Death on a Perfect Day

Last Saturday, on an otherwise perfect day, someone’s sister died. The sun and the clouds, puffed up and proud of themselves for existing, were sharing the sky harmoniously. It was somewhere right around 72°, alternating between one degree to hot in the sun and one degree too cool in the shade. I was wearing shorts. Shorts! This was the rarest kind of Spring day, and one that insists, demands, decrees that you get your ass outside right now.

Who was I to refuse? Out I went. I live by the river, so for me outside is that little sliver of open greenish space hugging the western edge of Manhattan. It was swarming with people, all talking about how many people there were: “Where do all these people disappear to in the winter?!” We were inside one of those drone photos of the beach, teaming with people that look like colorfully outfitted ants. There’s no beach on the Hudson (yet), but the colorfully outfitted city ants made it work. It would have been rude not to on a day like this day.

After I laid out my blanket—yes, the kind that has the nylon bottom, so I don’t get wet—a couple sat down behind me and the man asked the woman whether she minded him taking off his top. He didn’t want a t-shirt tan. He asked so formally, I realized it must be a first date, or at least a very early one. He was quite pale, and I wasn’t sure this particular form of peacocking would be effective. I amused myself thinking about what might be going through the woman’s head.

There was another group of girls a little ways off. Four of them, my age or maybe younger. I noticed because they were playing Settlers of Catan, and that characteristic red box caught my eye. It’s not my favorite game. In fact, I don’t care for it, but as a lover of games, seeing it made me wish I had brought a deck of cards. I was alone though, and solitaire has no charm for me either. I had my book—incongruously serious for the atmosphere, but very good.

I ate goldfish, and read, heating up like a little stone in the sun, waiting for my lover to arrive. It’s quite nice to have a lover on a perfect spring Saturday. He came, and we decided to move a little, into the partial shade—like I said, one degree too hot in the sun, and it was starting to set right on top of us. Now we were closer to the girls playing Catan, and further from the topless man. Also closer to a Great Dane named Wonder, who at first I thought was a Weimaraner because of her color. Almost immediately, one of the Catan girls got a phone call and was suddenly standing in the bushes. And then was suddenly howling.

I don’t remember the initial exclamations, just distress. I looked back, and her friends were all standing up, frozen in a little circle looking at her, watching her begin to cry. It was then that she took two steps toward them, one palm open in what looked like uncertainty, and said, “my sister died.” If a word as commonplace as “said” can really be used to describe that process. Sending those words from your brain, where they’re just beginning to burrow in, through countless little synapses, to your vocal cords, and out through your mouth—out into the world. Then she was on the ground sobbing.

She doesn’t understand. Wasn’t she fine when she went to sleep last night? She doesn’t understand. No, no, no, no. She can’t live. She can’t live. She’s going to throw up. She doesn’t understand. What do you mean? Are you at the clinic? She can’t live. But she hasn’t seen her in such a long time. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand.

All around there was a nervous shifting of eyes, heads swiveling quickly. Look back there, but don’t be too obvious. Do we all need to get up? Do we all need to not move at all? It was like a scene in a superhero movie where time freezes and everyone is still. Except in this scene, two little girls are flitting through the blanket islands picking bluebells for flower crowns. And Wonder, the Great Dane, is rolling around in the grass the way dogs do when all is right in the world—belly up. And in a superhero movie, the sound would stop too, but the sound didn’t stop.

So we listened. I listened, and I thought all the thoughts that someone privileged to be largely unacquainted with grief should think. I am so lucky. I love my sisters. Ten minutes ago, I was annoyed that my lover (alive) was late. How irrelevant. It’s so crazy that a phone can ring, and it can be that news. On any given Saturday, someone’s sister might die. On every given Saturday and every other day of the week too. It’s so easy to forget that death is all around us. Life is so fragile.

Simultaneously, on a more physiological level, I entered a state of extreme discomfort. That may seem like a self-centered thing to say in the middle of a story about a girl with a dead sister, but it’s true. My body protested, and some unique version of the fight or flight response was engaged. I needed this girl to take her pain, her sister-death, far away from me. I didn’t want to hear her agony, and I didn’t want to think her thoughts. Strangely, I also felt the urgent need to sit as still as I could and hear her expel her confusion and sorrow. It was of the utmost importance that I was there to bear witness to her budding grief.

