What a grizzly and a broken-down car in the middle of a winter night have in common with the last thing any of us will ever do
What frightens us most about the grizzly, and I mean the real one, not the one you meet in a documentary with its careful narration and its safe remove but on a trail in failing light with the wind coming wrong so it never caught your scent until you were already too close, is not the size of it or even the speed of it, though the speed is its own kind of theology, a whole sermon delivered in under three seconds about the distance between what you believed about the world and what the world actually is. It is that the bear does not know you are a story. You come before it with your whole warm interior, your children’s names sitting in your mouth like river stones you have been carrying so long you forgot they were there, your regrets and your tenderness and the thing you have been meaning to say to your brother for eleven years, and the bear regards none of it, the bear moves through your significance the way the Alcan wind moves through a man standing alone on a frozen road at two in the morning with the gas tank empty and the heater already forgetting what warmth was and the cold coming in under the door and around the window seals with the slow patience of something that has all the time in the world and knows it. And you stand there on that road with the spruce trees black against the black sky and the temperature dropping the way it drops in that country, which is to say without drama or apology, just a steady subtraction, and you understand for perhaps the first time in your soft and storied life that the night does not know your name and would not slow down if it did. I remember Matt telling me over beet tartare in Austin about how he does not play with nature because nature is ruthless. It has no rules. It does now care whether or not his daughter is cute.
Death is like this. Death is exactly and only like this, which is the thing we spend the whole of our living years constructing elaborate and beautiful fictions to avoid knowing. We build our rituals and our hospital rooms with their soft lighting, we build our language about passing and resting and going to a better place, we build and build and bargain forward into the future with something that has never once in all the long human story pulled up a chair and listened, that has never been moved by the argument that a person had more to give, more children to finish raising, more hard-won wisdom sitting in them like sap in a winter tree waiting for the thaw to make it flow. The hippo does not stop because you are loved by people who would grieve extravagantly and mean it. The bear does not pause over you because you have already suffered, because the years took things from you that you never got back, because you were once very kind to someone in a moment when kindness was not convenient and you have always quietly thought that counted for something somewhere in some accounting you trusted was being kept. The Alcan night does not consult your feelings about the cold. And so you can only hope, standing at the end of it with the dark coming down thick as fur, that it leaves something behind when it is finished with you, some remnant or remainder, some piece still warm enough that the people coming after will be able to find it with their hands and know that you were here and that you were real and that you loved them as hard as you knew ho
D
No comments:
Post a Comment