Two Dreams

edited and expanded

I’m going to publish this piece again as I’ve spent the past two months on it and have added so much and edited the existing material so much that it feels as if it’s a new piece. Slowly, this is getting to a place that I think is somewhat decent.

The job search has been an unending tedium, and so I am at least trying to put my free time into writing. This piece would be the second to last chapter in a book, I currently have about thirty thousand words. Slowly, I feel as if I am turning a corner and getting closer to a place where I can imagine finishing this whole book and see it all in my head. At the very least, I can feel my writing improving. I still can’t write quite like Denis Johnson, but I’m getting better.

It’s worth noting that substack creates a lot of formatting problems and takes out indentations. Please keep that in mind as this project already feels disjointed with its many jumps— I much prefer the spacing I have in my word processor.

This piece is too long for email, so it will be best to read it on the substack website.

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Two Dreams

Here is what I remember.
Glacial blue. Specks of blood and mucus high on the white lavender walls at sunset. Cleaning out his truck. 
I love you baby boy.
My little blue pill she called them. 

My parents' deaths happened, to borrow an aphorism, slowly, and then all at once. 
I return home from a work trip to New York and the situation at home has changed over the course of the week. My parents' friends are staying at the house, waiting for me to return and relieve them. They are distraught.

It is July. The week before, I am in New York for work. I call my father before his operation from our office by Madison Square Park. The sun is low between the skyscrapers, light glinting on the sheer glass walls. He tells me it will be only a small procedure. I am alone in the office and I cry at someone’s desk after I talk to him. I don’t remember what my father said to me, but it is the last time I will hear his voice. I do not know this then. When he goes under the knife, they find more growth and take out his entire tongue. 

I fly home. I look out over the wing descending into SFO, circling the green and red partitioned salt marshes outside San Jose, the patchwork colored by the milky swirl of tides and salt, and think of my descent into a new life and into a place from which there is no escape or return. When the wheels touch and smoke on the runway, I will be a prisoner of unwanted responsibility. I listen to “Welcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd. The ominous circles of the future ripple around me. I feel fear and dread. I am unsure of what I am coming home to, and as much as I am needed, I am in no hurry to know. Perhaps this is the last time I would feel all of my strength intact. 
I find my father in the hospital with no tongue. He is mutilated. He takes liquified nutrition through a tube and a hole in his neck, a pale soy liquid with an unpleasant smell. The medication going into my mother’s skull is killing her brain. She needs help walking now. My parents’ friends ask me to go into the bedroom and talk to her, go through all the drawers, go through her things and find the little blue pills. They are in sock drawers and tucked into blankets. She would hide them, ashamed of taking them. Days before I returned home, she forgot how many she had and took three in a row in one afternoon. She was incoherent. They need me now to take over, the son and the only child. I am set to inherit whatever this is. I fly through shades of denial, walking into a room ablaze. I am angry about the parties I will miss and the life I am leaving. I can tell you that’s a normal thing to feel. 

My father comes home from the hospital and sits on the couch with his face burning from radiation and his tongue cut out, cast into a hospital biohazard bin somewhere and burned. His eyebrows and eyelashes fall out. He sleeps in my bedroom downstairs, curled on his side. My mother is shelled down to nothing, her mind a husk as her doctors drip medication down through a port in her skull to kill the cells growing in her spine. Soon she will be in a wheelchair. She needs to be walked to the bathroom. Dancing she calls it. I hold her hand with a hand on her back as she counts out the steps, one two, one two, one two across the grey and green and red slate floors my father cut and laid with hot water running warm beneath our feet, one two, one two to the bathroom, her feet scuffing on the floor in her hospital socks as we waltz.
So, I find all the little blue pills and put them back in their bottle and explain to my mother that she can have them whenever she likes, that I only need to note how many she takes. I’m not scared of dying she says, I’m just scared of being in pain. No matter mama. 
The book I am reading at this time is The Plague by Albert Camus. My father’s friend notes that this a particularly on the nose choice in reading material. The bodies are moved out of the city. The words before me are wonderfully plain. 

In early August, I send an email to the people we know. I explain that my mother is dying, that we are overrun. At the end of my letter, I write: I'll also add that the three of us are doing as well as we can be. This is a very humbling and undignified time for the three of us and we're all feeling some combination of frustration and anger and sadness, which is what any emotionally healthy person should feel here. The three of us also understand that this is just how life works and we're maintaining our collective sense of humor. Everyone goes through this at some point and many of you already have. There is never a good time for events like this to occur. Still, having my mother and father get hit with this bullshit at the same time does feel like it's a bit much, but hey, whatever. If they were healthy, my parents would just be here, together in the house they built (not a bad metaphor, Karl cut every board and hammered every nail of our house) and what we're doing now is just some version of that. I admire my parents for their independence and their insistence on living by their own rules and this is only a bad chapter in an otherwise great story. Plenty of good things have happened that can't be undone and there is plenty to look forward to. Refusing to believe in linear time helps as well.
I’m twenty five when I write this. 

My mother’s friend makes a page for donations, money rushes in. I feel ashamed and grateful. The house overflows with color, with spotted orchids, melons, with zinnias and grapes and dahlias and lemons. I arrange this effluence, of stamens and pistils and seeds, on the butcher block counter in my mother’s blue glass bowls and trays. People deliver meals until they accumulate in the fridge and begin to mold. The sheets have to be changed so often people donate new sets and laundry piles up in the pantry and the mudroom. The spare bedroom and loft fill with objects I don’t recognize, strange cars pull into the driveway, headlights shining through the oak trees and the paned glass of the front door. The dog barks at each arrival and digs at the fir trim. 
I interview new help. It is hard to find caregivers who will travel up the mountain. Some of them last only a few weeks. I hire more caregivers to replace the caregivers that quit. Our home is small, our privacy is gone. I come home to strangers being paid to sleep on the couch. We live in a strange state of crisis, in a maze of uncertainty that expands in a bizarre, mundane slowness. Every decision feels wrong. My father is opposed to the swarm of help around us and concerned about the money being spent, even as it is being given to us. We settle into taking on more of the work ourselves, so long as my mother is never alone. My father organizes his rides to radiation treatment himself. My uncle comes from Seattle for weeks at a time. He is near retirement as a city planner and the house is filled with his calm and affability when he is with us. I make use of his presence and catch up on my own work. A woman from my mother’s school comes every week and cleans for us and leaves. I adore her for how quiet she is. Hospice nurses come and refill prescriptions. When I am too exhausted to make decisions, others step in and do their best and leave. Different people organize and reorganize calendars. I come home to new opinions and methods. My mother is eating too much or too little, taking too much medication or not enough medication. I grow tired of the concern for my mother. People avoid the intractability of her dying. They come over and cry and leave.
“Do some laundry,” I want to tell them. “Go cry at your house.”

Weeks pass in unsteady cadences. I continue working; driving up to San Francisco, spending a few nights in my apartment, driving home on the coast to relieve whatever help we have. Three months to six months or a year. How do you plan for that? In the datebook there are no plans, only the disorder and losses of a retreat. The florist comes so often with deliveries, we develop our own rituals with one another. Relatives come to visit, my parent’s friends visit. Women older than my mother, and in far better health, visit. At work, I am told by my new manager that I am not acting enough as a teammate.
My mother eats more now. My mother who always cast an elegant figure. The self-observation that leads to discipline has left her. She is greedy and impulsive, deteriorating into a kind of infancy. She eats fruit salad and gelato. Less and less of my mother is there. She is impatient with us, as exhausted as we are. 
My mother has a silver call bell that she rings when she needs help. She rings it liberally and I learn to hate its sound, to listen for it as I drift into sleep. She is becoming incontinent, but refuses to wear absorbent underwear. I empathize with her desire for some semblance of dignity, but as I clean the sheets and her clothes, my patience wanes. My kind and gracious mother has left us already. 
Now my mother and my father fight. He can take care of himself still, she can’t. She is receiving the thrust of the care and concern that pours into our home. He is alone in a sea of pain.
“I’m sick too god dammit” he types one day.
“It’s not her,” I tell him. “Ignore it. All of it.” I give him a new ice pack.

We are wearing into something fragile. I wake up each morning just as tired as when I lay down. My father sits on the couch with an ice pack on his face and rocks back and fourth while his skin burns. He types out what he needs on his phone. In October, my father begins chemotherapy treatment. Slowly his hair falls out. His skin is flaking away. The dandruffed clumps of hair smell faintly sour. He does not want to shave his head. I vacuum up the brittle strands from where he sits and wash it out of his clothes. 
We are surrounded by generosity and care and in this moment, we are also gruesomely alone. Unnerved as they are, our relatives and friends inevitably leave and return to the thin stability of their own homes. My mother was sick for ten years. I watch her now in the dim conclusion of her life, at the end of her doubt and fear. She protected me when I was younger, whatever apprehension she had was private or shared only with my father. The women she worked with at her school spoke often of her courage. She was graceful. You would never know there was anything wrong with her. 
Now, she has morphine to dull whatever fear is left within her. 
The silver bell rings. As much as I resent my mother’s failing body, as a matter of knowledge I understand that I cannot retreat from this stage with regret. I spend myself completely in her care. 

