I didn’t feel guilty taking this family trip the day after you passed away. I simply couldn’t cancel. I couldn’t stop living my life indefinitely during your months of hospice. All the literature emphasizes the importance of self-care when your spouse is infirmed. Good days, bad days, how should I have known when you would pass? My kids were en route with their families. I’d prepared my grad students to muddle by on their own.
“We take these family trips to assuage our guilt,” you’d say. We both knew extravagant vacations didn’t allay our sense of parenting inadequacy, but it never stopped us trying to buy new memories to erase the old. At least we understood that about each other.
You were such a burden in those final weeks. Ever since you retired, you’d been burdensome. If I’m honest, your death delivered a measure of relief. I’d already started grieving a lost version of you years ago. You never really lived up to the husband I imagined you’d become when I formulated my needs for a later-in-life second marriage. Sure, on the surface your curriculum vitae appeared a good match, your degrees and credentials, tenure in Berkeley’s economics department, even some notoriety from your published works. I did admire your work, a lone exception to my disdain for economists with their emphasis on social rather than science. You possessed a rare ability for quantitative rigor, and, rarer still, an aptitude to communicate complex, data-driven concepts in prose for the everyman. I was never threatened watching you take a selfie with one of your groupies. You possessed such charm in those days, exchanging pleasantries with these sad, desperate people who’d read your books.
I was gratified by the grandkids’ joy when they greeted me at the Eugene Airport with cheers of “Grams!” I know I told you I hated the fusty moniker. But you, being ever so clever, suggested it was the scientific weight and measure, not an abbreviation. Since then I’d warmed to it. How could I not adore their embrace and smiling faces? Of course, with their flittering attention spans, they dissipated as quickly as they swarmed, off to the next novelty observing the ballet of planes on the tarmac.
“We’re sorry about Christopher, Mom,” Seth said as he hugged me. You know my son is the affectionate one.
“It was considerate of him to pass before we took this trip,” I admitted.
“I guess that answers that question,” Sasha said. Where did my daughter get that macabre smile or her obliviousness to her husband Pierre corralling their children?
“Christopher’s passing won’t cast a pall over the trip,” Seth finished her thought.
“Heaven’s no. It’s our family time,” I said.
“Well, he was a good guy. I liked him, and I liked what he did for you.” Sasha softly rubbed my back. “I’ll miss those trips to his family house in Santa Barbara.”
“We’re going to make new happy memories,” I offered.
You would have hated this trip, Christopher, riding donkeys through the Willamette forest, snaking our way over a mountain ridge down to the McKenzie River valley when everyone would have preferred four-wheeling. I fell to the back of the group rather than suffer their complaints. One of the guides fell back with me to mind the fragile old lady. Can you believe her nerve?
“You know it’s not me you need to babysit,” I told her. “I’m more rugged than I look. I’ve summited my share of fourteeners.” I may have omitted those hikes were before my knee replacement.
“You like to hang back and watch over your brood. Am I right?”
“I like to know they’re all safe.”
“Well, you’re my brood.”
This latest generation certainly has a knack for drawing false equivalencies.
When we reached the campsite, I teased the kids with growling animal noises and we skipped stones, our pant legs rolled up, splashing in the water. After dinner we toasted s’mores which made up for their distaste for what I considered a gourmet meal of fire-roasted trout, lardons, and corn on the cob.
I could have counted on you to appreciate the meal. You did enjoy a good meal, like the evening dinners I prepared for us every night. I derived such pleasure from cooking for you. It helped me unwind. We sat across the table and discussed the events of our day. You liked to surprise me with an unusual wine pairing, like the Carménère we discovered when you accompanied me to the quantum physics conference in Berlin where I presented my paper on the nonlocality of entangled partner pairs.
Where did that Christopher disappear to? My intellectual companion. We were to retire together, travel the world, and run interference for each other at family gatherings. Why would you retire at sixty-five? Had you really exhausted your intellectual curiosity? Given up challenging yourself? How could you possibly have been satisfied passing the days volunteering at the Berkeley Garden Collaborative or docenting at BAMPFA? It wasn’t long before I gave up feigning interest when you regaled me with your mind numbing daily activities. You seemed wholly indifferent to captivating me.
