What Remains - A Remembrance

It was a coincidence, of course, that she was buried on my birthday, a year ago, on a dazzling, summer day. You could hear cars passing by on Route 44, people on their way to the gym, the beach, or to the nearby malls, business as usual. She was my best friend.

Every time someone close to me dies, I wish the world would stop for a while,  and take notice. But the world is quite selfish in its ability to keep going, so it was a bit ridiculous for me to be angry at things that no one could control. I know it is absurd, but I can’t help it. I was angry at upcoming vacations and weddings, at the annoying self-assurance of healthy people, at bargain sales, electronic gadgets, and smart investments. I was angry at summer itself, and the rest of us keeping on living.

Since my parents’ death, 20-something years ago, I believe that no one should die in the summer. People should die off-season, when there is nothing good on TV, and when the absence of the sun and the bright sky would make us stop and reflect more. There are no places to hide and cry in the summer. Summer belongs to the living: Nobody thinks of death, and cancer is a word we’d rather not use.

Her name was Diane, and like the rest of the people that mattered in my life whom I lost over the years, she died in July. While waiting for her at the cemetery, I thought about how for 16 years, I spent all my Easters, Thanksgivings and Christmases at her house in New Hartford.

Well, it wasn’t really her I was waiting for, but rather her shiny mahogany casket, reminding me of a small, limited-edition luxury European car. (The mind goes everywhere in the presence of death, and you make the strangest associations.)

I was 10 years old when my maternal grandmother died in 1975, and my parents locked me in my bedroom for several days, sheltering me from grief. They showered me with books and oranges, hoping that I wouldn’t notice the muffled cries and the rushed steps of relatives coming and going on the other side of the door.

I was 10 years old when I smelt death for the first time, sneaking under my bedroom door, the scent of paper from the new books and the scent of oranges unable to stop it. Your first death stays with you the way your first kiss or the day you drove for the first time does, so that is why, every time I open a book or peel an orange, I remember my grandmother, while the scent of freshly spread mulch in my garden always recalls my mother’s coffin and its strong cedar scent.

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We met 16 years ago, after I landed on the shores of my adopted country from Romania.

Back then, I was hopeful and frightened, excited and disheartened. I lived in limbo in a depressing neighborhood, and worked long hours in a sweatshop. English was a distant language. I had no one to talk to. My American Dream consisted of a 1978 Mercury Zephyr, a small color TV, a few books and a bed. I didn’t want much, just to somehow become myself. I wanted to teach. I wanted to write. I had dreams of showing my art in a gallery in New York City. I wanted to belong. Because of Diane, a college counselor at the college where I teach today, I went back to school.

I took my first college course (Spanish), a language very close to my own. Surprisingly, I got an A. “See,� Diane said, “you can do it.� We became friends. For the next years, she shaped and followed every step of my career, advising, redirecting, encouraging and cheering me up.

In a fast, disposable culture like ours, where relationships often have the lifespan of a pair of shoes, she taught me what it means to stick around. She helped me learn English. She rescued spiders and mice trapped under her refrigerator. She helped unclog my sinks and corrected my school papers. (She would proof these very words if she could.)

She witnessed my car crashes and my heartbreaks, my small victories and my big failures. She had an incredible talent for reading people. She was present at the closing of my first home, and she warned me about my future ex-girlfriends. Once, while I was in the hospital, waiting for minor surgery, she put on an ad-hoc tap-dance show and, several hours later, while I was still in the recovery room, she went to my studio, picked up some of my paintings and set up a mini-exhibit in the ER.

Up until the last months of her life, carrying along her voluminous bag filled with chemo pills, she attended all my art openings. In all my job application, she was my “emergency contact.�

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I wish I were big on faith and rituals, but I am not. (I have always tried very hard not to picture heaven like a Florida drive-in movie theater where all the films have a happy ending.) I have experienced first hand the primitive, slightly extreme theatricality of Eastern Europeans during both weddings and funerals: the coffin laying on your dinning table, the designated mourners descended from a black-and-white Bergman film, the screams and the moans, the hair-pulling, and later, the drinking and the colorful storytelling.