I’ve been listening to a new podcast recently, or at least it’s new to me. Each twenty minute episode is about a different species of animal. So far, I’ve learned that garter snakes move their tail tips like head tips when they’re being attacked to confuse their predator. Pandas have the digestive tract of a carnivore but choose to eat bamboo anyway. Camels don’t store water in their humps, they store fat. Some rabbits can swim, monarch butterflies have generational GPS, and tigers kill by stabbing their canines through the top of their prey’s skull.

The show is genuinely educational, but it’s also low-impact and extremely soothing. When I listen, I feel like one of the little children the host sometimes addresses before he talks about mating, to make sure that they fast forward if their parents don’t want them to listen. In my heart, I am one of those children. And just like them, I’m soaking up information like a sponge—good information that doesn’t make me feel like everything is going terribly wrong, which is a rarity and a gift at our current information buffet. Like an omelet bar.

Each episode also wraps up with a little section designed to remind us that we are also animals. Just one species in the vast tree of species, with all kinds of fascinating and funny, important and useless traits, picked up along the way. It has reframed the way I look at the world. Can couples flirting at the bar…smell each other? Dogs and humans love each other so much because we are in a symbiotic relationship in the literal scientific sense. I see little kids throwing tantrums on the sidewalk, and I think about how preposterously beautiful it is that we raise our young. Many species don’t. Beavers do, but that’s besides the point.

I felt like an animal on Saturday. I wanted to run away, or I wanted this wailing girl to run away. I felt the natural imperative to remove myself from danger (discomfort). If not that, then I could hope that the danger would conveniently move itself away from me without requiring action on my part. Could I make a lucky escape from the contagion of badness that, by no fault of her own, was emanating from this poor girl receiving probably the worst news of her life? It didn’t seem like I could, and that made me feel very uneasy. Animal.

However, I was also gripped by a more admirable feeling, though I know it’s not right to assign moral value to these things. I felt the need to stay, and for this girl to stay, and to not go away from all these people who could not help her but could at least hear her. It was a moment of profound human connection. I was flooded with emotion—real emotion, about a girl who was dead and a girl who had to keep living, and I didn’t even know their names. I felt my stomach drop, and I cried, which admittedly, doesn’t take much, but still. I was surprised by the intensity of my feelings.

In some small way I experienced a sliver of what she was experiencing, all because I was close enough for her sound waves to hit my ears. The fact that it was a total coincidence of location (humans have relatively weak hearing when compared to most other species) made it even more powerful. Just like a perfect spring day, such an extreme revelation of the usually invisible emotional threads that connect us is a rare thing. Now, a week later, I still can’t stop thinking about it. More than that, I can’t stop talking about it. I keep blurting it out, letting people in on this horrible little story. I don’t know why—I’m not trying to cast a morbid shadow, but I can’t help it. And now, here I am writing about it. Why?

Well, it was awful, but it was also beautiful, which is maybe messed up to say. I recognize that I’m in the privileged position to view all of this through a long distance lens. I recognize that someone is dead, so I hope this doesn’t sound callous, but I feel grateful for this encounter. I’m grateful for this reminder of my ability to somehow feel what other people feel, even when those people are perfect strangers. It’s a miracle, but it’s also at least generally explainable. Humans are uniquely capable of making these types of connections because the ability to make them has helped us to survive. Empathy is an evolutionary trait.

I guess I’m running around telling people this story, telling you this story, is because I want us all to remember that we have this power. I’m saying listen to this story—it’s horrible, and sad, and I feel pain for this stranger whose sister is dead. Don’t you also feel pain for her? You weren’t even there! But you can feel it a little bit too. The pain. Isn’t that spectacular!? Someone doesn’t have to die for us to remember that we all occupy our own little slots in the grand web of human interconnectedness. It is a gift to feel the tug of someone pulling on the web from their perch, and it is a gift to know that when you tug, someone will be there to feel it too.

So, even though that Saturday in May will likely always be pure horror for our unnamed girl, and she’ll never read this or know that any of us exist, at least now I’m not the only one thinking about her. You are all thinking about her too, and that’s beautiful. We hope she’s okay.