Thoughts on a Possum (Part One?) - July 30th, 2021
"Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do."
We have decided to establish a scholarship in my dad’s memory for OSU College of Education students. In lieu of flowers, please consider a gift to my dad’s scholarship fund. Gifts can be made to the OSU Foundation at osufoundation.org or mailed to OSU Foundation, 4238 SW Research Way, Corvallis, OR 97333. Please indicate that the gift is in memory of Mike O'Malley. Thanks to the many of you who have already donated.
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I haven’t posted anything here in a while. For that, and for many other reasons, this essay is long. Thanks. Hopefully it doesn’t read too much like a book report.
—
On Tuesday night, I killed a possum. I was driving south on 29th street towards campus when it happened. My friend Hussein was in the passenger seat, and my friend Joe was sitting directly behind him. We had just exited the four-way stop at the intersection of 29th and Grant — about 100 yards from where I spent the first two years of my life, 50 yards from my childhood best friend’s house, and 10 yards from where I worked for three summers. It was something like 11 PM, and there was no one else on the street.
I saw the possum while it was still in someone’s yard to my right. It was facing the street, hardly moving. It started moving slowly across the sidewalk as I approached it. I slowed down, and steered the car away from it into the opposite lane. I kept driving. Joe was talking, and couldn’t see anything from the backseat. The possum suddenly ran at the front-right tire of my car as I drifted over into the other lane at a 45-degree angle. I didn’t know whether or not I hit it. I sort of figured I did, but I told myself it was probably just because death had been on my mind. The three of us couldn’t decide if the bump we felt was the plastic lane dividers or a 20-pound animal.
We were taking Joe home, and we parked outside his house for a while finishing up the conversation we’d been having. It was a serious conversation, about whatever thing we had decided was serious in that moment. I sprinkled in a few jokes about the possum while we were sitting there. My left leg bobbed up and down the entire time.
I’d decided that we needed to drive back down 29th to see if the possum was there. I didn’t say this to anyone, but I’d decided that. There are two other ways to get back to my house from Joe’s house. None of them take any longer than any other. But we needed to go back down 29th.
So when Joe got out of the car, that’s exactly what we did.
For my dad to go to work, for my entire life, we had to drive up 29th street.
Hussein and I drove down 29th street to see if the possum was there — if it was dead or alive.
If we didn’t see it, it was alive. If we did see it, it was dead. I’d decided that.
There were two other cars between Joe’s house and the intersection of 29th and Grant. Once we passed them, I put my high beams on. And soon after I did, two bright eyes reflected back through the windshield at me and Hussein.
The possum was upright, resting on its hindquarters, almost exactly where I’d hit it. It wasn’t dead yet, but there was blood pooled around it. It was stuck in the road.
It was not alive. It was not dead. It was just there in the middle of the road, between life and death, staring me in the face as I drove down 29th street on my way home.
Neither one of us said anything interesting after seeing it. Just silence, mostly, and then something along the lines of “Anyways…” after a couple of minutes.
The lights of its eyes burned into both of us, I’m sure.
It’s my first 29th-street memory since my dad died.
—
I’ve been listening to two songs — most of the time — since my dad died. One is Linkin Park’s “One More Light” and the other is Passenger’s “All The Little Lights.”
Here’s a portion of “All The Little Lights:”
We're born with millions
Of little lights shining in the dark
And they show us the way
One lights up every time we feel love in our hearts
One dies when it moves away
We're born with millions
Of little lights shining in our hearts
And they die along the way
Till we're old and we're cold
And we're lying in the dark
'Cause they'll all burn out one day
And here’s a portion of “One More Light:”
Who cares if one more light goes out?
In a sky of a million stars
It flickers, flickers
Who cares when someone's time runs out?
If a moment is all we are
We're quicker, quicker
Who cares if one more light goes out?
Well I do.
Lights go out.
Inevitability. Blindness.
—
“The mind has always some power of evasion” is something C.S. Lewis says in A Grief Observed. And perhaps the central reason I haven’t been writing publicly the past week+ is for this evasion.
In the House of Grief, some subconscious actor put a foot on the doors at either side of the room and locked me in the Room of Denial. Because the other rooms had worn me down. They’d made me sick. They’d stopped me from sleeping. They’d brought me to the brink of violence. So I had to evade them.
After reading Lewis’ book initially, I remembered the above quotation, as: “Our brains put up barriers to protect us.” I guess that was just my brain giving me its own quotation — the one that it most needed.
