The Bad News

My mom and dad were gone long before they died. My mom had been unstable for years; now she was reclusive, frightened, erupting in volcanic fits of rage. Soon came a psychotic episode, a call to the police, two failed family interventions. Then one night she killed herself. I woke up that morning in May and my mother had vanished from the face of the earth.

My dad was already frail, crippled by various mental health meds and a terminal cancer nobody knew was cooking inside him. Now he was a ghost of a man, shell-shocked, going through the motions of daily life in the aftermath of his wife’s suicide. My sister bagged everything up, taking carloads of my mom’s clothes and creative clutter to the thrift store and the dump. During the chaotic last weeks of her life, my mom’s neglected aquarium of delicate glass shrimp had become a writhing mass of tiny arthropods starving and breeding and devouring each other. My dad and I poured the whole tank down the toilet and they were gone. Then my dad sold the big dream retirement house for a song, and that was gone too. The father I knew—the introverted Spanish teacher and musician—never really returned. He stayed agitated—traumatized, we thought—from finding Mom’s body. Six months after her death he was suicidal and psychotic himself. He spent a month in psychiatric wards while we tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with him. One day he told a nurse that his abdomen hurt; after a secure-transport to the hospital, the doctors found a mass growing on his pancreas. Turns out that pancreatic cancer sometimes shows up first as madness. That was December, and by February he was in the ground.

We lived in a whirlwind of loss: First the minds, then the bodies of our parents were gone, and all we had left was a bunch of furniture and boxes of stuff. Among the things I grabbed was my mom’s Kindle e-reader. It made sense that I would be the one to inherit it: We both loved books and gadgets. Her huge digital library gave me a snapshot of her eclectic intellectual life and quirky personality: books on animals (orcas, beavers, octopuses, elephants), books on medieval Europe, Chernow’s Olympian biographies of Washington and Hamilton and Grant, Star Trek novels, trashy spy thrillers, and, I noted with bitter irony, a popular health book titled How Not to Die. There was a book on schizophrenia, recently added. I wondered if my mom knew something was wrong with her brain. The last e-book she had read from was a cultural history of beekeeping in the United States.

I love books, but it would take me years to read all of that. And it also occurred to me that the books in this inherited e-reader weren’t really mine. In fact, they were never really my mom’s either. Amazon Kindle’s digital rights management, or D.R.M., meant that Mom had purchased a license to download and display these books, but they never fully became her digital property. She could not resell them, and she could not bequeath them to anyone when she died. To make matters worse, my dad’s compulsion for closure made him delete my mom’s Amazon account immediately, so even if I kept her device, it could no longer sync or update. I couldn’t add her books to my own swelling Kindle library, nor could I move the books from my old e-reader to this Cadillac Kindle my dad had bought her for a birthday or an anniversary. Or rather, I could move my books over, just as long as I wiped her Kindle clean. Then all her digital books would be gone, just like her and her tiny transparent shrimp.

I have the good fortune to teach in an English department of great talent and good humor, but some of my colleagues jokingly judge me for my guilty habit of digital reading: “It’s not a real book!” “You can’t write in it or smell it.” “What would Wendell Berry say?” In fact, I’m reminded as I write this that my Kindle e-books aren’t permanently mine either. The rich digital archive of books on Milton and Thoreau and Alcott and Twain, the public domain sci-fi, and the many books my mom herself bought me whenever they went on mega-sale at Amazon—they’ll be available to me as long as Amazon supports (or allows!) certain content, or as long as Amazon.com exists. In saecula saeculorum? Or they will endure until I eventually die, and my daughters toss my battered Kindle into the donate-or-dumpster box along with my fountain pens and—admit it!—my framed graduate diplomas. Even devoted children don’t need more clutter.

I watched my parents die tragically, and then I immediately turned forty. When you do that, you realize some uncomfortable things about how ephemeral human life and work and achievements really are. As I write this, my mom and dad are already being swiftly forgotten and erased from the world. My second daughter was born after my mom killed herself, and was only one month old when cancer killed my dad. She will have zero memories of either grandparent. Most of the award-winning books Mom wrote are out of print. Publishers and libraries want new books on more fashionable subjects. My dad’s chalk-dust-scented classroom in the public school of a Minnesota mining town has been filled by someone else. We got some kind notes from his former students and colleagues, but who is thinking of him now, more than a year later? My mom and dad’s siblings are getting old. The grandkids are very young. The nieces and nephews will be sad for a while, but after the funerals they rightly returned to their children and their careers, and whatever parents they still have. My own uncle died recently, and here I am in the office writing and prepping for class. I’m sorry he died, but life goes on.

