It never gets easier, you just go faster. —Greg LeMond

After my father’s stroke, after months of rehab, after coming to terms with the fact that the blind spot on his right side—his lost peripheral vision—was the new normal, his doctor told him he couldn’t ride his bicycle.

Last fall he had aortic valve replacement surgery to fix a heart condition he was born with, the same condition that ultimately killed his own father. The surgery went according to plan. They didn’t know he’d suffered a stroke until two days later, when he had recovered enough from the anesthesia for someone to notice that he was acting funny. In the aftermath of his surgery and the stroke, my father says his heart is twenty years younger, but I know that twenty percent of his brain is gone forever.

He lost his ability to work his job of twenty-nine years, he lost a good bit of short-term memory, which forced him into an early retirement, and now this: his beloved bicycling. This too was going to be taken away from him.

I have a picture from early September, before the surgery, of my parents at Scooter’s, an ice cream shop they like to ride to together on a black Burley tandem. They celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary with a ride and two giant sugar cones. My mom held hers in the air, as if giving a toast. Dad did the awkward selfie lean, trying to get them both in the picture.

And what now?

Life is a stage race like the tour, not one all-out sprint or time trial. There are days of sun and days of rain; wins and losses; successes, failures, and recoveries.

After a winter of too much TV, daily walks around the neighborhood no matter how cold it was, painstakingly typed comments on my Facebook page because of how slowly his writing skills are returning, I was afraid he would give up. I feared my father—this man who called me on his fifty-eighth birthday and told me he’d set out to ride fifty-eight miles in honor of the occasion, but tired out and only rode fifty; this man who had ridden every single mile of two coast-to-coast bicycle trips, from California to North Carolina—would become a couch potato. I feared he would sit at home and watch Fox News all day.

*     *     *

Greg LeMond was the first American to win the Tour de France. It was 1986. I was two years old. This was before Lance Armstrong became famous, and then infamous; before helmets were required; before all of the doping scandals. Back when hardly anyone in the United States was paying attention to the Tour.

I grew up admiring LeMond. Every summer my dad and I would sit on the couch in our family basement and watch the Tour. I cheered for whomever my dad favored that year, with English journalist Phil Liggett’s voice—synonymous with quality sports commentary—in my mind.

As a child I was carted around the Midwest to bicycle road races. I cheered for my dad from a big orange blanket along the sidelines. There were usually children’s races, too, and when I was old enough I rode my pink tricycle down the short, straight course at one of them. I pushed those black plastic pedals as hard as I could, my chubby little legs pumping up and down. I received a bronze medal strung on red, white, and blue ribbon, and ate pink cotton candy with my family to celebrate.

When I was six, I got a pink two-wheeler for my birthday. It came with training wheels, but soon my dad was teaching me to get along without them. He’d run behind me, holding onto the seat for moral support, and then he would let go. I would fly down the sidewalk, skidding to a stop with the coaster brakes when I reached the corner, waiting for him to help me cross the street and begin again.

The joy that pink bicycle brought to my childhood was not so different from the joy bicycling has continued to bring me throughout my life. There have been many family vacations spent camping and riding, afternoons pedaling around with friends in the neighborhood where I grew up, escapes from campus on warm afternoons in my small college town. There has always been a bicycle in my life.

When I graduated from college and moved to North Carolina, I had never owned a car, or even had a driver’s license. Everyone thought now that I had a college degree in hand surely I would grow up, learn to drive, and buy a vehicle like any self-respecting adult in North America. But I was about to begin graduate school in theology, and the idea of buying a car seemed laughable to me. I didn’t want to drive and never had, which was why I hadn’t gotten a license when I turned sixteen. Instead I sought out an apartment that was within walking distance of campus, the grocery store, and a coffee shop, arguing that those were the only places I was likely to hang out for the next two years. That proved mostly true.

Graduate school didn’t last forever though, and when I finished my master’s degree I took several part-time jobs and no longer had time for walking and waiting at bus stops. When my parents came down for graduation, Dad spent an afternoon on the porch with the old purple commuter bike he and my mom got me when I was fourteen. He overhauled the drivetrain, trued the wheels, and added a rack on the back to which I could attach panniers for carrying my groceries. It was everything I needed in a reliable vehicle. Then he presented me with a Duke-blue tire pump with a big bow on it. My graduation present.

*     *     *

The transition to daily commuting was not entirely smooth; there were obstacles ranging from flat tires to fitness to inclement weather. Few things make me want to stay in bed more than waking to the sound of rain on the rooftop in February. If the temperature is below 40, I may even start wishing that I had a car.

I get up anyway. I make coffee. I check weather.com. I forgo a shower, because it never seems worthwhile when I know I will be doused with rainwater shortly. I put extra socks and shoes in my waterproof courier bag, pour what’s left of my coffee into a thermos, and tuck that in the bag as well.

Donning a navy blue raincoat, black nylon pants with velcro at the ankles, and my oldest sneakers which smell like wet dog from previous soakings, I am out the door into the rain. I swing my leg over the crossbar of my white road bike and push off down the street. The drops fall freely, without concern for the inconvenience they’ve caused me, weighing down my long hair, obscuring my vision. I live near a golf course and the long, flat stretch of road that runs alongside it presents a different view every morning. On bright, chilly winter days I watch the sky turn pink and orange through the tree line as the sun rises. On humid days my eyes pick out benches and sand traps through the dense fog. In summer, I see early risers getting in a quick game before work.

On rainy days the course is abandoned. In the early morning dampness everything looks a brighter shade of green. The air is clean and invigorating as I start to pedal harder, moving toward my destination by the strength of my own legs. I have been dreading this since I woke up, yet it is never as bad in actuality as it seemed from the warmth of my apartment.

Bicycling is hard work and, especially in the summer, that work induces sweat. In four years of bicycle commuting, despite lots of sunscreen, I’ve watched my face become more and more freckled. I’ve chosen to ignore catcalls induced by skimpy clothing, because when the heat index is over a hundred degrees, who really cares what the homeless guy I pass each day on Ninth Street has to say about my legs? I haven’t the energy. I’m focused on movement, labored breaths, the feel of the sun beating down on my back, and the heat radiating from the pavement when I stop at a red light.

I’m picturing Greg LeMond riding into Paris and I am willing myself to keep going, to beat my only competitor, the voices inside my own head:

Grow up and get a driver’s license.

It’s unattractive for a woman to be so sweaty all the time.

We live in a car culture; get used to it.

Cycling isn’t safe in cities in the United States.

Why aren’t you in better shape after four years of this?

This last one runs through my head every time I ride up a street with a respectable hill. It never gets easier.

Not long after LeMond’s historic win in 1986, he was injured in a hunting accident on a trip with his uncle. He survived with thirty shotgun pellets inside his body, and spent two years in recovery before his career picked up again. He went on to win the Tour de France twice more, in 1989 and 1990. LeMond was among the best in the world, yet most people in the United States didn’t know who he was. Oh, sure, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated after his comeback in ‘89, but what about all of those years leading up to that? Years when people believed that American cyclists would never be able to compete with Europeans? His victory in ‘86—the first ever for an American cyclist in 85 years of the Tour de France—happened in relative obscurity when compared to the fame that later followed Lance Armstrong. LeMond was never a celebrity in that way.