“The mind has always some power of evasion.”
“Our brains put up barriers to protect us.”
Almost the same.
—
In A Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes (famously, I now know) about “the vortex.” To Didion, “the vortex” is the thing that she gets sucked down into by anything that reminds her of her husband or her daughter. It sucks her down into grief. It sucks her down into the Room of Pain. It sucks her down into the place where all the little lights have gone out.
Here is something I free-wrote the other night, that probably shows the vortex rather well:
It was sort of our last conversation. I gave him the cold I had the next week. He was mad at me, I think. He kept bringing it up. He mentioned my galavanting. That's the last fight I got in with him – is the galavanting. It was really the only fight I got in with him. Fuck. I’m in the vortex. Damn it, Joan, I’m in the vortex. This is why I shouldn't write. This is why I’ve been avoiding writing. It's the cortex. The cortex. The cortex. The cortex. I’m not looking. And I can’t even spell vortex. I won’t even spell the word.
Instructions: How does one avoid the vortex? Do not let oneself out of the Room of Denial. How does one avoid the vortex? Give into the brain’s tools of evasion.
—
The day my dad died, I wrote this:
And at the risk of sounding entirely new-agey, this idea of “giving pieces away” has been ringing in my head all day. My dad gave and gave and gave. He gave every bit of himself. He described his teaching philosophy to me and many others over and over again: “Get up there and cut a vein.” And he did.
Today, perhaps, he was out of pieces to give. Because every time he gave some out, he got fewer back. And to me, he gave chunks of himself. And I always thought I’d be able to give those chunks back further down the road — but that road got cut off before I ever really got the chance.
Here’s Passenger again:
We're born with millions
Of little lights shining in our hearts
And they die along the way
Till we're old and we're cold
And we're lying in the dark
'Cause they'll all burn out one day
Notice anything?
—
Four weeks after my dad died, I’m writing this:
The month before my dad died, I was reading a book that mentioned the idea of “transactive memory.” Basically, the theory (if I can call it that) of transactive memory takes up the cliche that so many people use when a loved one dies: “I feel like a piece of me died with them.” Someone who takes seriously the idea of transactive memory would say, in response, “Yes. A part of you did die with them.”
We store our memories in other people as much as we store them in ourselves. There are stories about me that my dad knew — and that only my dad knew — that died with him.
I do not remember them. No one else I know remembers them. Only he remembered them. And so with him, went that memory.
So with him, went so many parts of me.
—
We're born with millions
Of little lights shining in our hearts
And they die along the way
Till we're old and we're cold
And we're lying in the dark
'Cause they'll all burn out one day
The lights of my mind are the memories that I share with the people that I love. I loved no one more than I loved my dad. I certainly shared more memories with no one. And so many of the lights of my past — the lights that defined my life — went out with his sudden passing.
I was not born with all of those lights — my dad and I lit them together over the years. He tended to some of the lights, I tended to others. Our promise was that we would keep all of those lights lit together. He broke that promise.
That’s not anger I’m writing with. It’s apathy.
If I think about my dad enough, if I write enough, if I look at old pictures enough, maybe those lights will stay lit. Maybe they won’t all burn out, one day. Maybe my memory with him will not recede into the darkness that defines my days. Maybe some of them — some of these thoughts and stories and lessons — will burn forever.
Maybe that’s what people mean when they say he “lives on in me.”
—
C.S. Lewis, again, writing of his dead wife:
“What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do.”
—
It was comforting when my emotions were so overwhelming that I could not function. But now, I’ve numbed them. So I’m left asking even more painful questions. Most of them center thusly: There’s no way I would be okay, right? There’s no way I would be able to think of anything other than the death of my mentor and best friend...right? There’s no way that this is my one life, and that this is how I’m living it…...right?
All the little lights.
All the little pieces of my dad that might drift away when I’m not thinking about him.
The vortex.
The barriers that our brains put up.
The room of denial.
—
When I killed the possum on Tuesday night, I think I knew that I killed it right away. But I didn’t want to believe it. And if I’d just taken 53rd back to my house, I would have been able to go on living as if the possum wasn’t dead. As if the half-dead, half-alive rodent that could stare through my windshield and throw me down into the vortex wasn’t there at all. (I made a Schrödinger's possum joke to myself while sitting outside of Joe’s house after running over the possum but before confirming that I’d killed it. No one laughed. I made it again to my sister and Hussein when we got back to my house after seeing that the possum was really dead. No one laughed.)
