This is a report of my Tuesday, October 1, 2019. But, full transparency: I’m writing the report on Friday, October 4, 2019.
Reader, I hope you won’t consider this cheating. It’s just that I was really, really busy on Tuesday: the kind of busy where you don’t want to stare down at your phone and type diary notes out because everything tangible happening around you is too interesting or special or fleeting to want to miss.
I wasn’t in Middletown on Tuesday. I was in another city, in another state. A big city. I’ve been there before. Actually, I lived there for a little bit. I like it, but it’s not Middletown, so, you know. I don’t live there anymore.
My husband and I had been in this other city, in this other state, since the Thursday before. Tuesday, October 1 was our last day there before flying back to Middletown the following day.
We were in that far-from-Middletown city for a funeral and a memorial service, because our good friend who lived there died from Leukemia.
Yeah, f**k cancer.
The friend was mostly my husband’s mentor. An accomplished writer and his former teacher turned friend, and then later, my friend, too—I think?
My husband insists he’d call me a friend, and I mostly believe it, aside from the fact that my husband spoke to him about 10 times more often than I did, and for all intents and purposes he made a far, far bigger impact on my husband’s life than he did mine.
Though I guess you could argue that in making such an impact on my husband’s life, he had an equally large “trickle down” impact on mine. I met him a good handful of times. He made me laugh, and I think maybe I made him laugh sometimes, too.
This friend—about whom, regrettably, there is so very, very much cool stuff too identifying to share in this anonymous diary entry—died too young. Not yet 50. I’m including that info because I think it drives home how unfair his death his.
I mean, I get it—death is rarely fair. It might feel more fair when the person is very old and they die from normal old-people stuff, like rust and un-dust-offable dust and other things you can’t really do anything about.
And maybe you can’t really do anything about cancer. Or maybe we can, and maybe there’s already a cure, but there’s a conspiracy or cover-up by the pharmaceutical companies to not release said cure lest no one buys chemo drugs anymore. I don’t know.
But cancer is stupid and unfair. Sometimes, cancer feels like a joke.
Maybe on your timeline, reader, there’s a cure for it. Maybe you’re reading this right now and feeling like how I feel when I read about smallpox or polio, and you’re like, “That would suck so much to have to worry about that very preventable, very curable thing.”
But on this timeline, cancer still exists, and it feels like a joke to me sometimes because it doesn’t make any sense—it’s this tiny thing that just grows and grows and grows and then suffocates your organs and then that’s it. It’s not a virus or a bacteria. It’s a cluster of greedy, brainless, blind, dumb, and deaf cells that have no idea what they’re doing.
And this friend got cancer for no reason, and it wasn’t fair, and it never is. And he was way too busy for it.
Anyway, enough of that. I’m okay. My husband is less okay. But he’ll be more okay soon.
Here’s my Tuesday, October 1, the best I can remember it:
I wake up naturally around 9 A.M., not in Middletown, but in a big city far away, on an air mattress on the floor of my husband’s friend’s 5th-floor, teeny tiny studio apartment.
My husband is asleep on the couch behind me, perpendicular to my air mattress, my head towards the couch and my feet towards a bay window with white Christmas lights strung around it, as you might expect in the downtown studio apartment of a young, single woman in her mid-20s. Said single woman isn’t home: she’s at work now.
I got to sleep a lot. I’ve been tired ever since we got here. Probably the time difference, plus lots of extra walking. We walk in this city. We don’t walk in Middletown.
If you’re seen walking anywhere in Middletown, no one assumes anything good about you, unless you’re walking around campus midday with a backpack on, or downtown in a suit at lunchtime.
Otherwise, you’re walking because you can’t drive, and you can’t drive because of something sad or stupid. I’m not saying I feel like that, I’m just saying that you rarely see anyone walking in Middletown who’s happy about it. Hell, we hardly have any sidewalks. No demand, no supply.
Anyway, I’m a coffee drinker and can’t do mornings without it, so the night before today I bought some cold coffee in glass bottles at a convenience store down the street. I wobble up off the air mattress, head to the fridge, grab my cold coffee and a blanket, and go sit next to the window.
The window looks out over—well, not exactly a courtyard, but something like it. Not green enough to be a yard, and not expensive enough to be a court. Through this window you can see into the windows of about a dozen other apartment units, plus fire escapes and brick on brick on brick. I see no skyline save for one unimpressive building in the distance peeking up above the apartments. Pigeons roost all over like they’re in a meeting.