Most of life is like that. The goals we set, the things we care about, what we hope to accomplish—very few people will see them. Training rides, weightlifting, junior races—LeMond did these things like every other racer, building his career one day at a time. Cycling, even as a commuter, is a mental game as much as any competitive sport I have ever played. When I am sticky with sweat, when my mouth is dry and my muscles burn and I want to quit, I think about LeMond after that accident and the pain of getting back on a bicycle after physical trauma, when people said he was finished. I think about LeMond racing and not winning. And then I think about a poster on my brother’s bedroom wall of LeMond sprinting for the finish line at the 1989 World Championships with two European riders on his wheel, in the rain. His muscles bulge, wet hair is plastered to his forehead, and his mouth hangs open as if releasing a battle cry. His eyes are focused straight ahead on the finish line. He is going to get what he came for.

As I pedal up these modest hills in North Carolina’s Piedmont, I have to fix my eyes on the road ahead and keep pedaling. Life is a stage race like the Tour, not one all-out sprint or time trial. There are days of sun and days of rain; wins and losses; successes, failures, and recoveries.

*     *     *

Someday I will lose him.

That is the thought most present since the stroke. That, and he is still here. We get to keep him for a while.

Death, mortality, finitude—these are not new concepts to me. I have pondered their meanings philosophically. I have experienced the yawning chasm of loss. My uncle, Steve, when I was in 6th grade: heroin overdose. My other uncle, Joe, when I was in 8th grade: liver failure due to alcoholism. My seventeen-year-old friend Ryan: car accident. Gravel, tree, the curve of a road that led not to the endless possibilities of life beyond high school, but to one final ending for him, confusion and grief for the rest of us. But these losses never prepared me for the reality that someday I will lose my own parents.

Since the stroke, my father has been more open. He cries easily now. He simply cannot hold certain emotions in any longer. Home in Kalamazoo for Thanksgiving, I sat in a chair across from him while my sister played the grand piano in the living room. A month after his surgery, the scar across his chest was still pronounced, his heart healing while the rest of his body was in limbo. Tears filled his eyes and I watched him blink them back in what appeared to me a silent denial and quiet sorrow, and also, somehow, gratitude. He could have died. He knows this. Instead he is sitting here, listening to his daughter play piano as he has so many times before.

“I cry more easily since the stroke,” he told me on the phone last week, verbalizing what I had already seen. He says it like it’s a physical side-effect and, though I don’t know much about medicine, I assume this is his way of explaining displays of emotion previously so out of character. Before this, there was only one time I remembered seeing my father cry, and one time when I heard it in his voice over the phone and tried to ignore it.

The first time was after we packed up the Volvo to drive to North Carolina the summer I moved to Durham for graduate school. My clothes and books and a few stray boxes of kitchen stuff were packed tightly into the trunk, my cat was in her pink carrier in the back seat, drugged up for the long drive, and Dad had loaded my bike onto the roof rack. He, my mother, the cat, and I would be road-tripping down, and then they would drive off and leave me in a city and state I had never laid eyes on before, where I didn’t know a single soul.

In the driveway he told me he was proud of me. I politely pretended not to see the tears in his eyes, while more welled up in my own.

And then there was the night before his surgery, when he called me.

It was only in the weeks right before the surgery that its seriousness took hold of me.

They will break his sternum, I thought. They will cut open his heart. They will break him open; will they be able to put him back together?

On the phone that night before the surgery he tried to hold his voice steady, but I could hear everything he wasn’t saying—everything I wasn’t saying—in the tremor of his voice. A friend was picking me up as I said goodbye; she and I were going to our favorite brewery for a drink. I was in a hurry, and I felt guilty about that, but I also think now that it wasn’t just about getting where I was going. It was about my inability to fathom my own fear that this conversation could be the last one I ever had with my father.

It wasn’t. And yet it was the last one I ever had with that version of him. They cut him open, they sewed him up, they gave him back to us—but he will never be the same.

If you spoke with him, you might not know that anything is wrong. His short-term memory was the primary loss; most of the other difficulties have been overcome, gradually, with therapy. So he pauses mid-sentence, dancing around the word he wants but cannot find, his brain trying to form new pathways where the old ones have been erased—trying and sometimes failing, though succeeding more often now than in those first few months. Still, it isn’t enough. The loss of memory and the loss of sight on his right side, led to the loss of his job. He is only fifty-nine and was not ready to retire.

We used to talk about how someday, when he was ready to retire, he would come down to North Carolina and we’d take a bike trip together. Bicycling had become the glue to our relationship, which has been difficult as I’ve become an adult. I don’t see eye-to-eye with my parents on much when it comes to politics and religion and—though they are supportive of my work, my art, my impractical career choices and graduate degrees—there is a breach between us that often seems impossibly wide.

A couple of summers ago I rode on the back of the tandem with him for the first time. It was a strange experience, riding a bicycle and not being the one in control of steering it. I told my mother when we got home that he was the only person I could imagine trusting enough that I would be willing to give up that control. He’s been cycling for decades, and I trust his experience. Also, I am his daughter.

Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway is a dream of mine, and I thought one of these days perhaps we’d do it together. He rode sections years ago on those coast-to-coast trips—another thing I dream of doing with him—though I’ve known for a while that he probably didn’t have a third one in him. But part of the parkway—that, I always thought we could do together.

*     *     *

I guess he couldn’t take it anymore.

He didn’t listen to his doctor. He trusted the fact that he has ridden the same routes in Kalamazoo for decades, that his favorite route is all right turns. He chose to believe that he could learn his new limits and that, even though he’ll never be able to drive again, he could learn to bicycle once more.

In April, on the first day he rode, he posted on Facebook—grammar and spelling only slightly jumbled—that it was the best day since his heart surgery six months before. The best therapy he could ask for, he said. His heart was ready for this.

But his eyes might not be.

Yes, six months after surgery he rode his bike. I did not believe that would ever happen again. But even in my joy I knew that this was not a step on a brilliant recovery narrative. His eyesight is not coming back. These limitations are here to stay. And so he will adapt. He will have to limit himself. And many of our plans will not fit within those limits.

He tells me how he double- and triple-checks before crossing busy streets. How, because of the way his vision was affected by the stroke, cars look closer than they actually are. We take comfort in this: better that they appear closer, making him overly cautious, than the other way around.

He rides with friends, some new, some old. They look out for him. And yet, he tells me, one day a couple weeks ago he started to cross an intersection and stopped at the last minute when he realized there was a car coming he’d missed the first time he scanned. He stopped in time.

But it scared him. It scared me, too.

I would never tell him to stop riding. I cannot. I cannot bear the thought of losing him, but I will lose him either way. The father that I love will waste away if he cannot do this, of that I am sure. And I would rather he take this risk in order to live than that he give up and tumble into despair.

My father worked too hard for many years. He coached my soccer teams, went to all of my figure skating competitions, worked third-shift and overtime so that my siblings and I could have the education and opportunities he did not have.

I wanted him to have the retirement he planned on, and that is gone now.

Today, he will go to occupational therapy. Today, he will check Facebook, and “like” the link to my latest blog post. Today, he will say something political that I disagree with, and I will choose to ignore it because I love him too much to fight anymore. Today, I still have my father and I don’t much care about brilliant recovery narratives, climbing mountains, or triumphant entries into Paris.

I will never get on the back of that tandem with him again. I will never ride the Blue Ridge Parkway with him. But maybe, next time I am at home in Michigan, we will take a spin out to Scooter’s. We will ride together a few more miles.

Meghan Florian earned an MTS from Duke University and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is the Creative Writing Editor at The Other Journal. Her work has been published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Salon, Religion Dispatches, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and teaches in Durham, North Carolina.

