How to Keep Going
M, our son, asked for clothes for Christmas. For years he loved LEGOs, and his room still contains clumps of bricks that we assembled together, products of a young imagination turned toward worlds other than ours. But he’s 15 now, and his imagination has been reassigned to the bits of this world that have to be put together without instructions. No surprise that he has opinions about his appearance and the distance he sees between the self he projects and the one he wants to project. His friends have opinions too, just as busy finding their place in the complex social galaxy of adolescence, with its bodies, orbits, and gravitational pulls. He wanted things to wear that signaled fluency in style, even some daring, but he wasn't sure what. No doubt you remember.
Our daughter Q (13) answered questions about her Christmas list by mentioning the inconveniences of her loft bed. She spends a lot of time in her room drawing and making all sorts of things and listening to music. We met her young needs for space and sleep with an enormous Ikea puzzle that she and I solved one entire afternoon into a twin bed over a desk. But now she worried out loud about coming down in the night, how when she sat up she felt like her head would meet the ceiling. Hint gotten.
My wife and I went shopping with our ideas of the ways that M might want himself to look. After many stores and lots of holding things up for each other to wonder about, we settled on some shoes (non-athletic sneakers from a hot and fairly exclusive designer) and a type of jean jacket that he’d been thinking he could pull off. For Q, we brought out the tape measure to help her imagine herself in an older-girl’s room, then brought her with us to furniture stores to find a match for the picture in her head. Like always, she had a fairly firm picture — a wooden platform frame, queen size if possible, modernish, simple (and no upholstery or fabric). We all agreed on something that arrived early in the new year, along with a popular mattress from the internet that unfolded like a short story.
Just two weeks into 2019, we heard that my 98-year-old grandmother needed a new heart valve. She found herself repeatedly short of breath after just a little exertion, and more than one doctor informed her that she could do nothing and her life would end fairly shortly, or, healthy and present otherwise, she could risk surgery to insert a new valve and keep going for who knows how long. For years she’s been saying that after 98 years she’s ready to go, and “if it’s my time, then it’s my time.” She opted for the surgery.
These days, my wife and I often find ourselves thinking about how the once vast time with our kids in the house has nearly vanished. In two years, M will graduate high school and dedicate himself to being gone. Then two more summers, and Q will (likely) be gone too. All this picturing and accommodating is momentary, the early chapters of their lives being furiously written while the later ones of ours gets taken down in a slower hand. We know this, and can’t help but know this. We notice that Q somehow seemed to fill her whole new bed with only herself, and we couldn’t help but know what it meant. We understood when M left the clothes we got him in their freshly unwrapped boxes, and we didn’t mind returning them. We knew that he’s looking for just the right outfit for leaving us.
I go out for a walk. It’s cold but calm and crisp, like each thing is proud of its edges. Weather has been weird, swinging wildly from freezing to warm, the cycle of seasons getting more noise in its signal. I try no to think about what that means. The year that just left was a hard one in many ways, unfair and unkind but also carrying in some good, and in any event inevitable. The Hudson River looks like a busy mindless line. I know that if I could cross it and keep going, through the broad country and then out over the oceans, eventually I’d come back to where I stand. And if I don’t move at all, the planet would spin me around and back anyway.
How do we keep going? The answers I come up with — wake up, go to work, eat, love, sleep, wake up again — don’t extinguish the asking. I realize that this question really wants to know why we keep going, especially when so much ends. Now that’s a question with a little danger in it.
I’ve been putting out these guides for two years, and I don’t have to keep going. I’ve certainly felt tired and done, wondered more than once about the point of it. But here I am again, standing in a new year looking out over a river that doesn’t care what it does and wanting to ask myself questions to see what I’ll say. And I want to tell you about it. I appreciate your coming with me.
My grandmother’s surgery goes well. She’ll spend a month in recovery, then more time in physical therapy to bring her strength back up, but she’s fine. M finds clothes on his own and looks good, like himself, then leaves to be with friends until we say he has to be home. Q slides into her bed with a sketchpad and markers ordered according to the color spectrum. My wife and I sit on the couch and scheme about how to handle right now.
We keep going because there seems to be no choice. And when there is a choice, we choose to keep going.
Year three. Another year. Here we go.