Memento Mori: We Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Summer Chronicle #5

I live with death. It smiles at me from the corners of my memory and reminds me that it is waiting for me on a day to be named later. When, I don’t know.

I’m glad for its company. Its presence informs every second of every day that I have left. It adds depth and texture to each present moment, granting me grace, beauty, and a fierce, urgent love of the world. I hold my wife and son more dearly and savor the extraordinary in the ordinary—every sight, smell, touch, taste, and thought is a miracle.

Tomorrow marks the 2-year anniversary of my life-saving liver transplant. I came within 24 hours of dying, but I didn’t. Before I went into the hospital for the operation, I shaved my head and joked (kind of) that cutting off my long hair was like killing my old self so a new one could be born. I haven’t cut it since; every hair on my head is a measure of the length of my second incarnation, but really, it’s always been ceaseless inception and cessation, second by second, all the time.

I had a couple more brushes with mortality on my road to recovery. Death gave me a grin. I bowed and kept going. Baptized by tears, fueled by longing.

Every time you almost die, you occupy the gap between coming and going, letting go and becoming again. It is the borderland, the liminal zone, the bardo. Pregnant empty space. The nothing before something.

If you pay attention, however, it’s not just when you come close to expiring that this happens. You can feel that gap every time you fall asleep and sense the surge of being upon waking. It’s there when you get lost, outside of time without realizing it. You can feel that space after you breathe out, in the interstices before you breath in once more. Again, and again.

What is more real, the realm of dreams or the waking world we occupy? What is the space in between those destinations?

In hospitals, I heard a lot of people die, many of their loved ones crying. I also heard the coded alerts that someone had just been born. It was an intimate, elegant dance. I am those deaths and births.

I carry them with me.

At one point in my journey, I nearly lost my mind due to a drug-induced state of neurotoxicity and wandered through a nightmarish landscape full of malice and danger. Horror lived there. I didn’t know what was real and what was not.

Then it turned.

And out of nowhere, I had a day of rapture—felt it in my mind and body. That night, the roof of the universe was lifted as I sat in my back room, and I saw what lies behinds the stars. I was mad and joyful.

Slowly, I returned to “normalcy.” Along the way, I wrote a book of poems about all of it, published columns in the newspaper, Substack pieces, and more. I wrote my way through, manic and sane, normal and not. Almost dead, alive and well.

My sense of self has become rawer and more tentative. It is both greater and smaller. My love for others extends further and my view of “me” has come to encompass more than it ever has. All the while, the world has become uglier, meaner, and more brutal to the point where I sometimes wonder if it is beyond redemption.

But none of it will stand, nothing lasts. Death smiles at us all.

Every day we die and every day we are born. We continually create ourselves anew. We are the stories we tell ourselves and each other and there is always a new one to be told.

And here I am, telling stories.

Memento Mori.

Note on the Summer Chronicles:

Over a decade ago, during my time writing for the OB Rag and SD Free Press, I penned a series of pieces over the summer that moved beyond the blog/column form to something a little looser and more open to improvisation and the poetic turn.

Below is the original preface for the first series of chronicles:

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News ] not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."

What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.

More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."

Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it—for better or worse. So for a few lazy weeks of summer, I will try my hand at the form.