Mercy Now - Lori McKenna (mp3)
Dear Richard Russo,
"You should write him."My mother, looking every bit of her 67 years of age, lay on a hospital bed in the emergency room as we awaited results of several tests, any of which could come back startlingly negative. Her skin contrasted just enough with the sheets to keep her from disappearing, her lips almost devoid of color. She hates not being "put together."
Conversations in hospitals have a surreal quality. At times the patient speaks like a shaman, connected to dimensions and spirits the rest of us can neither see nor comprehend, sallying forth with wisdom and insight beyond their normal capability. At others, it's just incoherent babbling. Not even the patient seems certain of which is which.
My step-father, the man who adopted me and helped raise me since I was five, had died the previous October. Mom wasn't loyally following him to the grave or anything, but from my selfish perspective, it just seemed natural that she'd go ahead and die on me, too.
It had taken a full year to feel the impact of Dad's death, like I was one of those crash test dummies who surge in super-slo-mo towards the hungry and eager windshield. The action moves at such a slow, frame-by-frame pace you almost believe you could change things, avoid hitting that glass and cracking your skull, but you can't. You're just a dummy.
From my dad's death to that stay in the ER with my mom, I'd been inching, one frame at a time, towards some windshield. No seatbelt. No pause button. No alternative Choose Your Own Adventure outcome. And just as my head began to connect with the glass of Dad's death, I found myself sitting in an emergency room with my mother. Dad and I weren't even all that close. I'd originally, naively -- because why do we think we know what the death of a parent will or won't do to us? -- thought I'd be fine. I knew Dad was dying for years. I'd accepted its inevitability and taken numerous opportunities to say the things that might haunt me had I kept them in. Closure was not going to be a problem. Besides, I had a third child born the next month, a son we named after both my step-father and my biological one, who died shortly after I was born. My hands were full with real-life shit, and I had paid them both their due respects by naming my first son in their honor, so they should be able to rest and leave me the fuck alone.Except that having parents go and die on you is very much like parenthood itself. People can warn you about how grueling it can be, the emotional nitroglycerin that injects itself at random intervals in the aftermath, but until you actually experience it, you just can't appreciate those warnings in a genuine way.
At the time I was close to finishing Bridge of Sighs and had pulled it out to read a quote I'd marked. It's where Lou says life is a series of doors, that going through them one at a time like we do, it feels like we're making free will choices, but when we get closer to our final doors, and we look back at our path through all those doors we walk through, it starts seeming inevitable that we could have chosen any other path, that maybe we weren't really making free will decisions after all.
I asked Mom if that made sense to her.
"I don't think your father ever had an affair," she responded. "But I couldn't know for sure."
Her eyes were fixed on some point miles above the ceiling. I gave the "Huh?" response. She searched for moisture in her mouth and continued. "A few women, I wondered. Never worth worrying about, I guess. What we don't know." Then she said something about his Bloody Marys.
What I remember about Dad making a Bloody Mary was how he crushed the ice, and the ice machine stood on the bar and roared and crackled louder than our lawnmower with every cube he'd drop in. I was watching The Karate Kid on HBO and my Dad crushed the ice and conversation between he and Mom and a friend of theirs took on this staccato strobe light feel of pausing with every cube.
"I loved your father so much."
I told her that your books gave me a level of comfort and hope and sadness that I hadn't felt with anyone else. You convince me that humanity is so deeply and pathetically flawed that only some kind of powerful force could have such a sense of humor and love us enough to pull it all off.
"You should write him," Mom said.
"Write who?" I asked. "Dad?" That would be kinda weird. I mean, I'd written him in my journal, but not like an actual letter or anything.
"That author. You talk about him a lot. He seems really important to you."
"He is. But he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author. I think he kinda knows that he's important to lots of people."
"But he doesn't know it about you. And maybe he'd like to know. Maybe all of us like to know those things."
"Wouldn't you want to know if you gave some stranger hope? I bet you sure would appreciate knowing that. Why is that man any different? I bet that's half the reason he writes."
"What's the other half?" I asked, but in that two-second gap, she had somehow drifted, and she was silent for a long pause. I stood up to look into her face and make sure she was OK.
"I loved his Bloody Marys."
Mr. Russo, you know people. Or, maybe better put, you know people the way I think I know people, or the way I want to know people. You see in them such beauty and such pain, and it's never simple, although their actions may be occasionally predictable or inevitable. More importantly, you love people. You don't love them for the Wizard of Oz facades we all manage to create for others and ourselves. You love them because they all do stupid or inexplicable or random things that are out of character or out of bounds.
The worlds you create, where you are the God of sorts, are places where there's a God who cares for them, who shows grace and understanding and maybe even sympathizes with their plights. I know you love your creations, and you want the best from them, and even as you open that next door for a character, a door you've fated him to open, I know it pains you to do so. Your love of those people passes understanding.
And I just need to thank you personally for that. Every book is a gift, and I'm lucky to receive them.
OK OK, I'm also intensely jealous, but mostly lucky.
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