KATHERINE AND FRANCINE FLEW to San Francisco on Halloween in the midst of a series of Pacific cold fronts that were battering the city with rainstorm after rainstorm. From the airport, they took a taxi to the hospital. Kevin no longer needed oxygen, but a second opportunistic infection had been diagnosed. Mycobacteria had spread throughout his body, causing persistent fevers and more weight loss.
Francine struggled for three long days at maintaining her composure before finally succumbing to grief. Witnessing her son’s physical disintegration was intolerable. She returned to Boston alone.
As soon as he was in his apartment, Kevin was desperate to get outside and see the greening world. Once the rain let up, he made Katherine take him to Tilden Park, high above the Berkeley campus. She pushed him in a wheelchair to a point where they could view Mount Tamalpais to the west and Mount Diablo to the east.
“This is the place! According to Marco…”
He couldn’t remember why it had been so important to come here.
“I think local Indians believed this place was… Didn’t I already tell you about it?”
“You said something about Indians. I forgot the details.”
Kevin looked at the jade-tinged Contra Costa hills rolling east to the horizon. He concentrated. He was sure he had been at this very spot with Marco. It wasn’t an invented memory. But all he could recall now was their camping trip in the Mojave Desert.
He was buffeted by waves of anger and self-pity which vanished as quickly as they had arrived. Dust devils, he thought. He fixed his attention on Katherine.
“You’re buff, Sis. That was a mile and a half uphill.”
Katherine squatted down to see the panorama from his eye level.
“Guess what?” he said. “I’ve discovered the great irony of facing death.”
“Which is?”
“Epiphanies bloom, right as time and energy are fading. It’s like Dad’s favorite cliché, ‘youth is wasted on the young.’ Well, death is wasted on the dying.”
She was baffled.
“I mean there’s this emotional intelligence that comes with accepting the end. Lots of people have written about it. Anyway, the irony is that it’s wasted on me. The closer I get to the end and the more clearly I can see the big picture, the less I can say anything coherent about it.”
“Keep trying.”
“You really want to hear this?”
“Absolutely. What are your epiphanies?”
“You would ask that, wouldn’t you,” Kevin laughed. “All right. Here’s one. Approaching death isn’t about resolution for me. It’s about completion.”
Katherine was puzzled again.
“There goes my lucidity.”
“Don’t stop.”
“How to explain? OK. Life’s great disappointments is a good example. You’d think resolving your unmet expectations would be the key to dying peacefully, right? Not for me. I just want the kind of satisfaction a mechanic has after rebuilding an engine—knowing it all fits together—and I have it.
“And if that’s too abstract, how about this? Even though I wish I’d had children, I’m not consumed by regret. Honest, Katherine, I’m not trying to rationalize my way out of self-pity. My default mode is to wallow in it. I don’t know why, but I can’t think about the joy I missed without also imagining having a kid who becomes a hateful skinhead or suffers from some terrible disease. So when I look back now, I don’t just see the tragedy of unfulfilled fantasies. I see the pain the downside might have led to as well. So, I’m content with how things played out. It’s weird.”
Comprehension dawned on her face.
“Tell me more.”
“Hmm… See these fir needles, the birds, the early grass. Remember the twin babies we passed. Living creatures are so tenuous, aren’t they, so miraculous. It’s wonderful to be certain they’ll still be here after I’m gone.”
Katherine shuddered.
“It’s not morbid. I’ll be part of it all, even if I can’t influence what happens or be conscious of what’s going on. At least not in the way we think of being conscious, which always relates to ourselves.”
She frowned, having lost his thread.
“It’s the Zen paradox at the heart of Catholicism!” he shouted.
Kevin spread his arms like a symphony conductor beginning an overture.
“I get it,” she said and hugged him.
“Don’t bury me in a grave,” he ordered her. “The atoms that make up my body won’t disappear. I want them out in the world! I want them to be building blocks for new life.”
“Kind of like being here, even if it’s not you?”
“Oh my God, Katherine! You’re a mystic. Nobody I’ve talked to about this has understood but you.”