The Best American Essays 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Landon’s
Highway to Heaven
, about an angel who tends to the needs of dying children, I directed my fears at a more likely possibility: disease, and more specifically, Cancer.
    One time, when I was around eight, I had a violent flu, and the whole time my older sister kept giving me significant looks, like she wanted to tell me something. Though I was pretty out of it, I couldn’t help but notice, and I became convinced that this was it. Dr. Elisofon had already delivered the news to my family: I had Cancer, I was dying, my sister knew but she didn’t want to tell me, and I was just going to have to accept it.
    Eventually I discovered why she’d been giving me all those concerned stares. A couple nights before, my father, apparently, had gotten in very late. Still awake, my mother had said, “I don’t expect you to come home for me anymore. But when your son is running a 103-degree fever, you might think about leaving the bar before 2 A.M. ” To which he had responded, “If you knew where I actually was tonight, then you’d be
really
mad.” And thus it turned out that the big secret responsible for my sister’s displays of anxiety was not Cancer but Divorce. My mom had decided to wait until I was feeling better to tell me. I wasn’t dying, but my parents were splitting up. Life and death, marriage and divorce—ever since then, they’ve been all mixed up in my head, each one at times standing in for one of the others.
    The problem with marriage, we all know, is the endlessness of it. Plenty of things we do will have long-term repercussions, but in what other situation do you promise to do something for the rest of your life? Not when you choose a college. Not when you take a job. Not when you buy a house. During childhood, you pick up many habits that are probably going to be lifelong, like walking, talking, reading, and sleeping, but once you’ve got those down, you start to feel like you’re at greater liberty to decide what things you want to do and what things you want to stop doing. Especially when you’re a young adult, the apparently infinite multiplicity of possible choices—possible jobs, possible friends, possible cities, possible girlfriends or boyfriends—can sometimes fool you into thinking you have an infinite amount of time to try out everything. But once you’re married, you’ve significantly cut down the options, and it suddenly makes your life feel shorter—like now there’s a direct line between you and your own death. You’ve just gotten on a train and you won’t get off until the very end of the track. In your final moments, if you stick to your promise, you’ll still be doing the same thing you’re doing now, dealing with the same person, possibly having the same arguments. And that commonality between now and then makes that far-off time, when you’re old and sick and about to die, a little more imaginable. Which is scary.
    Apparently even my father didn’t quite escape this predicament. Although they were no longer married, my mother was still there with him in the hospital on the day he died of lung cancer at age sixty. And she even managed to subject him to one of their old familiar rituals, though he wasn’t exactly in a condition to notice. Apparently after the nurse declared him dead and shepherded me, my sister, and my two aunts out into another room, while we were all hugging and crying, my mother stayed in the room with my father’s body in order to give him a final piece of her mind. “How
could
you?” she asked him. “How could you take such bad care of yourself and abandon your two kids like this?” My parents had been divorced for over fifteen years, and my father was dead, but my mother wanted to get in one last good fight.
    I was stunned when my mother told me afterward what she had just done. You had to have some pretty strong feelings, after all, to