The cop that wrote me up for trying to use a fake ID at an Ocean City bar was wearing yellow-striped shorts, an embarrassing reality that defused any grand aspirations of mine to spin the tale into one of proud delinquency. Where that cop is today, I do not know, and he does not know where I am, and it’s unlikely that, beyond the hour during which I sat on the curb reciting personal information for his report, our lives will ever cross again. Where those shorts are now is also a mystery—they could still be adorning his skinny, tan legs as he apprehends more underage drinkers; they could have been passed along to another officer; or they could have become undesired, as the yellow fabric faded and the threads loosened at the seams after many long, taxing hours under the Maryland sun. Once undesired, clothing can be interred in a messy closet, tossed out, or, in some cases, given a shot at new life via donation. If given to a thrift shop, those yellow-striped shorts would join the massive ocean of used clothing donations made by Americans every year—4.7 billion pounds, by some estimations.

During busy hours at the 96th Street Housing Works, one in a chain of thrift shops operating in New York City, it can feel like all 4.7 billion of those pounds have arrived in a single afternoon, unloaded unceremoniously at the donations counter for the attendant to sort through. I know this because I am the attendant, serving 40 hours of community service assigned by a Maryland judge as punishment for my use of that fake ID in Ocean City. My options for completing the hours were plentiful—volunteering at a soup kitchen, picking up trash in Central Park, cleaning animal cages for the ASPCA, and so on. I chose Housing Works at 96th Street at the recommendation of a college classmate, who called the labor boring but manageable.

I look down at my own body and imagine myself stripped down, my possessions assessed and passed along.

During the chunks of hours I put in over the weeks following my sentence, the Housing Works manager assigned me a variety of duties. Sometimes I swept the floors and wiped down the furniture. Sometimes I re-racked the clothes to comply with our color ordering scheme—red, pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, gray, brown, beige, black, white. Once, after a rack of blazers was stolen, I was told to act as a security guard and walk around looking for possible thieves. (What they expected me to do with the type of guy that pilfered items from a thrift shop was never explained, nor was how to differentiate a potential criminal from our less-than-polished clientele. I puffed out my chest anyway and stalked around the place, keeping an eye out for suspiciously stuffed pockets or hurried hand movements and fantasizing about foiling getaways with Heisman-worthy tackles.) But most of the time I stood at the gloomy and gray linoleum donations counter, as I do now, waiting for people to come in and drop off their stuff. In five minutes, I will have completed 39 hours. Today will be my last day.

A woman walks up to the counter. She’s wearing a pantsuit and has very straight brown hair and the click-click of her heels turns our hard thrift shop floor into a metronome. She probably just got off work. Along with the lunching hours, the end of the workday is the busiest time for donors to drop off their used clothes at Housing Works. In between are lengthy stretches of inactivity during which I struggle to stay awake. A man, her husband I presume, trails behind her with two black garbage bags.

“Welcome to Housing Works,” I say with a hint of enthusiasm, although she’s definitely not listening—could I have said “Welcome to Hell” without her even flinching? Her husband plops the bags on the counter and I untie the knots. Out spill high-end dresses, designer jeans, and a pile of silk scarves. One of those donations. Along the wide spectrum of quality that encompasses our endless and varying donations, this woman represents the superior end, the end created by Manhattan socialites who need to un-stuff their closets for the new season so they dump their dated collections at Housing Works for us to paw through. These prized contributions aren’t frequent, though. More often donors will leave sartorial flotsam: torn sweaters and stained shorts, frayed hats and scuffed sneakers, undesired uniform shorts and even some underwear every now and then.

At the bottom of the second of the couple’s two bags is a cardboard box with a sewing machine in it. Can this woman have ever even considered repairing something once it ripped? I stack it next to a dusty Cuisinart on one of our appliance shelves. The fact that we take household items in addition to clothing leads to the expected—old plates, spare pillows, video cassettes—and also the unexpected. One woman dropped off a bag of about 300 female condoms, looked me in the eye, and demanded I put them somewhere where they’d be sure to sell. One man deposited a set of wall curtains, each several hundred square feet in size. My manager knew that the few people who shopped for wall curtains probably didn’t do so at a thrift shop, and ordered me to tear them into pieces and throw them out. They proved to be perforated by an army of needles that stuck into my palms as I angrily ripped at the cloth, a bandana across my face to block my inhalation of the colloidal fabric that levitated from the shredded curtains. Another woman donated an unmarked box of assorted clear plastic pieces. A half-hearted attempt at assembly revealed the contraption to be a used breast pump. This too was deemed worthy only of the bottom of a trash can.

The reality is that a sizable portion of donations find their way to the garbage. The donated items are transported from the counter and placed in the storage room several yards behind, separated from the store only by a plastic curtain. The curtain hides us as we choose what to keep and what to discard, an essential barrier since some donors would be appalled if they could see how quickly we decide to throw out their former possessions. Although I don’t think this woman in particular really cares whether we keep her stuff or throw it out or if I put on six of her dresses at once and tap dance on the counter.

The source of our endless garbage is twofold. Sometimes people assume we can make use of items that we actually can’t, such as wall curtains or a used breast pump. More often the owners of these doomed donations had always meant to throw them out and wanted to leave that task to someone else. The thrift store donation counter is a hassle-free alternative to garbage disposal. Donors let us sort through paper, plastic, and glass. They let us decide what to do with their unwanted belongings. They let us feel the guilt of throwing away former favorites. They don’t want to look a teddy bear in the eye before tying the plastic knot above his grave. And best of all, they can shirk this responsibility all in the name of charity.

I scrunch up the garbage bags and the woman swivels on her heels to leave the store.

“Would you like to fill out the tax write-off?” I half-yell at her as she distances herself from the counter, waving the form like I’m bidding her goodbye from the deck of an outgoing ship. But she casually throws up the back of her hand as if lazily batting away a fly: she is like most donors, simply wishing to flee the scene of this hot-potato game of garbage passing. Some leave before I can even identify whatever they’ve left, the retail version of ding-dong-ditch.

Others do accept the chance to claim the deduction. The form asks that donors be thorough and specific about the things that they’ve donated and to determine values of items based on 40% of their original retail price. Most donors, predictably, stretch the limits of this suggestion. They scribble down a loose definition of their donations—“clothing”—and pause for a moment before deciding that they are worth as much or more than they originally cost. Somehow a moth-bitten hat has accrued value in the decade since it was first bought. They snatch up the yellow carbon copy of the form and zip out of the store, having been paid to not deal with their trash.

This is Housing Works. This is how it works. And I have an hour left.

*    *    *

An old couple walks in. The woman is pushing a black cart full of junk, and the man with her holds a stuffed garbage bag in each hand, also, presumably, full of junk. They shuffle their way to my counter. I brace myself for the incoming storm of clutter.

“Welcome to Housing…” I say, trailing off. The man spills out one bag onto the surface while the woman plucks objects one-by-one from her cart and lines them up. The items that emerge are virtually unsellable. Packs of cards with a third of the deck missing. A board game without the top to the cardboard box. Cracked bowls and dirty cups. A stack of withered books interspersed with the couple’s personal papers—are they really donating their own mail? A lamp with a severed power cord. Ragged T-shirts and mismatched socks. A Reagan-era PC that stares apathetically back at me.

I expect them to bolt from this glorified garbage dump, but instead the woman begins recounting a story for almost every item that sits on the counter. The cards and board games were purchased to entertain their grandchildren when they were born, but they have since outgrown such trinkets. One of the sets of bowls came from a vacation to Venice several decades ago. The books have all been read and reread.

“It’s time for someone else to enjoy them,” the woman says. I stack them up.

