Page 73 of After His Eulogy
“I called Sara three weeks ago,” he says.
“I know.”
“You know.”
“I noticed you stopped calling her.”
He looks at me.
“You have not said anything.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because it was not mine. It was a thing you were doing on your own. I have been letting you do it on your own. I have been trying to.”
“Okay.”
He is quiet for another minute.
“I called her three weeks ago,” he says. “Monday afternoon. I’d been planning to tell her I was with someone. That something might be changing. I’d been working on it for a week. I sat on my couch with the phone in my hand and thought it through. From her side. I’d been thinking it through from my side for two weeks and hadn’t been thinking from hers, and on Monday I did. I sat with the phone and I understood what telling her would mean. If I went. If I told her I was with someone and then I went, she’d have a thread. She’d have a name. A story she wouldn’t let go of. She’d do what I did. She’d look. She’d find. She’d put the things together and she’d come find me. I can’t give her a thread.”
“Okay.”
“So I called her and I told her nothing. I told her I was having a hard semester. I told her I had been bad about calling. I made up a thing about a paper not going well. I let her tell me about her kids, about her job, about my mother. I sat there on the couch and I let her have a normal call with me, and I knew while I was doing it that the call might be one of the last normal calls I ever have with her.”
“Yeah.”
“And I cried for an hour after I hung up. And I did not tell you. I did not tell you because I did not want to tell you while I was deciding. If I told you while I was deciding I might be deciding for you. I might be saying look what this costs me and making you talk me out of it. I did not want to do that to either of us. I wanted to sit with what going meant on my own first, and then to decide, and then to come tell you what I had decided having sat with what it meant.”
I keep walking.
“I sat with it for three weeks.”
“Yeah.”
“I sat with it. Made myself sit with it. Made myself think about what the next five years of my life look like in the staying version and what they look like in the going version. I made myself think about what Sara not having me looks like. I made myself think about what my mother… my mother does not have very many years left where she will know who I am. I have to decide whether the years she has left of knowing me are years she has me, even if I am at a distance, even if I am bad at calling, or whether the years she has left of knowing me are years where she knows I am dead. I had to think about that.”
I don’t say anything.
“And I thought about it. All of it. The Ph.D. My apartment. The bench. Min. Priya. Hellman. Every piece of the life I have in this town — specifically, in detail, the way you think about something when you’re saying goodbye to it. I made myself say goodbye before I decided. I didn’t want to decide and then say goodbye. I wanted to say goodbye and then decide. I wanted to know what it felt like to lose those things and then choose, having felt it.”
“Yeah.”
“And then I sat with the staying version. The version where I stay. I sat with it for a week — what it would be like to be in this apartment in five years without you. With a Ph.D., a job, Sara coming to visit at Christmas, my mother in the home, the life I have, intact. I didn’t sit with it as the bad option. I sat with it as a real option. Staying is a real life. It’s the life I’d been building for two years. It’s not nothing.”
I let him have the silence.
“And…“
He stops. We are walking. The beach has curved and we are now walking back toward where we parked, at an angle, the wind on our left side. The dog and its couple are nowhere. There is no one on the beach but us.
“And I could not do it.”
“You could not stay.”
“I couldn’t stay. At the end of the week, staying was the version where I keep my sister, my mother, my degree, my apartment — a thousand small things. And I lose you. I kept running it and it kept coming out the same. The thousand small things aren’t the one big thing. The one big thing is you. And it weighs more. Not by a little. By a lot. The math isn’t close. It’s not a hard call. I’d been telling myself it was hard because the cost was high. The cost is high. But the cost being high doesn’t make the call hard. The call has been clear for weeks. I was just sitting with the cost. I needed to. And I have. And I’m coming.”