The tremendous purity of the present lives within our home. It transcends the philosophical and spiritual tools others possess, I watch people set these tools aside as they pass through our doors, and I am watchful that they do. My parents lived lives were unornamented by parables or comparisons. They varnished sailboats, they gardened, they listened to the news, they read to me. Things are the way they are. 
I snarl at appeals to optimism.
“I can’t imagine how you must feel,” people say to me. 
“Sure you can,” I want to tell them. “Just imagine your whole family is dying.” 

My father’s youngest sister visits us. She has cancer as well, she is the youngest of my father’s siblings. My three cousins are with her. They have driven all morning to see us. I make myself busy as a host; I am too scattered to listen and to be present. These months have stolen my ability enter a scene other than my own. My aunt is enfeebled, but she can speak and walk. Her face, so much like my father’s once was, is intact. Her hair is covered in a purple scarf. We sit in the living room. It is cloudy, the day seems trapped beneath the moving layers of grey. They sit with my mother as she sleeps. Her face is twisted. They stay for an hour and leave, to drive all of the afternoon homeward. 

More weeks pass us. One fall afternoon I come home to find that my mother has tried to get to the bathroom herself. My aunt, the second oldest, is in the living room. My father is at the hospital for radiation. I find my mother standing by the toilet. The walls are smeared. The dog is beside her, his back is soiled. From the bed to the toilet, the hardwood and the slate are soiled. I take my shirt off and pick up the dog and run to the other bathroom with him. I put him in the tub and run to get his leash and tie him to the faucet.
I run back to my mother and hold her upright while I help her out of her clothes. I walk her into the shower. She is apologetic. 
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “Just keep your hands against the wall. My day gets worse if you fall. Don’t move until I get back.” 
“I can do that,” she tells me.
I check the water temperature and run into the bathroom and strip the sheets and carefully fold them. I run them to the laundry and start the wash and run back. I check that the dog is still secured in the tub. He is shaking. I run back to the master bathroom. My mother is still upright in the shower. 
“Sit tight,” I tell her, and I fold her clothes in a tight bundle and run them to the laundry and tie them in a trash bag. I run back and wipe up the slate floors and the walls and the toilet. I run and dispose of the paper towels. I help my mother clean her legs and her bottom and wash her. 
“I bet you never thought you’d be doing this,” she says. 
“Aw shit,” I say. 
“Aw shucks,” she says.
“At least you still have your sense of humor,” I tell her. 
“It’s me, your elegant mother,” she says. She has some adrenaline in her. 
I help her into the hall and dry her. I put her in clean clothes and make the bed and help her lie down. I ask my aunt to stay with her and I wash the dog and clean his fur and dry him. I set him loose and return to the bathroom to finish cleaning the walls and floors. When I am done the first load of wash is finished. I clean my mother’s soiled clothes in the sink and add them to the wash and run the sheets a second time. My aunt asks me if she can help. 
“That’s fine,” I tell her. “Just enjoy the visit.” She is crying. I console her.
I consider having a drink. I decide to go for a run. I take the dog out to pee, he has spent his time in the bath drinking shower water, then I tie my shoes and leave. 
It is evening. I run down the driveway and run the loop past the volunteer fire station and the school. People are returning from work. I watch the lights turn on in homes through the trees. The insects and birds are out. I run hard, kicking through my strides up the hill and cross the double yellow lines to keep my view of the oncoming lanes. The asphalt is still hot. 
On a final bend, I turn onto a straight section of the road, tunneled by oaks. There is a dog in the road ahead of me at the next bend. The dog is yellow and grey in the muzzle. He has an unsteady, aged gait. I run half the distance to the dog and the dog begins to retreat. I stop to listen. The air is still, I do not hear the rush of a car on the road. 
“Go home,” I yell. 
I walk forward. The dog stares at me and turns and walks back and turns again and crosses a ditch and follows the fence line beside the road. There is a narrow straight at the bend by the telephone pole where the wooden fence joins and chain fence and the two follow one another back on the property line. The wooden fence is broken and leaning. As I near the corner, I can see two loose boards. The yellow dog pauses at the opening.
 “Go home,” I shout, “get in there.” 
I step into the corner and the dog disappears into the yard. I move to kick the fence boards closed. There is a rushing noise on the other side. I hear claws on the wood and a knotted grey head snaps through the fence. I run backwards. The shoulders of pitbull charge after me. The yellow dog follows. I retreat into the road. The pitbull is a quivering mass of muscle. The yellow dog is animated. Both dogs are snarling. I am yelling at them. They slow as they catch up to me. The dogs speak to one another in their primordial language. They flank me. The pitbull crouches, the yellow dog is emboldened. The yellow dog moves to flank me further. The pitbull lunges. In the wonderful slowness of adrenal time, I feel my front foot plant before me as I watch the dog’s head and teeth charging before me. My back leg sails like a falling tree and I feel the full force of my kick land against the dog’s jaw. The mandible slams shut and the teeth jam into one another against my bridge and I bring my kick through the dog and lift it into the air and feel more give. The dog lets out a whine in the air and lands on its feet and cowers. I run to the yellow dog with my hand out to grab its neck and my other fist raised to hit it in the skull. The dog retreats. The pitbull is hurt.
“Get the fuck back,” I yell. “Both of you. Both of you.”
They retreat and I retreat. The follow me and I rush them again. They stop following me but will not turn their backs. I walk backwards until I am around the next bend in the road, and then, with wings at my heels, I run to the mailbox. 
I walk up the driveway to cool down. At the house, my father has returned from the hospital and my aunt has left. I take two of my mother’s lorazepam.  

I sit on the deck with a man we’ve hired, going over his notes from that night while the sun rises. He reminds me that everyone will want to visit right at the end and I will need to say no to nearly all of them, that this happens with every family he works with, that the time to visit the dying is always much earlier than anyone anticipates. It is already time to start turning people away.
“Close the circle,” he tells me. He is an older man, grounded in his faith, overwhelmingly kind, with a neatly trimmed beard that fades into the trimmed thinning crown of his grey hair. He’s lived though the AIDS crisis. He is a well-built man and can lift my mother in and out of her bed on his own. He is tremendously useful to me, even without his spare but eloquent advice. I thank him and I finish my coffee and the day begins. 
I drive up and down the coast to San Francisco, listening to the news, worrying, moving from conflict to conflict. I listen to the election results and pull over after the sun has set to hear the Wisconsin come in and resign to the election of the 45th president. I am on a tall cliff one hundred feet above the ocean. I turn the radio off and drive home and return to the work before me. 

To revisit this time, to remember it, is to return to a disordered and uncertain life. I can tell you that at the time, it felt as if I was watching a car crash on film. Seeing only a frame a day, watching the glass fly. 
I pull my car over on my way back from work and call a friend. His mother died when he was in college.
“I’m worried I won’t be myself at the end of this,” I tell him. “I’m not in control of how I feel. I feel I’m heading into a tunnel and I don’t know how long it is.”
He listens. I am on the coast. The waves crash into the cliffs below and churn over the eroding mudstone and reef bunched with black and purple mussels. They saw the sea into foam. The ground hums with each concussion.
“I can’t get away from this thing,” I tell him. 
It is as if I am under the effect of a powerful hallucinogen, one that will last for years. The intensity is inescapable. Surely, it is a form of insanity. I yell.
The sun sets and the sky turns green and yellow. I drive up the hill.

I begin to have the first dream in the months that precede my mother’s death. It is night, but the sky is clear and the woods are sharp under a bright moon. It is light enough to walk through the oaks in beams of light and shadow where the light glares off the shining leaves. You hear the motorcycles first, roaring up the hill, engines choaking and jumping. The bikes are far away, but drive towards you in a wedge of unstoppable noise, shattering the night. They come onwards and onwards. They are unstoppable and terrible. They turn up the driveway and when it is clear they are coming straight to you and you see their headlights cutting through the clustered oaks and hear the men’s voices, and hear the riders dragging chains. You run into the house. They are in the yard, the headlights blind you through the windows. Ten of them, twenty of them. They ride in circles and throw the white sand into dust. They are armed. They are bandits and raiders and killers, horrible black riders in the moonlight. They break the windows, they set the house on fire. You have the dream over and over. Through the smoke and flee into the woods with the dog and your father on your back, barefoot, naked, running from burning Troy like Aeneas. Sometimes you are carrying your dying mother and you leave your father. Sometimes you only have the dog in your arms. You can never save all of them. The bedroom is engulfed in flames, the wall of heat and flame throws you out into the night. You hide in the woods and watch them circle the house as windows explode. The flames drag the oxygen out of the dark air. They come looking for you and you run on bleeding feet, dog in your arms, running through the forest. Over and over.
This dream, you tell a therapist, is about not being able to save your family. Not much interpretive power is required here. 

