Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

As I said, the shrink sedated her. She slept for 36 hours and seemed much better. A postmortem honeymoon period ensued. For a week or so, we couldn’t stop talking, but in a good way. Real chatterboxes. A freaky, hypomanic phase, like being back in college taking speed to cram for exams. O, we had mourning sickness (with a “u”) for sure! We vomited, metaphorically and not, and when that was done, like after peyote — ever eat peyote? — that’s when the magic began. Being in our bodies, being in the world, was some kind of insane kick. It was almost like we were discovering them for the first time, no, maybe more like interlopers, those old Hollywood movies where angels come to Earth and are amazed to have bodies again. Or with psilocybin, when you get that insight that the mushroom has taken you so it can see the world through human eyes… It was funny. Even taking shits had us in stitches! It was a way of being with Ryder too, as if the three of us were already in the bodiless regions and Kelly and I just came down temporarily, to revisit what a hoot and a comedy — what a divine travesty it was to have a body, we were on spring break but would return to our boy after a long carnal weekend. Good times! I think we had entered this weird labile stage of loss where everything was so surreal it felt antic: we had crossword puzzle showdowns, we painted little masterpieces, we polished silver crap we didn’t even know we had, cooked dinner at 4 a.m. in formal dress… told forgotten, complicated jokes and recited the first and last names of ancient homeroom geeks. We tried on distractions, competitive channel-surfed with dueling remotes, indulged in klieg-lit nighttime gardening, built ingenious Rube Goldberg devices. It felt zany and erotic —overheated teenagers in a seizure of shoplifting. In fact, it got erotic. We fucked again, just once. And that was… sad. For a while anyway and then it got funny again. Really funny. We were in a frenzy that we had no desire to name or explain. Couldn’t explain. Just we happy two. And we had these — we experienced these moments of supreme, supernatural, grief-free giddiness! It was so awesome. In those fucked-up days, without knowing, my wife and I probably got pretty close to getting it — the formless form/gateless gate scam, the whole bullshitless bullshit , “non-returning” Pure Abode — dwelling anagami rap—’cause something way outside of ourselves was forcing our hand. Talk about your unsolicited crash course in enlightenment! (And boy, did we crash. But that wasn’t till a week later.) We got out there , like those airplanes that almost make it to space. Where the pilot sees the stars and the blackness just beyond the atmosphere?

The Theory of Relativity proved you would come back younger from a voyage to the stars, right? I think even when you come back from New York on JetBlue, you’re technically younger. Infinitesimally so — but hell, I’ll take it. Have to. It’s like that old line about pregnancy — you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either come back younger or you don’t. So we went through this phase, got our degrees in the jitterbug-ology of Death. We blew through verbiage, waving words like the man who waved his whisk before God, as the Sufi wiseguy once said. Danced our jive asses off to Motown… how it can dance! Had Ryder dancing with us too, we each held one of his little absent hands though that was tough because, see, the three of us actually used to do that, had our sweaty, popcorn’d Soul Train — American Bandstand Saturday nights. But Kelly and me danced through it, pretended Ryder was there, full-on boogie’d with and acknowledged him. I was the coach, Ryder the quarterback, and Kelly the head cheerleader for Team Zombie. O yes — the walking and dancing dead.

Dead man meditating…

Then one day it was over. Guess you had to have been there. You know, I learned a lot from Kelly. She was magnificent. I don’t think that’s been adequately conveyed in the few hours we’ve spent. Kelly was simply magnificent.

About a week after Ryder died, I spoke to a friend who lost his kid two decades back. He said the hard part came after the wake, when friends stopped bringing food and folks stopped calling, to give you your space. Or because they didn’t know what to say or whatever. “These are the good times,” he said. “Savor it.”

The irony is that the death of our son was his teachable moment to her . But I think she’s going to have to wait a long time to learn its lesson. Hopefully, she’ll get it, at the TM of her own death: the lesson of Impermanence.

There’s a marvelous little story that Sir Richard Burton recounts in his Anatomy of Melancholy. That book didn’t leave my side for three years after we lost our son.

A young man, disconsolate over his debts, saw no way out. He went into an abandoned shack to hang himself. He’d already tied the rope on a rafter when something caught his eye. He went over to a caved-in closet to investigate and found a trove of gold coins. It was meant to be hidden but a rotting beam had broken under its weight. He couldn’t believe his reversal of fortune. He crept away with the treasure chest under his arm. A while later, another young man entered the shack. When he saw that the treasure that he’d hidden was gone, he used the rope left behind to hang himself. Isn’t that lovely? Like something from Boccaccio.

I hope you don’t think it too strange, my telling that. I’ll tell you why I did. Have you ever had a bad breakup? Or unrequited love? And when it’s over, you keep thinking you see their car? You see it everywhere: on the freeway, in parking lots, in front of you, behind. You see it in your dreams… I did that for years once. I even knew it wasn’t his car anymore, someone told me he’d bought a new one but there I was, trapped in time, still on the lookout for a yellow Corolla with a dent on the passenger door. Couldn’t help myself. It’s like that for me and hangings now. Whenever I read about one in the paper… I’ve got a book of clippings. Maybe that’s carrying it too far. I don’t do the tarot anymore. For some reason, I shy away from the Hanged Man, though I’m a real fan of upside-down crucifixions. St. Peter and all. Go figure.

What can I say? There’s perverse comfort in it. I don’t know the psychology. There’s a hidden fraternity, you’d be surprised, of people whose loved ones hanged themselves. And folks like me, who found them. Thank God for the Internet.

He laughed, smiled to himself, then placed his hands together in his lap and closed his eyes like a guru who was done for the day. I took the liberty of boiling water for tea but in a few minutes he broke free of his thoughts and leapt beside me. “No no, don’t fuss with that. You’ve listened so patiently that a parting cup of tea is the least I could do.” We drank in relative silence, with Charley resuming the lotus position. A pleasant smile of what I took for catharsis suffused his features. He asked me a few questions about where I was going next, when I thought the anthology would be published, and so forth.

I was in my car and halfway down the winding hill when he appeared, out of breath. He looked not so much anguished as startled. I asked what was wrong. He said he’d left something out—“a rather crucial last piece of business. I’d kick myself if I never told you, whether you decide to include it or not.” I told him I would turn around but he said the afternoon’s talk had exhausted him. He apologized again for any inconvenience, offering two choices: tomorrow — here at lunchtime — or later on at 2 a.m. when the baths at Esalen open. It appealed to me to end our encounter at the place it had begun.