Bubblegum, page 42
So I can no longer speak, Belt. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ll never speak again. And I know, I know: never say never. But it’s been a few hours, and nothing has changed, and, believe it or not, I’m already used to it. Which isn’t to say the experience isn’t strange to me, but the fact that I’ll never speak again…I’ve accepted that. To experience this symptom, or whatever it is (maybe it’s the drugs, perhaps a combination of drugs and symptoms, mild seizures or so-called “mini-strokes”) is very strange. Here I am, writing this letter, a letter composed of sentences that—I think, I hope—are clear, yet if I open my mouth to speak what I’ve written (in a double-checking spirit, I did so just now, tried to speak the words “to speak what I’ve written”), all that comes out are those crying sounds.
I’m not telling you about any of this in order to scare you or make you feel sad for me. Quite the opposite. There are lots of reasons for you to be sad and afraid—you’re about to lose your mom forever—and I won’t deny that, but my speechlessness isn’t one of those reasons. I’m telling you about it because it’s so strange, and because I want to share with you what it’s like for me to die because, well—because I want to share everything I possibly can with you while I’m still able. And the first thing I’m really trying to get across here is that, having only just lost the power of speech two hundred–some minutes ago, I’m already finding that I’m grateful I still have the ability to write, the ability to bring (or at least try to bring) the experience across in this letter. Hugely grateful.
(I don’t know whether this gratitude is “miraculous” or horrifying. I don’t know if it’s a testament to man’s (or my) capacity for resilience or his (or my) tendency to cling to life no matter the indignity. It doesn’t really matter. Or maybe it does matter, but it’s not what I want to focus on here. Even beyond the gift horse’s mouth aspect, wondering at the line between hope and desperation is a waste of my time. Maybe of everyone’s, ever, I don’t know.)
So, grateful I was saying. I’m grateful, hugely grateful. Grateful I can write. But grateful though I am, I am equally afraid, Belt, and newly afraid—I am SO afraid—that wherever my ability to speak has gone, so will my ability to write shortly follow. Ever since I was diagnosed, I have of course known I would soon and forever lose the ability to communicate with you—that’s the first, most awful thing that death means for me—and I’ve spent the last week writing and rewriting the “second” (i.e. enveloped) letter with that in mind, a letter that I hope says everything sayable that needs to be said, yet the thought that I might, once I’d lost the ability to communicate, still possess the desire to communicate…that’s the new fear.
I guess I’d just assumed the one would go with the other, that with the ability would flee the desire. That I’d be alive, communicating, and then I’d die, not communicating. I don’t know why I assumed that. Maybe for my own sanity’s sake. It seems pretty unimaginative to me now, but that’s what I’d assumed: that once I was no longer able to say anything, there wouldn’t be anything left that I’d feel needed saying, or there wouldn’t be any I left to sense unsaidness. It really does seem stupid when I put it like that, huh? It does. I know. What’s more, it was selfish, that way of thinking. Because, you see (and this is the second—the main—thing I’m trying to get across), what has finally occurred to me, which is something that any child would know, something I managed, in- or conveniently, to put out of my mind, what has finally occurred to me is that our ability to communicate requires not only my ability to speak/write, but your ability to hear/read what I’ve spoken/written, and it wasn’t until I considered the implications of that that I realized how important it was to allow you the chance to say to me whatever last things you need to say—how important it was that you know I’m able to hear those things, whatever they might be, that I don’t rob you of that, that I allow you the chance to respond to me about my suicide.
Please read the letter in the envelope now. Please come sit with me once you’ve read it, and please say anything you need to say. I want to listen.
I love you,
Mom
PS Although a couple or three things in the second letter, especially toward the end, indicate the contrary—were I certain we had time, I would have changed these things—I want to reassure you I’m still alive. I am. I promise. I’m just downstairs, same spot on the couch as when last you saw me.