In narrow hours of the day, I see parts of my mother. Hours of recognition, smiling eyes, my mother behind them. Wanting to talk, to feel my face. When I leave the room, I hear her behind me.
“I love you baby boy.”
I leave crying. This woman visits us less and less.
At night I sleep as if I am stumbling through a moonlit landscape. Valleys of cool darkness broken apart by the house around me. My dreams are ruled by fear, distortions of things I feel in my gut and in my spine. I kick my sheets off. The dog sleeps in the other room. I plunge into sleep fatigued, wake, listen for my mother’s jagged breath, this sound of her failing life. I resent the wrecked body in the other room, my mother already departed from this husk that soils itself. I hate what is left of her, but hang on this wreckage like a drowning man. The same woman I used to cry for as a child, outside the shower, standing in the bathroom next to the tempered glass screaming while she left me for a few short minutes and disappeared into the steam.  
Glacial blue around her teeth. Blue from the syringe, now every two hours. The nurses explain the process of dying to me in steps. She sleeps with the death rattle, the blue pooling around her gums and teeth. I wipe it away with a washcloth and add more under her tongue.
The hospice nurses explain how morphine will stop her breathing. They tell me just how much she needs to be comfortable, how much more will speed the passing and ferry her into death. They show me how much morphine it takes to stop someone’s impulse to breathe, how to collapse a few rattling days into one other, to blur the rasping hours into shorter hours, more glacial blue morphine. Blue as the deep crown of the sky as the stars appear.
It is late November, days after my twenty sixth birthday. 
Her last words were days ago. Murmurs. A little rattling rasping body with blue around the teeth. Her face is twisted, mouth open, hair growing on her upper lip. Not her face or her body. Her friends come and put makeup on her, bright red lips, eyeshadow. It isn’t her, cartoonish. I thank them and ask them to take it off, as politely as I can. Nobody knows quite what to do. We are outside the perimeters of ritual and experience. My mother’s friends, my old elementary school teachers, are no longer the wise, knowing women they were when they raised me. I see them in shock, startled, disturbed. I see their faces move slowly with open, stunned eyes. I no longer live in a world where others can impart peace or composure to me. 
“You’re on your own here kid,” I say to myself. 
Every two hours through the night my alarm sounds. Every two hours I rise and give her morphine from a syringe, under the tongue. I sit with her and blot away the drips. My father in chemotherapy, breathing through his neck, face burned, going blind. His clothes no longer fit him, he is swimming in loose cloth. We get him new running shoes so he will not trip. The caregivers come and go in a line like ants, passing information back on a trail. My father writes them checks. 

My mother was attractive. Dark hair, olive skin, knowing eyes. A wide clever smile. She raised chickens and taught elementary school. In her summers she tutored the farm workers’ children in math. Their ranches were leased from the state, scattered with lowered Chevrolet trucks and corrugated sheds, clotheslines, and leaning buildings built around irrigation ponds. She would give them her young roosters when they became too macho to be with her hens. The bantams lay eggs no larger than a small shallot. They are too small to butcher, not worth the trouble. The ranchers would keep the roosters as pets. They thought they were funny, these pocket monarchs, plumed and enflamed in red. Driving into their yards, my mother would see them running in small flocks of two or three, standing in tires and hunting for bugs in the grass and in the grooved black soil of the artichoke fields. The families would send my mother home with gifts, with tamales and cards. When I was a boy, she read to me every night.

My mother falls into a coma late in the afternoon, late in November. I am at the hospital with my father for an eye exam. He is losing vision in one eye. The iris and pupil are milky. We wait between appointments with the oncology doctors and the optometrists. My father hobbles his bent frame through the floors and wings of the hospital. A farmer’s market selling produce in the courtyard of the hospital is packing up, men are carrying waxed boxes of wet, wilted vegetables into trucks. My father rests his hand on my shoulder in the elevator.
We wait for a half hour. A nurse returns brings the scans of my father’s head and the eye doctor comes back and sends us to the oncologists. We wait for another half hour. My father’s doctor leaves his meeting to see us. He studies the black and white images of my father’s head, of the tissue and feeling and brilliance of my father, all his memory and life reduced to spots and shadow. He frowns and sits at his desk. The nerves in his eye are being pinched, he tells us. He has cancer all throughout his brain in little clusters. Tongue cut out, radiation and chemotherapy, and the cancer is back again. He offers us no equivocation. My father has three to six months to live, the doctor says. The spots are everywhere. 
My father’s doctor has a hard time telling us this. I sit in his office looking at him out of eye sockets that feel like long tubes, far away from the front of my own face. I feel bad for my father’s doctor.
“I like you Karl,” he says. “I have to give this news to a lot of people. I didn’t want to have to give it to you. If you want to pack up all the treatment and say ‘so long doc’ and buy a box of cigars and go fly fishing that’s alright by me.”
My father shakes his head and points to the hole in his neck. No smoking, he signals. He takes out his phone. 
“Keep going” he types. 
Edith Wharton observes that we are the only people with a system of beliefs within which our own gods loose. The great serpent swallows its own tail and the world ends. We are destroyed. Nevermind the trolls and the giants; other faiths are wholly unsubstantial in their ability to register the violent decline we experience. Losing has nothing to do with anything. All the heroes die, they fill the halls. 
We drive home in the rain with the windshield wipers whirring back and forth. I watch the yellow stripes in front of us run up curves into the mountains. My father and I grew up on the same roads, through the redwoods and firs, through the oaks. In the dark, the headlights throw the forest open in slanted orbs. Behind us our red lights fade and the mountain is swallowed back into night. 
I drive very slowly up the driveway and help my father through the dark to the sleek redwood steps of the deck. The dog is at the door and I watch his head throw back with each bark. All I can hear is the rain. 
I take my father’s jacket and calm the dog down and in the hallway, sitting on the hall tree, I learn that my mother has passed into a coma. The caregivers are worried. They leave me with detailed notes. I want to tell them that it doesn’t matter, that it is over now. I tell them my father is dying too and send them all home for the night and sit up with my dad and listen to the rain on the metal roof. I wonder if my mother can hear us or understand us. 

My mother passes days later on the first of December. Her breaths rasp and slow and stop. The final, preserving rhythms of life fray and end. I cry and sit with her and my father and her friend and cry into her dead chest. When my back and lungs are sore from crying I clean up the room and take out the washable mattress liners and change the sheets and run the laundry. I arrange my mother’s body on the new sheets. I go to bed and sleep a long uninterrupted sleep with no alarms and no morphine every two hours and no silver bells.
When I wake I am happy. The clouds run in front of the sun and a woodpecker drinks from the rainwater in the gutter. Its claws make low scratching noises on the galvanized metal. 
The morticians come and take my mother’s body. Somewhere within my dead mother, the cancer is dead as well. My father and I throw away hospital supplies, pill containers, the stained extra sheets in colors I detest, the piles of disorder through every corner of the house. Elation carries me as we wheel the reclinable brown hospital bed out of the French doors and around the deck to the front of the house. We call hospice and they take the ugly frame away and the master bedroom is returned to its symmetry, the king bed centered between the light switches and sockets and centered beneath the light fixtures set into the fir ceilings.
Our house diminished and hollowed, but it is restored. The sunlight streams in through the eastern windows and onto the walls, all in my father’s design. We sit on the couch next to the piano for days and play albums cover to cover, loud on my father’s studio speakers, and rest. He tells me how he traded a car for his speakers when he was my age. Sound pours through the high doorways. He tells me my mother’s original diagnosis while we sit on the couch. He types it out word by word. She had three to five years to live after her double mastectomy, she lived for twelve. Whack-a-mole she called it. Never told me and that was the right choice. I try to not sit with any feeling too long, I make sure my dad has a ride to his next radiation appointment. 
I joke with the florist that he should keep the deliveries and just come once a week to save himself some trouble. He is kind and deferential. 
We have Christmas dinner with my closest friend’s family, at his grandfather’s house by the university. It is a single-story home, wood paneled at the end of a long drive. The back yard opens into live oaks and a ravine. After dinner, we play a game with white elephant gifts; one prized item is a coffee cup shaped like a toilet, another is a windup cockroach with wheels. My father is animated. There is a wooden bowl and tools for crab that I have played for, my friend’s uncle has used his turn to steal the gift back from me. My father wins his turn. I can see his wrists shaking faintly in his shirtcuffs and his breathing is labored through his neck. He steals the bowl back and gives it to me. His intensity is nearly overwhelming. We are guests and he has extended himself too far, cared too much, seized the bowl too swiftly. But my brief embarrassment collapses. He is enjoying himself and he has outsmarted someone. In a life now full of inability, he has won. He grabs my shoulder as I drive us back up the hill and his bony hands are still strong. 
I sleep for a month before I feel the full shape of grief beginning to surface, the bulge of its form moving towards me. I defer the feeling. I feel brittle. At the time, I had what I believed was a grasp on how I felt. The hospice nurses refer you to literature on grieving. The distinct transitions between shock and denial and anger and sadness and acceptance follow traceable movements. What are the steps for losing your mother and father within months of each other, I want to ask them. In myself I see no waypoint or topography. Two waves refracting against one another, amplified and distorted. I experience grief in strange harmonic points. At work there are bereavement policies for losing family members. I want to ask them what the policy is in my situation. Competencies are strained. People are unsure and uncomfortable, I am like a gale. 

