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Apatheia

Samuel Lawrence Sullivan

The fifteenth of January, 2014

I’ve started, ripped out, and thrown away five or six attempts at this entry. It’s wasteful, like the whole practice of journaling itself – a shedding of a part of you that should be kept close. But I keep coming back, so I must have something that I’d like to get rid of.

Dad was selfish. He buried his thoughts and feelings in his journals instead of letting them air out in the open with me and mom. Every night, after he thought I was tucked away in bed, he would sit at the kitchen table, or lock himself in his office, and fill his little marble notebooks with so much of himself that by the time the next morning rolled around, there would be little left for anyone else. He’d drift into the kitchen, as light as a ghost, make himself a cup of tea, and work in the garden before leaving for work. Sometimes, I wouldn’t hear him speak until that night, his mind spinning from the frustration of human interactions.

Maybe he saw himself as one of the ancient stoic thinkers he spent his evenings reading. “They had it all figured out,” he’d say before launching into one of their lessons when he was supposed to be helping me with my algebra homework. “Everything was simpler back then. A quieter life. A fuller life.” By the end of my senior year of high school, I’d read Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Zeno of Citium, and the other stoic writers that stole dad’s time and focus. I thought that I could get to him through them. I don’t know why. These were ancient men with no baring on the present who, as far as we know, never married or raised daughters.

Joe says that he’s happy I started keeping a journal. He said it’d be good to, “let my ears rest for a moment.” Well boo-hoo for him. Apparently, I’ve got a whole lot to talk about and not a lot of people to talk to. I never complain about making him dinner, or driving him into town so he can get smashed with Fred Henry at Smiling Jacks. I didn’t complain when he threw his back slipping on a patch of ice and I had to help him in and out of the shower, or when the meds the doctors in Craig had him on made him soil his good pants. No, I didn’t get mad. I changed him, took his pants home, and washed them as good as new. Did he thank me for that? No. The second he could walk on his own, he burned the pants in the steel barrel in his back yard.

I am grateful to him for this home, and for this once-fresh start, but sometimes gratitude can feel like an obligation. Sometimes an obligation can feel like a prison.

I’m sure that’s exactly how dad felt. Mom and I were his obligation, his prison. Maybe he wanted to be something else, someone else, anything else, but we held him down to earth as best we could, so he retreated into the echoes of his own thoughts against the long-dead.

Mom only ever saw the good in him. “Your father is a thinker.” She’d say on the evenings that he’d come home from work and lock himself in his office without a word to either of us. “He can’t let those thoughts keep rattling around his head, because then he’ll start rattling and it’ll become a whole mess.”

Mom was patient. She liked doing jigsaw puzzles without looking at the box. Every other weekend we’d make the two-hour trek to the hobby shop over in Sun River and pick up a puzzle wrapped in brown paper they had prepared special for her. “We don’t want to know what we’re working towards,” she once said to a new and very confused clerk. “The fun is in the discovery.” We’d take the puzzle home, dump it out on the coffee table, and work for hours, comfortable in the silence and in each other’s company. She’d slide a cluster over to me that would fit perfectly with whatever I was building. I’d find the piece that eluded her from the start. When she got too sick to make the trip, I’d go alone. I had a lot of time to think on those drives. More than a few times I felt like I could keep driving forever, pass the exit for Sun River and continue north, to Washington, Canada, Alaska, then off the edge of the world.

No one knew what was wrong with her. The doctors would test her, find nothing, consult other doctors who had fancier sounding, more expensive tests that also found nothing. Some accused her of faking it, but you can’t fake losing thirty pounds in two months, and you can’t fake the fear that followed her from room to room and poisoned the air and blocked out all sound.

During her hospital stays, I’d bring her smaller puzzles that could fit on the table the nurses rolled over her bed. I’d present them to her in zip-lock baggies. She said that was cheating. “You already know what’s going to happen,” she’d say.

Each time I saw her, she looked less like herself. When I try to think back to the details of her face in that hospital bed, I can see the powder pink sheets and worn quilt. I can see the sterilized bedside table and large plastic water pitcher, the crucifix hanging on a nail by the window, looking out over a field of snow. But I can’t remember the details of her face. Maybe I’ve blacked it out. Maybe I stared at these things because I refused to see the end before we got there. In her place, all I can imagine is a dark shape, a silhouette, a shadow.

On one of her last good days, when she could still hold herself up, we were putting together a Fourth of July puzzle. It was mid-March by then, but the puzzle was the only one the Hospital had in their little giftshop. As I searched for a piece of the dark blue sky, I noticed that her shape kept leaning towards the box that I had thrown on the ground. The puzzle was only 350 pieces. Without looking up from the hole in the sky, I asked her what she was doing. I could feel her looking at the top of my head, but I couldn’t return her gaze. “I could do with a little less mystery right now,” she said.

When mom passed, home wasn’t home anymore. It was a tomb. I couldn’t stand to live there. I couldn’t bear the thought of it existing at all. Every time I came into a room, mom’s shadow would be there waiting for me, reading in her armchair, humming in the bathroom, brandishing an old-fashioned at the kitchen table, an impossibly large puzzle sprawled around her, leaning over the mason jars that we used to hold our rhododendron cuttings, and whispering, “good morning, lovely.” She whispered so many sweet things into my ears that they began to ring.

