The Summer We Came to Life - By Deborah Cloyed Page 0,1

I had both feet pointed toward graduate school when I decided to spend six months backpacking Eastern Europe instead. I took a camera. Turns out I took to the artist/gypsy life like a baby to his first taste of sugar. Or like Isabel to social causes. Or Kendra to a six-figure salary in the fashion industry. Besides, Mina was the one meant to be an academic.

I rolled to a stop, near a gold journal on the floor. When the final diagnosis was in, Mina started three journals, one for each of the girls. Mine was a team effort, an earnest plan to contact each other after her death. I moved back in with my dad in the D.C. suburb where we all grew up, and stuck to Mina like Elmer’s. My job was to compile all the physics—translating everything I could find about consciousness and death into laymen’s terms for Mina. Her entries came from the heart. We passed the journal back and forth between visits, and spent most every afternoon discussing, forming our plan. In this way—as the maple tree outside her window set its leaves on fire then shook them to the ground—we spent the days, the hours, and the last minutes of Mina’s life like we’d spent the twenty-four years prior—laughing, crying, and together.

When she died, I read the journal over and over, obsessively trying all the ways we’d devised for me to contact her, with no results beyond excruciating sobbing fits. I felt silly and naive, totally unprepared for the weight of real grief.

In Paris, I eventually abandoned the rituals. And by Honduras, I’d begun to read the journal like the I Ching—pose a question and flip to a random page for the answer. My questions varied from day to day. Where should I go next? Is it time to give up on my dreams? Why did you have to die?

I reached down and untied the roller skates. I picked up the journal and headed out to the balcony. “Isn’t Gmail more practical?” I’d chided Mina, but she wanted something tangible, something that “would last.” I touched the antiqued cover and had a vision of growing old with that journal, my arthritic hands resting atop the thinning pages. It gave me the chills. One deep breath and I placed my right hand flat like a plaintiff, squeezed shut my eyes, and added my voice to the din of Tegucigalpa:

“Mina, should I really marry Remy?”

When my thumb settled on a page, I opened my eyes.

October 17

Mina

Love is not inevitable, Samantha, like you seem to believe. It is a gift. It is the thing that wraps you up like a plush bathrobe to insulate you against cold, illness, and all of life’s indecencies. It is the thing that makes you less naked in the mirror of reality. It blankets you. It warms you. It saves you. No, that last part is a lie. It doesn’t save you. My father loved my mother from birth and she died anyway. And now me…

Today, I planned to write about how grateful I am for the love you three have drenched me in. But I confess I am feeling sorry for myself instead.

And I am preoccupied with the question: Does love last?

Otherwise, how else would you describe what is left when a person dies and leaves you behind? Look at my father. I know you see him as cold and brittle, but that’s because he hides inside himself, clinging to the embers of my mother’s love.

He came into my room last night and fed me crumbs about her, tiny things really, but details I’d been begging for my whole life—how she wore her hair, how she smelled, how she laughed. And when he went off to bed, I felt a warm buzzing cloud hanging in the room, just the same as when you and I laugh hysterically and then fall silent. It’s love that hangs in the air, lingers in the world around us. Love is what lasts.

But, maybe…

Maybe love is less of a gift and more of a distraction from an ugly truth: in the end we die alone. That is the truth, isn’t it?

And it is the living’s love for the dead that lingers, not the other way around.

So, when I die, I’m taking nothing with me, and leaving nothing behind.

Our “research” is going nowhere, right? It’s all websites for crazies and desperate rich widows. I’m one of them, aren’t I? Desperate to believe that somehow I can still enter