In the new year I return to work. I come home every few days to check on my father and stay with him. He can take care of himself around the house. We are both waiting to see what will come. It rains all winter, an El Nino year. Storms spin down from the Gulf of Alaska. Roads wash out, hillsides collapse, trees fall down on powerlines. Some mornings it takes me hours to get to the office on the peninsula in Redwood City. Fences wash out and I chase cows off the road back into their fields in the blue grey of the morning. The sea churns beneath the fog, the beaches wash away into deep ocean canyons in rivers of glass and stone. 
I come home late one night. I drive up the long gravel driveway flanked by manzanita and cypress and oak and watch the rushing rainwater building up in the culverts. Hold the headlights on the grey and gold gravel where I will need to dig out the drainage in the morning. Rain blurs on the windshield. I see a flash of white. The dog runs into the light, frantic and shivering. I open car the door. He jumps into my lap. I dry him in my shirt and drive up the driveway, past the bend around the chinkapins and find my father in the headlights, wet with his shoes untied, holding a flashlight against in the slanted gale. I bring them both inside and dry them off. I give him dry underwear, dry around the tape on his chemo bag, and towel the dog off. I build a fire. My father is angry. He writes out that the dog ran away when he took him outside. He was chasing him in the rain for half an hour. He couldn’t call to him. When I get them inside, they are both angry, mute rage between man and dog. Both are shaking. I get them both to eat. My father pours the waxed cartons of soysmelling soycolored fluid into his tube and the dog swallows his dry starshaped kibble. I pour myself a glass of scotch and watch the ice melt and go to sleep.
I come home again in the rain again and my father is up on the slanted corrugated metal roof, working in the light of his headlamp. He is tightening the leaking screws that have worked themselves loose in the storms sawing, lifting wind. In the rain he climbed a ladder with the wind around him and pulled himself up on the roof, his tools and with his chemo bag taped to his side. Water rushes out of the gutters and into the gravel culverts and drainage fields. The rain beads and dances on the deck and raindrops run in the gusts like schools of fish. 
“Stay inside god dammit” I tell him when I get him back in the house.  
He waves me away with his hand.
“I am ok,” he types. He points to the wet stain on the pine ceiling planks and the dry floor and hooks his bony fingers into a thumbs up. No more water. He uses paper towels to blot at the blood and phlegm that spout out of the hole in his neck with his breath. 

Spring comes. My uncle stays with us for another week. My father’s closest friends visit him. They sit on the deck and look out over the ocean. The storms ease in their fury and the days lengthen. My mother planted bulbs around the house, the yellow and white daffodils bloom. The bees are in the white bell-shaped flowers of the manzanita trees. My father shaves his head. He keeps his bad eye taped shut. 
I watch him, unsure if he is changing. He encourages me to work and to spend time in the city. 

I come home with groceries for myself. I find my father in bed, struggling to open an envelope. His good eye is red. He types words into his phone and kicks on his side in slow arcs. He can’t see the screen and his fingers won’t find the keys. He labors in his anger. The breaths out of the hole in his neck are short and sharp. I get a yellow pad and write out all the letters of the alphabet in a thick pen and he points to them to talk. He is on his side in bed, barely able to raise himself up to sit. The property taxes, he explains, are due. He is worried I will have to pay the three hundred dollar fee for late payment.
“Dad,” I tell him, “let me worry about all that. You stay put and rest.” I show him the check and the postage on the envelope after I prepare it. He lets out a sharp breath and then a long breath out of his neck. 

When my father passes, it is late April. He waits for me to come back for the weekend from San Francisco. He has already stopped eating, when I come home, he stops drinking water. He will not take anything for the pain. He is small, most of him gone, just a skeleton. He is like the mummies frozen in the ice in the Himalayas in the National Geographic magazines I read as a kid, arms wrapped around themselves, skin brown, teeth black. They find these men in the sky where the prayer flags are bleached and frayed into paper. In the mountains, they are frozen into the sky for hundreds of years alongside the stars.
I sit with him for three days and three nights. The days and nights are silent. I remember very little from these hours, only his face, only the brightness of the room that day and twilight and moonlight around us.
On the second day, I take my father to the bathroom. He is weak, I help him with his movements. On the toilet his head rolls back and he lets out a deep breath from the bottom of his lungs. I think he is dying right there. I check if he is still breathing. I can’t tell. I talk to him. I notice that I have closed the toilet seat on his finger under him. Kneeling, I lift his body and free his hand. He regains consciousness, his eyes come back. He motions he is ready to return to bed. I carry him back. He assures me his hand does not hurt with an upturned thumb. 
The dog begins to bark and I hear a car on the gravel. I lay my father in bed and run to the front door and quiet the dog and look out at my father’s friend in his green jeep. He’s offered to come up to bring sandwiches today. Bob is a painter, he worked with my father over the hill. 
I run outside to Bob. I tell him my father is going to pass any moment. He has sandwiches, he hands me the cooler. The sun is over the oaks and the heat is beginning to evaporate the dew in the shade. I can hear woodpeckers. 
“This is a sacred time now,” he says and he hugs me. He drives away and as the dust from his tires coats the deck. I turn and run back into the house with the cooler to sit with my father until he passes the next morning. 

My father passes the next morning. It is April twenty third.
The sun is rising up out of the oaks and hangs in the sky and I sit next to the bed on a dark wooden stool with the dog at my feet. He has me bring a picture of my mother over to him and he slowly raises his fingers to his lips and touches the picture. Kissing his fingers, touching the picture. Over and over. A tear pools in his good eye. He kisses his hands and places them on my forehead and kisses his hands and places them on the portrait of my young mother’s face. 
My father dies. He lies on his back staring up at his ceiling, the finishing nails buried so neatly in the rough pine. His little breath slows in his body. The morning is burning away into the heat of midday. He is gone. The air is silent and filled with light. It feels as if a pale bridge has extended to you from the sky and you’ve climbed halfway up and your father has climbed these stairs into the sky beyond. You are standing in the sky alone. The entire roof of the house is lifted away and there is nothing above you. In the high air where only seeds and light travel. Alone in the clouds over the ocean and the oaks. A permanence comes like a truth and nothing else, the same as a change from day to night.

—

My father was alone often in the final months of his life, sitting in silence in the house he crafted in the sand, nail by nail by shingle by shingle by his hand. He prepared for death alone. At home with him, I would sit on the deck and stare out over the horizon and watch the fog come in over the ocean. When the sun sets, little bats come out and fly low in the lavender evening air.
Most people live on the same little patch of land their whole lives, he would tell me, writing the words out and pointing when he was finished. I’m not sure any of us are meant for much more. A whole life under a grey sky in the same dirt. People who try to make their lives into something else are kidding themselves. Maybe you’re on a rocky island looking out over the water, maybe you have a dog. You push a plow around the same piece of land. You’re born there and you die there. We aren’t meant for much of anything else he says. That’s ok. My little quiet father, tough as nails.

—

When my father dies he is still on chemo and radiation. On treatment, you can’t be on hospice care. So, I call 911 to report a death and I get on the phone with the operator and ask him not to send an ambulance.
“How do you know he’s dead,” the man asks me. 
I say “Listen he’s dead, I’ve been with him for three days and three nights and he’s dead and he’s not breathing and he’s getting stiff now and he’s dead. Don’t send an ambulance up here to defibrillate my dad.”
And the man says “You don’t know he’s dead you’re not a doctor”
And I say “Don’t send a fucking ambulance just send me a coroner to pronounce him dead so I can call the mortuary. He’s dead. A lot of people died before we ever had doctors and he’s dead, listen to me, don’t send an ambulance up here and a bunch of paramedics to pump on his chest. I don’t want that. He’s dead. Send me a coroner.”
I am met with what feels like a very long pause. 
My neighbor arrives with a cloud of dust behind him, settling against the back window of his truck. He is in the volunteer fire department and has a yellow siren on his roof. I meet him in the yard and assure him there is no emergency. I tell him my father has passed and he hugs me and offers whatever assistance he can. For the next week, his wife leaves small bundles of shrub roses in my mailbox. 
The Sheriff comes. I can’t call the mortuary until he confirms there are no suspicious circumstances and certifies my father’s death. He drives up the road slowly. I meet him in the yard with the dog and he shakes my hand and enters the house quietly and studies me. He takes a look at my father and sits down with me in the kitchen asks if I need anything from him. He asks for any leftover prescriptions in the house. I go to the bedroom and bring him some of my mother’s old prescriptions, but I keep the morphine and lorazepam and Vicodin. The sheriff is an older man, he passes on calls as they come in over the dispatch and takes his time in the house.
“Don’t worry,” I want to tell him, “I won’t have to come up here again because I’ve killed myself with pills.” For months I nearly do, in weeks filled with mornings where my heart barely moves. 
I put new clothes on my father, clean pants and underwear and socks, and I call the mortuary. I fold his arms. The morticians come up to the house for the second time in four months in their black gloves and practiced austerity and eyes that never hold your gaze. They leave with my father’s little body and burn him. I take the sheets off the bed and wash them and smooth the hollow in the mattress where my father laid for three days and three nights. 
By now it is midmorning. I sit at the butcherblock island my father built. The surface is oiled and smooth. I go to the Hoosier cabinet and find the legal pad with my list from four months earlier, from when my mother died, and add my father’s friends to the end. I begin making the calls. I say hello and I tell them that their brother or their childhood friend is dead, that I was with him when he passed. My father’s high school friends, the men who drove him to so many doctor’s appointments, are in disbelief. His closest friend hangs up crying. For months, I have known my father would die. I recognize now that so many of the people around me were not forced to this realization. My father died quickly. Eighteen months ago, he was a healthy man. I call some of my own friends. When I finish it is noon. I have made more than fifty phone calls. It is a bright spring day and it is hot out and the sun is shining off the fog over the ocean and the waxy dark oak leaves and the sand in one brightness from the end of the horizon to the other. I stand on the deck and watch the birds. I feel there, in that hour, as sharply alone as I have in all my life. There is nothing left to do. It’s over, all of it. 