I still might have preferred those conversations to the bickering by the campfire. The “adults” all drank too much beer, lowering what few inhibitions they had. Seth and Pierre pissed into the river, vying for who could cast the highest arc. Seth teased Pierre, mocking his Canadian “eh’s” and “about’s” and “processes.”
Ainsley kept still. You know how Seth’s wife disengages. I don’t see what Seth sees in a woman who wants nothing more than to be home knitting with her mother and sisters and exchanging casserole recipes from the back of salad dressing bottles.
Seth’s barbs intensified as the night wore on, until Sasha returned fire, picking at Seth’s rawest childhood nerve: his demotion to repeat eighth grade.
You would have admonished me to say something, and so I whispered to Sasha, “Seth’s being a bit of an ass, but you don’t always have to go for the jugular, punkie.”
She turned on me with an expression to make me regret minding your advice. Then she sighed, “Let’s not go there, Mother.”
“Are we really sleeping on the ground?” Ainsley asked, successfully diverting the conversation to begin a chorus bemoaning the discomfort of the camp’s sleeping arrangements. Their definition of “roughing it” would have baffled you as much as it did me. Since when did catered meals, staff to pitch tents, guides to prepare and portage the rafts become associated with “roughing it?”
Remembering your advice not to dig myself deeper into holes, I refrained from pointing out I, as the group’s lone septuagenarian, was perfectly content glamping.
As we said good night, each family retiring to their own two-room tent, Sasha hugged me and whispered what I could only imagine was her moderated response: “I learned from the best.”
I laid alone in the quiet of the campsite. I used that silly technique you taught me to tamp down the chatter in my brain, closing my eyes and stopping my thoughts and simply listening to the silence even though you know perfectly well no such thing exists. Perhaps, yes, in the emptiness of space, at least something imperceptible to human hearing, the vibrations of pulsars, quasars, black holes. I could always count on you to draw my attention back to the quiet of earthly night, which was anything but silent, filled with its symphony of chirping frogs and crickets, the steady flow of the river. Faster, deeper than a babbling brook. Slower, more relaxing than churning, wild, white water. Its sound unbroken. Twigs snapped. Branches flapped. Footfalls padded nearby. Breathy, nocturnal creatures sniffed around camp to slake their curiosity. I fell asleep with your voice fading from my mind.
In the morning, a sliver of fog evaporated over the water, everyone’s spirits lifted at the aroma of frying bacon. We gorged on pancakes, syrup, bacon, eggs, hash browns. We laughed. The kids already told tall tales of the fish they imagined catching. I did my best to hide my disdain as they slung poop jokes about their adventures defecating in the woods. Their parents were less enthused by digging and squatting in catholes. Glamping has its limits.
While the guides put the rafts in the water, Seth and Sasha declared they wanted a “brother sister” raft with their kids, leaving me with Ainsley, Pierre, and Seth’s oldest, experiencing the teenage compulsion to distance himself from his father. The youngest kids tested their parents’ nerves, breaking virtually every safety rule they’d learned only moments earlier.
We paddled side-by-side for the first hour of quiet water, exchanging conversation on the majesty of the scenery, quipping about the rapids we’d encounter and the chutes we’d run. Everyone was taken by the beauty of the water beneath us, crystalline and clear, the sun shimmering on its surface. Life surrounded us, on the banks of the river, the fish swimming beneath us, the birds overhead casting pixelated shadows. I couldn’t remember a time of greater joy, Christopher, besides maybe our vacation together in Argentina, soon after we were married, when we conquered the Andes and then drowned ourselves in Malbec and feasted nightly on what seemed like an entire side of beef, and I clomped around in my poor approximation of the tango, unwilling to follow your lead.
Our first thrill arrived with a good run of rapids. In the other raft, the children squealed with excitement. In my own raft, the stellar guide wasn’t enough to stop Ainsley’s knuckles going white grasping the raft, leaving the rest of us to paddle. A certain queasiness struck me, too, the undulating dips and wrenching up-turned bow reminding me why I prefer hiking to rafting. The cold river spray fed my adrenaline with opposing force. The site of the rocks narrowed my focus, a tunnel vision not unlike when I lose myself for hours at the whiteboard postulating new formulas to test my hypotheses.
