So I'm going to be reading an essay called Childhood Eulogy,
and it's a second-person essay, so I'm addressing my childhood.
I think that's all you need to know.
"You're a boxy car.
And Dad, what does this lever do?
I was young.
Not even in grade school.
My legs so short, my feet couldn't touch the mat--
they just swung above it.
You were the small hitch beneath the window.
Pulled before an answer.
You were the open car door.
Air rushing in because I needed to know how everything worked,
because I needed to know what I could control and what I
couldn't.
You're Dad pulling over, shutting the door,
and asking me to trust him.
I trusted him.
You were the Ramones CD playing on the living room
stereo, a rough voice and simple chords.
You're not necessarily the lyrics, but their cadence.
The way you begged for people to hop
around in socks on wooden floors,
the joy and ridiculous movement of dance, the jumps of nothing
to do, nowhere to go.
The way Dad and I sang with breathy British accents:
I want to be sedated.
You were two pigtails and sometimes a French braid.
Mostly you were a ponytail because it
was easiest to run around with hair out of the way.
This was important-- the freedom of the body.
So of course you were not bows.
The dogwood trees blooming, neighbors
waving from their porches.
The sun gone, but the air still warm.
You were walks around the neighborhood
in the early evening with Dad.
You were the ice cream at the end of the walk.
I always thought of this as a secret,
as a time just for Dad and me, safe from the rest of the world.
And for a while, it was.
You are the sprinkler I ran through at the same time
as another girl.
Water like opaque glass, the warmth, the wetness.
The sidewalk and the hidden sky and the bathing suit I wore.
You weren't goggles because I didn't know I needed them,
but you were the scrape I got when the other girl fell
on top of me.
She'd run at the same time as me, entered
from the other side of the sprinkler,
but I never saw her coming.
You are my scar, the way Dad tended
the wound, constant with care.
You were never ear infections, and often you
were perfect attendance.
This was more luck than anything else.
You were a lot of math games and worksheets.
You were 2 plus 1 equals blank.
And if I have three oranges and give two away,
how many do I have?
What am I left with?
I mean, you were tonsils and adenoids,
meaning you were too big to swallow.
You were suffocating.
At night when I rasped, startling myself,
awake with a lack of oxygen, Dad heard
me and he knew how to help.
He flashed a flashlight down my throat and saw you glisten.
You were the hospital, the needle, the numbing cream,
the screaming.
You were high pitched and sharp, a knife splitting almonds.
You were popsicles and pudding.
You were reruns of Matlock.
You were vanilla yogurt, the kind I ate for breakfast.
Eventually, you were just a story to tell friends.
You were the protective goggles my brother
and I wore when we chiseled away at fake fossils
on the kitchen counter.
Two siblings eager to find bone, dust-coating the Formica
like dried sweat on skin.
You are the protective goggles Dad insisted I wear,
even though they were a little too big.
'Better safe than sorry,' he said.
You are the chickenpox I gave a family friend at our chickenpox
party.
The ones that sent him to the hospital but just made me itch.
We ran around in the yard, playing tag
and letting the grass squish beneath our bare feet.
That virus still swims in my body, sure,
but it hasn't been in my skin since.
I sometimes wonder, why was I lucky?
Back then when red dots pockmarked my body,
you were just a lot of hydrocortisone cream.
You are my bike in the Richland Fashion Mall parking lot.
The floor still dark despite the overhead fluorescence,
streamers rustling in the breeze.
Dad pushed me one hand on the handlebars
and one on the seat steadying me.
He ran beside me and then let go.
A classic movie scene, almost too cliched to be true.
Then it was just you and me.
No one to save us.
You were gravity-winning, and then you weren't.
You were the brakes I still needed to learn how to use.
You're badges of honor, scraped elbows.
You are pain overcome.
You're sips from Dad's diet coke, sweet aspartame that
made me hunger for more.
Did you know what was coming?
Did you know that soon the pain would never go away?
I want to slow down.
Let me have this happiness for just a little while longer,
please.
Let me stay here, please.
Once you were Dad's car and my high school parking lot.
Me behind the wheel.
Old Green Day turned low on the radio,
then clicked off for concentration.
You were the pollen lines curved by rain.
You were the pine needles I eased over
and the smell of evergreens in the air.
You were the brakes jolting, my hands sweaty.
You were the curbs I hit and then didn't, the white lines
I parked over and on and in between.
Dad was patient with me.
He let me take all the time I needed, meting out minutes
like the ticker tape would never end.
You were the conjugation of être and photosynthesis
and derivatives.
You were good grades, a small bus
on the way to math competition.
You were numbers-- a ribboned metal emblazoned
with a calculator and division symbol.
You were that boy's broken femur,
the one he cracked in half during a game of pickup soccer.
We drove him to the hospital in Dad's car--
Dad in the driver's seat, me in the passenger,
and him laid out across the back.
You were his low, constant moans,
the speed bumps we drove over slow, the railroad tracks
we couldn't avoid.
We could only listen as he cried over his broken body.
You were the car, first, a silver Volvo,
then a silver Mazda, the calculated gas
mileage at the gas station, the equations
Dad made me run through, the numbers
that told us how far we could go with what we had.
You are a growth in Dad's pancreas-- a tumor.
Mom did not call you cancer, but that's what you were.
You were Sufjan Stevens Impossible Soul,
the longest track on the album over and over and over again,
alone on the drive to school.