In the days that follow, the florist comes with more deliveries. I come home from surfing and there are flowers by the door. When I am home, I meet him in the yard. He has seen us in frames, in the initial shock, at each death. I wonder how it all seem to him. He must see people die with regularity. Does he visit any other homes this often? He has a talent for condolence and he has a talent for timely goodbyes. 

The second dream you have over and over again for years after you father passes. In your dream you are home, in the basement moving boxes and you find him. He has crawled in between the boxes and a raw plywood wall and has been living for months on nothing. He is in a bowered nest of torn up paper and insulation and scraps of cardboard, with shells of chewed up seeds and nuts around him. Little piles of wool and insulation with mouse droppings and stains from urine. Small father who never wanted to bother you. You carry him outside and up the sandy hill into the house and feed him and wash him. When he can write he tells you he didn’t want to inconvenience you. He didn’t want you taking care of him, so he hid.
In the dream you have to call all the family and friends back and tell them you were wrong, your father is not dead. After you find him, the house is his again, all the help and meals and money that flowed so generously into your life now have to be apologized for. You have to give back all the feeling too, all the times you felt a room look at you, all the times you met your friends’ parents at weddings and dinners and they said “we’ve heard about you” and you watched their eyes change as they look at you, place your face into the stories they heard about the classmate whose parents had cancer at the same time. For a time, you are talked about quietly at the dining room tables of everyone you know. In the dream you have to go pull it all back, pull the news back, arm over arm like a fisherman hauling in his glittering net, apologize and tell everyone that the story is not real, that they never died, that somehow the news of death preceded death, somehow they died and came back or never died, all of it unreal except the guilt and shame of explaining the untruth. Within the dream, nonsense. Your father looks as he did days before he died. He is never well again. Sometimes you say nothing, keep him hidden, wait for him to die again. You do not want to hand back the land, the dog, the bank accounts, the trucks, to have to apologize for him not being dead. Your mother is not dead either. You apologize for her too. There is no reunion, no scene of health, just the shame of unweaving the story from its loom. The dream is there waiting for you in sleep for years, hunting you. You wake from these dreams tired.

I still have this dream. It ambushes me these years later, holds me beneath its surface for days. No shade of recognition, of intellect, can wrestle me from its pull. What I can tell you about my dream, the one about my father not really being dead, being wrong, my grief being fake, it that it always involves the sensation of thinking my father was dead on the toilet, of having that sensation overturned as he gasps back into his body in one slow giant breath. 
I tried to fool my father in those last days. I was wearing a black Pink Floyd shirt with a diver diving into a mirrored blue lake. The back of the shirt had the words “Wish You Were Here” on the back. I had ordered the shirt online and a knockoff version had come with just the picture on the front and so I had ordered the shirt again and waited a week for it to be shipped to the house. I am wearing the new shirt while my father is dying. I lean over him to adjust his pillow and he pulls at my shirt. I think he wants me to bend closer to him and so I do and he pulls at me again. I ask him if he is in pain. He pulls my shirt upwards. I am confused. He indicates that he wants me to take my shirt off and I do. He reaches for it and points to himself. He wants to wear it. In the moment I don’t want to give it to him and so I leave and walk down the hall to my room and quietly open and close my dresser and return with the knockoff shirt. I sit my father up in bed and he shakes his head and points to me. I had hoped he would not have noticed the switch in his diminished state. I run to my room and return with the shirt we both want and put it on him and days later he dies in it. I send him to the mortuary in it and he is cremated in it. I order the shirt once again. 
I can say I’ve never felt guilty about this deception. It is a detail amidst a much greater moment that I have learned to ignore and in the moment that it occurred, understood that it was not a moment to fixate on. It was only a flash of pragmatism. In the clarity of the day, I feel very little guilt for anything, for leaving my alone father to work while he was dying, for the joy I felt when my mother died, for switching two Pink Floyd shirts. I have always felt that I was wise to forgive myself, to understand my own efforts and desires and shortcomings amidst their difficult circumstances, and to treat myself with the kindness I am sure my parents would wish upon me. In the clarity of wakefulness, I understand all this. 

Still, I am clouded in surreality and doubt. It makes sense to me that I still feel some degree of disbelief and confusion, but I can’t tell you where the guilt comes from. It is like following tunnels in some strange subterranean and primordial world. I am unsure and lost. I wish my father were an angry ghost, calling me to a kingdom, pointing. Mark me, the phantom king says. If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. But my father does not want to be seen, he does not speak. I feel a pity and a regret that I do not know how to unseat. 
My father’s death presented me with a series of switches and reversals. 

I can’t recall how long I sat beside my father once he was dead. I know it wasn’t for long enough. A good caregiver will tell you, and I heard this advice myself, that there is never any hurry to get rid of a body. It will take days for a body to begin to decompose and smell. A corpse may release a urine in the bed, but that’s about it and this will happen quickly, soon after a person passes. There is no harm in waiting hours, even days to remove a corpse. In that day, I didn’t know what else to do and so I occupied myself with the logistics of death. And then my father’s worn, twisted body was gone. 
I’ve never had much use for religion beyond an appreciation for stained glass windows, but I could have used a priest that day. Some kind of process to tie the day back down into detail. I never saw my father in an open casket or built a pyre for him. I wish I had arraigned my father into a longship with weapons and gold and armor raided from our dead and bloody enemies or wrapped him in blankets and silver and lowered him into a deep crevasse. I wish there was screaming and drumming, that I could cut my hair and go blind. Our ancestors would get so drunk at funerals that some of them would die. Howling, they would hack the heads off of horses and oxen. Kings were buried with their mutilated slaves and concubines. The ships burned in the night like magnificent trees, doubled in their reflections over the deep harbors. Whatever nightmares they had, they were different than my dreams. There is a distance between the stories and the rituals. I’m convinced the rituals are what matter. A stone path through the fog. 
And so, I dream about my father. Little father in a nest, growing like a hideous pink squirrel pup, blind and inchoate. 

I only ever saw my father completely naked twice in my life. Once I was three, he was stepping from behind the shower’s tempered glass and grabbing a towel. I imagine every three-year-old boy thinks their father is large and so I don’t put much account into my memory then. So, I assumed my memory then was right and never had a reason to consider or revisit it. The second time I saw my father naked was the morning he died before I called the mortuary, changing him out of the clothes he died in. I undressed him and there he was, his body beginning to stiffen, his skin just a little warmer than the room. I take his clothes off and roll his body over and he is starting to get cool and stiff, but I can still bend his limbs. And there he is naked desiccated into a small small yellow bud. 
It isn’t until five years later that you realize that my father was shriveled down into nothing. When he died and he hadn’t had water for days. Much of his blood was surely gone. His face looked like a skull. A frozen iceman, thousands of years old. Why would there be anything left. 
What you saw wasn’t real. What you saw wasn’t anything, didn’t mean anything. Skin retreating into a dead body with no blood left. Specks of it on the wall in the lavender light where the lights are spaced perfectly to cross under the sloped ceiling under the stairs. Dying in his beautiful frame. He peed once in the last three days, there was no water in his body. You never talk about it. You don’t figure it out for five years. You didn’t see it twice you saw it once, one morning when you were three in the old house when your father stepped out from behind the tempered glass and grabbed a towel. Five years walking around it and it wasn’t real. Doesn’t mean a thing. Nothing. Go back into that day and tell yourself that until you feel it. Rip it all out by the roots. Wrong for years. Burn it out and move on.