Soon, my husband is awake and he isn’t happy. He says he didn’t sleep well. His friend (the one we’re staying with) and him stayed up late chatting and drinking. (I was there, just asleep with earplugs in and an eye mask on because that’s how exhausted I was.) He says he felt like he was waking up every 15 or 30 minutes through the night, after that.
We chat a little and he scrolls through his phone, looking at funny pictures, trying to wake himself up.
Eventually, I grab my computer and get online to review applications for a job we’re hiring for at work. I actually have the day off today (we get unlimited paid time off), which I asked for because the memorial service is today and I wanted some space to be sad.
But reviewing applications is kind of fun for me, so I do that.
The position is a writing position, and at least 90% of the applicants can’t write, so reviewing the applications has been about as hard as clicking the disqualify button after reading the first line of every resume.
This goes on for awhile—me clicking and typing, my husband complaining, sighing, yawning, occasionally dozing.
Later today, around 4 P.M., we plan to meet 2 friends at a favorite old bar before going to the memorial.
Around 2, my husband and I are working out plans to get ready and leave the apartment and meet up with these friends. We bicker a little over a misunderstanding about said plans:
I thought he and I would be going out earlier for a special meal at a cool place on our last day in the city. He hadn’t anticipated that.
He says something about how I should say what I want. I ask—not at all in this tone, because I get very sheepish when tensions warm—why I would request for something to happen, ask for something to happen, or express my desire for something to happen, if I already assumed it was going to happen. (You know what happens when we assume.)
He gets a little snippy, understandably, then apologizes: he says on top of being tired, he’s very sad, today, and knows better than to take it out on me.
He’s thinking about not going to the memorial tonight. The funeral on Friday was long and Catholic, highly-attended, and very, very real. We both cried more than we had in a long time.
And my husband in particular, having lost a mentor he looked up to and loved so much, and by whom he was likewise so obviously loved, felt like going to this memorial service would be more self-injurious than healing, like sadistically digging a knife into a still-tender wound he was trying to leave alone after it got pummeled at the funeral.
He’s also very sleep-deprived, which will make anyone feel worse. And he doesn’t like how he (thinks he) looks or feels: scuzzy and bloated all over from drink.
Furthermore, he’d been asked to speak at the memorial, and now he was doubting whether or not he could do it, or wanted to do it.
I don’t want to tell him what to do. I get it.
My dad texts me to see how the trip is going and I tell him my husband is hemming and hawing about whether or not he wants to go to tonight’s memorial.
He says: “seems like a long way to travel to not go”
I want to go, but I don’t tell my husband—
—wait, I’m getting tired of writing “my husband,” so from now on I’ll just call him SD—
—I don’t tell SD that I want to go, because more than that, I just want to be with him, whether it’s at the memorial or not.
In spite of it all, we’re looking forward to meeting up with friends, so we go ahead and get ready, and we leave the apartment to start walking to the bar.
It’s a 30-minute walk, and we want to walk it. We love walking in this city. It’s great for busy minds because everything around you is busier and way more interesting, so it cancels out the incessant thoughts, including the more nefarious and critical ones.
Plus, it’s a pretty day. Sort of a cold-ish day. Unlike in Middletown right now, where it’s a balmy 90-something because global-stupid-warming.
We walk and walk and walk and talk and talk and talk.
We get to the bar and order some food (a really good burger, some really good chicken strips, and some really, really good fries) while we wait for 3 friends.
SD’s had his share of beers and hangovers this trip, and told me earlier he wasn’t going to drink today. He doesn’t.
Even inside the bar, even with his favorite beer on tap, he doesn’t. It’s unlike him in a good way. I’m really proud of him. I always am, though.
As for me, I have a beer. A pint, as our friend-who-passed would have called it. (I have a second pint about 40 minutes later after our friends arrive.)
We’re waiting for our friends. SD still feels bad—very tired, worn, dried-out, sad—but he’s pretty much completely decided by this point that he’ll be going to the memorial. The bar is a 5 or 10 minute walk from the event, anyway.