1/25–30/88
Bedroom, Basement, Living Room Couch
Dearest Belt,
The most important things don’t need saying. I am certain you already know I love you, and certain you know I know you love me. This isn’t an exercise in concision, however; it’s a suicide letter. And so I’ve just said the most important things. And, redundancy be damned, I’ll even rephrase them:
Hating my death—and, Belt, please make no mistake, I hate it—is a matter, first and foremost, of hating the fact that I won’t get to keep on being your mother.
And I won’t. Always, I will have been your mother, and, as I write this, I am still your mother, but soon: no more. I will not get to keep on being at all, nor do I doubt that even a little. Here in my foxhole, I’m still an atheist. That’s the last important thing I’ve learned about myself—that I really don’t believe in the everlasting soul, in fate, or in anything else even vaguely supernatural—and it’s the least important thing I’ll say in this letter, but I want you to know me for who I am and, once I’m gone, I want you to remember me for who I was. So to clarify a little: In saying, “I really don’t believe in the everlasting soul, in fate, or in anything else even vaguely supernatural,” I don’t mean to suggest that I haven’t wondered, “Why me? Why now? Why this?” I have. I have asked those questions no few times. However, it’s precisely when I remember that I don’t believe such questions have answers beyond the materialistic (genetics, environment, timing—pure chance)—when I remind myself that the universe is wholly amoral, that I’m going to die soon, to cease to get to be your mom, to cease to get to be your father’s wife, and that, in the time I have left, I will, intermittently, with increasing frequency and growing intensity, continue to suffer unspeakable pain for no good reason—that I see (over and again) how pondering the “meaning” of my suffering and imminent death is a waste of time, a needless distraction, something I’m simply not obliged to do, and I then find peace, or something close to peace, for I would much rather just think about you and your father, and I become more free and able to do so: to remember you, observe you, to try to know you as well as I can before I’m gone, before I can’t know anything.
Your journals have helped. They have helped immensely. I have read them all, now. Thank you for letting me. They have not only allowed me to know you better, which has helped me to determine what needs to be said here in order to leave you in as mothered a place as I possibly can, but the quality of thought (especially in this past year’s entries—oh my!) that comes through in your writing—the abilities to analyze and empathize you demonstrate—has freed me from any worries about how those things I should say should be said. I see that I can write to you in the same voice in which I’d hoped to one day write to you once you’d grown up; the voice in which I think when my thinking’s most complex and deliberate. All those em-dashes you use, and all those parentheses—all those asides and thoughts within thoughts (all that paradoxical back-doubling)—they make it sound, in form if not content, the way the inside of my own head sounds when I’m at my sharpest. And if you couldn’t tell, your style is infectious. Contagious. After just a couple hours of reading your journals, I found I couldn’t help but rip it off.
I don’t know where you learned that stuff. When I was in school—and I, like so many other bookish girls and young women, wanted, and even tried for a while, to be a writer—they taught us that long sentences were inherently the products of sloppy thinking. That asides were messy. That parentheses were loathsome. (Loathsome! No kidding. They actually hated certain punctuation marks. How is that sane?) They’d demonstrate the power of the declarative sentence—and there is, to be sure, no more frequently powerful a kind of sentence—while claiming, against all kinds of contrary evidence (e.g. in Ellison, O’Connor, Salinger, Roth—the list goes on and on) that declarativeness was somehow determined by the raw number of syllables in a sentence (i.e. the fewer the better) rather than the frequency and placement of stress. Tin-eared, all of them. Maybe that’s changed. Maybe there’s a genius teaching at Washington. I tend to doubt it.
But if you do continue to write, Belt—and I imagine you will—please trust me on this: refine what’s yours. Strive to get better at sounding like yourself. You are not fully formed—no one every really is—but you are muchly formed. Precociously formed. If you seek out teachers, judge their worthiness only on whether they enjoy what you already do. Whether they enjoy it. Whether it speaks to them. If they only admire it—let alone if they don’t like it—they can’t possibly help you to get any better.