It takes days to clean out my father’s truck. There are cases of tools in the back, all in their specific, lost order. Saws, drills, leather tool bags, milk cartons full of sorted screws and nails, tile saws, ammo cans with nail guns and sanders and hand planes. In cut down cartons there are collections of screws and drill bits, the order of their categorization now, very suddenly, vanished. The glove compartment is layered with folded lumberyard receipts and invoices, notes, drawings. He was working right up until he was too sick to swing a hammer. I picture him limping. No time to plan or adjust or settle into a slow dignified decline. In the glove compartment I find smelling salts, some of them used. I sit down in the dirt right there and cry. I imagine him driving home exhausted. Driving from Santa Cruz to San Francisco and back, working construction greyhaired with months left to live. Limping to his truck carrying his heavy tools, loading up the bed in the pink dawn. My little father worked with a quiet doggedness, head bent against his final months. He must have known he was dying and felt it in his body. Working until his body failed him to make sure we would be ok. Driving home, taking his boots off, limping into bed, caring for my dying mother. When I stop crying I feel rage and shame. 

I’m guessing now. There is plenty from these years and months that I can no longer remember, not with any kind of precision. There’s a large calendar from that time with all the caretaker schedules written down. I have no desire to go back and look at it. Errands to run, gaps in the schedule. Tension in the back of my neck. I do everything to leave it behind and it feels it will never go away and then I can’t remember what it was. I don’t miss those days or their proximity. Still, as they fade, I mourn them too.
“You’re on your own kid,” I tell myself.
I can hear my mother’s voice. I hear her ease, her cadence. “Hey Ro,” she would say on the phone. I have voicemails of hers, calling to ask if I’ve booked flights to Seattle. When I want to hear her, that’s what I listen to, her caring, even voice filling my skull and my eyelids and my ribcage. 
“Hey, Ro,” she says. 
No one will ever say my name like that again. You only get one mother.

—

In the weeks after my father’s passing, I take a trip with my cousin and spend a week on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico beach, revolving through various degrees of drunkenness. We stay in a thatched hut without electricity by the water. I eat ceviche and snorkel. My skin tans. I sit against the hulls of the painted fishing boats and watch the sky turn pink as the stars are erased in the light and as stray dogs run and fight on the white sand feeling a strange combination of freedom and sadness. I didn’t know how to begin to plan a funeral for two parents. The longer I delay these choices, the less they seem of importance. I carry cold beers out into the ocean and watch the fish run across the striped sand beneath me and I watch the women along the shore. I didn’t have a funeral for my mother because my father was too sick. I called a church and received voicemail from a priest. That was as far as my planning went. He asked me if I was a member of the church, I was not. Where else do you go for something like that? I don’t want everyone up at the house, I want to be able to leave. The water is the same temperature as the air. 

