Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (3 page)

To set stones on stones not for the architect but for eternity.

The Latin epitaph in one seventeenth-century cathedral translates:
Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

The words are carved in a disk of black marble set beneath the center of the dome. The disk was placed there by the architect’s son.

It’s easy to imagine the great man, but try to imagine the son who knows his father’s cathedral will be loved longer than the flesh of his flesh. ♦

The oldest known cave paintings are thirty thousand years old. Along with abstract markings and pictures of animals, they include images of human hands.

It seems that the painters pressed their hands against the walls, blew pigment from their mouths onto the walls, and then lifted their hands away.

Then they walked out of the cave, marked with red ochre from fingertip to wrist.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. ♦

Another friend inherited a collection of ceramic bowls that used to belong to her great-great-great-grandmother.
I like the fact that they break
, she said,
so that I can glue them back together.

Before my husband went into surgery to have his shattered nose reconstructed, the anesthesiologist told us she’d give him a benzodiazepine intravenously.

It causes anterograde amnesia, so when my husband whispered
I love you
directly into my ear, I whispered back,
You aren’t going to remember this.
♦

When I became pregnant I struck something mortally. Not just myself, symbolically; my son, actually.

The partly made flesh wriggling inside me was already mortal. ♦

During my pregnancy I couldn’t remember anything. Information seemed to enter my memory and dissolve.

The diary was of no help.

Emerging from the sickening exhaustion of the first few months, I began to see the work I might do next—this, an assemblage of already exploded bits that cohere anyway, a reminder that what seems a violent interruption seldom is. ♦

Goldfish are said to possess legendarily short memory spans, but in fact they can recall information—such as certain sounds—for up to five months, or so one report claims.

I’m told that even a newborn, in its first months outside its mother’s body, remembers the underwater sounds of the womb. ♦

I developed the amnesia that some people call
pregnancy brain.

Heavily pregnant when I heard my friend’s father had died two years earlier, I sent condolences at once, hysterically sorry. My friend wrote back. I’d sent a letter two years earlier. I didn’t remember sending it.

Then another friend told me his apartment had been burgled.
How lucky that the dog wasn’t hurt!
I wrote back. He’d put the dog down months before. I hadn’t remembered that, either.

I scrambled to remember the dead in order—of course an eighteenth-century composer was dead, and all the people who died before I was born. My grandparents all were dead. Recent deaths of those I knew only by their work—a novelist, a monologist. I remembered which of my friends were dead. Another friend’s stepmother, in a coma for years, had died earlier that year.
Good
, I thought,
I haven’t forgotten them all.
♦

When I was almost nine months pregnant, my mother-in-law began receiving hospice care.

My doctor wouldn’t permit me to cross the ocean to see her. My husband didn’t want to miss the birth of our son. And he didn’t want to miss the death of his mother, the woman who raised him.

I drank quarts of raspberry-leaf tea, trying to trigger early labor.

Six thousand five hundred miles away from each other, two unplannable moments prepared themselves.

My husband’s phone rang. It was his stepsister, calling from his mother’s hospital room.
Yes
, he said. A few moments later he said,
Hi, Mom!
I hadn’t heard him say it for days. My heart beat hard, as if it knew. ♦

My husband photographs everything: bound hanks of insulated wire on the train platform, clouds at sunset out the jet window, the shape of my foot as I sleep.

When he was fired from his job, he cleared off his hard drives. Then he gave back the company’s computers. That night he discovered he’d forgotten to copy the last photographs he’d ever taken of his mother.

In one of the lost photographs, she holds her head in her hand. She turns toward the glass doors that open onto the porch over the canal. She is skeletal, her body no longer able to derive nutrition from food.

She looks uncharacteristically hopeless, as if the picture represented the moment that she, who had outlived her sudden-death prognosis by five years, would not go on. ♦

She was given twenty-four hours to live on the day I was told my cervix was 50 percent effaced.

Three weeks before her only grandchild was born, she joined her old horse, who had fallen suddenly ill only months before and was awaiting her patiently in the earth. ♦

Then I became a mother. I began to inhabit time differently. It had something to do with mortality. I kept writing the diary, but my worry about the lost memories began to subside. ♦

Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time. Of the baby’s nighttime feeds I remember nothing. Of his daytime feeds I remember almost nothing.

It was a different nothing from the unrecorded nothing of the years before; this new nothing was absent of subjective experience. I was either asleep or almost asleep at all times.

Day and night consisted of the input and output of milk, often in an emergency, but the emergencies all resembled each other. At dawn I noticed a pile of tiny damp blankets and tiny damp clothes on the nursery floor, but I never remembered replacing the green shirt with the yellow one.

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time.

I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

My body, my life, became the landscape of my son’s life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world. ♦

In my twenties I stopped to write every time I happened upon beauty. It was an old-fashioned project. Romances were examined in detail. Each one was new.

