a valley

The first time I listened to the supernatural podcast, N and H and I were driving home from a hike in Tom Sauk mountain. I was in the backseat with the dog. It was raining lightly, or cloudy, and we had just been up on the rocks, seen a waterfall. The world felt high up and separate, trapped in a wet net of fog. The dog started to gag in the backseat, and I grabbed her empty water bowl from the floorboard and followed her moving snout around with it. She thrashed and I jerked with her, catching the vomit in the tupperware perfectly. It was warm, cross-hatched with pieces of grass and leaves, mucus gelled. I didn’t look for too long. 

The trail was dappled with puddles and mud from the week’s rain, and my baby blue reeboks were caked in dark earth, chocolate dipped. My mom had bought them for me in 2018 right before I moved away. It’s been 6 years of wearing them, and the mud dried around the leather, dying them, and later I placed them by the chocolate brown st. louis city dumpster and hoped someone else would want them. 

N was home from Florida the second time around, which means their mom had passed. It was early May. N wanted to hike, so we did. We missed the turn to the mountain on the way there and had to drive an extra 20 or 30 minutes around its massiveness to find the entrance to the park. To leave the mountain was simpler – we passed the same signs advertising the trail. The green hills in missouri are covered in trees, maybe that’s obvious, and I was watching them from the window while the podcast started to play over the car speakers. 

The podcast episode was about a man who was very sick, got sicker and sicker, until he needed a serious surgery with risks. He had a bad feeling about going into the surgery room, and during the procedure he lost blood and consciousness, went into a coma. This reminds me of when I was reading my notebook tonight, and read the scene of me walking home from the blue line in chicago in the late summer afternoon when I talked to my dad on the phone before his surgery. I was wishing him a happy early birthday. I walked past a hospital with his voice in my ear. I have written about this memory many times. On the phone, he said he didn’t want to have surgery, that his shoulder was starting to feel better. In my notebook, I had written that the sidewalk was chalky and light, too pastel for how the memory feels now; a darkness, or a spiral into the unknowable. In another essay, I wrote: this memory makes me suffer. 

The man in the podcast left his body during the surgery malfunction. He entered a field with lots of tents and groups of people camping. He was in a valley between two mountains. I looked at my real scenery, my life, and saw a valley with two mountains out the car window, layering over the audio of the stranger’s voice. I imagined people in the field fuzzing past, sitting in the sauna of the drizzly late afternoon. The man explained how in the space, he was with a familiar woman and two children who he had never met before, and he began to tell them the story of his whole life, as if coming back from a long trip. Right when he got to explaining his first memory, of walking towards his mom on a playground bridge at a park, he woke up in the hospital. 

This reminds of me of when I had to help D’s grandpa edit a poem. He was taking a creative writing class in his old age, a new found hobby, and he emailed me his writing for more guidance. The poem was about being a kid at Christmas, eating Christmas dinner with a big happy family, and then waking up as an old man in a hospital deathbed, where a “fog” envelopes him, sending him up to a heaven place with the “Lord’s love.” All his dead family members greet him. I gave D’s grandpa some advice about adding more sensory details. 

There is something sincere about the desire to imagine a dream of wholeness before the reality of endings. I remember thinking, as I wrote comments on his google doc, that all old people (all people?) must want to write about this, practicing their own deaths, to become comfortable with the procedure, and to view the possibility of the moment before death as ok and meaningful, not something to be scared of. Which was exactly what N found comforting about the podcast. They wanted to know their mom could have gone somewhere peaceful, even if just for a moment in the in-between space before total nothing. As the podcast ended, I thought about how people need to enter spaces before death to explain what their life was, which is also writing and making art. The reeboks shoes sat by the dumpster, not totally inside of it, maybe about to go somewhere, before.