A month after my father’s death, I climb Mount Shasta with three college friends. We leave San Francisco at dawn and drive north through the high alpine meadows and timber scars. I rent boots with toe pins and skins and skis. We all rent beacons and probes, axes, shovels, and crampons. 
We drive to our point of departure, following the two laned road through patches of shade behind the Poderosa pines. The pines have thick grey brown bark split like puzzles. The bare white cone of the mountain flashes beside us through the evergreen canopy. We park beside a tall, dirty berm of snow and unload our gear. There other cars parked, but we are alone in the lot. I organize my backpack and change into my long underwear. I turn my phone off to save its battery. My friends are already unrolling their ski skins and applying the adhesive to their skis. I do the same, watching and following their movements. We have tents, food, portable stoves, headlamps, and layers of clothing. We stand in a field and test our avalanche beacons. We pack our avalanche probes and shovels and ice axes on the outsides of our packs where we can easily reach them. Heat radiates off of the asphalt of the lot and the tar paved cracks glisten like liquid. We lock the car and step into our ski boots and skis and leave and the car. 
I look back as the lot disappears behind the scrub pines and as my skis slide under my toes and the heels of my boots tap against the heels of my ski bindings. I fall into a rhythm. The tree wells below the scrub pines are bare and in the wet dirt there are crushed and opened pinecones. Robins peck for seeds in the bare dirt. We traverse through the rolling hills with the sun cut through the pine needles above us. The sunlight glows in the golden pine flowers and I can see the yellow pollen in the air and smell it. We are in a low gulch, the snow is bright and pilled in the sunlight. The trees and the shade fall away behind us as we climb. The last trees on the slope are saplings, bent and buried in the snow. We laugh in the sun. I tie my shirt around my head to keep my hair from my eyes and admire my tan. I unzip the sides of my ski pants to ventilate my legs. We are like otters. I think how nice it would be to have a beer while we climb, watching my skis slide before me. I am hungover. My sweat smells faintly of alcohol. I have been taking Vicodin this week and there is an itch in the back of my head now. I stop to rest and my friends ski on ahead of me. 
We are of an age where the world before us feels wholly attainable. We are golden, cared for sons, at the height of our confidence and at our strength, full of promise and aspiration. I am convinced that with some toughness, I can take on any challenge. I have a healthy fear in the mountains, of avalanches, of quick death within a landscape of indifferent proportions, but today, climbing the sides of this snowcapped volcano, I am impenitent. If my friends are here; there is no reason I shouldn’t be. This is sport. We understand the line between unpreparedness and foolishness, between discomfort and consequence. To die, to have to be rescued, is irresponsible. But to throw yourself into effort, to live with whatever discomforts come of that trying; we are prepared to endure that. We joke about it. We are always on trips surrounded by older, more methodical travelers. We get wet, hallucinate, run out of food, come home blistered and burned and bruised. We seem always to have the most fun. We are on the edge of boyish, youthful indifference, enjoying the last of the dying carelessness that transitions us into manhood. We stop and my friend boils snow for us to drink. Lines of skiers climb the track behind us like bugs.
The rolling hills steepen. I strain to stay with my companions. We all talk less now. The sun is still above us but now lowers above the folds of the mountain to our left. I am wet with sweat across my shoulders and my stomach. I stop and put my shirt on and follow the pressed tracks before me through a low bowl that rises into a saddle on a ridge. My friends are already resting on the ridgeline. Close to them, the slope rises. I fall near the rim and slide in the snow. I arrest my slide with my arms and swing my skis back under my body. The track is steep and my legs are tired. I rise and fall again and slide lower. I punch the snow. My friends are watching, encouraging me to take my skis off and hike. I swear them off. They have skied up, so will I. I fall again. I am not standing far enough over the front of my skis and balancing and pushing ahead in a controlled rhythm. The skins on the bottom of the skis are a fabric with an adhesive side for the skis and a barbed fabric side that acts like a kind of snakeskin against the snow. On this slope, without forward force, they slide backwards in the groove of the ski tracks. I stand and with labor I reach the top of the ridge. My shirt is wet and I have snow in my ski pants. Across the valleys below us, the shadows sweep down the hillsides like great teeth. At the dim edges of these sweeping forms, the treetops are spangled in gold and green as the scales of a trout before the shadow gathers upwards from the forest floor and the tree crowns fall underneath the blue. High above on the ridge, we are still neatly within the light, but the air is cooler now as the sun cuts across the horizon. Where I am wet, I feel a chill. 
The ridge arcs left towards the mountain and through fingers of shade. There are other skiers before us on the trail, in groups of three and five. On a plateau above us are red and yellow tents. I put a lined jacket on. I feel my tiredness set in. The rise and fall of my legs seems to pull the warmth out of my chest, as if the light of the day is falling through me. The plateau before us grows and tents rise behind other tents into the sprawl of a small village, full of figures in the evening light. They wear headlamps and put on jackets and pitch tents and pull small boilers from their packs. The wind carries their voices away from us, over the snow with the falling cold air and down into the valleys. 
We arrive at the edge of the red and yellow tents and in the moment I stop moving I become delirious. I kick out of my skis and take off my wet clothes and change into dry pants and dry tops. The air on my naked skin throws me into fits of shivering. The tents around us are in rows with blocks of snow cut around them for wind breaks. My friends have already pitched our two tents on empty platforms. I lay my sleeping bag out and lay down. I am shaking and fall out of consciousness. 
I hear my name. My friend wakes me with a tin cup of hot food. I am warmer but still cold. He tells me to eat. I ask him if I can help with camp, but I am incoherent. He tells me to stay in my sleeping bag on his sleeping pad. 
I’ve refused to bring a sleeping pad on this trip. I don’t own one and I have insisted, for years, that camping on the ground is fine. In a conscious effort to under pack, I have considered sleeping pads to be an unnecessary comfort. I’ve slept on the ground in my tent many nights, and I take a measure of pride in the toughness I see in myself as I sleep on the ground. I am alone in this conviction. My friends have lightweight foldable foam pads. Sleeping on the snow, the pads provide a needed layer of insulation. On my friend’s pad, I fall back into sleep. 
I wake to go relieve myself. It is evening now. There is a pit in the tent village and we all carry sealable bags to pack the soiled snow off the mountain. I return and talk to my friends as the sky turns yellow and lavender and as the white clouds turn dark in the dying light. I tell them I’m ok. I’m out of my hyperthermic shock, now only deeply tired. I resolve to change in and out of layers more quickly. 
We sleep two to a tent, burrowed into one another. The wind rises around us. In each crescendo, the cold blows through every zipper and seam of our gear. I sleep for no more than five or ten minutes at a time. The ground is hideously cold. 
Until this night, the worst night of sleep I’d had was on a beach in the Channel Islands, in a windstorm that whipped sand off the rock walls on either side of me in a cove that looked out over a blinding full moon over silver whitecapping sea, where I felt the air rise over the ragged island like some great wing. I slept with everything but my nose zipped inside of my sleeping bag, assailed by grains of sand like pins. That was a better night of sleep than this night on the volcano. Hunger, pain, heartbreak, all are dwarfed by the cold. 
We rise, stiffened, at four in the morning. We look to the wall of the mountain before us. Flickering lines of headlamps are already climbing toward the dark rim of the ridge. It looks as if the headlamps are straight above us, suspended in the sky. I am dismayed to find that we are starting late. We pack our tents and stoves and leave our overnight gear in the camp for our return. We fasten our skis to our backpacks like teepees and fasten our crampons. I look to the south, out across the starlit sky and let a long breath out into the air and feel the mountain sweep it away from me. 
We ascend. The tracks switch back and forth across the face of the gulch. We pass other groups of climbers. Soon it is light enough against the snow to stow our headlamps. Behind us, only the white snowflecked caps of distant peaks are visible in the grey and purple light. I listen to the sharp chipping noise of the spikes on my feet as they dig into the bootpacked steps before me as I lift and drag and kick my toes with each step. We climb in angles, with the face of the slope to our side. I plant my uphill ski pole with each step and hold my downhill ski pole ready in fall line beside me. 
The daylight grows. We are now halfway up the face of this slope, the tents are colored specks against the sweep of the mountain. The valley below us is drowned in shadow, we feel the first light of the day from our height. At the crest of the ridge, we stop for a fast breakfast. My friend boils snow and makes a cup of instant coffee which we share. Behind us, the granite buttress of the rim rises out of the melted snow like a fin. It is a meager but consecrated pleasure. 
The summit is invisible to us, hidden behind the rising slopes. We climb higher to a lesser incline and put on our skis. Skiers who have started that morning from the parking pass us. Some of them wear sunglasses with flaps that cover their noses and cheeks. I am already windburned and sunburned from the day before, as the rays of the sun reach my skin, I feel a sting. We joke that there was no point in sleeping on the mountain. None of us slept. 
We pass peak after peak. I expect to see the summit of the mountain over every crest, but there are only more open faces and bands of granite under the spring snow. I take my jacket off. I am dizzy and I breath deeply to quiet my lungs. I search for signs of fatigue in my friends. 
We climb for more hours and stop on an open face and eat a light second breakfast, bars and tangerines. We are well above the distant mountains around us, their peaks sit below their treelines and they are only flecked in snow. Beneath a cloudless sky, a thin grey fog sits in the shapes of these mountains and the horizon hangs in a grey line over the dark expanse. The sunlit blue above us is thin and dark. I watch a jet pass to our east, its contrail blooms in a sharp wake across the pure air.
On another rise, I take my phone out and turn it on to take a picture. I have a little cell service. I sit and remove my gloves and with my phone in my lap, I receive a message from a cousin, then my uncle, then an aunt. My phone hums against my hip. I know, without reading that my father’s youngest sister has passed on that night. I turn my phone off and zip it into my inner pocket and look out over the wide expanse, where somewhere to the south, my little aunt lies dead and my cousins cry and the day’s light lies faintly on the dusty curtains of their trailer beside a dry creek. We climb on. 
The day warms, the sun is above the mist. We are in the wind now. The shadows are sharp against the bright snow. We climb ridgelines with open sky on either side of us. The bands of rock are frozen with strange windblown blooms of ice. I am dizzy with exhaustion and curse whenever my friends pass a suitable point for a break, but as they go, I go. My left foot is in pain with every kick forward. We pass other groups as they step off the steps of the boot pack. The sky is full of glittering ice. I feel as if I am about to step off the edge of the world. We pass groups of climbers with no skis, tethered together, carrying ice axes. We pass false summit after false summit. I look out at the peaks ahead of me and wonder how there can possibly be more mountain behind it. We see skiers returning downhill before us. Then, beyond another crest of ice, the summit, a cathedral of rocks and rime ice. 
There is a crown of peaks at the summit, joined by a ridge line. We stow our packs and skis against a cliff band and with our ice axes, follow the mountain to its end. We pass other returning climbers and wait for a group to leave the nest of rocks at the summit. We sit, take pictures with our arms upraised, congratulate one another. We can see far to our north. The volcano is a monolith, we are atop a spire in the sky. The atmosphere above us barely veils the vault of space. An azure that suggests nothingness. I say goodbye to my aunt, the youngest and the gentlest of that company. We descend from the summit’s castle and leave way for other climbers. 
Aware that I am the slowest climber of the group, I have been looking forward to the ski down as a chance to show off. But the windswept faces we ski are windhardened ice and my legs are exhausted. We ski with caution, I stop when my legs begin to shake beneath me. We traverse away from rock faces, dipping and rising and dipping over the covered backs of the titanic granite fingers. We rest and I regather myself. The air is warmer, we are below the wind. My friend finds a fall line that sweeps away from the cliff bands. We ski into the basing and within moments we are below the ice. Between the ribs and buttresses, the mountain opens into wide sunsoaked glades and softer snow. We hoot as fly, our turns arc across one another like a braid. The snow soars from under our skis behind us in the sun and the sound of our skis, slicing the snow into ribbons, fills the valley. We are in a frenzy, swallowing the mountain, racing one another, our hair streaming beneath our helmets. We arrive at the camp suddenly, the morning and early afternoon of climbing are over. The consequences of the day are gone. I look back at the snowsloped faces of the volcano. The face that towered above us in the early morning, flecked with headlamps and challengers, is empty and smooth in the afternoon sun. Fear and apprehension are behind me. 
We pack our camp and waste and ski lower. We pass the rise where I met so much difficulty the afternoon before. Below it, the snow is warmer and grips the bottoms of my skis. I am thrown forward with every hump. My pack is heavy. My legs shake and spasm. As we ski through the shade of the pines, we run over ice and then are nearly stopped back in the melting snow. I am at my limit. 
Many of the cars are gone in the lot. I throw my skis and my pack aside and kick my skis of. I take my boots off with deep enjoyment and peel my damp socks from my feet. My feet are pale and wrinkled. I sear them in the burning dirt and pavement. My lips are cracked. The big toe of my left foot moves to my command but is numb to the ball of my foot. I feel drunk. The berm beside the car is filthy and shrinks in the sunlight. We return our rented equipment and the four of us drink cold beers and eat cheeseburgers and depart. 
We drive homeward in battered silence. The air is thick and warm and easy. It is spring. The lowlands are full of water. Grass grows in a brilliant rush. Swallows spin in cloud above the threshed fields and rounded bales of hay. The skeletal galvanized bodies of pivot irrigation arms stand like crooked spiders in the cut fields. Water pours through the lowlands and weeps with the melting snow, pouring into the fields and the orchards. The land is green and vigorous. In the sky, outside of time, my aunt sails arms folded to meet my mother and my father and the white tree. Cool water runs through the earth into caves and chambers.  
I think of none of this. I watch the sweep of the road through the crush of bees on the windshield and in exhaustion, think of my still numb foot, of girls undressing and the words that undress them, of a night of sleep wishing the wrap of my bed. I feel invigorated, worn out of shock, and entirely wound into my self-centered wants.
—

My uncle calls and wants to know if there was something in the well water that would cause cancer. He is kind and worried.
“I doubt it,” I tell him.
But the thought stays with me and so I call the hardware store for a free water test. The next week a man drives up the mountain. He tests the water and in the kitchen he begins his pitch for filters for the well and the house. He is about your father’s age, driving from home to home selling water filter systems.  
“Thanks,” I tell him “I think we already treat everything at the well for the copper pipes. I don’t mind how it tastes now.”
He explains that the water hard and has minerals in it. I tell him that my parents just passed and that I want to know if there is anything in the well that would cause cancer. I hate the question as I ask it. He looks at me with discomfort.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “there’s not anything that I know of that would cause anything like that. I just test for pH and sediment.”
I thank him and take a brochure and he leaves.

I see my friends again at parties. Some of them I have called after my parent’s passing, many I have not. I drive with my cousin to a friends’ ranch in Sonoma. The air is warm, the dirt hangs around us in the summer air. We turn into the valley and look out over the parked cars and fields and barns in the late afternoon. The Russian River winds and glints in the background. My college friends are on a lawn. I let the dog loose and drink a beer and chase girls around the farm equipment and visit the pigs with my friends. Christmas lights line the stage and the eves of the tractor barn and cross above us over the lawn in the oaks. I get drunk. I tell one of my close college friends my parents are dead. He laughs in disbelief and lurches as if I have hit him in the stomach. 
“I’m ok,” I tell him, “sometimes I feel it and sometimes I don’t.” 
I try to lift him out of the hole I have dropped him into. “It’s some shit,” I say. 
The sun sets and a band plays and I sleep in the back of my truck with the dog and watch the stars move. 
I do not know how to answer simple questions. On dates, I oscillate between dismissive lies and long explanations of the past. I am regularly sedated. 
Peoples’ faces change when they see me. 
I see my mother’s friends often in Davenport. There is a brief moment and then their emotions register in their features, some of them cry.
“Are you ok” they ask.
“Yes” I say, “I’m alright, I’m fine, I hope you’re well. I’m ok up there,” I say.
“Are you alright.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” Yes, I’m just trying to get some coffee, waiting with a croissant in a paper bag in my hand.
They read my face.
It resists a sense of proper entropy or proportion. Two parents in four months. It is too much, too fast— it’s not supposed to happen that way. Other deaths, accidents, are explained by absurdity. Our family offers no antagonist or drunk driver or fatal mistake, just the mundane oblivion of dividing cancer cells. It unmoors their sense of permanence and security. More than anything, I make other people uncomfortable. This becomes its own kind of weight. 
“Don’t skip any checkups,” I say.

