32. real, dead people
the afterlife and real, made-up holidays
Before Noah died, I had no concrete concept or even a feeling about what the afterlife was going to be like. I actually believed there was no such thing, so I never had to think about it. Heaven logistics always made me confused—are you like a chameleon, yourself but changing into different ages or abilities depending on what you wanted that day? Would your great-grandpa recognize you in heaven if he only met you as a little kid? They must have automatic translation obviously, but what does their voice sound like? One time Noah joked about what he thought heaven was going to be like. His scenario was: Eating infinite pizza (like the pizza replenishes constantly as you eat it) while Arsenal score on Tottenham in quick succession, and then a sexual thing I will redact to preserve the honor of our families. Sort of a hilariously simple concept. It’s just squishing all of your favorite things in one setting in a logistically improbable way.
At the farm, I had gotten much better at using a hoe since when I arrived. At first, I felt like hand-weeding was so much better, because I felt that the hoe was unwieldy. BUT! In the time of the two weeks I was there, I learned to hold it and use its weight to chop away weeds with abandon. It’s actually very fun to have a flat piece of metal stuck to a wooden pole that somehow you can use to mold the garden around you. Weeding in itself is a meditative, destructive in the name of constructive act. On my last day of work at the farm, I decided to enjoy hoeing. I hoed and hand-weeded the last section of the little garden that peas, onions, beans, and squashes are growing in that was covered in weeds. I hoed the bindweed that was encroaching on the tomatoes we planted a week and a half ago. It was work, and I was in the zone. I thought about work in the afterlife. Because I don’t have a job job right now, I enjoy doing chores. I like having something to do that feels productive. Would I be able to have a job in the afterlife? Be in the zone, hoeing all the bindweed away? Noah can draw for fun until the cows come home, but would be also have fun clients if he wanted? Can he do a cool mural, or an afterlife infographic, or collabo on a cool soccer jersey?
On my way out of the area, I visited a bougie hot springs/spa in the countryside. Just so you know, I also went to the hot springs in the area where it’s part of a rocky hike along the Rio Grande. Get you a girl who can do both, as they say. Anyways, the fancy hot springs has thermal pools with different compounds that are supposed to be good for different things (e.g. iron for immune system, lithia for uplifting your mood, arsenic for arthritis), which is quite Japanese of them. They had a big pool that was 80 degrees, which is their “cold” pool, but it felt nice and lukewarm. After working in the sun all morning and driving, I floated in this pool and looked at the big blue sky with fuzzy clouds. At a certain point, I sort of felt an out of body experience/a very much in my body experience where the water was just surrounding me in this soothing way, I couldn’t see anything except the sky in this roundish shape save a swallow flying across it, and the first thought I had was “I wonder if this is what being dead is like.” Just a sensory experience that made me feel like I was in a different dimension.
Ever since Noah died, I have visuals that pop into my head once in a while, where he is doing something in the afterlife. When his parents’ dog Zizou died, I immediately thought of Noah throwing a ball and Zizou zooming away to fetch it. It was his dead uncle’s birthday, and an image of him and Noah drawing side by side at a table popped into my head. I envision him sitting on a porch with John Prine, playing music and drinking whiskey and laughing quietly.
I also see him doing the things where I am in that moment. I see him bombing downhill on the mountain roads I have been very brave to drive by myself! I see him eating tamales and enchiladas and making a quesadilla. I see him making fun of a piece of art or saying “This is sick” in front of the cool ones in the museums I go into. I see him bumping his head on the low threshold of a colonial-era hacienda. I see him befriending the big rude alpaca at the farm. I see him lying down on a Airbnb bed and settling in, phone in hand, the other hand behind his head.
So I treat Noah’s afterlife like an extension of the life I knew with him in it. He’s watching the same stuff that I’m watching (or in the case of crime tv shows, that I’m not watching), eating twice as much food as I’m eating. My imagination is quite limited, because he could be a bird in the afterlife, or have superpowers, or is one with the universe galaxy brain, but all I can think of is the mundane stuff he would be doing anyways if he were alive.
The other day, I walked into a art supply store. The storekeeper was eating a snack and was quite chatty. She asked me where I was coming from, and I gave her a confusing answer, so she asked if I was in between things. So I just decided to tell her that I’m a widow, and she actually was one, too! She said that she was about three and a half years out since her husband died suddenly with an aneurysm. She had a picture of him on the wall in the store; I think they were running it together. She said that it took her a long time to know that she herself wasn’t dead. That for a long time, if someone offered a hole in the ground where she could go into and be with her husband, she would have gone in, no questions asked. I think of it like one hair splitting in two, our lives becoming different paths. At first, I’d rather not be here at all, to be with Noah (even in death) is much more preferable than my reality. I think I’m still ambivalent and indecisive about my life, but I am aware that the hole you can go into to join dead Noah isn’t a real option. She said that I’ll be okay, because it will be okay. She didn’t say when. She didn’t say how. But that I’ll be okay.
I know it was Father’s Day. I’ve been actually having huge angst about fathers recently, because of my idealized image of Noah as the perfect father. I don’t think I’m totally baseless in this delusion, but it’s not fair to compare real, actual fathers who are fathering or have fathered real, actual children to my imagination of Noah as a father. It’s like when I think of him in the afterlife, but in the other thread, the other hair where he would still be alive, he would be the perfect dad. This is a time where I think to myself, damn, what a good thing to talk about in therapy and find ways to overcome my angsty feelings, to work through my fantasy of a life and work on my current, existing, relentless life.
Speaking of fathers, did anyone else watch the Japanese movie Evil Does Not Exist? A widower dad and a kid, sacred waters, city folks encroaching the countryside, all hit me hard as I took a tour of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, seeing tourists try to touch the sacred waters of their river when they were explicitly told not to touch it by the tour guide. And how the village has been inhabited for 1000 years, but Teddy Roosevelt put Blue Lake in a national forest so they couldn’t access it for ceremonies until Nixon gave it back. I did really enjoy my fry bread taco in a woman’s restaurant/living room, it was so decked out, and fry bread is basically a large sheet of donut, which is part of my afterlife plan.
I’m in St.Louis currently, spending some time with real, live babies with real, live parents. Sending love to all of you who have real, dead parents or real, dead children; it’s such a bummer. I guess my imaginary children with Noah can get some love, too. And my imaginary Noah who is a dad to my imaginary children can definitely get some love. If only we could all live in one house, the living and the dead.
On a lighter note, hope you’re enjoying the Euros and the upcoming Copa tournaments. We’re all about to be in this situation:
Love, Hitomi
p.s. Young Fathers are amazing live! Like dance church.
Ah, Young Fathers is the best Father's Day shoutout.
I'm sitting in a lobby, waiting for a coffee date, wanting to cry except there are no tears because damn stoicism and I'm just so moved and feel so seen even though my real dead people - at least the most recent - are my dearest friend and her dog who lived with us the two months between when she died and when he died a few days ago.
All of which is a very long way to say: thank you for writing 💜