I could have just driven down 53rd, and the possum may have been alive.
I could have just driven down 53rd, and never thought of the possum again.
I could have just driven down 53rd, read more about the NBA Draft when I got home, and everything would have been normal.
Normal.
But I drove back down 29th. Because I wanted to know if I’d killed the possum. And I had.
Almost.
It was alive enough for me to know it was dead.
—
Possum’s are known to play dead. But when they play dead, they don’t crawl in the middle of the street with blood oozing out of multiple points of their body. They don’t stare into the eyes of the person that killed them. They don’t force the person that ran over them into the vortex. They don’t make that person ask whether or not human life is just an elaborate attempt to convince ourselves that we are not the possum that’s liable to run out into the street and be crushed to death. They don’t make the person ask whether the possum’s lack of consciousness made it easier for the possum to die. Or harder. Because all they were left with was the physical pain.
The possum, that is.
The rest of the C.S. Lewis quotation I used above goes like this:
What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion.
I should have just driven back down 53rd. The consciousness was the mistake.
The mind has always some power of evasion.
—
On the cover of my copy of Lewis’s A Grief Observed is, in the boldest, most elegant font possible: “A Masterpiece of Rediscovered Faith.”
The “Rediscovered Faith” portion of the book is the part of the book that is useless. He asks so many great questions, and then when he can’t seem to grapple with the meaning or pessimism of these questions, he defaults to religious cliche. It’s maddening. Not because I harbor any animosity towards faith or religion, but because it reads like a fucking cop-out. He articulates his own cycle, but then closes the book at a point that is so clearly part of that cycle.
Look, here’s a fascinating and resonant part of his cycle:
Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards.
There’s no way I could say it better. How fragile was my own sense of self and direction that the death of my father would cascade me into constant feelings of meaninglessness?
But alas, here is a sample of Lewis later in his cycle — tired of asking great questions, preferring to give useless half-answers:
Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some reason — the merciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of — I have stopped bothering about that.
It almost reads like a mockery of his earlier introspection. And mine. How could it be juxtaposed with something as incisive as the below, you might ask? It can’t be:
Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
This marks something that fuels so much of my constantly screaming anger these days: A penchant for ideology (negative connotation applied) gives everyone I know easy answers to impossible questions.
—
When I woke up the morning after killing the possum, the first thing I thought of was not my dad. It was the possum. I can still see it.
Not quite dead. Not quite alive. Eyes reflecting back through my windshield.
It wasn’t playing possum.
I wonder what it was thinking. I wonder if it knew that it was dying.
It wasn’t there when I drove up 29th the next morning.
It wasn’t there when I drove down 29th the next morning.
It will never be there again.
Its bloodstains were there, though.
They will be gone soon, though.
—
The possum’s death is a death I can think about, I guess.
The other one I can’t think about.
To misquote C.S. Lewis, “Our brains put up barriers to protect us.”
To quote Linkin Park, again:
Who cares if one more light goes out?
In a sky of a million stars
It flickers, flickers
Who cares when someone's time runs out?
If a moment is all we are
We're quicker, quicker
Who cares if one more light goes out?
Well I do.
“Well I do” is not an answer to a difficult question, it is just a statement in response to one.
Well I do.
Maybe there is no arc to grief.
Maybe there is no arc to life. Maybe the arclessness of life is the thing we really can’t face.
—
Here are three last quotes from C.S. Lewis:
“From the way I’ve been talking anyone would think that H.’s death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself.”
“Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.”
“Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.”
If only Lewis attempted to face up to the implications of these questions, rather than just bending towards ideology.
Well I do.
Isn’t that just ideology, too?
Well I do.