In spite of having decided that he was going to go, he still mentions at least once more how awful he feels. (Or maybe I ask him and he tells me.) I feel bad for him. I want him to rest if that’s what he needs to do. I say:
“Do whatever you think would make you feel best on Saturday.”
By that I mean, pretend it’s Saturday now, a few days later, and ask yourself what you’d most regret not doing: if you think you’re going to feel really, really bad on Saturday due to lack of rest through the week, then skip the memorial and go to bed early. But if you think your regret of having missed the memorial would be deeper than your exhaustion, then go to that.
You can make up sleep. You can’t go back in time to go to a one-time event you wish you’d gone to but didn’t, even though you could have.
Our friends show up. Looking back now, I realize how awesomely diverse our group was, with 3 different countries represented.
One friend has a broken wrist: an ice hockey accident.
Another is between jobs after an unfortunate budget-related lay off, but doing well and in the final rounds of a few interviews.
The other, I’m just meeting—but he talks. A lot. It’s okay.
I remember that my daughter gave me and SD some toys to take with us on the trip. When I’ve traveled in the past, I’ve asked her to give me a toy and I take pictures of the toy around the location I’m at. It shows her that I’m thinking of her and playing with her from afar.
Out of my purse I pull the toys: a plastic male, “dad” figure and a female “mom” figure, about 4 inches tall each, accessories to a dollhouse.
I ask 2 of our friends to hold the toys so I can take a picture. They position them as if the dad is drinking a (giant) beer and the mom is trying to stop him, the two friends laughing hysterically in the photo’s background.
I text it to my daughter and say, “He’s drinking too much cream soda!”
The Finnish and Singaporean friends get up to get more beer. The Singaporean one asks SD what he wants to drink, and SD declines. The friends seem a little surprised by that.
When they get up again for third and final beers, the Finnish one asks SD if he’s sure he doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t.
It’s obvious they respect him, even if the sight of him without a drink is a little different. Maybe even the tiniest bit unsettling for them.
The Finnish one tells us how, in Finland, they get 6 to 8 weeks paid vacation, government mandated. It’s usually taken during the summer. People drink a lot and enjoy their time and are happy. They soak it up because the winters are so awful.
He tells us he has French cousins and that the French are really clingy. I ask him if he knows French and he says he does and I say, “Of course you do,” rolling my eyes, joking. The joke being that the Finnish are obviously perfect at everything. Their happiness is government-mandated and paid for by the people.
When it’s time, we leave. After lots of hugs and see-you-laters, 2 friends head out. SD, the third friend (a student of our passed-away friend), and I start walking to the building where the memorial will be.
On the way, we’re joined by the friend whose apartment we’re staying at, as well as one other person I don’t have any sort of relationship with.
The memorial is in a classroom on the second floor of the university SD went to. We get there and decide to go to the bathroom before going into the classroom.
In my stall, there’s a sign that says, “Please urinate in the toilet bowl.” There are Chinese glyphs under the English letters. I take a picture. I don’t get it.
When I get out and meet back up with SD, I tell him about the sign and he says the same sign was in his. Neither of us get it.
We get to the classroom. There are about 6 or 7 rows of folding seats in a semi-circle, with the department chair front and center. The department chair (of the department our passed-away-friend worked in) has a seat front and center, as she is to lead the event. There are 40 or so people, with more coming in.
There are cheap snacks: cakes, crackers, salami and the like. There are 2 big, yet inconspicuous cameras, set up to livestream the service for people who can’t be there: mostly other students and faculty.
There’s a very poorly printed-out, black and white portrait of our friend on an easel at the front: sheets of 8×10 papers taped together. He would have rolled his eyes. He would have rolled his eyes at most of this, we think.
SD has decided he won’t speak.
After some hellos, we take our seats with about 5 dozen or so other people. We’re in a front row, towards the left.
The department chair holds a microphone and tells everyone that we’re here to remember our friend and share memories and stories about him.
Then she hands the microphone to the first person “in line,” a man sitting just in front of SD and me.
He talks, then hands the mic to SD, who rubs his face and sighs. He didn’t want this, but now that he’s holding the mic, he seems to.
He says lots of really nice things and ends with a funny story:
“One time we went to a bar. He asked me what we were drinking. I said gin and tonic, and he said, ‘Gin makes me sleep with women, and I don’t like either.’” Everyone laughs. A lot.
