Episode #2: A Suitable Vessel For Magic
Sanctuary
Sanctuary - March, 4, 2020
Your office at home is in the exact condition you left it a month ago - only stiller. You know this. How the thick rug mutes more sound. How dust settles. But I don’t dare disturb your carefully curated objects. The two matching armchairs face each other across from either wall. Aunt Edith smiles from her tiny brass frame on your desk, her wild hair sweeping off her head, an ascot tied around her throat. The papered drawers in your desk slide serenely open - only soaping the rails would make them glide this easily - revealing the most intimate level of your order. Silver scissors in their dark wooden tray - for paper only! - the fountain pen, the blown glass inkwell, the black and brown ink that will mix inside, the white-out applicator, the blank rolodex cards at the ready for new people to fall into your alphabetical spell. The whole place is composed of surviving objects objects from any Jimmy Stewart movie about an honest man that was ever made.
From this office and this chair you set the world in order for the two of us. Years of you sitting, standing, bending, turning in this room must have accumulated electromagnetic sketches of your movements somewhere, Nicholas. Your particular current of habit etched like grooves in vinyl. So that the laying on of the tip of the stylus could set it all back in motion, pulling you into the architecture of time here. Who or what is the needle, I don’t know yet. But let me hope.
There’s the issue of your closet. I can’t go in yet - obviously. I only have the courage to brush my fingertips across the shoulders of your wool suit jackets, and your starched shirts, hanging like cards in a deck. I keep the door ajar in case tiny spores of mildew move into the stagnant air and take hold on a cuff of blue cotton, a mother-of-pearl button, a leather belt, a fedora, or a silk tie. On the floor, shoes at the ready, face toward the wall on tiered shoe racks. I don’t have the will to take them out and polish them on your schedule. They fade into shadow, as if making their escape halfway through the wall. Stopped by wooden shoe trees holding the space. Ghost feet. Containers of your missing shape. I can’t touch those yet. I will break.
The staff at Mount Sinai Hospital made you vanish after your breath stopped. I asked to stay and watch, to help them prepare you for cold storage. Why not? You would have too, Nicholas. This only happens once. There’s no other love like this. But after my allotted four hours with your body, they insisted there was no person there anymore. Like magicians who are liable for revealing their dark arts, they told me it wasn’t hospital protocol. “You think you want to see this, but you don’t,” the hall nurse told me. But of course Death doesn’t have a protocol. I was already ninety-five percent initiated, and I wanted the whole package. So I insisted again that I help wash you, like the women of the family are supposed to do. When she saw that I couldn’t be persuaded by reason, she lied and told me it could compromise my favorite nurse, Patrick.
Patrick ran his palm over your crown and down the back of your neck to soothe you when he came in to move you. Did you see him or hear him? He spoke to you as a person, calling you by your name, Nicholas. You were on your way out, eyes closed, no words anymore. But I hope you felt how he lifted you lightly out of bed in black, sinewy, tatooed arms, like a holy thing. His perfect silent kindness a knife-blade into me. Patrick was the only one I trusted with the tiny bouquet I made of our wedding flowers and a rubber band. I asked him to promise - yes - to put them on your chest before they zippered you into your bag - yes. He promised. I couldn’t bear to take your gold band off your finger. So I left without it. I should have stayed and died myself on that hill in retrospect. I should have been there to prepare you for the last leg of your trip. I’m sorry.
Here in your sanctuary I have rubbed your oak desk and dresser with lemon oil as you instructed. In the afternoons I sit in the client’s armchair, as if I were your patient. I prepare to be hypnotized. I cross my legs and place the brown mohair throw over my palms in my lap. And I listen. Safely untraceable in your sanctuary. This place might as well be deep underwater. Silly to hope you can hear me. I use my breath to steady us in our Bardos. Me on solid ground, and you traveling, traveling.
I opened my eyes the other day, remembering another closet. I was eight. My grandmother Zonelle had died at fifty two from the same lung cancer you had. On one side of my mother’s closet were her own clothes, but at the far, deeper and darker end, was the evidence of her mother’s disappearance — satin gowns, a pink linen pantsuit, boxed hats, and fur stoles - holding negative space. I used to sit in the dark underneath, letting the fabrics brush my face. I memorized a magical pair of sling-back clear plastic pumps with carved lucite heels. I knew that one day all of these things would fit me, that one day my feet would slip into the clear pointed toes snug. I made my mother promise.
Reminder:
So brave. So perfectly truthful. This passage calls to mind the writing of Richard Selzer, a surgeon, whose stories are heart-stopping in their terrible beauty. "Imagine A Woman" is my favorite. It also calls to mind the strangers and loved ones--my father, my mother, my husband--I've been privileged to companion at the end of this life and the beginning of whatever is next.