Once when I was younger and my mother was very upset she clutched at her chest and said, “Sometimes I forget how to breathe properly.” And her chest was swelling shallowly and I didn’t really understand what she meant, so I put my small hand on her heart and nothing happened and we were both very quiet for a long time. Later when boys began to notice me and I started testing the feel of curse words in my mouth I began to develop that same pressure on my heart, like someone was standing on my chest and I had to mentally will myself to take deep breaths. When my mother first told me, I did not understand that someone could be so sad and distracted by their sadness that they would have to be very conscious about their breathing, counting nine seconds in between each breath, pressing a palm to the heart to relieve the weight. But after my first boyfriend crumpled my love in his hand like an old receipt and my parents started living in different zip codes and my Grandmother had a stroke right in front of me I understood the weight and did everything I could to run from it. It always caught up anyway.
A lot of people I love have suffered recently and I know that it’s not my fault but as someone who has never really had anyone close to her die, I feel responsible somehow. Maybe I have gone rotten and am infecting the good people around me. I know that it’s ridiculous and even egotistical to think my actions have this sort of consequence, but I guess because I don’t believe in god I don’t have anyone to blame so it just seems easier to point the finger at myself.
But really for my whole life I have been clumsy with people’s hearts and maybe this has made me rotten. I remember the first time I realized how easy it was to break something delicate just by looking at it. I was in high school and the power to make men swoon seemed like a prize I had won; one night I went to bed and the next day I woke up and it was mine to use forever and ever or at least until the first wrinkles set in. I was never kind with it or responsible. I brought boys to their knees just to see if I could, just to see what would happen. I have been a cruel girl and a clumsy girl and I am so sorry for not being more careful with the shy, shiny hearts men have offered to me. They are tiny gifts worth protecting and I never really understood what it meant to collect them, but I have a lot of them that I never gave back.
I think these feelings are called “Survivor’s Guilt.”
Last week in the bar someone announced that his friend’s son had died. He was 14 and he died of pneumonia! “It’s the fickle finger of fate,” he lamented. I countered, “But why does that finger only seem to point at the best people?” This is true and has been well documented in Billy Joel lyrics. It does seem like only the beautiful and thoughtful and caring people that cause the gardens in our souls to erupt into full bloom ever seem to have their lives prematurely pried away from them.
Now having become personally aware of how cruel this is, it’s as if my entire worldview shifted over night. I no longer knock on wood when I make a sweeping statement or a negative thought comes to mind. That was an OCD way to control an uncontrollable universe, to make me feel like I had some sort of agency in a world reined by chaos. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion elucidates the contradictory ways in which she allowed herself to internally believe her husband would come back to her after his death. She could not donate his pairs of shoes, but she did authorize an autopsy, believing that when they discovered he died of something simple, they could fix it and somehow bring him back to life. This is not the way I am processing these situations; I admit that it’s hard, both intellectually and emotionally, to comprehend that one moment someone can be here and the next moment they can be gone. But knowing that they are gone but not far, living on around us and in us, is a necessary comfort. The truth is that we are helpless on this pale blue dot and all we can do is love each other with abandon to make the chaos feel less threatening.
When she died, the next day I woke up and I was sad and angry but mostly I was lost. “You have essentially come face to face with your own mortality,” my boyfriend shouted over the car stereo while we zoomed down the 101. There is no rhyme or reason to the events in our lives, but I keep writing to try to make sense of this. Still, I don’t knock on wood anymore; there isn’t any point.