The day my father had his tongue biopsied for cancer he was remodeling a bathroom. He took the midmorning hours off and went to the hospital in Santa Clara. They cut out a small section of his tongue and then he went back to work. I can imagine him sitting in his truck with his tongue in pain and then limping past the stacks of cut marble at the job site. Every day he wore a white t-shirt and jeans and redwing boots. The sole of his boot wears from his limp. 
When his doctor called him days later, he was also working. I can imagine him sitting down to talk to the doctor, in his truck, eating lunch. My mother would make us sandwiches and wrap them in tin foil. Each morning she would take the ice packs out of the freezer and place them in my father’s lunch box. After the doctor called him and told him he had tongue cancer, my father worked until the end of the day. He waited a day to tell my mom. I imagine he needed time to get his head around it himself. No sense in not working while you think. They cut out a third of his tongue and replaced it with muscle from his thigh and his surgeon stitched the little blood vessels back together under a magnified lens. The surgeon had delicate hands and shook my father’s hand softly. 
My father could speak but it was difficult, he started seeing a speech therapist. The tissue that they sewed back into his tongue was pale and discolored, an alien piece of flesh. Eating and talking was painful for him, he lost weight from his already modest frame. 
When my father’s tongue had begun to heal, he went back to work again. He drove hours each morning and evening to job sites. He would come home and unload his tools in the dark, limping with the heavy work bags. 
How I felt or what I knew at this time is all very foreign to me now. I’ve worked very hard to forget so much of what I felt, and to some extent these efforts have been successful. I felt a profound sense of guilt that my father was still working and that I was not earning enough money to support the family. 
A year before my mother died, the December when my father was first in the hospital, I took a picture of my parents. My father is asleep after surgery, his face is asymmetrical and swollen. A tube is taped to his nose. He is in an exhausted, ancient sleep. My mother sits at the foot of his bed, she rests her head in her arms on his legs. My mother would never let anyone photograph her when she was pregnant with me, she felt it was indecent. There is only one picture of her. She is smiling and in a nightgown. She would tell me she was glad she had it, that all these years later, it was nice to have some memory of that time. It felt indecent to take this picture, of my mother resting, devoted, at my father’s feet. I took it in the doorway, in an impulse. To even witness the moment felt as if it was a stark violation of the deepest form of privacy. The moment lives in my mind. I don’t look at the picture. The sparingly few times I have, it pitches me into the hollow of our defeat. Why us? They were the best kind of people. Generous, humble, kind, hard working. They were wonderful. Run down and slaughtered. Why us? A world of thoughtless and indecent people running wild over the face of the earth. Generations born into unending illiteracy. Unending entropy. I do know that for a long time after my parents passed on, I had a hard time caring about anything and that I worked very hard to black out that unattractive feeling. 
I remember too when I understood my mother was very sick. I have a picture of the flowers I took to her hospital room. This was in May. The cancer and surgery hospital she was in was a ten minute walk from my office in Redwood City. She was in the hospital for two nights; I slept in a chair in her room and went into work each day. The surgeons cut a hole in the top of her skull and installed a port to administer treatment. I don’t have pictures of my mother from this time, but I remember being upset that they had shaved part of her head. Something about her change in appearance was final. 
I was home that June. We took the dog to the dog beach and my mother was different. Her face was swollen. She wore a hat and rested on my arm as we walked. He memory had changed and her speech had changed. We watched the dog race down the beach and the waves wedge and break on the sand. Body surfers and boogie boarders swam alongside the cliffside waiting for the waves. 

The summer after I graduated from Stanford I lived at home. On one of those summer nights, on a trip to the bathroom, my mother comes into my room and turns the lights on. The windows of the house are open, the light wind off the ocean blows gently under the eaves and through the halls, and sun’s heat has died in its dance in the white sand around the house. It is late. I check my clock. My mother stands at the foot of my bed. 
“Ro,” she says, “did you brush your teeth?”
I explain to her that it is two in the morning, she asks me again. She’s worried I haven’t brushed my teeth. 
“Mom,” I say, “It’s two. I brushed my teeth, you asked me earlier. Go to bed.”
She stares at me a moment and then she smiles. 
“I’m losing it,” she says. “Don’t pay your mother no nevermind.” 
“Goodnight mom,” I say. “Hit those lights.”
The lights fade and I listen to my mother’s padded steps on the hardwood and hear her make her way to bed. 
She apologies to me the next morning with some embarrassment. She is on a new medication, it makes her loopy, she says. It might be right here, in this memory of your mother standing in your room, disoriented but self-assured in her nightgown, that you first recognize that she is failing, that she is now seriously threatened by her illness. You learn sounds of a house, the dog’s clicking steps, the footfall and stride of your family, the routes and routines of the night You learn these things without knowing them, these familiar catacombs of behavior. They are intimate, undistinguishable shapes, that you notice only in their absence. After our first dog died, the house was so quiet. I would know the sound my mother anywhere, as a form of prelinguistic knowing, a sound before memory. Rarely, but every so often, I will see a man or a woman, catch a glimpse of some bodily cadence, some suggestion of a frame beset by age, the back of a grey head, stooped shoulders, and confuse that outline of a person for my dead mother or my dead father. The sensation breaks as quickly as it forms. It is a fresh form of heartbreak.
 
It is strange now, to look back on this time and see it as the end, as the evening of their lives. When were the final vacations and visits and dinners where the illusion of a future was possible? The day we picked up the new dog we drove to Sacramento. On the way home he peed with us for the first time in the grass by the highway, his body wiggling in the ruts of the packed earth and in the gusts of wind from passing cars. We named him Lorenzo.
On another warm summer night after I graduate college, I can hear the frogs in the spring through the screens. My mother is in the kitchen and I sit down with her with a glass of water. My folks have eased into the comfort of no longer raising a teenager, of living in their own uninterrupted home and own uninterrupted lives. My father starts smoking pot again with his friends on vacations. My mother, who gave up drinking for years and years, starts having a small glass of red wine with dinner. 
“I like drinking wine again,” she says.
That night I get up and go to roll a joint outside and turn on the porch lights and the June beetles with their white striped backs and brown antlers come flying into the opaque rounded glass around the bulbs. There is a dull ping as their shelled bodies collide with the lights. I roll a small joint and go back inside and light it on the stove. My mother is at the kitchen island in her pajamas.
“Heya mama,” I say, “your son is smoking a little pot,” and joking, I ask her if she wants any.
“Sure,” she says.  
So, I sit down with her and smoke pot with my mother for the first time. She’s beaten cancer in three rounds now and I tell her I think she needs to start running again with her friends. I tell her she needs to get strong again, that I think she keeps acting like she is sick.
“You don’t know everything that is wrong with me right now” she says, sitting beside me on the black leather couch with the dog and a red wool blanket and a joint between her fingers. 
She looks at me and looks over my face as the words hang between us. Looking back, maybe right here was the beginning of a kind of end.  
Half my life she knew she was dying. I love you baby boy.  
“I want to show you the slides,” she says, “I want you to see how your grandparents grew up.”
She tells me how she took care of her mother after her father died. Stories I’ve all heard in parts, but never in whole. He was a first lieutenant in the navy and a star tennis player and a wrestler, the Alameda County Man of the Year. He came home from the war, worked, bought a house, and retired. When my mom went away to college, he wanted to sell the house and travel. But my grandmother grew up during the depression and they had lost everything. Selling the house scared her. Selling the house would be like losing everything again. He wanted to sell the house and she couldn’t. They argued about it on end and she won. So, they stayed and after my grandfather had a stroke. He wasn’t the same tennis player, he used to beat everyone at his club she tells me. A few years later he died. Her mother always felt guilty, my mother says, she never forgave herself. She would drink and on the nights she was in bad shape she would call my mother and say “Don’t come home. Don’t come, not tonight.” 
My mother was in graduate school. She would drive back and forth to the little one-story home in Lafayette with the fields of yellow flowered mustard grass in the empty lot out back to take care of her mother. On a night when my grandmother didn’t pick up the phone, my mother called my father and they drove to the house together and they found my grandmother dead on the kitchen floor. She had been drinking for days. My mother picked up her little mother in her arms and cried with her shoulders and held her and said mama, mama mama mama mama.
Mama mama mama mama.
—