My thirties were filled not by romance but by other writing. In the diary I logged the words I wrote and the light or heavy passes I took through existing manuscripts. Virtuous activities such as exercise and housekeeping also were logged. The rhapsodies of the previous decade thinned out.

Toward the end of my thirties and into my forties, entries became further abbreviated. Most of the sentences started with verbs.
I
is omitted from as many sentences as possible, occurring only for emphasis. I logged work and health—symptoms, medications, side effects. Housekeeping was no longer noted. If I read or looked at or heard something extraordinary, I named it, but as one ages, fewer things fall into this category. Reflection disappeared almost completely.

Of a concert by a band I’ve liked for almost twenty years, listened to most recently about five years ago, but never seen live until this week, I wrote only
Still know every word.
Twenty years ago, the sentence would have been twenty sentences.

Though I try to log only the first time he does yet another extraordinary thing, the diary is now mostly about my son. ♦

Sometimes the baby fed at seven thirty and cried until feeding again at eight thirty.

My life had been replaced with a mute ability to wait for the next minute, the next hour.

I had no thoughts, no self-awareness, just an ability to sit with a little creature who screamed and screamed.

Waiting for the baby to feed or stop feeding or burp or pass wind or yellow liquid shit I postponed showers, phone calls, bowel movements. I ignored correspondence because I had no energy even to say
I am so tired
, and no one cared that I was tired—who isn’t tired? Before I had the baby I remember feeling tired all the time. But after he joined me I could spend four days in two rooms, pajama-clad, so tired I was almost blind. ♦

I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.

I was at once softer and harder. The hardness was a capacity for pain that would otherwise have interrupted the soft, almost bodiless calm in which I held the baby. ♦

Soon after his mother died, my husband’s dead father’s best friend’s ex-wife died. The best friend is the only one left. My husband said the man’s name.
That leaves him
, my husband said.
That leaves him, of the people who have known me since I was born. And then my childhood will be truly gone.
♦

Another friend wrote to ask all the desperate questions I used to ask before I became a mother.
How old were you? How long were you married? How long did it take?

I wrote back,
One of the great solaces of my life is that I no longer need to wonder whether I’ll have children.
♦

Time kept reminding me that I merely inhabit it, but it began reminding me more gently.

In a dream I found an old-fashioned windup metronome on my desk. A man’s voice behind me:
Is that really a metronome on your desk?

In another dream an old woman told me that at my age, she wished she’d known that
the soul never stops appearing.
♦

Perhaps it was all the years studying the piano repertoire of the great prodigies, or perhaps it was studying alongside some actual prodigies—one of them was blind—but when I turned seventeen I became convinced I had fallen into a life of irreversible failure.

The stench of failure—I felt it coming to cover me.

Now I am old enough to know what I’ll never accomplish. I will never be a soldier, a physicist, a thousand other things. It feels like relief.

Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to.

I use my landlady’s piano as a writing desk. ♦

My students still don’t know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.

I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don’t value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don’t care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what’s coming next.

I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.

That beginner’s hope, the hope that ends with the first failure—when I was with the baby I felt that hope all the time. ♦

Trapped in a party conversation with two young people, I wanted to wait with them in the smoky hallway for fifteen years so I could hear what they’d say when they were forty. ♦

In another dream my tiny toothless son had all his teeth. I’d looked away long enough for all the teeth to emerge, even the back molars, the teeth beating time in months, in years, his full jaws a pink-and-white timepiece.

In the next dream his downy hair had grown very long and I needed to cut it off with dull scissors. Again his body had recorded time passing, time that had escaped my notice. ♦

For months the baby woke at seven, fed, fell asleep at eight thirty, woke at ten, fed, fell asleep at eleven thirty, and so on for the rest of the day. I’d made him into a milk clock.

Every hour was part of a ritualized ceremony of adding or subtracting milk. A river of milk flowed in and out and around him. He floated down the milk river toward the rest of his life. ♦

One explanation for the loss of preverbal memories maintains that after acquiring language, one forgets how to access those preverbal memories.

As I watched the baby play with his toys I remembered an orange plastic panel fixed to the rails of my own crib. A round red rubber air bladder the size of my fingertip. A bell. A black-and-white crank that clicked. A blue-and-red sphere that spun fast in its housing and looked purple.

My brain had stored this memory—all the textures and colors and shapes and sounds. If you had asked me six months earlier if it were possible to retain infant memories into adulthood I would have said no, but I carried this memory without looking at it for thirty-eight years. ♦

As I fed the baby with a little spoon I remembered a spoon scraping dribbled food from my chin and tipping it back into my mouth. That dribbled food, already tasted and diluted with saliva, never tasted good.

What else was on the orange panel? The bell and the crank and the spinning ball rang and cranked and spun. The air bladder forced the clapper up. I could see it moving up and striking the silver bell anchored by its silver bolt.

I remembered wanting to press the little red bladder again, again, again. Spinning the ball again, again, again. Wanting to see the purple. Wanting to hear the bell. I liked that it kept ringing.