The mail stopped coming. And when it did, it felt exactly like everyone said it would. Only, they weren't talking about receiving your deceased loved one's mail; they were talking about grief. One day, you'll wake up, they said, and it will be gone. You don't notice it's gone until several months later, when you happen to be sitting on your front porch, staring at the mailbox, noticing the extra name you had written there.
Then a whole new layer of grief is revealed: I'll no longer see her name through the plastic window of some homeowner's insurance solicitation. The endless credit card offers. One time, AARP even sent information offering their discount on a certain cruise line. My mother was 49 when she died, but as far as AARP was concerned, she was still kicking around and just beginning to ask for her senior discount at the movies.
One time, she received an offer for financing from a funeral home. If that isn't the nadir of marketing savvy. It's nice to know that, at least in death, we'll all have such good credit.
And then, once that's over, it's like the real death. After all, when someone is absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can't make a single solitary dime off of you, you are free, you have slipped the surly bonds of the economy, and have floated off into the ether.
I moved, and I forgot to include her name in the forwarding request I sent in to the post office. This was 8 months ago. All that mail the new tenant must be receiving, and marking "Not at this address." Somewhere in Texas, a dead letter office filled with opportunities for her.
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beautiful. it hurts, these words. so accurate.
ReplyDeleteAt college I had a professor named John Stilgoe. He was an urban theorist, historian, photographer. He wrote, according to his Wikipedia page:
ReplyDelete"Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter. All that I do is urge my students and my readers to look around, to realize how wonderfully rich is the built environment, even if the environment is only a lifeboat close-hauled in a chiaroscuro sea."
The two things I remember most about Stilgoe are his obsession with trains, with movement through the American landscape, and with the notion that German submarines were staking out the coast of Massachusetts for much of World War II; and his almost delusional paranoia about junk mail and other forms of potentially invasive or interceptible communication. He was so obsessive that he had no phone in his office and the only way of setting up a meeting with him was to slip a handwritten note into his mailbox with a suggested place or time along with your phone number. If you were lucky, he might call you back from a pay phone.
Your post made me think of Stilgoe's phobia. Slipping the surly bonds of the economy, floating off into the ether: there, off in the ether, slipping the surly bonds of the economy, Stilgoe was perhaps suggesting, was a more human America, a place where abandoned railroad tracks were beautiful.
Or maybe he had simply achieved an advanced state of non-forwarding, an uncommon comfort with death. Like that of the grieving daughter, perhaps.
Now *that's* beautiful.
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