Then, SD passes the mic to me. It surprises me, because I don’t feel like a part of this family—I just feel like the wife who hangs around. But SD has always tried to convince me that all these people like me and care about me, that I’m not just worth caring about by proxy, and in light of everything, he’s also tried to assure me that our passed-away-friend felt the same about me.
He’s handing me the mic, not just passing it to the person behind us, not skipping over me.
I say some things. I say, “I didn’t even go here.” People laugh. I’m sincere and brief. I miss him.
It takes a long time to get through everyone. Over an hour. Sometimes it was really awkward. SD cried more, but I was out of tears already, so I just rubbed his back when I heard him sniffle.
At the end, SD and I agree—our friend would have hated that. He would have appreciated it, but he would have also kind of hated it. Or maybe not hated it. But he would have looked forward to it being over. In a good way. With a big heart. It makes us love and miss him more.
Later in the room, we’re chit-chatting. We end up in a conversation with a former teacher of SD’s, who asks us about life in Muncie.
SD tells him it was the subject of some important sociological studies in the early 1900s or so, and that over years of research it was eventually concluded that Muncie was the “most American town in America.”
The teacher says, “I think I’ve heard of those studies, actually. I almost got a degree in sociology.”
I say, “The Middletown studies?”
And he lights up with, “Yeah!”
We chat about that for under a minute before things break up. SD talks a bit more with some folks and I find myself wandering about, looking for something on the walls to read or something to do with my hands. I’m not bored, though.
I see a couple of people picking up folding chairs to put them away and I move in to help.
“No, it’s okay! You don’t have to.”
“It’s something to do,” I say cheerfully.
I want SD to see me as helpful. I want them to see me as genuinely caring—not just a social mooch. But I also genuinely do care. Death sucks. It’s sad. Sadness makes cleaning up hard. Every chair I folded and put away was one they didn’t have to, and that’s all that mattered to me. It made me happy, no matter who noticed or cared or didn’t. It was something to do.
When it’s over, the young woman we’re staying with informs us she’s going to go out for a bit with the person I have no relationship with whatsoever. We’re invited, but we have to be up early tomorrow to catch our flight back to Middletown. Plus, we’re both exhausted.
SD and I leave and he decides to stop at the bathroom one more time. When he comes back out into the hall, his eyes are red again.
Our friend’s office was on the way to the bathroom. He knew seeing the office would make him sad again, but together we went and took one last peek at it anyway. It’s where I was when I first met him, and it’s where SD had spent many hours with him, both for work and social reasons. His picture was still outside the door. Unfair. F**k cancer.
SD and I leave and walk the 30 minutes back. We walk and walk and walk and talk and talk and talk.
We love walking around here. Always something to see. Lights in all colors. People speaking all languages. Creative vandalism. Surprising trash.
When we’re almost back at the apartment, I stop at the convenience store where I got the coffees earlier. I want ice cream. We see a dog there with the body of a Basset Hound and the head of a derpy German Shepherd without the pointy ears. Normally, as much as we want to, we don’t ask to pet strangers’ dogs, but SD did. Dogs make him happy.
I go to the ice cream freezer. There’s a sign on it that says, “Do not open until you know what you want.” People don’t mess around in this city. I like the sign.
I get a pint of Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream.
We get up to the apartment and I put the ice cream in the freezer and announce that I’m not going to eat it until I’m all packed up. So we pack up and make sure we have nothing left to do before we settle in.
Once packed up, I eat the ice cream over a round coffee table, seated on the air mattress, using a spoon with a flat tip—not a rounded tip, a flat one. I read about the Trump impeachment inquiry and the definition of treason. I ask SD what a congressional committee is and what it means to be deposed, and he explains, and then I keep reading, understanding things better.
I tell him that if the news is this complicated for someone like me to digest quickly enough to want to keep reading, I can’t imagine how hard it would be for people less educated. I tell him it’s not fair, and that there should be an easier-to-understand news source, and that maybe if they didn’t use language like this all the time—maybe if more Americans could easily understand what the hell was going on, ever—maybe more people would participate, more people would understand why things are awful, and better people would be elected.
He agrees.
I eat the entire pint of ice cream. Unlike me, but in a good way. I’m not proud of me, but I know SD is.
It’s midnight and we have to be up around 5 A.M. to get to the airport on time. So we turn it all off and go to sleep.