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Necessary, but frustrating.
I relaxed while I made dinner, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head of what she’d been painting in my absence. I liked knowing she was feeling the need to express herself. I envied it. She had so much to show the world, and I so little. Her emotions ran over, and it was hard for me to even find mine, and then I kept them locked away.
“What are you making?” she asked.
“Fried tofu and tomato sauce.”
“I guess it could be worse,” she joked.
She took out the plates, and I served the food before we went out on the porch. She said it was good, and we didn’t talk much more while we ate. Then I made tea, put on music, and lay in the hammock with a book in my hand.
Leah broke the silence after a while.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
“An essay. About death.” I suppressed the impulse to get up, kneel beside her, and embrace her. That’s what I would have done during the first two or three months. Now the idea seemed so distant, almost impossible.
“Why are you reading that?”
“Why not?”
“It’s not something people like to talk about…”
“Don’t you think that’s a mistake?” I’d been thinking about it for months…
“I don’t know.”
I put the book aside. “I’ve been reading about death in other cultures. And I’m wondering if the way we face things is a matter of how we’re raised or if it’s instinctive, inborn. You know what I mean?”
Leah shook her head.
“I’m talking about the different ways human beings have of channeling and feeling the same thing. Like some aboriginal people in Australia put dead bodies on a platform, cover them with leaves and branches, and leave them there. When they have an important celebration, they rub the liquid from the corpse on themselves, or they paint the bones red and use them to commemorate the people they love. In Madagascar, the Malgache take bodies out of the grave every seven years, wrap them in cloth, and dance with them. Then they spend a while talking to them or touching them before they bury them for another seven years.”
“Jesus, Axel, that’s gross.” Leah furrowed her nose.
“That’s where I have questions. Why does something that seems horrible to us comfort other people and make them feel better? I don’t know, imagine if since we were children someone taught us that loss isn’t sad, it’s just a goodbye, something natural that we have to talk through.”
“Death is natural,” she agreed.
“But we don’t see it that way. We don’t accept it.”
Leah’s lower lip trembled. “Because it hurts. And it’s scary.”
“I know, but it’s always worse to ignore something and pretend it doesn’t exist. Especially when it’s something we’re all going to experience, right?” I got up and crouched down next to her. I held her chin in my fingers. “Are you aware that I’m going to die?”
“Don’t say that, Axel.”
“What? The most obvious reality there is?”
“I can’t even think about it.”
I opened my mouth, ready to go on tensing the cord, but when I saw her face, I stopped. I got lost in her frightened eyes, and couldn’t keep myself from bending over and kissing her forehead. Then I pulled away quickly. I went back to the hammock and opened my book again. I stayed there reading until late, after Leah had said good night, thinking, thinking about everything…
It was so strange, so illogical that for years, they taught us math, literature, biology, but not how to deal with something as inevitable as death…
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