“He claimed he could fix this,” she says, gesturing toward the lamp. She looks at him and he chuckles. “I guess not…” she says.

The woman puts her hands on the sides of the computer and tilts it up to look at it. “We haven’t turned this thing on in years,” she says, “And my daughter bought me a new one in the spring anyway.”

They don’t explain every T-shirt as I fold them, but they do offer anecdotes for a special few. A University of Wisconsin shirt with a faded badger, the school’s mascot, draws a story of their son’s college days. A Regent Seven Seas shirt is the product of a recent cruise trip, an Obama ’08 shirt an expression of their political affiliation.

Eventually the counter is clear. I mention the tax deduction form but they brush it off.

“The money doesn’t matter,” the woman says. The man compresses the empty garbage bags and tosses them into the cart. I offer the couple my standardized gratitude for their donations. They smile and then weave their way through customers to the store’s exit. The bell above the door jingles as they pass through.

I transport all of their donations into the storage room. They all seem a little bit less shoddy now that a lifetime of stories has been attached to them. My grandmother used to have board games for me. The lamp could be resuscitated by any passable electrician. Was my first computer somewhere in the basement at home?

One of my superiors joins me behind the counter.

“Look at all this shit,” she says, scanning the items that the elderly couple dropped off. She pulls shut the curtain that separates the stock room from the counter, hiding our ruthless sorting of donations from our unsuspecting customers.

“Keep the books, the housewares, and the computer. Everything else is trash,” she says, and leaves me behind the curtain to dispose of the unwanted items. I scoop up the stuff, hugging it against my chest, before unloading it into the dumpster we keep in the storage room. What little order the couple had preserved is undone as I toss away their erstwhile belongings. The board game pieces scatter within the can and nestle in the corners of the bag. The shirts unfold and cardboard royalty slip from the deck of cards and down through crevices in the pile of rubbish.

I tie up the bag and sling it over my shoulder. I walk through the store, a bizarro Santa carrying the world’s rejected possessions. At the curb outside I stack the bag on top of the others from the day, totaling perhaps a dozen. There are homeless people waiting for the drop-off, a daily sight outside of Housing Works. As soon as I turn, they undo my knot and start rifling through the bag. I glance back one more time when I get back into the store. One homeless man has found the jackpot: the stack of old T-shirts. He jams them under his armpit and scoots down the block with his prize. The faded badger peeks out nervously from under his brown jacket.

Back in the storage room, I turn over a milk crate and sit down to start pricing the couple’s books, as directed by my boss. We have instructions on how to assess the value of the many used books that we receive—criteria revolving around the size, condition, and renown of the book, and even the original price tag if it can be found—but the process is somewhat arbitrary. I absentmindedly stick freshly inked 6s and 7s from the pricing gun to books I’ve never heard of.

I begin to think about all of the items that the couple donated. Where they began—toy stores, housewares outlets, clothing shops, onboard cruise ships, and where they ended up—a garbage dump, adorning a homeless man, or sentenced to an idle eternity on a Housing Works shelf. I look down at my own body and imagine myself stripped down, my possessions assessed and passed along. My pants and shirt hung on racks at Housing Works, my shoes pecked at by crows at some lonely landfill, my cell phone disassembled and separated into computer chips, my keys melted down and re-constituted as nuts and bolts. I sit there on the milk crate, naked. Then my skin is ripped from my flesh and fashioned into hide. The meat is torn from my body and molded into burger patties for a fast food joint. My eyeballs are extracted with tooth picks and frozen in glass and modeled in a museum. My hair is shaved off and stuffed into the cushion of a desk chair. My ligaments are tied into rubber bands and used to bind the elderly couple’s piles of mail. My bones are stacked up and tossed into the Housing Works garbage can, where bugs nip at them until nothing remains but a few chalky specks.

At the bottom of the pile of books I find The Moviegoer, a novel by Walker Percy, my namesake. My thoughtless streak of pricing comes to an abrupt stop. I put the gun down and hold the book in my hands. What are the odds that one Walker would find another in the bottom of a stack of forgotten books? How had this title avoided being carried away by a vagrant, left under a bed in an apartment, tossed casually in the garbage, burnt or buried? Surely this passing of men in time and space, this interaction between person and object, this evanescent moment of possession should be recognized! I set the price gun to $61,092, those digits a standard numerical representation of my date of birth. I stick the white rectangle on the cover, flattening it with my thumb. The book will have to be repriced, assuming no one is willing to shell out sixty grand for a shabby paperback from a thrift store. But for the moment it holds my mark and indicates that it once passed through my hands. I take it and the rest to the bookshelves in the store and spread them out. There is room enough that only one line of books needs to be formed, but I nevertheless hide The Moviegoer behind two others, saving its bogus price tag from a quick death for at least another day.

It is 7 P.M. I take off my Housing Works lanyard and leave it on the desk in the back office. I fill out my final shift’s paperwork and make sure the previous ones all add up to forty hours. I thank my boss, put my jacket on, and exit the store, to buy and sell, to collect and dispose, to cherish and forget, to meet the man behind the counter and attempt to explain value.

Walker Harrison is a young writer living in New York City. He works for a start-up and writes both fiction and non-fiction in his spare time. He studied applied mathematics and creative writing at Columbia University. His most recent published work can be seen in the Cobalt Review‘s annual baseball issue.

I am looking for someone. On the subway. At the hospital. Walking the sticky streets of the in-town neighborhood where I live in the shadowy, noirish, lost-dog summer nights. It takes me a long time to realize what I am supposed to be doing. Two years, maybe.

In my self-involved twenty-something way, I consider two years an unbearably long time. I think I’ve already seen enough of life to retreat from it. Enough has already gone wrong, gone past, or one way or another ended up in the “out” basket to give me grounds for resignation. A two-year long marriage, though much of that time was spent living in a “commune” with other people. I was fired twice from teaching jobs and left a few other jobs without waiting to be asked. Cohabiting with a student was a contributing cause in one of these departures. Missing school breakfasts at a residential school for special needs students was the official reason in another—when they work that hard to find a reason, you know they are so looking forward to saying goodbye.

I did my share of saying goodbye as well. I walked away from the hippie house where I lived for two years with the people I “loved,” a verb I was not afraid to use in those days and seldom used afterwards, until (as I wrote then in a poem) “love turned to words.” Sometimes hard words: I specialized in resignation letters, well-reasoned kiss-offs. The home of my youth, a family by choice, best friends, communards, all left behind. A second stab at community ended more quickly and bitterly.

Disillusioned, I filled the hole with “relationships.” One with a teenager with a drug problem, followed by a couple of unequal liaisons. When I found myself on the gives-more-than-receives end I wrote another goodbye-cruel-world letter and followed the wisdom of I Ching: the superior man knows when to retreat. But as seasons passed, my retreat became a surrender, my withdrawal an isolation. One winter night in the last days of February, a friend drove me to a rundown building in a Boston neighborhood city and helped me carry my stuff up a narrow, winding stairwell. He told me to call him if I needed anything, but I didn’t have a phone.

I would dearly have preferred some sort of window treatment to the metaphor of vulnerability, of naked anonymous exposure to an uncaring world, offered by my uncurtained window. But the prospect of doing something about it defeated me. I had no idea how to acquire curtains, or how much they cost.

I chose the path of solitude. I wondered how far that path would go, and whether I would know it when I came to its end.

