the family after all.
So I removed your tiny bottles and baggies of emergency rations - tums, glasses, eyedrops, nail file, tweezers, scissors, twine, mint tea bags, plastic silverware, AA schedules, copies of your driver’s license, insurance, triple-A, medical cards, pencils, the clipboard wedged neatly between passenger seat and gear shift console with notes detailing expenses and shopping lists, jumper cables, oil, emergency tire repair spray, and of course bags of peat moss in the trunk. When the tow driver came I ran out and took pictures as it was being attached to the winch and chain, and cranked at an angle onto the bed. Yes, I cried. Another piece to let go.
During our first winter together, in between blizzards, we spent most nights making out like teenagers awkwardly across the center console of this black Toyota convertible. Under the haloed light of street lamps in deserted parking lots, in the same car your former girlfriend Barbara bought you twenty years ago when you left her to begin your transition into Nicholas. We pushed that car back and forth on my long, rutted, dirt driveway, frozen solid that winter. Finally, you agreed to return me home at night by the mailboxes at the top of the slope, and I would make my way back down to my house by the light of my phone, walking on the powdery snow at the edges of the ice, in the black. What were we trying to outrun in that vehicle besides your wife? It seems so obvious now that it was Time.
The faded fabric roof no longer operated by the time I knew the Toyota. It had seen twenty years of women. The gas lid had to be looped and pulled with a certain lasso length of string that you kept in the middle console. The radio no longer played, and the medallions had fallen off. But aside from these minor inconveniences, over twenty years you had lovingly replaced nearly every part in it, like Theseus’ ship.
“I like this tendency,” I told you. “It gives me hope that you won’t replace me when I get old.”
The ancient Greek philosophers tell it this way: Theseus goes out on a long voyage, and at each stop a part of his ship is replaced, identical to the original. By the time he returns home, every single part has been replaced with an identical part. The question is: Is it still Theseus’ ship?
We were fascinated by this identity over time puzzle, how a person stays identifiable as a self, when all parts are continually being replaced. We had no idea you would be gone in five years. I look back at the two of us, our love blossoming in your ship, bursting at the seams, two ancient philosophers with the misfortune of having bodies. We were giant brains with hormones attached.
We had been so careful, and so solicitous of your wife’s sobriety that we drove to other towns to attend AA meetings. Do you remember one particular night when we winged our way east to Montauk ? Past the Amagansett Presbyterian church, the firehouse, and the gas station, the last signs of civilization before the dark of the Napeague Stretch. That DWI Highway that the police loved because there were so many side streets to hide on. But we didn’t have to worry about the police now that we were sober.
I’m sure we were holding hands on that low highway running parallel with the ocean. Waves whispering just out of view beyond scrub brush and pines in the cold salty air. At the fork, just past Cyril’s old place, you would have taken the higher part of the roadway that suddenly twists and climbs to a 360-degree overlook. There you could see both the sea to the south and the waters of the Sound to the north. Just for a moment before the road wound back down into a dark burst of forest.
The last stretch of dark road was under construction that winter, and you slowed the car to a near crawl over black asphalt that had been cut and striated in preparation for new tar. It only gave us more time to talk and laugh in alien wobbles as our tires rolled across the spaced cuts. We vibrated in rhythm for miles. How funny that this is still so clear to me.
“How do you get a new Toyota sports car for leaving someone?” I asked, over the rumble of the rutted road. I wanted to get to the bottom of this anecdote about the car we were riding in. All I knew was that when you left Barbara she took you to a dealership and you picked out a new sports car. I had always imagined you driving off the lot with the top down, your auburn Gwynnefahr hair blowing cinematically in the wind, leaving poor Barbara in the dust. If anyone could pull this off it was you.
“People like to give me things,” you said with relish. I loved watching your large, sure, freckled male hand shift the manual gears seamlessly as the terrain under us changed from smooth to bumpy, to smooth again.
“Women,” I smiled at you.
“Women really like to give me things.” I am positive your eyes glinted with mischief even in the darkness of the car. “Let’s just say that Barbara took something I had, and I wanted it back,” you continued cryptically. “By the time I left her, I had to have it back.”
“Can you put that in layman’s terms?” I laughed.
“I think you would say power dynamics,” you continued. “I don’t know - complex - because I never would have chosen that particular woman if I had been this man.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” I said, meaning it, but not understanding yet that it was your fierce predator that you needed back desperately.
“So, this car was really a gender change present,” I said. “Goodbye to Gwynnefahr.”
“I found some strange pamphlets when I lived with Barbara. I would take them out periodically.”
You looked at me across the dark interior of the car. You spoke as if this hadn’t been fully formulated in your mind until the words left your mouth. Or was it that you were tired of explaining yourself? “I was revolted but fascinated, and I would read them in secret. I never thought - Oh, could I be one of those people? - until I did.”
The dark canopy of trees flashed thickly past keeping your secrets as you fell silent, and the wind whistled in through the worn rubber around the windows. As we entered the small back streets of Montauk Village I could see you in the interstices of light, when street lamps illuminated our tiny cabin for moments, your face seemed to alternate between melancholic and joyful, a lantern flickering between dark and light. I loved the whole thing.
“Then, when your mother died. You decided to do the whole thing - breasts, ovaries - ?” I asked.
“Her insurance company surprised me with a check. That’s what I mean about shifts. I felt my decision was instantaneous - just do it! But it had been coming a long time.”
Our AA meeting that night was in a small freezing chapel in Montauk where you had been a regular in other lifetimes. First as Jennifer and then Gwynnefahr, and finally Nicholas. These local Montaukians, mostly fisherman, boat captains, and bartenders, who had inexplicably loved you through all of your transformations over the last thirty-five years, welcomed us now graciously as AA love outlaws with cheap cookies and strong coffee.
