These Things I Used to Own (Excerpt)
Elizabeth T. Anderson
Sunday's gloomy, my hours are slumberless
Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless.
Little white flowers will never awaken you,
not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you.
The angels have no thoughts of ever returning you.
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?
I keep lifting the needle at this point in the song and starting the record over. I just can't go on. I can't stand to hear that awful tug in Lady Day's voice when she cries that she and her heart have decided to end it all. Better, I think, to leave it as a question - would they be angry? Will they be? Probably not. I hope. Aren't angels supposed to be sympathetic? It depends which angels, whose angels, maybe.
But that doesn't matter. This is my song, my record. I can start and stop it as often as I like. As often as I need. And I do need this song, and this book beside me on the floor; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is my book. These things that are mind, books and records and a few pieces of furniture, will not be mind much longer. Ha! What an estate sale this will be! Thirty-two LPs, seventeen religious books, and a dusty table. What they won't know is that these books have saved my soul, the music has carried me through, and the coffee table - my parents bought that in Canada for their first house. That's not enough for an estate sale, I know. Nope - my landlady will take these things I used to own down to the Sallies. Twenty-fice cents apiece for the records, fifteen for the books, maybe seven dollars for the coffee table. My life's worth: $17.55. Less than an Andrew Jackson for all I've gathered around me. Then you subtract the expense of even the simplest burial, and I'm in post-mortem debt up to my rotting eyeballs.
But here's what I really want to say: The only thing we ever own is love. The people we love, even after they're gone, are still ours. And I'm not talking about some reserved-for-Christian-brethern in the sweet by-and-bye reunion bullshit. No. But once love finds its place between two people, it never ceases to exist. Like matter and energy, love is constant, if not unchanging. And I do love. I love them all. Some gone for twenty-five years or more, and I still love them. Isn't that remarkable?
I don't know who's going to read this in the end. Landlady? Police? It really doesn't matter. When I'm gone, when my conciousness ceases to exist, when my memories cease to exist, my dead friends must not die again with me. And I know that someone will have to read this letter as a matter of course. Whoever you are, you will carry in your mind the names and circumstances of the people who went before me. And there is something I can leave behind, something you can't stuff into a hefty bag and leave by the back door of a second hand store.
Nelson was my brother. He was seven years older, and he was seventeen when he died. My parents had taken me to Regina to visit my father's sister, who was living with an older man who beat her when he drank. They lived in a double-wide trailer and I hated it there. Mom and dad slept on a pull-out sofa and I slept on the floor beside them, resting uncomfortably on an air mattress we kept in the trunk of the Dodge for those spontaneous camping trips we never took. The phone rang early, maybe around six-thirty that evening. Nelson was required to call us every night while we were away. They put me on the line with him -- I said that I loved him and that I was having fun, which of course I was not. The next time the phone rang it was 4:39 in the morning. My aunt started crying and gave the phone to my mother, who also started crying and handed the phone to my father.
He said, "Nelson's been killed." I'm still annoyed by those words. "Nelson's been killed," made it sound like he was murdered. In fact, he wasn't killed at all. He just died. Just drank too much, drove too fast on a dirt road, and died.
We were in the Dodge, heading home, within fifteen minutes. I had to leave the air mattress on the floor - no time to let it deflate. I was mad. Where would I sleep the next time we went camping?
I didn't see my brother again until the funeral. He was lying in a walnut box, his legs encased, his head resting on a white satin pillow. He was wearing a tie. Not one of my father's nice silk ties, but one of those terry-cloth textured things that teenage boys keep in their closets for school pictures and nursing home visits. I remember, I asked my Mom why the hell Nelson was wearing a tie. A guy like my brother would not want to spend eternity in a fucking tie. I don't think I swore like that, but that's the way I remember the feeling.
The funeral home director, a guy who climbed up on the roof of the home every Halloween and chucked full-sized candy bars at kids on the street, said we had to put Nelson in a tie, my mother told me. To hide his swollen neck. They swell when they break. That, I could understand. I could not, however, accept the digital watch beeping on his wrist. He had a tan line, my mother said, from wearing that watch all the time. But, I should have argued, it was an insult to the very nature of death to bury someone with a watch on. Death puts people beynod the reach of time. Nelson didn't need a watch anymore. The tie and the watch told me that the way his corpse looked for a forty-minute funeral was more important than his comfort for eternity.
But I'm writing too much about Nelson's death. It's really his life that's important, right? The love. That's what I said, anyway. The problem is, I don't remember that much about him. I remember I had an older brother, then all of a sudden I didn't. In a strange way, it seems his death had a greater impact on me than did his life. I hope that isn't true.
What I do remember of Nelson is this: He always smelled liked under the hood of a car. That's not such a good memory, though, because it was that same car that took him off the road and threw him fifty feet accross the riverbank.
Once, he took me for a ride around the yard on his Yamaha and I screamed because he was going too fast. Another time, I fell from the top of the swingset and he carried me inside. Each time I would catch him smoking, he would offer me a stuffed animal to keep quiet. I would tell our parents anyway, but he never took back the animals. That's about it, I guess. I don't know the order of these events. It's funny, isn't it, how a lifetime can be distilled into these fluid fragments of scenes?