chronesthesia: the brain’s ability to maintain simultaneous awareness of past, present, and future and to travel back and forth between them
I sit in a rental car in an office parking lot in Atlanta watching for a blue Pathfinder, the car my former therapist, Randy, drives. I glance at my watch. He’s late. It’s 10:15 a.m., Friday, May 13, 2005. I stopped seeing him regularly when I moved to Michigan several years ago. Maybe he drives another car now. I decide to wait in the lobby. I present myself to the receptionist who looks aghast, telling me Randy died two days ago. Heart attack. She wasn’t expecting me since I’m no longer a regular client. She’s so sorry.
She urges me into his private office to be alone, take my time.
I slump on the familiar blue couch, bereft.
He died here in his office Wednesday afternoon. It’s not clear to me whether the ambulance arrived first or not.
I must morph three time frames together: the “me” who I was/am when I live(d) in Georgia, when I was/am still his regular patient; the “me” who I was/am sitting on the couch two days after his death; and the “I” who I am now, at 2:34 p.m., May 13, 2015, in my home in Michigan. My responsibility here, as I discover how to survive death, is to merge selves and time frames into one present continuous moment. I must re-create the past as if it’s the present: all eras coalescing into now. I refuse to consider the death of any given day. I carry each day forward with me.
In his office, after learning of his death, I spy his eyeglasses and legal pad, a green ballpoint pen clipped to it. Coffee dregs remain in a Styrofoam cup, his Nike tennis shoes on the floor—for all time.
I place his glasses in my purse. A few minutes later I talk to a friend on my cell phone who convinces me I’m not thinking clearly. I shouldn’t, in effect, steal Randy’s glasses. His family might want them.
I return them to the cushion. I also decide against taking his Nikes. I unclip the plastic ballpoint pen from the pad of paper claiming it instead. On it is printed, will always be printed: American Homecare Supply, Georgia.
A secret message?
What I should not do, but do anyway, is glance at his legal pad to glean the last words he wrote. But his familiar handwriting is a jumble of names and phone numbers. They could be plumbers, electricians. Just ordinary notations of a seemingly ordinary day.
A placard hanging on the wall reads: “Barbie Is Anorexic.” This is new, the first time I see it. I consider the clients he leaves behind.
On the end table is a seashell, my own pearl-pink West Indian conch, a going-away present I gave to him when I moved to Michigan. I put it in my bag as well.
I imagine Randy, a bachelor, leaving his condominium for work Wednesday morning. Dishes remain unwashed in his sink. Damp towels in his bathroom.
His dog Mocha awaited his return . . . still awaits his return.
I was so certain—am so certain—of his arrival this Friday morning, I review, while waiting in the car in the parking lot, the words I wanted—want—to tell him. That secret I’ve never told anyone: that night in New Jersey, the blood, the pink-tiled bathroom. Now, sitting on Randy’s blue couch, I believe(d) I’ll (I’d) never tell anyone. If not Randy . . . Even though my therapy with Randy had formally ended, I plan(ned) to tell him today. I was/am finally ready.
The air-conditioning in his office is, as always, too cold. It always will be too cold. As if he’ll always be here waiting for me to ask him to adjust the AC forevermore.
“For us convinced physicists, the past, present and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.” Albert Einstein
I leave the rented car in the parking lot and aimlessly wander sidewalks past shops and cafés. The area is familiar: air scented by azaleas, pine straw, and the deepening humidity of a Southern spring. Except, on the other hand, nothing seems familiar. I’ve been gone from Georgia for years. I walk neighborhoods through a glare of heat. Sweat beads the nape of my neck beneath my long hair. I wander block after block looking for something. As if I’ll find a “thing,” an “essence” of Randy, here or here or here.
I pass a public library: newspapers, obituaries, funeral announcements. I enter and ask a librarian for copies of The Atlanta-Journal Constitution for the past few days.
Randy Groskind, 53, of Smyrna, died May 11, 2005. Mr. Groskind . . . was a therapist for several years with Metro Atlanta Psychological Services. . . . Graveside services will be Sunday, May 15, 2005 at 11:30 AM at Arlington Memorial Park. . . .
I’ve brought no appropriate clothes for a funeral. I enter a boutique and am dazed by colorful merchandise, the scent of new clothes more alive than I myself feel. Red, lavender, yellow blouses, skirts, dresses. Nothing suitable. A clerk asks if she can help. I shake my head. I can’t speak, as if weeds clog my throat.
My skin: frozen in his office, sweaty out on the street, frozen in the air-conditioned library and boutique. Heat. Cold. Heat. Cold. It hardly matters. Both are numbing.
I stumble outside. Afternoon deepens. Sun sears oxygen, strands of breath, as if I no longer remember how to inhale.
On Sunday I stand graveside at Arlington Memorial Park surrounded by Randy’s family, friends, coworkers. Heat. Cold. No breeze ripples the cemetery as if stilled by acres of dead bodies. Every rib in my chest feels frozen. A rabbi prays, words indistinguishable whether he speaks Hebrew or English. I wear a tan dress I bought in another shop. I never wear it again. For years it remains in my closet on a hanger—limp, formless—before I donate it to the Salvation Army.
The short ceremony ends. I am handed a shovel. I scoop bits of red clay onto Randy’s coffin. I don’t hear the thud against wood.
Driving away from the cemetery, I set Randy’s pen on the seat beside me. I worry I might leave behind the Homecare, the soul-care he supplied me. How does the present-me tell the present-then me not to worry? Do you join the dead? Resurrect them? Re-create them through sound, memory, verb tense into the present?
James Baldwin says, for the “dead their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
While still in Michigan, before flying to Georgia, I receive an email from Randy on Wednesday afternoon only a couple of hours before he dies. I emailed him first, telling him I look forward to seeing him on Friday, but am nervous, too. I haven’t seen him in a long time.
He writes, “I’m still here. Everything will be fine.”
Night floats down onto the Atlanta airport. The red and white lights on planes seem bright, harsh. My image reflected in the window grays to translucence, as if I enter the glass, where I won’t feel the absence of his presence. Or as if I am the ghost, not he.
Maybe I should have taken his eyeglasses. He is the first person to understand me, as if, with his glasses in my possession, he will see me forever.
I save his email: I’m still here. Everything will be fine. Years later everything is—and everything isn’t.
I want to respond.
I do.
This is it.