I know that, as with anything positive I have to say about you, you’re taking all of this with a grain of salt. Part of me wishes that weren’t so, but most of me knows that you wouldn’t be you if you accepted your loving mother’s praise as gospel. That’s also part of why I think you’ll continue to write: you have the temperament. Doubting praise, your mother’s or anyone else’s, is an outcome of your wanting not merely to be thought of as good, but to, in fact, be good. That, incidentally, is what makes a person good, and it’s necessary to make a writer—any artist—great. Not sufficient, but necessary. And it’s just as necessary to know it’s insufficient. Now you’ve been told.
So, sad as I am for you—that you will no longer have me around—I really do think you’re going to be fine. You have found a vocation, something you’re always going to love to do, or, at the very least, feel is worth doing. That’s no small thing.
I’ve discussed it with your father. You asked me not to show him or even talk to him about what’s in your journals, and I haven’t, other than to tell him that your talent for writing is surprising, even to me, who thinks the world of you in all things, and that I’m all but certain you’ll be a writer. I want you to know what his response was. He said, “Tell me how to keep from fucking it up.”
I have no brothers, nor any male cousins. I hardly dated before I met your dad. All I know about fathers and sons comes from novels and movies and the two of you. The two of you have been growing distant. Over the past few months—maybe longer, maybe I’ve been slow to notice—it seems you’ve begun to (accurately) sense just how different you are from one another. He’s loud, outgoing, aggressive even, doesn’t read much, prefers to fish, to watch boxing, is excited by certain forms of circumscribed violence. You, like me, are quiet, a little too shy, content to walk around and think, to sit upstairs in your room and think. In sum (if I haven’t already reduced you guys enough): he tends to hate being alone, and you often need to be alone.
Maybe you’ll eventually learn from each other. I know I’ve certainly learned from your dad. Most saliently I learned self-confidence (though I don’t think he’d call it that; he’d probably say I “found my legs” or “learned to take it on the chin”). And I think he might have learned a thing or two from me: just the other day, when you showed him Kablankey and he gave him that onion, you saw the way he melted—he wouldn’t have done that when we first started dating; back then, if he’d sensed any kind of fuzzy feeling coming on that didn’t have its origins in me or some underdog boxer or hero of the Second World War or a Springsteen lyric or something, he would have looked away and, if he couldn’t look away, he would have been too embarrassed to say anything, let alone anything resembling “I just want to eat it right up,” or whatever it was he said about Kablankey. But we’re in love, your father and I, and we were young when we fell in love, and now, though our love has only grown more intense, we’re not so young, not so able to change. So while you might change some—might become more like him—he isn’t likely to change very much, if at all. Still, I’ll tell you the same thing I told him when he said, “Tell me how to keep from fucking it up”: be patient with him. Despite your differences, you’re not at odds. You asked me not to show him your journals because you don’t think he’d like them (you’re probably right) and, because he’s your father, you value his opinion about what you do. Yet because you’re his son, he, regardless of his opinion about what you do, values you; “Tell me how to keep from fucking it up” is Clyde-speak for “tell me how to help Belt be whoever Belt wants to be.” So instead of dwelling on how you two wouldn’t ever bother to know one another if you weren’t related (not to guilt you, but that entry really broke my heart a little when I read it), try thinking about how, because you’re related, you have a rare (a onetime!) chance to be friends with someone so different from you. I want you to be friends.
So like I was saying, I told him, “Be patient.” And I also told him to move my PC from the basement to your room. I don’t think work will attempt to take it back, but they might—it’s theirs. If so, Dad’ll buy you a new one. He’ll make sure you always have a computer to write on. (A quick note about writing on computers: the sooner you get comfortable doing it, the better. Your handwriting is just not very good, Belt, and the extensive revising that you do—all the crossed-out words and margin notes—make reading it, and therefore, I’d imagine, editing, also, harder. The delete key was invented for you.) He also happily agreed to buy you a new book each week and to maintain the (pretty good, I must say) library in the bedroom, even if you move, or he gets remarried (in which case I suppose he’ll move the library into another room—don’t get mad if he does this, it’s fine). Last but not least, he will not discourage you from studying whatever you might want to study in college. Maybe it’ll be English. Or even Creative Writing—they teach that, now, you know. I’m not saying I think you should major in either of those things—I majored in English, then Philosophy, and I think the humanities effectively murdered my desire to write—but rather that I trust you to know what’s best for you to study, and your father will, too.