That night, surprised to be asked, you stood at the strange little lectern on the raised stage and told your story to the group through a microphone. I sat with the others on a cold metal folding chair below the stage, tucking my poncho underneath my legs for warmth. You glowed in your ironed and starched shirt, meticulous suit jacket, surprisingly seductive socks in risque stripes, while you told us about your miracles. All in anonymous code, mentioning no particular names.
Do you think now that we were two separate hurricanes that wound our sympathetic velocities together until we synchronized? Or was there just one tornado that held both of us in its spell, causing arrests and boiler explosions, blizzards, and marriage dissolutions? I’ll take most of the blame. Emergency was the water I swam in, and my addiction to it was so hard to see.
What day was it when you realized that you would not be able to get in and out of that low-to-the-ground Toyota? The last time I remember you driving it was when you came home from the nursery on the North Shore.
“Want to see what I got?” you said delightedly, your face beaming.
“Where did you go?” I followed you out to the driveway and saw the entire trunk bursting with flowering plants, in oranges, and yellows and crimson.
“Riverhead!” You glowed with accomplishment. You weren’t going to die, your face said. It was all a dream.
“You’re telling me you drove an hour and half, there and back? Fuck!”
“What is there to be mad at?”
“You're on huge amounts of Morphine and Xanax and Valium!” I shouted. “What if you get pulled over? What if they take you to jail and I can’t get to you with your medicine? What if they take your car and my car overheats?! How will we get to the hospital if we need to? Goddamnit!”
If you could have spared me things like this I know you would have. If only you had told me you had enough money to go for better treatment, and that I could stop working and spend this precious time with you. But you were still under the illusion of control over your life. You took care of the money. You decided what food was and wasn’t acceptable. You were still so addicted to struggle and penury and worry, and so was I. Working on my Etsy shop at night after caring for you, cooking, pill managing with detailed charts for the thirty-plus medications you were on, and were now unable to remember.
For a year and a half, while the world was muffled and Covid quarantined, your body might have been glistening with crystals of ice. Still and intact in a freezer at Stony Brook, where you had donated yourself, to be taken apart for research. I called asking when your pieces were going to be returned. Since there were no classes during Covid, “The body was still in storage.” I felt conflicted for you, suspended in limbo, being no real where. But I have to admit it was calming when you still took up physical, rational, anatomical space. However delusional, I knew where you were.
I also had a fantasy that the longer you stayed in storage, the more likely that I could call and ask for you back. Why not? If you’re not going to use him, then give him back. Years ago my mother and I had come very close to stuffing our St. Bernard when she died. But the taxidermist told us that the stuffed dog would never look like our dog; she would never have the right expression unless we froze her while still alive.
By the second spring of waiting, I got a letter from the Department of Anatomical Services informing me that by the time I read their letter, you would already be in the furnace, or even already a pile of ash. I could arrange to collect you by calling the funeral home.
“I think I should bring him home in the Toyota,” Richard said when I called. “Yep. I just got goosebumps down both arms,” he confirmed. “I think Nick likes the idea.”
“Ah…then that’s a big yes,” I answered, letting your dear friend, Richard, take the lead.
I hung up and put my head down on the dining room table with a thump, in despair, not only that I had again missed a crucial moment in your alchemical transformation, but that the department of anatomical services had no idea what procedure might work best for those whose loved ones had given them the profundity of their flesh. Hey, just letting you know that your husband is leaving the freezer today and going into the fire, in case you want to be there. Of course, I did.
I screamed, flushed with anger, remembering how I was left out of washing and preparing your body that February morning when I woke in our hospital bed with your head on my shoulder, to find your breath finally still. They let me have four hours alone with your body. But at that cut-off, you transformed into their property. It was strictly against hospital regulations for me to witness the tiniest breakdown of your particles, to even let me watch them prepare you to zip into your bag.
“You think you want to see this, but you don’t,” the nurse at the hall desk assured me when I insisted. And insisted. I did want to see it. Fluids and urine and sweat and hair and muck. Your face as it turned more solidly into marble. I did not insist strongly enough. I am sorry. I should definitely have staked my flag and died on that hill. What is the worst thing that could have happened - that I stole a scalpel and ran wild through the corridors? That I climbed into your bag with you and refused to come out?
I wanted to be fascinated with the process of your death, rather than be excluded from the process. But when they lied and told me that Patrick, the gentle soul who helped me care for you so lovingly those last days, calling you by name and lifting you in his dark, tattooed arms, might be in danger of losing his job, I gave up. So I made Patrick promise - yes - each time I pleaded - yes - to make sure - yes again - that the tiny bouquet of flowers that I made hastily from our wedding bouquet, and tied with a rubber band, and put on your chest, that it would make it into your bag with you.
Yes - he promised.
Kara Westerman is a published fiction author, journalist, teacher, podcaster, and the fearless leader of the East Hampton Writers' Collective, now known as The Writers Collective Out East.
She received her MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and was awarded the Edward Albee Foundation Fiction Residency Fellowship. Her short fiction has been featured in The New Ohio Review, the anthology Submerged: Tales from the Basin, and The East Hampton Star.
Currently, she is working on a double memoir with her husband, titled A Suitable Vessel For Magic. Recently, she joined the Substack community, publishing two newsletters: Writers Daily Dive, a live online daily writing group, and A Suitable Vessel For Magic, featuring excerpts from her double memoir.
Formerly, she was a features writer for The East End Beacon and the producer and host of her podcast, Phantom Hampton: Stories From Where The Rest Of Us Live, available on iTunes.
She currently lives and works in East Hampton, New York.
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