It is a bit humbling to reflect that if I were to die, the liberal arts school where I teach would replace me within a semester. My colleagues might miss me for a year or two. But a basement-dwelling junior faculty member would quietly move into my office. And in four years, no student would have the faintest idea that there had ever been a wiry, middle-aged man with unruly Croatian hair teaching Walt Whitman. My scholarship? Even my own mother didn’t read that. My journalism for a paper with four million subscribers? Fish-wrap by Friday. My poetry? I’m laughing as I draft this sentence. Ephemeral. “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth.”

Losing my parents wasn’t just a reminder that I will die and be forgotten. It also started that very process. When they died, they took to the grave some of the stories and memories they had of my early childhood. Things that only they remembered, that I never knew or have forgotten. Things that never got written down or captured in Kodak. Those events and memories were part of my story, my life. But now they’re gone because the only two people who carried that part of my life story are gone. I’m not even dead yet, and I am already slowly being erased from the world.

What I am experiencing, then, what I see and touch and what I insist on recording is that everyone, everything on earth is ephemeral. My parents are dead; my wife and daughters and friends will all eventually die; my teaching and poems and translations will someday be forgotten or lost; even what little I have put into print will sit slowly biodegrading in the basements of a handful of libraries. This summer I went to our college library to borrow a volume of poems by the great Spanish Romantic poet José de Espronceda; when I opened it, most of the pages had never even been cut. Does anything we do last?

As a Catholic, I have consolation available to me in the faith: “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge”; “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones”; “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead.” This is what I have somewhat thoughtlessly called the “good news” all my life. But as the saying goes, the good news isn’t good unless the “bad news” is bad. When I lost my parents over that catastrophic year, I finally heard the bad news.

I am beginning to realize what a gift this was. The world, the flesh, and the devil are working very hard to conceal or blunt the bad news. Sick? There’s a pill for that. Aging body? There’s a nip-and-tuck. Lonely or worried or restless or afraid or heartbroken? There’s shopping and sex and bourbon and YouTube. Anything, anything rather than facing the bad news that I will, that I must, sicken and die and decompose and be forgotten from the face of the earth because of my inheritance of Adam’s curse, and my complicity in that same curse by my sins.

Even Christians tend to soften the bad news. When someone dies, we skip straight to the Resurrection and try to comfort the bereaved: “He’s in a better place.” “He won’t suffer anymore.” “God has him in the palm of His hand.” These seem like meaningless platitudes until you’ve heard the bad news. There is something deeply, cosmically wrong with the universe, and without the intervention of a deity, my final end is utter, total erasure and senility and death and rotting and oblivion. “Remember your last days.” writes Sirach. “Remember death and decay.” The good news will not be truly good unless the bad news is truly terrible.

I have heard the bad news now, and I can’t unhear it. But for all this, some things surprise me by enduring for a while. My sister is writing memoirs of our family life; we found a bunch of letters I wrote to my dad, carefully preserved in one of his files; I discovered a special collections archive at the University of Minnesota that has my mom’s literary papers, including drafts, notebooks, and unpublished work; I find myself making dad jokes that I got from my father. These, too, will eventually pass away, but for now I can take comfort in some of the beautiful small things that remain.

Which brings me to the day I decided to wipe my mother’s Kindle. Did I—do I still?—feel a little guilty? Yes. It took only a minute to de-authorize (a term with a certain ironic significance) the device, and all of my mom’s e-books were gone. Absolutely vanished forever. If someday I want to read them—and I kept a list—then I will have to buy them. But I signed myself in with my Amazon credentials, and in no time this deluxe e-reader was mine. Bigger screen, better battery, warm backlighting. And all my books. Or rather, all the books that I have permission to download and display, and that—when I die—cannot be transferred to my daughters and will most likely vanish into the ethernet. Maybe my colleagues are right to judge me: Maybe I should invest in more physical print books that are really and permanently mine. But what is permanence, really? I recently pulled a paperback volume of Lectura Dantis off my bookshelf. I could already see spots of mold growing on it.