I lived in that dark old building like an alcoholic who didn’t drink. My life was shabby, unwashed, neglected; hand to mouth; colored with occasional outbursts of irresponsibility. I permitted a cranky old car still registered in my name to rot on a city street, its tires slowly flattening. (This karmic trespass caught up to me a decade later.) The dog I was taking care of for a girl, the remnant of a last entanglement, sometimes crapped in the empty room of my apartment, especially on the nights I neglected to walk her. Sometimes I didn’t bother cleaning it up for days.

No telephone. No shower. I had a job in a hospital that would bore a high school dropout.

My condition cried out for intervention, rescue, a humanitarian mission. I was a failed state in need of a strong injection of external resources.

I needed someone.

And amazingly some part of me realized it. Because I began looking.

*    *    *

In the spring of the year in which I tried to resign from the human race but failed, I found myself wanting people. Female people, mostly. I worked on talking to the girls at my time-killing job in a city hospital. A short, cute blonde dropped by the room where I operated a mimeograph machine to chat, telling me she was engaged to a guy who lived in a different city—yet here she was in my doorway again. I liked her and her message was decidedly mixed, but I couldn’t get over the engagement thing. I was in my second adolescence: shy, insecure, defensive, while given to unexpected bouts of absurd over-confidence. I had a low threshold for complications of any sort. I needed someone to set the bar clearly; then I would leap over it, catch my foot, fall on my face. Another co-worker took me home to meet her father, but the invitation, as she carefully explained, was “not a date.” That made it safe. I changed into my sneakers so I could walk on a beach in Quincy and left my leather shoes at her house in a paper bag.

Back in my colorful, clannish North End neighborhood I frequented a Store 24 where the night clerk, a dark-haired siren, chatted to me about the joys of being Italian. Nothing developed there either because while she was attractive, she wasn’t the one. The talkative young wife out looking for her dog one spooky summer night found me instead. We stood on the sidewalk making tentative sense of the universe while a man stood in a doorway calling her name with growing irritation. No place for me there.

When I began to cross paths with Anne, however, the slender, smart-sounding admissions clerk who worked at the other end of the hospital taking insurance information from the poor souls who stumbled into the emergency room, I was at once struck with worry over what she would think of my life. The gloomy apartment, the bathroom in the hall, the shabby room where I kept the dog who sometimes used it to—well, I covered that point. But did I mention that when I failed to come home at night she would break into my cupboard and eat an entire bag of sugar, for instance, or something equally un-doglike and throw up on the floor?

I knew my living conditions posed some challenges.

I’m not sure who made the first move. Anne’s memory is that she made a point of walking by the little room off the corridor where the distribution clerk (me) pretended to be doing something. She saw me reading a book and flashed me her special smile. Somehow I failed to respond.

What I remember is nearly running her over in the corridor; and then Anne apologizing (though it was as much my fault); and the glow of the physical contact remaining with me for the rest of the day. I took it as a sign.

We had a casual date. The little complications of life make me stumble. The girl at the hospital who took me on outings that were not, we agreed, dates said she would see me for lunch in the cafeteria as usual. But I was not having lunch as usual, I was having lunch with Anne. A social coward, I neglected to mention this fact, and so, an hour later in the noontime hubbub of the cafeteria, two women eyed one another while I stumbled over an introduction. The not-a-date girl took the hint and backed off. The next day she brought me my shoes in their paper bag.

Anne and I went out to a jazz club (definitely a date). Anne only pretended to drink whatever she ordered. I drank only the one-drink minimum, because I couldn’t afford more. We listened to the music and talked between sets, both of us relieved to get past the first date.

Things progressed, but then came the Sunday afternoon when we met for a walk. The day was hot and the North End lethargic. Should I tell you how being “hot” affects Anne, burning her pale blue eyes and wilting her enthusiasm? (Well, I suppose now I have.) We went back to her apartment where she appeared to tire quickly of my company. I was on my way to the door when, apropos of something, I uttered the phrase “when I was married.”

“You were married?”

I told her the tale. It took a long time. I highlighted the more intense events, Penny’s dramatic runaway, the confrontation with the psychiatrist who wanted to lock her and her married partner-in-escapism up in a psych ward. I acknowledged some of my own subsequent (and concurrent) peccadilloes, such as my failure to realize that the girl I was doing a thing with, as we said then, had become addicted to heroin. What “thing” did I believe I was doing if I failed to notice this elephant in the room?

I was wooing Anne, I told myself, like Othello arousing Desdemona’s sympathies with his war stories. Some role model. (I knew Othello, a voice whispered, and you’re not him.)

*    *    *

A couple of weeks later, I waited patiently in a bland administrative corridor far from the crises of Anne’s emergency room or the surgery wards, where I delivered medical orders and prescriptions and picked up gossip.

“What are you doing here?” Anne asked, leaving an unhappy meeting with a supervisor who was unable to find time for her until after her shift. “I told you not to wait.”

I made no answer. My presence was the answer. I was there because I was remembering how to be a human being. And because she was the one.

Though she had told me not to wait, she was happy to see me. We left the hospital together and, for the first time, ended up at my apartment. This was not a moment free of conflict and apprehension for me. I have already mentioned a few of this place’s special qualities, such as the absence of a bathroom or a phone. My apartment was on the fourth floor of a dark, damp, ancient building in an ethnic neighborhood with an Old World feel that was clinging to its clannish black-coated, black-veiled, foreign-film, urban-peasant lifestyle with its desperate, garlic-scented fingertips. The sixties never happened in the North End. A long-haired single male was unlikely to find anyone to rent to him, but for some reason an old building squeezed between banana warehouses was owned by an embittered Polish immigrant with her own hang-ups.

She rented me the place for very little. We got along well enough until Anne showed up in my life.

When Anne came to my place that first afternoon and completed the thirty-second tour the place merited, she offered no judgments though I could almost taste the blood from her bitten tongue. She stood in the doorway of one of the small, dark, unkempt rooms and said, “Is this where you sleep?”

Suddenly I realized that we were going to make love for the first time.

My eccentric bedroom space, however, presented a problem. The bedroom window, as it still embarrasses me to recall, lacked a curtain even though my windows and those of the apartment in the neighboring building were kissing-cousin close. The view from my bedroom window was what you saw in old, black-and-white movies set in atmospherically depressed tenements: another tenement. I lived in a noir.

I would dearly have preferred some sort of window treatment to the metaphor of vulnerability, of naked anonymous exposure to an uncaring world, offered by my uncurtained window. But the prospect of doing something about it defeated me. I had no idea how to acquire curtains, or how much they cost. And nobody in my life I felt I could ask. As the expression goes, you can either light a candle or curse the darkness. I didn’t even bother to curse. I changed in the dark and went to bed.

But now, finally, after a year alone in my dungeon, there was too much on the line.

“But what about the windows?” I asked, desperately. “I have no curtains.”

“We’ll just have to hang something over them.”

My god. A problem solved.

Instead of getting mad at me, throwing up her hands, storming out of the house in disgust at my inadequacy, telling me I was pathetic, or merely leaving in a dignified huff, Anne found some sheets and draped them over the windows so we could take our clothes off and go to bed together without fear of the world watching.

A revelation. An approach to life that challenged my hopeless embrace of misery by making things better. Not a world revolution, maybe, but a personal revelation.

After that we were an item, a relationship that punctured the shell of my obstinate self-defeating singularity. I didn’t get better all at once. I was often distant, grumpy, unresponsive to conversation, sleepless, dream-haunted. Anne’s old friends came to visit, but I withdrew into puerile silence. I didn’t want to share her attention.