I was impressed with the way my eldest grandson comported himself. You would have shared my hope for him, as you did with your grandchildren, that they redeem our legacy. We no longer deluded ourselves our children would do better than us, much as we wished they would, so now we placed our ambitions on the grandchildren. He paddled with a vigor for achievement, something innate, obviously not learned at home.
“Are you game for a little race?” our guide asked during a lull in the action.
Our raft had fallen far behind Seth and Sasha’s. The guide pointed her oar towards a collection of boulders. It cut a more aggressive route with a narrow channel between the right bank. “We’ll need to paddle hard, then hang a high brace left to hop the eddies. Alice, you’ll need to give us a draw stroke when I tell you. What do you say? You tough enough, old gal?”
“She’s just teasing,” you would have told me when I bristled.
Ainsley looked peaky.
“Ready to show-up your dad,” Pierre said to my grandson. Their eyes burned with a competitive fire.
I don’t need to tell you what this type of testosterone-induced bravado does to me. My body pulsed with an intoxicating desire to assert my preeminence, to deflate those puffed up chests who think they alone can face down seemingly insurmountable challenges.
“Let’s not…” Ainsley started.
“Let’s show the boys how it’s done,” I shouted to our guide, plunging my paddle into the water.
We gathered speed at an exhilarating rate. The closer we got to the channel, the narrower it appeared, with the unexpected hazard of a fallen tree creating a shallower draw to our starboard. The clear water knuckled over the first set of rocks, then inside the channel, paddling hard to veer left, we saw what the boulders had obscured: a churning, raging, angry set of white water with the sun lighting up the spray like a disco ball. A moment of alarm set in when the raft spun one hundred and eighty degrees and drifted backwards. The guide shouted instructions, and we righted ourselves another one hundred and eighty degrees. Pierre screamed “Suck it” into the open air.
We emerged several hundred feet ahead of the others. Even Ainsley joined in the whoops of celebration after our confrontation with nature. Pierre raised his paddle over his head with both hands. The guide gave my grandson an exploding fist bump. I accepted as praise when she turned to me, “Not bad for a hiker.”
I relaxed a moment too soon, missing another set of rocks which hit under the back of the raft and bucked me into the water. Caught off-guard, I took a breath of water, burning my nostrils.
My body whirled under the surface. There was no escaping the panic. In the brief moments my head bobbed to the surface, I gasped as much roaring water as precious air. Beneath the surface I squeezed my eyes shut, all sounds muffled except for my own shrieks amplified between my ears. Suddenly my body intuited buoyancy theory, instinctively rolling onto my back to maximize my surface area, popping me up, torpedoing over the rapids, my breathing still hyper. Somehow I aimed for a quieter cove, grabbing a branch to anchor myself. I started to feel the cold shiver through my body. My grip on the branch was tenuous.
My raft-mates held up and tried to make their way back to me, but they were too far down river.
Seth made no effort to paddle towards me.
“Paddle,” Sasha barked at him, despite the likelihood she harbored more acute misgivings than her brother.
Sasha extended the first hand to steady me. The guide and grandkids pulled me out of the water. When I was secure in the raft, Sasha said with a lilting voice and ironic hand wave, “You sure have a flair for grabbing the spotlight, Mother.”
Splayed in the sun, resting on the left bank, I ran my finger along my cracked helmet. Wool blankets draped over me concealed my body’s shaking and shivering.
One of the guides applied an ice pack to the swollen bump on my head. I had not broken the skin nor did I have any sign of concussion.
“I’m really sorry, Alice,” Pierre repeated over and over. Compulsively, like a mantra he said it again and again. “I shouldn’t have gotten carried away like that.”
“It’s alright. We all got carried away,” I said through a forced laugh, disguising my trembling, fragile voice. I am so much older now, Christopher, with just absolutely nothing I can do better anymore, just things I used to do which I do less well now. Unmet challenges like the Camino or Denali which I’ll never meet. And no matter how I tried to cloak it, this decline was plain for all to see as I sat recuperating.
Sasha towered over us, covering us in her shadow. I squinted up at her, “Not exactly what I had in mind for creating new memories.”
“I know you’re trying, Mother.” She touched my shoulder tenderly. Long enough for me to stroke her hand, feel its warmth. “But you can’t curate our memories.”