It was always the same no matter who in the family died: the legend of my uncle Iorgu, assassinated in the 1940s by the communists during his honeymoon; my mentor, a brilliant, talented art professor whose influence on me is present until this day, who was hit by a car several weeks before his wedding; my father, whose death came suddenly while I was attending a summer camp several hundred miles away from my home in Bucharest; back in 1983, my mother’s death, on another hot summer day, while a loud birthday party was unfolding across the street.

We all carry a private archeology of sorrows within us, but Diane’s death affected me more profoundly even than the death of my parents. In the past year, in nursing homes and emergency rooms, I have probably learned more about human nature, greed and love, faith and loss, than in my entire life.

In a country where the only acceptance of decay is within the well-groomed, permissible decay we label “vintage� on our jeans and on our antiques, nobody likes to talk about the crumbling of the body, and about the humiliation, loneliness, despair, doubt, and pain accompanying it. (Forget about the “War on Terror� — no nation on the planet has been fighting such a constant war on wrinkles.)

And every time I see an ad about cancer patients, the beneficiaries of some miraculous new drug smile, talk about opening new businesses, or play volleyball on sun-drenched beaches. None of those people seem to know how it feels when the greatest achievement of the day is taking those few steps between your bed and the bathroom. In the end, no one can really lead us through the private labyrinths of suffering. That silent journey never shows up in commercials.

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A year later, there is another beautiful summer, and in the physical world, nothing much remains of what last year seemed so important. At the hospital, the thin privacy curtain, shielding the suffering of new patients from the rest of the world, or the rest of the world from their suffering; the cheap, colorful reproductions of not-so-famous paintings that nobody pays attention to; the nurses’ obscenely cheerful smocks, full of dancing elephants, lollipops and cross-eyed kangaroos; the unfazed indifference of objects that sometimes, ironically, outlive us.

Cardboard boxes, piles of clothes, empty bookshelves, car keys, credit card bills, unfinished shopping lists, and so many unasked questions: What do you think of at night, before going to sleep, knowing that you only have a few months or days to live? What do you think of when you wake up the next day? Do common phobias disappear when you know you are dying? Would you still care about MSG in your Chinese food? Does it make any sense anymore to be afraid of flying or snakes or open spaces? Do you still worry about your weight?

A year later, what remains is the world, beautiful and complicated, new and unchanged, indifferent and on the move; the weight of her absence; our absurd No Trespassing signs; the price of gasoline; the latest Hollywood flick to help us forget; the trees I planted in her memory in my garden; the back-to-school sales; the traces of our expensive degrees as a badge of honor on the back windshield of our cars; children savoring their ice-cream cones; the blue sky; a distant war;  the strong bonds I formed with people I barely knew before last summer.

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A few weeks before she died, we were watching a Seinfeld episode on the TV above her bed, when she suddenly said, “Dying is nothing like the doctors tell you it is.� I remember the absurdity of the context — comedy and death, and the “Life is Good� baseball hat she was wearing— and I am glad that I didn’t ask her the obvious follow-up question. For 16 years, we talked almost every day, but that night, I was out of words.

Instead of trying to understand, I spent the following weeks mainly in silence by her hospital bed, unable and unwilling to do anything else but listen to her breathing. There was a strange freedom and comfort in knowing everything about each other, a certain peace in knowing that everything that really mattered had been said.

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A year later, what remains is the wonderful anonymity of a well-lived life (I am not sanctifying a friend, I am just seeing her better than ever), the thousands of lives she touched, and the numerous lessons she taught me. Her life and death showed me not that the party is not worth attending, on the contrary, but that sooner or later, we need to go home; that everything is here, at our fingertips, and traveling is sometimes only a form of running away.

She taught me that life is indeed good, and that you never quit people you really love; that we are becoming constantly; that all the shiny stage props we call possessions, all the hours we spend at the gym, all the framed diplomas and customized pickup trucks mean absolutely nothing, because we exist only as long as someone remembers us, and that maybe the only possible heaven is being lucky enough to live in someone’s mind.

As I finish writing these words, I get up, make a cup of coffee, and, before erasing it, I play one more time the last message she left me on the answering machine a year ago. The voice is so real, so here that I am tempted to call her back. “Sorry I missed you. I’ll call you on your cell phone,� she says. Why do I still hope that one day, she actually will?

Artist, photographer and teacher Florin Firimita lives in Winchester and has exhibited his paintings at galleries throughout the Northeast.