But changes happened. Anne talked me into getting a telephone in my apartment, though the poor technician almost fell off the roof trying to find a wire to plug it into while some crazy woman screamed at him. “Oh,” I said, “you’ve met my landlady.” I got the phone so we could discuss plans (your place? my place? nobody’s place?), but it turned out I wasn’t very good at talking on the telephone.

Our relationship was not seamless. I did not realize how much younger than me Anne was because I found in her a maturity and responsibility I lacked. I had thrown away the need for those qualities when I jettisoned the ideas and values (or so I believed) of the conventional, middle-class world and assumed I would find somewhere else to live. Now that I had sunk those illusions and gone down with my ship, I did not find it easy to pick up the useful everyday real-world skills I had shoved somewhere into the back of my brain, like some abandoned needlework project left to get tangled up in a closet. My personality was buried under the old shoes in the back of that closet. Not only was I unable to solve the conundrum of how to cover my bedroom window, I slept without sheets because I did not wash clothes, except in extremis, and sheets were just too big a job. I did not buy anything I literally couldn’t do without, and that narrowed the field to food and cigarettes. I had minimal social skills and couldn’t get on with anyone who required a demonstration of them on my part. When I interviewed for a job, I could not think of any reason to offer why I wanted it except for a pressing need to pay my rent. The hospital personal director hired me while candidly predicting, “You won’t stay.” (Yes, but I hope to be vertical when I leave.) My minimal conversational skills did not include inviting anyone to my place because I was ashamed of it. I couldn’t picture abiding anyone’s company for more than a half an hour without withdrawing into a sullen silence, which limited my circle to those few “old friends” accustomed to my depression and strangeness.

So Anne’s ability to improve my performance in the basic area of sustained companionship, in addition to her demonstrated practical skills in areas such as washing sheets and installing them on my bed, established her in my reckoning as at least a peer. She wasn’t. She was only a year out of college.

Still, she had lived long enough in those youth-oriented days to have her share of relationship history and disappointing conclusions. As I was to discover when the time came, at least in my view, to take the next step.

*    *    *

We met at the end of an evening that we had spent apart in a coffee shop on Cambridge Street, midway between my place in the North End and the apartment she shared with roommates on Beacon Hill. The winds blew; the night was cold. City lights hid most of Orion, but I had seen its brighter stars when I crossed the windy desert of City Hall plaza, because nowhere in the city was the air colder and clearer than that expanse of empty pavement in front of the old town’s modernist city hall. Still, I took that walk gladly because something was on my mind.

“I think we should live together,” I said, sitting across from my salvation. “This figuring out what we want to do every night is getting me down.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready,” she replied at length.

I took a breath and drew on my deep experience of relationships.

“It’s natural. It’s what people do when they’re serious.”

I did have other arguments at hand. My domestic qualifications might not have shone in anyone’s first impression of that dump on North Street, but I was making progress. We now had sheets on my bed. I had given up smoking. The dirty foster-dog had gone back to its owner, an ex-girlfriend. (Anne was always delighted to meet my ex-girlfriends. They hung on the border of things, possibly because I was willing to take care of their dog or paint their apartment. Anne’s approach to ex-lovers was goodbye, good riddance, get out of my life.)

Some of my rusty life-skills, besides dog-walking and painting old apartments, were returning. I could cook well enough (rice and stir-fried vegetables) to keep two people alive. Anne was a vegetarian who did not cook often and at times appeared to subsist solely on bread. Besides, we had good times together. Stir-frying the stuff we bought from sidewalk vendors at Haymarket; going out somewhere inexpensive (such as to someone else’s apartment); walking back to her place; then having a little too much to drink before stumbling into bed together.

“I don’t want to rush things,” she replied.

I persisted, lowering my voice in the emptying cafe, muttering in a wounded, exasperated manner more to salvage my pride than to convince her, now that my bold proposal had apparently been rejected.

But Anne was talking to herself as well.

“All right,” she said abruptly. “But I never want to be in the position of having to divide up our things afterwards.”

I continued talking to myself, somehow having failed to hear the “yes.”

“Smile,” she said, with some exasperation of her own. “We’re going to live together.”

“We are?”

Later, much later, she told me she agreed because she was afraid of losing me.

I should have said, “I’m not like that. I’m faithful: like ice, like fire.”

Besides, I might also have said, “If we break up, you can have my things as well as yours. My ex-wife has already taken the good stuff.”

We left the cafe and separated for the night. She would be getting up early the next morning; I wouldn’t. We kissed goodnight on the sidewalk beneath invisible constellations.

I turned away and took a running step or two in the darkness. My heart leapt up.

*    *    *

It was the decision to live together that brought her parents up from New York City so we could eat together in a traditional Boston restaurant like the Union Oyster House and look at each other. All I could tell her parents was that I wrote poetry; I’d already quit the job at the hospital. The personnel director was right; but so was I, since I left with a lighter heart than I’d arrived with.

Oh and by the way, I’m not Jewish. We were all very cautious and careful and stepped lightly around one another, but I could tell her parents were kind people.

*    *    *

Committed now to cohabitation, we looked for an apartment in the North End, checking into any place with a sign out, and found a pretty spot on Copp’s Hill with the best of neighbors, a cemetery across the street. The landlady showed us the apartment, but then asked if we were married. We knew this could be a sticking point in old-country Catholic North End, but Anne said “no” without hesitation: to live in sin you must be honest. The landlady politely, but decisively, showed us the door.

We hadn’t even talked about marriage. Marriage was a serious step as I knew well, having already taken it once and fallen on my face. Who greased the stairs?

In Cambridge, where community standards were lower, we found a rare affordable apartment, a second story loft looking over a big front yard where the owner parked his enormous black shiny truck.

We lived happily above the truck in Cambridge. I collected unemployment (my favorite job), wrote poetry, connected with a group of other aspiring writers. We started our own “tabloid” lit mag published on newsprint. Liberating herself from the hospital, Anne was temp typing and applying to graduate school. Harvard accepted her, but UMass-Amherst came across with a better fellowship deal. When she took the better offer at an institution a hundred miles from Boston, I was faced with leaving my little poetry scene in Cambridge to follow her to the Pioneer Valley. Each twist in the road is a choice, a decision, a renewal of commitment.

We moved to Amherst and lived in the woods. Almost literally.

A year went by. Living, eating, washing the dishes. Getting excited over the scent of autumn in the air, the first snow, spring, the first flowers, conversations over books, movies, or newspaper stories in which we never precisely agreed but seldom seriously disagreed. Poking fun at one another’s foibles. At our own.

I found part-time work as a research assistant: a low-commitment opportunity that left a lot of time for long walks in the woods, followed by periods of notebook scribbling. Anne drove to the university (after I taught her how) and finished her course work in a year.

Things could have gone on this way. I would not have said anything was missing in my life. Money, opportunity, a career? I lived apart from the goods of the world—except, of course, for food, coffee, sweets, warmth, a roof over my head, books, and a warm body next to mine at the end of the day. Otherwise, I buried myself in words.

When the second autumn of our woodland idyll came, Anne said she had something to tell me. She was pregnant.

“When did we make this choice?” I asked myself. Now we had the conversations we should have had earlier, but they were tough and slow-going. I gave the wrong answer in one of these, or rather was unable to commit to any answer.

“Then I’ll have to get some counseling about my choices,” Anne replied.

The next time I was able to get together with myself, however–I mean with whatever it is inside of us we need to pay attention to and can sometimes hear if our inner ears are working–then the right answer was very clear. Very obvious. And felt good.