Hi Emmett, I am going to match your long post but while I apologize for any harm I do. I think that is why we can’t write to you, what if we make it worse? I have a correction first and unsolicited endless commentary you might ignore because it probably won't help and it is not as good writing as Mike or you would like. I think no one really writes you back because we know we can't fix this. And no one wants to talk to everyone they don't know in public like this but whatever, for Mike, here I go. I was one of so many (apparently thousands of people!) who knew you gave your Dad more than enough while he was alive. There was no need for any saved-up chunks you were supposed to give him later. I honestly feel your Dad is really upset no one had more clearly clarified this for you. Your Dad absolutely had what he needed from you; so much so, it overflowed. It was in his twinkling eyes, mischievous grin. He would grab me and give me the biggest bear hugs whenever he was with you, just to give some of the love you two had away. He could not contain it. He was all light with you. I know I am supposed to send comfort but I also know I can't. I also suspect you are on to something that nothing will ever be the same, even if you are on the same streets. It is the unknown and it is scary, the uncanniness of being in the same place but in an entirely different reality without Mike. We all saw and we all know how close you both were, more like real twins, every time I saw you together, it was striking. Mike was only older in appearance but not in boyish exuberance. So now I have more to say specifically about the possum. My boyfriend died in 1994, July 24, about 5 pm. I wasn't there but when his friend came to tell me I slapped him across the face for thinking that a joke like that would be funny and chased him screaming out of the house. That is denial and to this day, I think about the trauma in my shock I created for that poor friend. Our brains want to help us, but I am not sure they always do. By the way, to even write or say my "boyfriend died" doesn't fit, maybe like "Dad died” perhaps in your case-- so trite, so incomplete, the relationship not properly conveyed nor described for its gravity. My boyfriend Jack’s heart just stopped. No reason, no overdose, no explanation. No cause of death on the death certificate. He was only 26. It made no sense. I just sat in the backyard of my apartment for days waiting for him to come back or to just die myself. Just sat there. My mom had to come and take care of my son. Maybe I wrote all of this to you before but the point is, I was half-dead like the possum. I was entirely dead in my soul and mind but with a breathing body, I no longer wanted to have. I can't give words to it. But that was me on the road, then; so maybe you are the possum, it is not outside of you but in you. At some point, I am not sure when, I had to acknowledge there will be two of me, the one before July 24 and the one that didn’t die after July 24. Two different people in the same body. One is eventually ultimately more grateful than the other for what I do have and the people left. You have Hussein, you have your friends and family. They will need you. But I couldn't see that part when I was in it, as you can’t likely from time to time when we are being a more than half-dead possum. Maybe I would have stayed that way forever if it wasn't for Jack's intervention. I think his spirit must have caught sight of me and been ashamed. He came to me in a dream-- maybe a month after he died. I was so happy to see him but he was furious. He was sitting in my living room so I ran to him, overjoyed-- but he just sprang up and yelled at me, pointing his finger: “THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU!” and before I could even hold him, he stormed out, angrier than he had ever been in life, slamming the door so loud it woke me up from the dream. I could not believe I had seen him, so real, so alive but then he yelled at me! How could his spirit not even care what pain I was in or how I needed to still be dead ---with him, but he cared less. I suppose because he wanted me to go on living and caring for what he cared about and carry what I had of him on. Maybe your Dad sent you that possum? Do you think he might be telling you to accept he is really physically gone, but you aren’t? If you can carry the soul of a possum, you know your Dad is in there, too, right? No lights go out. Bodies die but the possum is not leaving, either, you still feel it. In Lakota way (Jack was adopted by a Lakota elder, but this is all being translated through my poor memory so forgive me for offending or getting the actual workings all wrong) you cut your hair, you get rid of everything that was theirs, you have a “give way” of all of it, or burn it and you make prayer ties to grieve. You just sit and mourn and you don’t have to do anything for a whole year except be sad. You are not expected to be who you were and you don’t have any physical tangible pieces of the person left. And there is one thing you can’t do. You can’t show the person’s spirit that died that you need them, or let them hear you calling because then their spirit ---it might get stuck in between the dead world and the living world, maybe also like your possum. Maybe they can’t make it to heaven to be with creation. Maybe it is this process, of mourning and forgetting as type of letting go that taught me in tiny steps how to go on living. I remember one day realizing that my whole life, I had looked out the car window and see the clear-cuts go by and be so sad. I never saw the trees that were left standing. But I did after I lost Jack. All the colors changed into neon green, so many different shades of green in the trees. Eventually, his death gave me a different me but with perhaps a clearer vision and sight of the whole. I try to be him who I loved so much and do the things he would have done and treasure the people he would have loved if he had been here but that might not be where you can be yet. Just know I am here even though you can't see me and I read your Dad’s light in you. Do you want to fold peace cranes with me for him? I would love to just sit and fold with you. Folding origami is a bit like the tobacco prayer ties I had to make for Jack, meditative and honest. Love, Linda.Richards@oregonstate.edu
Sending you love, Emmett. ♥️