She trudged up the bank, through the reeds.
Pierre scooted closer to me, leaning his shoulder against mine. “She can’t square the things about you that drive her crazy are the things that make her so strong,” he said.
I don’t know what I had done to earn his fealty, but he had no idea how much I needed consolation for whatever of my failures had yielded such disappointing children.
We shared the disappointment in our children, Christopher. “No good deed goes unpunished,” I often teased you on occasions like when your son’s wife called to ask for help with their mortgage after he’d squandered the last tranche on a dilapidated RV or your daughter called in tears because her ex wouldn’t take their daughter for the last-minute Maui weekend she wanted to sneak-off to with her latest lover. They never stopped cutting their teeth on us.
Watching your adult children linger by your deathbed, feeling for your pulse while they held your hand, I was heartened you were so medicated the concept of consciousness was abstract at best. You deserved their love instead of their impatient clock-watching to access their trust fund. When my time comes, Seth and Sasha will behave no differently than your children.
The guides made camp to give me more time to recover. The grandchildren caught their fair share of trout for the guides to clean and cook for dinner.
After dinner, I laid my sleeping bag under the stars. The grandkids huddled close to me. We looked at constellations. I entertained them with scientific details of gravity warping space and time, collapsing nebulae, mathematical equations explaining the forces of the universe. Maybe the darkness concealed their boredom, but they seemed to indulge me.
“Are there any stars named after poop?” the youngest asked when she’d endured enough of my ramblings.
“As a matter of fact, Puppis.”
“She’s teasing,” the oldest snarked.
“Google it,” I challenged. “It’s Latin for ‘poop deck,’ so not really named for poop, but I’d say that’s close enough.”
The middle kids giggled. “What do you do if you catch a bear pooping on your deck?” one asked.
“What?” they eagerly cried in unison.
“Tell him to scat!”
For the rest of the night, we told poop jokes by the crackling fire.
The house was quiet when I arrived home. I should not have been stunned by the picked over carcass of the house, ransacked by your children. Even as the most obvious impositions of your infirmity had been removed— the hospital bed and hospice nurse’s cot, the medical equipment— furniture was strewn about haphazardly, reminding me of the antique shop on Ashby Avenue. In the dining room, where you’d slept these past months, the table and chairs pushed against the walls, cluttered and folded. Faded patches of wall were exposed where the most valuable paintings once hung. Books had been removed from the shelves like pulled teeth. In your bedroom, the closets held empty hangers, the dresser drawers half open. Piled high on your bed, garbage bags stuffed with clothes for the Salvation Army. No mystery where your watch collection went.
I dropped my bag in my room which they thankfully left untouched with its pressed bedsheets and gleaming bathroom. I couldn’t coax the cat out from under my bed, despite her plaintive cries. I was eager for a bath and a glass of wine.
When I tried to blow-dry my hair, the fuse blew again. The one you said you fixed, but I could never rely on. The one which blows the entire fuse box. I’d need to call the electrician in the morning. There I was, in my robe, in the dusk.
I ignored the sink filled with dirty dishes your kids left behind, but I couldn’t abide the chaos of the dining room. In between sips of the well-aged Tannat you’d given me last Christmas, I unfurled the carpet which had been rolled up in the corner between the breakfront cabinet and sideboard. With some effort, I was able to pull the table back to the center of the room. My knees ached as I knelt, straining to unfold the tables’ leaves and tug open their braces, the centuries-old wood warped and swollen. I placed each chair where it belonged.
Lighting the candles restored a certain coziness.
I sat at the dining table, savoring my Tannat and a half-eaten lasagna your kids left in the fridge, probably more out of their neglect than consideration. Without power, in the flickering candlelight, the silence was like the stillness after a fresh snowfall, made more profound without the hum of the refrigerator, the flow of the air conditioner, the ambient current of electricity which has a nearly imperceptible sound until it’s gone.
Georg Gerstenfeld studied English and German literature at Cornell University and has been an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine since 2014. His fiction has appeared in Blood & Bourbon, exploring themes of memory, dislocation, and familial tensions. He lives in Napa Valley with his wife and their wackadoodle, Jake.
Photo by jeein