If I got to the parking lot early enough
before too many other people were milling about,
I would sink down in my seat and listen as I watched the sky.
The pulp of my body scraped out.
You're diet lemonade because what if the Diet
Coke had caused the cancer?
You're big armchairs beside IV drips,
room temperature yellow Gatorade because the cold
interfered with the medicine.
You were canceled runs, swollen ankles.
You were one thing and then all at once another, dying,
you were dying.
I can say that now, now that you've
been gone for the better part of a decade.
At the time, though, I couldn't even think it.
Some things were beyond imagination.
I thought I would see the end for what it was.
I thought I would know that it wouldn't come until I was ready.
Sometimes hope looks like foolishness.
You were WebMD at night.
I huddled under a thin sheet in bed with my phone
cocooning myself.
You were a 7% five-year survival rate,
but I didn't tell anyone this because I
couldn't say the words.
I couldn't speak those numbers, make them real in my mouth.
You were thick envelopes in the mail
for my brother, the ones he opened at the dining room table
with the whole family, huddled around
like we were hungry for a feast.
You were his fingers, greedy for the insides and imagined future.
You were expensive college tuitions.
You were painkillers and the CDs Dad
handed me, the pen he tried to write on it with.
What CD were you?
I can't remember now.
Does it matter?
You are his slurred words, more slurred than any drunk speech
I've ever heard, an electric guitar slide I couldn't track.
Yes, we can sell that, Mom said as she took the disk
and told me to go to my room.
She knew not to puncture the world he lived in,
to let him think that everything would be OK,
to let me think the same.
And really, she thought it too.
We thought you would be OK.
You are the yogurt Dad covered himself in,
the yogurt he thought was hydrocortisone cream,
the invisible bites he thought he had.
The pain pills, the pain.
You are the wet paper towel Mom cleaned the couch with,
the couch.
You were vanilla yogurt, the kind I ate for breakfast.
I remember you were the blueberry muffins
we made while the miracle drug dripped into Dad's IV.
Are the blueberries, so ripe, almost purple, a deep bruise.
You were the red mixing bowl and the spatula
I used to stir the batter.
Dad usually stirred, but with his backpack
filled with the miracle drug slung over his shoulder,
his tubes got in the way.
You are the tubes but you weren't the miracle drug.
Nothing was the miracle drug.
You were lime green bracelets that said,
it's not about the numbers, except it was about the numbers.
Cancer growing, white blood cells depleting,
you were the numbers.
You were ice chips slipping down the throat, coughing.
You were the corner hospital room,
the one we moved to after the first one got too crowded.
You were Dad's car on the drive home that night,
the night they told us he would make it through.
Mom in the driver's seat, me in the passenger,
my throw-up smeared across the silver door,
the slim birch tree I held when Mom pulled over
to let me empty the nothingness inside me.
You were time slowed down, molasses,
a minute stretched like taffy.
You were prayers, even though I wasn't
sure it would do anything.
You are his breath, the effort it took to breathe,
the air scratching at his esophagus.
You were that rasp.
The sound that won't leave me.
You were Dad's hand--
cold and heavy, the last piece of him I touched.
You weren't my 18th birthday or my 20th or my 21st.
What did numbers matter after?
You weren't half a can of Bud Light on prom night.
You weren't a bottle of gin in a dorm room.
The way it felt cold, then warm, and then
nothing felt like anything at all.
You weren't a mysterious illness, one that left me tired,
pulled vials of blood from my good veins
and gave me nothing in return.
You weren't my car, the silver car, Dad's old car,
ramming into brick walls, denting the front and back
bumper.
You weren't the tires swerving, smashing into a raised curb,
the way a hole shredded open on impact.
At the shop, the mechanic looked at the old tire
stored in my trunk.
'Man,' he said, 'that's really gone.'
You weren't majors and minors picking out colleges.
You weren't waist deep snow, the chill that made my cheeks ache.
I couldn't stop smiling.
The covered lawn, the library, the clock.
You weren't the kitchen counter, the letter.
The way Mom and I sobbed.
It was Dad's Alma mater, but I turned it down.
It was too expensive.
You weren't the ache that never left.
My life cleaved between what is and what could have been.
Years after you were gone, I read Didion's Slouching Towards
Bethlehem.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things
and harder to see the ends.
But I know exactly when you ended.
You couldn't exist without Dad.
Maybe what Didion means is that it's harder
to look at the ends of things.
Almost 10 years later, and I still
crinkle when I hear the Ramones.
You weren't dance floor make-outs, arms,
trailing bodies, waist, thighs, chest, lips.
You weren't misplaced hunger.
I ate anything I could.
I tried desperately not to collapse.
You weren't Frankenstein or the epistolary mode.
You weren't heavy textbooks that curved my spine.
My statistics class or the years or days.
You weren't numbers I could manipulate.
You weren't a crowded music festival
with songs that vibrated my bones, all
those bodies sweating, swaying.
You weren't Anderson Paak or Muna or Sylvan Esso.
You weren't the Jack and Coke I drank outdoors,
waiting for the next act.
The way the liquid slid down my throat, cool and traceable
until it dispersed, Until it disappeared.
You weren't Diet Coke.
Why weren't you a different DNA sequence?
Why weren't you higher blood cell counts or shrinking tumor?
Why were you take and not give?
You were so many things, so why weren't you a miracle?"
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Damn.
OK.
You're going to take a moment to reset wisdom.
Sorcerer.