If dad could see mom’s shadow, he never acknowledged her. He had cried at her bedside and at the funeral. At the wake, he disappeared long enough for me to go looking for him. I found him in their closet, mom’s favorite sweater draped over his face. It was one of the few things that still smelled like her. I knew because I had done the same thing that morning, which is why it was out in the first place.

When I helped him up, the sweater slid from his face. He looked too calm, almost drugged. “It is better to conquer death than to deceive it.” I didn’t think anything of it at the time. There was too much going on. Then, a week later, over a couple of overdone porkchops, he raised his glass and said, “I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.” When I said nothing, he smiled, nodded, and continued chewing.

Each morning when I woke up, I’d find mom’s shadow sitting at the foot of my bed, a little thinner than she had been the day before. I’d go downstairs, where dad was waiting to share another useless gem of stoic wisdom with me.

“Let each thing you would do, say, or intend be like that of a dying person.”

“It is not death that man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.”

“Brief is a man’s life and small the nook of the Earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.”

In hindsight I can recognize that in the face of the horrible unknown, he had retreated into the books and doctrine that had guided him his entire life. Maybe he thought he would find comfort there, or that Aurelius, Epictetus and the rest of the gang could help him make sense of a life that no longer made sense. Maybe if we had told stories about her, we could have kept her alive together.

She once chased a black bear out of our garbage cans, across the neighbor’s yard, and down the street, all while still in her pajamas.

In the summertime, she would insist on dancing to the Beach Boys. It was the only time I saw my dad move with abandon.

Every single time she left the house, she made a new friend. An almost impossible feat given the size of our town. People were drawn to her light. Without it, all we had was her shadow.

I waited for dad to acknowledge mom’s presence, but he never did. Her shadow grew weaker and weaker. Around a year after her death, she would only appear in the long late afternoon light. By that point, she was little more than a dark whisp hovering above the middle couch cushion, leaning slightly over the coffee table, as though she were trying to make sense of all the millions of jigsaw puzzles that had ever been scattered there. My memories were the only place where she existed unchanged from the mom I knew, but I had no one to share those memories with. I was afraid that, eventually, she would fade from there as well.

By that point, I had stopped trying to talk to dad about mom. All he could offer was advice regurgitated from men who had been in the ground so long that their bones had turned to dust and ash. These men were more present to my father than my mother, or me. If I didn’t act, mom’s ghost would fade from the house. Her memory would evaporate. In the face of these truths, I did the only thing that made sense. I gave her a proper send off.

I waited until dad left for work. I walked to the gas station, bought a small red gas canister, and filled it at the pump. I hadn’t planned much further than pouring a ring of gasoline around the house, striking a match, and watching my mom’s spirit lift from the inferno. But, the canister ran out before I got around the rhododendron bushes. They went up in a flash. As they burned against the house, a large black spot spread between two of the upstairs windows. For a moment, I thought it was mom’s shadow, growing larger and stronger as the flames climbed higher. Her renewed presence and warmth washed over me. I closed my eyes, thinking that once I opened them, her shadow would take form again, and all our shared moments that had disappeared over the last year would come rushing back in a flood of color and love.

Naked heat stung my face. The smell of burning plastic made me choak. I opened my eyes. The spot had crept further up the side of the house, but it was only a burn. Mom’s shadow hadn’t come back. She was gone. The wind shifted, and I ran for cover from the smoke.

One of our neighbors must have seen what I was up to and called 911. Within minutes of the bushes going up, a fire engine came screaming off of route 97. Dad came close behind them. After they smothered the fire, it was clear that the rhododendron had taken the brunt of the damage.

When Sheriff Jordi showed up, he made a show of crossing his arms and hovering close by where I was sitting in the driveway, as if I was going to make a break for it, as if I cared what happened to me. Dad took Jordi aside, spoke with him for a while, and saw everyone off. No charges were filed, as far as I know. Around an hour after I walked to the gas station, it was over. The fire was doused, the cops and firefighters were gone, and dad and I were left standing in the driveway, staring at the black streak that ran from our destroyed flower garden to the roof.

“Alright then,” Dad said after everyone left. “Alright then.” He disappeared into the house. I waited outside for a few minutes, then followed him. I stopped in the kitchen and listened for his movements, for the soft creek of the floorboards in his room, or the squeak of his office chair as he rocked back and forth and considered how to deal with me. I walked from room to room, looking for Mom’s shadow, but she was gone. The house was silent and empty. My heartbeat pounded in my ears. An awful thought came to me. This is how it was going to be for the rest of my life. I’d turn into a shadow, like Mom, and fade away. I couldn’t stay. Neither of us said so, but we both knew that this was the end.

Dad didn’t want me to go. He didn’t say so, but I could see the hurt in him. On the day I left, I stood in the doorway with my bags packed and ready. He stayed in the backyard and broke dry earth in his vegetable garden, as if searching for something he had buried a long time ago.

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Samuel Sullivan is a writer, RPCV, educator, and communication skills coach based in the New York metro area. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from Fairfield University. His work has been featured in the New Plains Review. You can reach him at samuellawrencesullivan@gmail.com. Read the author’s commentary on his piece.

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