He’s a good man, Belt. He’s kind (however sometimes inconspicuously), he loves you (ditto), and he always keeps his word.
So I’ve covered my atheism, your writing, and my hopes for you and your father. I wish I had something of value to tell you about women, or girls, about falling in love, marriage, having kids, but, apart from my telling you that I believe you’ll meet a good person to fall in love with if you remain a good person, that I really hope I’m right about that, and that falling in love with your father was the easiest thing I ever did, and, with the exception of becoming your mom, the most rewarding—apart from that, I have very little to say, and I’m not about to start making things up. I was very lucky to meet your father. It was at-first-sight and it made no sense. There’s no great anecdote. We met at a bar, where I’d gone to read. He came up and said hello. I really don’t remember what else was said. We were drawn to one another. We clicked. There was fire. All the clichés that are thankfully justified. I hope our luck runs in the blood. As far as I can tell, luck is what you’ll need; you’re like me in that way. You know well, and perhaps—though hopefully not—too well, how to be alone. My sense is: don’t seek love out. But that’s only based on my own singular experience. I met your dad when I was twenty-one because he came up to me. Maybe I’d feel different if I’d been twenty-two, twenty-three, thirty—who knows? You’ll figure this stuff out without your mother. Without your father, too. I guess that’s one thing I do feel I can tell you. You will—you won’t be able to help but to do so—figure falling in love out with the person you end up falling in love with, and until you meet her…you’ll have no idea.
Now about these inans. (What a transition, huh? “I wonder why she ever quit writing!” he says.) Really, though. About these inans. I’m as certain “they” don’t talk to you as I am that I can’t convince you of that. That is: I’m 100 percent certain on both scores. I hope that once you’ve finished passing through puberty, you’ll stop hearing them, or at least become certain that you aren’t really hearing them; I hope so because, that way, your life will be easier. But to tell you the truth, that you think you talk to inans doesn’t trouble me all that much. Billions of people believe they have conversations with a God they’ve never laid eyes on, and they aren’t (not always, at least) made to suffer for having that belief. And at least you can perceive the swingsets you speak to. You even have to be touching them, right? Even if you continue to converse with them—as long as that’s all you do with them—I think you will continue to be quite capable of having a good life.
Anyway (another stellar transition!), other than to note that solipsism is a perfect trap, I don’t have a lot to say about the inans, surely nothing that can match the rigor and complexity with which you’ve imagined their existence, with which you’ve made their existence impossible to entirely disprove to you, and most especially since you’ve already promised me (three times now) that you will never again destroy property that doesn’t belong to you. Sure, I can state the practical and obvious: that if you destroy property that doesn’t belong to you, you will eventually get in trouble, you will ruin your life, which will also ruin your father’s life, and that, furthermore, if the inans are “real” and they are asking you to ruin your life or the life of someone you love to help them (i.e. the inans), then they aren’t good, they certainly aren’t your friends, and anyway you owe them nothing. But I know from your journals that you’ve occasionally reflected on these things to one degree or another before and after you’ve ended up destroying private property because, ultimately, you end up thinking something along the lines of, “Well, they aren’t exactly asking me to ruin my life to help them, which would probably be unacceptable; they’re only asking me to risk ruining my life to help them, which maybe isn’t so unacceptable. If I abstract it enough, how different is it from being a soldier in a just war?” In other words, I know that, in the moment, you can convince yourself that destroying them is your duty as a human being—that it’s the kind, the right, and even the noble thing to do. It’s none of those things, and much of you knows that most of the time, but in the moment, when the inans are asking for destruction, when they seem most real to you, your intellect is less persuasive than your inner sweetness, so I’m not going to tell you that I expect you to believe what I believe the next time—or any time—an inan asks you to destroy it, I’m not going to say that I expect you to make the arguments against destroying it that you know I would make: instead I’m going to remind you once again that you have promised me you wouldn’t destroy them, and now I am going to dwell on that promise.
