Before. After.

The moment you realize how short life is.

All of us, eventually, discover the truth of the matter. And like any really big moment of insight, there’s always a before and an after. For me, it was just a few days after my son was born. He’s 21 now, so, it’s been awhile.

We were sitting outside on the front porch. He, swaddled, still bearing the mysterious red marks of birth. Me, exhausted, sore, hormonal, trying to remember the language of babies as this one squirmed in my arms, muscular, lithe, so alert. The narcissus were in full bloom at the end of March, filling the air with their sweet, slightly overpowering, perfume. It was going to be, I thought, an early summer.  

Then the phone rang, as it so often does in detective fiction and melodramas.

It was an old friend, calling, she said, “with some bad news, I’m afraid.” Another mutual friend, she told me, had died the day before, ejected from a car that stopped suddenly to avoid a deer bounding across the road near Tilden Park. She was driving to fetch her seven-year old’s forgotten baseball glove with her soon-to-be-ex spouse. She was not wearing a seat-belt. It was a convertible. Her head hit a tree.

My son huddled against me, nursing. My husband continued watering the plants. My five-year old daughter sensed my distress and came over. For a long moment there was only disbelief, then bird sounds, then the warmth of the afternoon sun. Then a crushing sense of exhaustion and weight, like the lead apron the dentist uses to protect you from X-rays. Then surprise. Then anger. Finally, tears.

I remembered an afternoon when I was in college, sunning myself in a meadow between classes. Suddenly I heard a guttural rattle of doors and windows and watched an earthquake ripple through the grasses, felt the earth move as a wave across the field. What was solid was liquid, if only for a moment. I was the only one there. In the instant before everyone came running out of the library, I considered the possibility that I had imagined the whole thing.

The moment before that call was the last moment that I could feel only one thing, exclusively, at a time.  Now, joy and sorrow are always mixed—the way that honey can taste both impossibly sweet but also savory, in the finish.

Looking back, I can remember the day that she and I left our toddlers behind, climbed into sea kayaks and navigated Puget Sound. I can see the sun’s reflections on the water, I can feel the wind, I can taste the salt spray. It is almost unbearable to recall my certainty, then, that there would be more days like this.

After she died, her friends gathered to clean out her house, deciding what to save for her son and what to share. Twenty-one years later, I still sit in her office chair at work. Impossibly, that day her earrings hung in pairs on a wire grid above her dresser—organized by color. She was a graphic designer to the end.

Turntable

Dollhouse

Leather jacket

Kayak

Gargoyle

Solid. Liquid. Permanent. Temporary. Always. Never.

That day the distance between birth and death was inconceivable and indistinguishable. The moment before that call and the moment after it was endless. Holding Sam, feeling him breathe in and out, marveling at the solidity of his tiny, warm body I felt fierce, protective. Terrified.

I’d like to report that what I lost in certainty that day I gained in gratitude. But to be honest, I constantly forget. I still believe that the ground is solid beneath me, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the constant reminders that nearly everything that matters is outside of my control.