back to Issue 18
by Joseph Bardin
in memoriam, Bernadeane
Once upon a time in the kingdom, the worst thing you could do was mess with my sleep. You didn’t understand because yours ran sound and deep, while mine puddled in shallows too easily rippled by waking. But when you got sick, I was up at all hours, your one-man pit crew, replacing wet sheet, shirt, panties, a warm wipe down, then back to bed before your legs gave out. You dropped off quickly, exhausted from the effort, while I listened to coyotes clucking and cheering in the night, as if a soccer game had suddenly started, before eventually sleeping too.
Cancer came but for eight years you were you, and there was no death in our kingdom and joy was the red flash of a cardinal alighted on an ocotillo. But then Covid came, too, and weakness colonized more and more of your day. We fought. We fought for what we couldn’t hold; me with my optimism, determined then desperate; you with your anger, seething at the affront of illness.
Morning came early in our kingdom, sun lining the shutters, so that I had to turn away to sleep for strength for the day. When you woke, and because you said everything, you said you were ashamed to be cleaned by me. But I said we are warriors, free to apply our skill and sweat to the purpose at hand, without worrying about proprieties of the civilian self. And you had to be a warrior to receive me.
Am I any less me in becoming more what I need to be? I asked you. No, so we crossed the frontier of poop and pee without fear. In our kingdom, the past, against which all loss is measured, was made to fade from sight.
On bad days, I sweated out promises to you—it will get better. On good days I wondered if we would remember the joy, the texture of the miraculous, that nothing is normal. I pictured us walking on the beach at Rocky Point, the Sea of Cortez at low tide, revealing the long, glittering cape of sand, crowned in sunlight, the jewels of sea life laid at our feet.
Did I worry I would love you less at the end, as others had threatened when we came together because you were older? But I never did. My heart opened to you and your gratitude nourished me.
The days trained us in what they demanded, in lying down and lifting and being lifted. In bringing and taking away, in asking for help, making messes, clearing messes, making more messes, and talking about anything, anything that was not the condition. I spoke to you of the sacred unknown, how to not be confused by the facts (as you had once taught me), because appearances change and then the facts follow, like the blue whales we once saw breach into view off the coast of Santa Barbara. These largest living creatures on earth had moments before been nonexistent to us. This was my way of prophesying healing we couldn’t see.
We wanted a new land, but what we got was a last stand. Only months before, we went to Montreal where my twenty words of Spanish confused my twenty words of French to your amusement. Your back hurt and eating wasn’t easy, but the jazz festival was on and this Japanese pianist, Hiromi, made our hearts soar.
Despite all our efforts and our denials, you were hospitalized and then hospitalized again. You liked the EMT that brought you, and in Emergency, dosing on pain meds for travel, you told me to get his business card. I went to the cafeteria to eat something. Walking back to your room, the sun setting through a western window, I felt the change of dimension, how nothing would be the same.
Death is a crime, but we’ve never known justice, so we say the goodbyes of the innocent condemned. I remember you naked in the pines at Payson on the car blanket, your pale skin bright in the trees and the quiet. Later we did a trail ride, and your horse spooked and threw you. You landed on your back on stony ground, and the cowboys were amazed you got back in the saddle.
I remember you saving me from social boredom, playing the foil to the mini mayhems I created for relief, as if you disapproved, so my comedies wouldn’t insult our friends. What a mutuality we made, you for whom nothing was too much, me for whom everything was.
At first my heart broke for you, because you loved living, as so few do. Then my own loss surfaced like a monster mammal: to no longer be seen by you, bereft of your bright eyes. So many of my gains are inconsequentially internal, writer’s victories, but you counted them all in your eyes.
My libido says, never mind, get laid, and I listen with limited results. One night, out in the desert driving home from the bars, I slow down approaching police lights flashing and a pickup parked on the shoulder. A man kneels on the road with a deer alive in his lap, head up, looking at me as I pass. I don’t want to, but I think of you, your innocence, and cry tears that don’t feel new. But later, I think, no, not a reminder of loss, but a symbol of presence. I’ll take it.
Who will see me now, I could well ask, but my choices are so limited: die with you or live fully without. What would you do, you who were a warrior by nature, long before I named you that? I know what you would do. Now, in my sleep, saguaros stand sentry, and bobcats brush the windows of my dreams. And sometimes you are there, so whole, it’s like you’re both here and gone.
Joseph Bardin is an essayist and playwright based in Arizona. He is the author of the essay collection Outlier Heart (IFERS Press). His essays have appeared in numerous publications including Interim, Louisville Review, Bull Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Eclectica, and been anthologized in the Transhumanism Handbook (Springer). His plays have been presented in various US cities. A scholarship alumni of the Valley Community of Writers, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild. josephbardin.com