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Edie had often joked when they were together that she was getting a PhD in Him—that he’d told her what to think, what to read, what and whom to give her attention, the qualities that made art worthwhile, the qualities that made life worthwhile. And she had, she knew, benefited from his education. She had been improved. Yet he’d also built up in her an indestructible confidence similar to his own, had taught her to respect herself and her ideas so much so that she, years later and slowly, began to see, through a lens he’d given her, his total disrespect of her, despite his love, the way he saw her as a project of his, a savage mind he was civilizing.
Everyone told me that everyone was breaking up or breaking down or breaking through those days—these days, these days, everyone said—something in the ether, it seemed, was pushing them all to the edges of whatever they were in. The pandemic was entering year three, and a friend’s paranoid delusions returned, and there were miscarriages and estrangements, and nearly everyone’s marriage was ablaze, and addicts were playing chicken with their addictions, and spouses were meeting strangers at the airport, then calling from foreign countries to say they’re never coming home again, and the piano player couldn’t play the piano, and the ex-wives became anti-vaxxers, and the neighbors kept calling the cops—please, dear God, please, do something—and all the while I kept writing down the facts, the sometimes barely believable facts of how much seemed to be changing, eroding, losing control, and I began to wonder if this has always been the reason I’ve written anything at all—to break reality down into a story, or to make a story into a reality. For a little while I wondered if there was measurably more chaos in late 2021, but it was much simpler than that. It’s natural to pay attention to the unceasing troubles of others when, like passing by mirrored windows, you notice yourself in them.
Later it became clear—The Reason had the right to explain my feelings to me because he’d spent six years telling me what I felt and who I was, and had quite often been correct. Usually the version of myself he sold me on was more positive than the one I’d previously held. He believed me to be smarter than I thought I was, more capable, more powerful than I had previously thought myself. I began to believe him, and yet that belief brought with it a strict obedience to this person who had, it seemed, created me. Of course he had the right to tell me who I was, and what I should want or do. I had given him permission to do so.
When I began to lose my faith in God at fifteen, I lost my appetite, completely, for years, eating only because it seemed I should eat and never because my body had asked for it. A passage in Corinthians had been the compass for what to do with the spiritual liability of my flesh—the body is a temple … ye are not your own—and once I had slipped loose of the belief that the Bible was the word of God, I had no law, no rubric for what to do with myself. I had believed a body was nothing but an altar to the Lord, not my own, not anyone’s own, just something I was borrowing as the physical site of my devotion. I packed rigidly balanced sack lunches as a preteen and worried about artery plaque, and preached to a boy at school I’d heard was stealing his mom’s cigarettes. For ye are bought at a price, Paul told us, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
Without God, what was a body? Just a place to wait.
The Amish had Rumspringa, but Methodists had no rite for testing a secular life. I stopped praying, stopped witnessing to kids at school, stopped protecting my temple from poisons like lust and cigarettes at the Waffle House. I expected that I would, like all biblical characters before me, be taught a lesson and return to the fold, but in the meantime there was no discernible God, and without a God—without a reason for life or death—what good was a body? I asked this question. I had no answer.
Hunger was the closest ancillary I had to the rapture I’d felt when I went to the altar as a kid with open palms at weekend retreats, or the nights in silent prayer when I felt—or swore I could feel or needed to believe I could feel—the hand of God resting on my chest, or the mornings in church when I knew every word of the sermon was a message just for me, just at the right moment, divinely sent. Hunger was a pure devotion to the nonmaterial, and its hollow suffering felt like an act of faith, a denial of the world as I waited for heaven.
After The Reason sent that email, my appetite left, completely, for the first time in more than twenty years, and it was only then I could viscerally remember what faith had felt like—this bright feeling in the nerves, a sense of being porous and airy. Reality was clear. Death was an illusion. I stood in our kitchen where I had cooked and eaten a thousand meals, and was unable to eat a piece of toast, as its texture and smell were an affront, somehow, a noxious torture where there had once been comfort.
A sharp inhale from customer service. Of course it’s hard for me to do this, she said, canceling a line, but I will do it.
It sounded as if she were giving a lethal injection to a suffering pet, but it was just a phone line, a number, a nothing. I smiled and rolled my eyes at Sara, who smiled back—and dear God, the smile of Sara, what a holy thing—but then I stopped smiling in order to meet this customer service representative in her funereal feeling.
Sometimes you have to just take it out back and put it out of its misery, I said.
There was a long silence on the line, then a hesitant and determined, Yes.
It’s OK, I said, trying to comfort her as she killed those digits. We’re doing this together. We’ll get through it. Sara raised her eyebrows and muffled a laugh, but I was deadpan, committed to the bit.
Moments later, when the customer service representative told me it was done, that the number was gone, that it was all over—did I hear a little jolt in her throat?—she asked if there was anything else she could do for me, anything at all, and I said no, there was nothing; then we solemnly wished each other well.
lol
When I asked if he was upset, The Reason said he’d mourned the end of our relationship slowly, in private, for months and months. He’d gone through his own piecemeal mourning right in front of me, without a word, smuggled out like a house removed brick by brick. If I had really been paying attention to him, he explained, if I had really loved him, then I would have known what he was feeling. I would have known how dire the situation was. How had I not read his mind?
tbh i get it
Apparently Seneca believed widows should be permitted to mourn their husbands for ten months maximum, a precept meant to counteract the stubbornness of female grief, but what had any ancient man ever really known about any female anything? How could any of them have been so sure that it wasn’t all an act, that she wasn’t a bit pleased, that it wasn’t just relief that led a widow to dwell in her black? What says leave me alone better than a veil?
Still, sure, I could see how there might be value in putting time limits—though not prohibitions—on mourning:
For to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness. The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it.
Weeks after latkes with the witch, an acquaintance, Molly, emailed to ask me what I thought of optimism. She had also reached the end of a long relationship, and was moving states away in our new country of uncertainty. I typed a reply in total confusion, unsure of what I thought until I read what I’d written. Maybe pessimism is the assumption that you know something you don’t know in order to avoid disappointment, but if an optimist remains an optimist when the worst happens, then what is the cost of optimism?
I really don’t know, I admitted to Molly in the end, but it seems optimism is free and pessimism costs you something.