Bernard Cooper excerpts a few hundred words from his forthcoming memoir in the New York Times Magazine. A moment - counted in mechanically delivered drops of medicine - of waiting as the man he loves dies. The waiting has been long, and it goes on. The partner's death comes after, not in Cooper's words but in an editor's footnote.
One of the stranger and more terrible things about a memoir - and a memory - is that it doesn't end. You can return to the exact page, and a moment is counted out again in increments that may be elastic but remain inevitable. It's the lesson that we asked to be repeated in our bedtime stories and then forget and then endure in the latter part of our lives. Memoir is the fairytale that waited until we grew up. Grew up enough to shoulder its burden.
I used to tell my goddaughter and her sister stories of my commonplace, suburban boyhood. They were little, as were my stories. They always began, "When I was a boy and my brother was a boy..." There weren't many of stories: when I jumped off the roof of the garage, when my brother took all the doorknobs off all the doors, the Christmas morning when I first saw my brother's electric train. A half-dozen stories, more or less. My goddaughter and her sister are, of course, far too old for them now (and not yet old enough).
In his memory, Cooper lies in bed, alert to the ticking of a machine, while his partner sleeps, drug fogged. In mine, I sit up with my wide awake mother, counting her pulse, willing her racing heart to still, as fear kills her. What little I do there in these moments turns out to be mere remembrance.
My mother sat in the rocker. I sat on the rug next to her. I fabricated a therapeutics of breathing and prayer and practiced it on her. She declined to go along. We sat in our silences most nights, until her pulse finally rested, my father sleeping a few feet away in the other room. Night after night.
Cooper writes of his nightly vigils, "But the deeper Brian sinks toward sleep - his hands unclenching, jaw going lax - the more wary I become. . . . I could spring across the room if I had to. I could lift the bed and carry him to safety." The story I told myself over and over when I was a boy always had me as the rescuer, the boy who saves the woman trapped beneath the rubble of the earthquake ruined church.
Cooper's vigilance did not save Brian; mine did not save my mother. A burden that I have to remind myself to bear.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Danny McL. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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