Window, Ocean, Song--How Mortality Arrived The Other Day

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I don’t know if you’ll be with your husband and son at a pool hall, working on your cartoons while the other two play eight-ball, when the texts and calls come in to say your father-in-law has died on the other side of the country — but I was.

I often accompany my two pool fans to their multi-hour activity so that I can be near them while I draw, instead of at home in the much-too-quiet. The other day was no different.

When we got there, the pool players set up shop while I went to the windows along the back wall. We had the entire pool hall — with music and wait staff scrolling their phones — all to ourselves.

I sat down on a stool in front of the windows and peered out. I was three stories high, looking out onto a self-contained chunk of the world. Below me was a big parking lot that served a retail plenitude. There was a grocery store, Starbucks, restaurants, and rows and nooks of shops — furniture, pet, liquor, barber, and second-hand. Beyond that, comprising the horizon, were high-rise commercial and residential buildings. I live in a federal contractor haven — lots of big companies with big offices, and the accompanying apartments that lend a housing hand.

I looked down and spied. A young girl in a pink tulle skirt followed her mother into the grocery store — the mother’s eyes pinned forward; the child’s eyes pinned to the man sitting atop a milk crate asking for money. In the center of the lot, a middle-aged, muscular fellow stood on his only leg and hoisted his wheelchair up into the back of his jeep, then hopped to the driver’s door, opened it, tilted in, and drove away. This was the moment I learned you can drive with one leg. There are endless things to know.

I became overtaken by a sense of the life cycle, the comings and goings of people, the small daily acts. This chunk of the world felt whole to me as I watched it do its thing. I walked back to my laptop and commenced drawing wolverines for the first time, which meant repetitious erasing.

The three of us settled into our usual rhythm — those two hitting a ball into other balls, me with my head in a screen. Then the calls came, which at first we didn’t hear over the toe-tapping hip-hop on the speaker system.

Texts blipped in succession, rolling down the phone screens. It was my husband’s family. I said, “This seems urgent. You should call them.” He went to the elevator landing where it was quieter. I wiggled off my chair and followed. When I got to where he was, he was shouting in disbelief into the phone, “Dad’s dead?!”

And so, the rest of the day began.

My father-in-law had died in his sleep when no one expected it, despite his deteriorating health. His home care aid found him quiet as a stone in the morning.

We packed up our stuff and left. The drive home was full of phone calls. My husband is the only one of his family not living in northern California. Thoughts raced, questions tumbled, and conversations on speakerphone came and went. Processing the immediate future dominated the hours that followed. Then the night came, and my son and I asked my husband what would help. He answered, “You want to learn how to play Skat?”

Skat is a complicated card game that a tired and distracted mind like mine would find challenging. But I’d have done whatever my husband asked of me, and you would have, too. The three of us sat around our sectional couch and learned to play.

I tried to get a feel for the vibe my husband was putting out. He’s a very smart person who feeds off of mental challenges, puzzles, and problem-solving, so playing cards when his dad had just died was a kindness he was giving to himself, and perhaps even a walk down memory lane of the times he’d played cards with his father.

My husband started humming a tune from somewhere in his brain’s jungle of information. It was a Jimmy Buffett song, and I started to sing along.

“You want me to play that song on Spotify?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Suddenly, Mr. Buffett’s songs were flowing over our card game like the warm Caribbean Ocean. It turns out, Jimmy Buffett died mere hours before my father-in-law did. No doubt, there was lots of Jimmy Buffett playing on Spotify that night.

It was quite the party — Jimmy, my father-in-law, my husband and son and I, and scads of strangers all singing, “Mother, mother ocean, I have heard you call. Wanted to sail upon your waters since I was three feet tall.”

We played cards and listened to tropical tunes into the night. My mind flickered back to the scene I’d watched out the pool hall windows earlier in the day.

Time can be seen on the face of our day-to-day, in the cycles of our regular activity — but who sees this time? We’re like any other animal. We do things to stay alive, then forget we’re alive much of the time. Then when a loved one, in the span of a single breath, leaves us, we notice time come crashing down like a wave. We notice its fast rush across the sand, up to our feet as we stand there looking out at an immense sea of mortality. “Wow,” we say, “I never noticed the water.”

Interestingly, none of what I saw out those third-story windows included someone’s last breath. My mind didn’t even imagine it. But that all changed within minutes when the wave of mortality washed up on shore, and I bent down in resignation to touch it.

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