Did I want my life to go on just as it was? How long? Forever? Change nothing? Make no marks? Leave no footprints?

“We should get married and have the baby.”

Did I say it just like that? I don’t really remember.

Maybe she said it first and then I came to the same conclusion and thought I was the one who thought it up. Eureka! What an idea.

Life went on. You have made a decision. Your wife is pregnant. She discovers she wants to eat chicken, so you buy it, cook it.

Then one day you wake up before dawn and drive to the hospital. Something inexplicable happens—something totally unbelievable though it happens every day, all around you—and that changes absolutely everything in your life for about twenty-two years. Or, by another accounting, forever.

Robert Knox is a husband, father, rabid backyard gardener, Boston Globe freelance writer, and blogger on nature, books, films, and other subjects. His short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary publications, and he was named a Finalist in the Massachusetts Artist Grant Program in fiction. Recent publications include stories in The Tishman Review, 3288 Review, and An Earthless Melting Pot. His novel on the origins of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Suosso’s Lane, was published in October 2015 by Web-e-Books.com.

1. IT’S BEEN A LOVELY DAY (EVEN IF I DID WANT TO KILL MYSELF)

“I find that being in a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.” —Anne Enright, The Gathering

Greetings all,

After a pleasant Thanksgiving with Mom and my siblings where he won all the after-dinner games, my father suffered a massive stroke. He’s currently on life support in the county hospital. Mom was also admitted, so they are on the same floor!

Dad is not expected to live, and Mom is referred to hospice, meaning the final months of her life.

That’s all I know at the moment, receiving hourly reports here in Manhattan, but please send loving thoughts as we all make this transition. 

My parents died exactly one year apart. It was as though a hole opened in the universe and sucked them away.

The upbeat, even cheerful tone reveals the depth of my denial, up to and including the exclamation point. And here’s the weirdest part, and if anyone can explain it by logical means, please let me know. My parents died exactly one year apart. It was as though a hole opened in the universe and sucked them away.

From early childhood, I suffered from depression. At various times, I believed that if I killed myself, I assumed power over pain and death. I tucked suicide into my back pocket, an option and sometimes a threat, to extract as needed. You can’t kill me because I’ll kill myself first.

“Who wanted you dead?” When I finally succumbed to asking for help, that’s what the grief counselor asked.

“Oh!” I said cheerfully. “Everyone!”

2. IT WAS THIS

When your parents die, your molecular structure breaks down and is re-arranged. You literally become a different person. –Mark

The morning after my father died, I woke with energy and enthusiasm. I loved my first espresso in the bright Manhattan morning. I was ready to run out onto Broadway and dance around. Then my mood shifted. Mark, my partner of ten years, was distracted. He had a show coming up. When he is concentrating on his work, he hardly acknowledges me. This makes me crazy. Or it used to. Before I learned how to cry, if anyone ignored me, I felt invisible. Being invisible was akin to being dead.

I thought I can’t stay one more second in this stupid relationship.

“Are you ready to be a pioneer in the middle of nowhere?” I asked for the third time that morning. When Mark failed to respond, I said, “You don’t care about my feelings.”

“I’m tired of your feelings,” Mark said. He danced around in a fierce circle and pounded the air with his fists. “Why would I want to live in the middle of nowhere when I can be in Manhattan?”

I didn’t bother to respond. I could not wait until he left the apartment, and then I could not wait until he returned. As I followed him around the apartment, I felt like one of our dogs, dependent on his attention. That day, across the nation in sunny California, a famous writer hung himself, and I totally got it. At least I thought I did. I was more arrogant then. I thought Now he’s captured everyone’s attention forever. He’s saying: ‘Here is my pain and here its breadth and height and depth, its weight. This is how grief smells.’

3. HOW TO CRY

You only become yourself when both your parents are dead. -May Sarton

When Mark and I finally returned to the sea and sky of the Pacific Northwest, my father no longer in it, I was unprepared for the blow. Nearby, in hospice, my mother’s body died more slowly. For the months it took her to die, my universe shrank to the length of trails near our cabin and my mother’s bedside, and, when the only other choice on offer was drugs, the support group.

“Want something to take the edge off?” Sarah, the physician’s assistant, turns her face toward me, and for a moment, I’m bathed in her gaze. I exist.

“Yeah, a lethal injection,” I say. “Of course I want something to take the edge off.” I think I’m hilarious and ironic, but Sarah returns to the laptop she usually taps instead of looking at me. Suicidal ideation. I could be in big trouble for letting that slip out.

“If you refuse medication,” Sarah says, “the hospital offers a bereavement support group.” Crying lessons, I called the sessions I began to attend every week. As my mother shriveled, I hunched into a brown metal folding chair and shared secrets with strangers with whom I had nothing in common. Except, of course, death. We had death in common. That thing, that word you weren’t supposed to say. Just as I wanted all of Mark’s attention devoted to me, in the group I didn’t want to listen to other people’s sorrows. I wanted to writhe on the floor, my fellow mourners tossing tissues at me, or at least kicking the tissue box in my direction.

“Do not hand a tissue to someone,” the counselor said. “That’s an attempt to stop the crying.”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?” I asked. “To make the pain stop?”

Everyone looked at me and smiled. The other group members were always so nicely dressed, and smart, and dignified, yet I sensed that if I rolled around on the floor and sobbed, they’d be fine with it. And very quickly, despite myself, I did become interested in their lives. For one hour every week, I didn’t have to make tidy. I didn’t have to pretend my father passed. I could say my mother is dying. For one hour, I could rage at the dead and dying, or, more likely, at myself, or I could feel nothing at all. At times, I could even laugh.

4. THE SCENIC ROUTE

Addiction to family impacts us on a cellular level, and because of this, escaping is like withdrawing from heroin. –Grief counselor

In Central Park, on my last day before returning West, the witch hazel started to bloom. When I arrived at my cottage in the West, the witch hazel my mother gave me burst with golden stars. I could hear her voice that winter afternoon in Port Townsend when she saw pots of witch hazel for sale on the sidewalk: “Would you like that for your birthday?” And without waiting for my response, she leaned over and swept the heavy pot onto her hip.

Grief became a screen that separated me from those I loved. Although I craved comfort, I forgot the rules of engagement. On some days, I couldn’t even remember how to talk. But worst of all was the exhaustion. My limbs felt heavy. I dragged myself from bed to espresso pot to shower, and then onto the forest paths to walk for miles, so tired I wanted to lie among the mosses and sleep. Several times, tended by my golden retriever and collie, I did. At night, if I finally managed to sleep, I jolted back awake, sometimes filled with terror, the child who has lost its parents and become prey.

Mark stuck it out. He wrapped himself around me like a warm and fragrant blanket, and his touch allowed me to relax in what felt like my own final days.

When we visited my mother, Mark always seemed to know how to be, perhaps because he tended his own mother as she died. He touched her and talked, or just sat quietly with a calm I lacked. My mother had no idea who I was, and without her recognition, it was as if I lacked a self. I dreaded visiting, and then felt guilty for my dread. Once, when ten days passed between visits, the hospice owner, Rosemary, said, “Long time no see,” and I obsessed about it for weeks.

The hospice consisted of two private rooms in the sea-facing home of a couple who grew organic fruits and vegetables. Chickens and dogs rambled around the property. Rosemary prepared meals from scratch and allowed my mother to eat or not eat as she chose. “She’ll eat when she feels like it,” Rosemary said, but I wanted to spoon feed my mother as if she were a baby I could somehow keep alive.

Sometimes, when I returned home, I imagined kayaking toward the horizon, and how it might feel to slide, gently, into the sea. Before my mother was moved into Rosemary’s house, she often kayaked alone, her arms whirling and her body almost invisible in the shallow seat.

“Should you be out there without a life preserver?” I called from the cliffs above the bay.

She shook her head. You really don’t get it, her look said.

6. THE GRIEF-CAVE

In essence, a testimony is always autobiographical: it tells, in the first person, the shareable and unsharable secret of what happened to me, to me alone, the absolute secret of what I was in a position to live, see, hear, touch, sense, and feel. -Jacques Derrida

On that December morning in Manhattan, after my father’s sudden stroke, when I felt almost merry, there must have been some kind of shock to my immune system. Within weeks, I was struck by one cold and flu after another. Then came kidney stones, two or three bouts with trips to the emergency room. A tooth abscessed, requiring multiple surgeries and a gum graft, which then failed.

Being sick served a purpose. I could burrow into my grief-cave. In our Washington Heights sublet, I hung double layers of dark curtains over the windows, and when that wasn’t sufficient, I bought a silk eye cover. I inserted two layers of ear plugs. I had tumbled over some kind of edge, and my internal structure collapsed. I yearned for that merry day when the patriarch died, and I was, at last, free. Now I wanted to take the scenic route, as my mother always called it, and arrive someplace else.

“Is this normal recovery from a bone graft?” I asked the surgeon when the graft failed.

“No,” he said.

After a month in my isolation chamber, I started the walking cure. On my first day out, an airplane crash landed in the Hudson beside me. When everyone survived, I counted that as hope for me, too. I walked Manhattan for miles, up and down, back and forth, and around the length and width of Central Park. I didn’t listen to music or talk on my phone or look at people. I didn’t really even think.

One night while heading home at night, north on Broadway near Columbia University, I passed a brightly lit café. As I glanced inside, a young woman froze in place, swayed slightly, and then collapsed. I looked around for someone to help, but a policeman arrived almost instantly, and then another stood in the street to flag down the ambulance wailing its way through traffic.

I ran through the dark to our sublet. Once inside, I leaned against the wall, started crying, and could not stop. I replayed the image of the young woman’s collapse, an endless reel of a horror film. My heart pounded.

“What happened?” Mark asked.

“I wish that ambulance was for me,” I said.

Gradually, and then suddenly, like electric shock, a memory appeared as stark as that crashing plane in the Hudson. During my first semester at college, I held three jobs and still couldn’t make ends meet. I took on another, as an artist’s model, and was assaulted. The following morning, I showed up for one of my other jobs: serving pancakes and eggs to my peers. As I stood behind the food cart dishing out plates of food, I fainted.

“Get her out of here,” someone said. The food service inspectors were due at any minute, and when I awoke, I was back in my dorm room pounding my head against the wall.

7. COMFORT MEASURES

Social contact constantly rearranges our DNA. -Anna Fels

After my mother could no longer drive, my parents were locked into a six-mile radius around their home. “You need to write your wishes,” I told them, “what you want after your death.” My parents sat in their usual places at the maple table we’d had since I was a kid, their one splurge covered with multiple layers of plastic, so that a lifetime later, the surface remained immaculate.

Obediently, my parents leaned over the bright green Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment Paradigm or POLST. They wrote rapidly, and without consulting each other. They knew exactly what they wanted and what they didn’t want. As if completing an exam, they handed the forms to me.

What about afterwards, I asked. Did they want a funeral? Cremation? What did they want then? They needed to write down their wishes about that, too. They glanced at each other and frowned.

“I want to donate my body to research,” my mother said.

“And then what?” I asked. “Do you want to be buried or cremated?”

“Buried,” my mother said. But when I asked her where, she had no idea.

“I don’t need a grave,” my father said. “Just scatter my ashes on the bay.”

“No scattering,” my mother said. “You’ll be beside me.” When my father shook his head, she looked him straight in the eye. “You’ll see,” she said, in a humorous mock-stern tone she often used with him.

I asked around our little village and learned that my parents qualified for a site in the historical cemetery. I contacted someone on the cemetery commission, an elected office, and secured one of the last available sites. My parents seemed disinterested in my efforts, but one afternoon, my mother asked me to drive her there. Just six miles from their cabin, the cemetery overlooks the bay, and the Olympic Mountains rise directly behind. The plot I’d chosen was beside that of the Native American founder of our village.

“You can have a line of poetry if you want,” I said, “on a stone.” She shook her head. Once again, I wasn’t getting it.

“Daddy,” she said.

Then I understood. She meant the grave was for him. That he would die first. And she was, of course, right.

8. WAKE TO SLEEP

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. / I learn by going where I have to go. -Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”

I’d been frightened about my mother’s physical death, but with the guidance of the hospice nurse, who’d known my parents for decades, the active dying, as it’s called, was gentle. That first night, two of my sisters and I sang every song we knew, including those she taught us when we were small. The next night, as my sister held our mother in her arms, I read from a book my mother gave me when I was in fifth grade, Words for the Wind. For the thirty minutes or so that it took me to read “Meditations of an Old Woman,” a poem I’d set to music in my teens, my mother stopped her intense dying breath, opened her eyes, and fixed her gaze on mine the way a child does as she’s being read to sleep.

After my mother’s burial, my father’s ashes tucked into her coffin, I felt flattened. Every day, I roamed the trails behind my house. All these decades, my parents lived just through the forest on this land where I grew up, anchoring me to the world. Some of the trails along the shoreline dated from the original people who lived here for ten thousand years. It was my job as a child, and then as an adult, to keep those trails clear.

Once a week, I continued to meet with my fellow mourners. Several of us lost significant amounts of weight, becoming almost skeletal. I could not imagine how I had ever been able to do anything, or that I would ever again function in any kind of normal way. “All responses are correct and normal,” the counselor told us. “You can’t rush grief.”

Most of us focused on regrets. We hadn’t spent enough time. We hadn’t done enough. “She wanted a scarf,” said one widower. He looked down at his hands. “The scarf only cost six dollars, and I wouldn’t let her have it.” One slept in her beloved’s shirt, and another carried her sister’s purse. Yet another tore the clothes from her mother’s closets and flung them into garbage pails, dragging them to a distant shed.

“Don’t rush into any changes if you can help it,” the counselor advised. Yet everyone else pushed the survivors to change. One widow wondered if she should move closer to family, as her sisters were insisting, and abandon the house she loved. The widower’s kids wanted him to shed the too-large family home where he’d spent so many years caretaking. “But then I’d have to pack,” he told us. “I don’t have the energy.” A young woman wondered if it was proper to stay on in her mother-in-law’s house.

“Am I even related to her now that my husband’s dead?” she asked.

One widow suffered none of these pangs. She joined us only once, and she spoke of her husband’s death with glee. “My girlfriends and I are headed for Hawaii,” she said.

“Take us with you,” we murmured. She didn’t need us, and we were glad. But we lacked the will to minister any such kindness to ourselves. In that icy Northwestern winter, our grief seemed frozen into our flesh. We might yearn for bright sun on sandy beaches, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. None of us could even manage hugs. Despite the intimacy of what we shared, we never exchanged numbers. We returned to our warrens like snails to shells, to reappear the following week.

Until we didn’t. When we were done grieving, we simply vanished. Time collapsed and fell forward, moment telescoping out of moment, until I barely remember any of them at all, but for that stretch of time we embraced without touching.

K.C. Pedersen lives on a saltwater fjord in Washington State, holds an MA in writing and literature, and blogs at www.kiriepedersen.com.