By Nina Sichel
Turn my body to the east,
Let the rising sun kiss my face.
I am dying. My soul is
Tugging free of its casing.
Let it go.
~~~
I dreamed I was in Montevideo with my aunt Steffie. She was already an older woman, in a bed in a room with a window over a canal that led out to the sea. The sun had climbed up in the sky, and there was a low rumble of boat engines chugging in from the bay. We were looking through photos in her album and came to one of an old man lying on a single bed in the same room, staring out the same windows at the same scene. I said, who is that man? I know him. She said, it doesn’t matter, let’s get dressed and go into town. We need to leave soon.
~~~
I had seen that man once, bald, gaunt, dying, in a house my father had taken us to on a trip back to Uruguay when I was a child. Nobody else has any recollection of this, yet it is so vivid to me. A searing memory.
He was lying in a hospital bed, white painted metal frame, under a bare bulb in an upstairs room in a rundown house in Montevideo. Light came softly through an uncurtained window. A woman tended to him, the same woman who had let us in. She wore a faded flowered dress, cloth shoes. Her face was faded, too, and wrinkled.
Did my father and Steffie once live in that house? I remember the family climbing the stairs to see him, I remember how the stairs were tall, taller than the stairs at home, and the stairwell was narrow. My shoes were too tight, the walls were stained and the light dim. But I do not remember who he was or why we visited or even why we were allowed in.
He was sleeping and did not wake. His mouth was slightly open, and his chest moved up and down. My mother gathered my brother and me close to her and we stayed back, at the door. My father said something, but I could not hear him.
Is the memory real, or is it something I made up, another dream? I have no one to corroborate it; I was young, my brother younger. The others are all dead.
~~~
I am surrendered.
Release me.
~~~
In the photo, he is in this same room that I am in with Steffie. The wall behind the bed is made of layered white stone, sparkling with mica. The bed is high, higher than a regular bed. There are mid-century modern hanging lamps and dimmed recessed ceiling lights, and the room is large, too large, as though it were once a suite that had been converted.
The plate glass window facing the canal is spotless, the little warehouses across the water with their peaked roofs and their bright colors lined up neatly. Tie posts are evenly spaced in front of them, waiting for sailors and stevedores to throw thick coils of rope around and around when their boats are docked. But there are no boats or sailors in the dream, they must all be out to sea, and the stevedores still asleep.
Who is this man, to merit this room to die in? How can he be the same man, dying in such a different time and place? Why have we chosen to stay here?
~~~
We were on our way to a month near the sea, and my father insisted on stopping. Was that also the time we visited the cemetery? His father and grandmother were buried there. Another vague, long-ago memory, of shaded paths and old stone markers and plots surrounded by low metal hoops, like the hoops that divide flower gardens. Is this memory any more real?
My father had grown up here, in the second half of his childhood, after leaving Germany just in time. Coming back to Uruguay was coming to reunions with old friends, memories of the good times come back to life, connections rewoven. The bad times were never spoken of. That his father died two years after they arrived, that his mother, once well-to-do, took in boarders to make ends meet, refugees from Germany. That Steffie never married and made a family of her own. That his immediate family had shrunk to three, the others dispersed among countries and continents.
We lived perched in Caracas, strung between the childhood homes of my parents, my father’s to the south, my mother’s to the north. My mother’s New York family, visited on summer vacations, was large, extended, aunts and uncles and cousins too numerous for me to remember. Death might happen there, far from where we lived, but wasn’t mentioned. We learned to stifle any questions about dying, about death. “God forbid,” my mother would say when we broached the topic, before slamming the door on discussion.
To die was taboo. To die was forbidden.
~~~
I am at peace.
Let me be.
~~~
The photo exudes stillness. The man sleeps on the bed, the curtains by the window hang undisturbed, the sheet and blanket are brought up about his body and do not move, there isn’t a fold or wrinkle, just his shape underneath. In the photo he is alone. Who took this picture? And why?
There are the same lamps, the same recessed lights. The red spread, the blond wooden table, the chairs tucked under it. It is exactly the same then as it is now, in my dream, even the quality of the light coming in softly through the window, filling the room. It looks like a painting, its quiet tones, its strange lack of shadows. The photograph holds the light like a treasure.
~~~
There were few old people when I was a young girl, no deaths to mourn or celebrate, sheltered as I was by distance and time and the silence of my parents. My mother never did speak of death with me, not in any real sense; she was superstitious and afraid. My father waited to speak of death until another day in Uruguay when we walked on a sunlit afternoon, my firstborn infant in a stroller, my whole being focused on nurturing her growth, her life, and he spoke of insurance plans, survivor plans, what to do if, what to do when. Steffie spoke of her own death many years later as infirmity crept into her bones, her legs, her back, questioning her life’s worth when it was no longer the life she wanted or had lived.
By now, of course, nearing my own old age, I have known many deaths. Deaths by airplanes, by cars, by earthquake, by a mountain fall, by illnesses gotten too young. Deaths by disease, deaths by old age. The deaths of those I have loved deeply.
Who has not?
~~~
Ease. Wane. Exhale.
~~~
Who is the old man who visits me in memory, in dreams?
He is so tranquil. His breath moves softly in and out, his chest gently rises and falls. All is calm. Morning light pearls the room.
They talk about the sleep of the dead when life is over. They say they rest in peace. They say they have gone to their eternal rest. These things make no sense. Death is not the same as sleep, and stillness is not the same as death. And there is something very different in a life wrested too soon and a life relinquished in time. Which is what this man, ancient, solitary, is doing: relinquishing, submitting, letting go.
There is no fear, only yielding.
~~~
Who is he?
Will he come again? Will he be lying on the same bed, in the same room, with the same milky light pouring in?
He is no-one I know, or have ever known, and yet he appears to me, in memory or dream, and I see him so clearly, waiting, resting. Will I ever know his name?
In the morning, I wake with these images, these dreams, these memories. I turn them in the light of day, try to shake the filters of distance and time, of dream and memory, of what is imagined, or may be. To remember is illusory and to dream is to fabricate. Memory shifts, re-creates, alters, and dreams are imagination.
When I think of the dead, in my memories or in my dreams, they come to me fully themselves, the way I knew them. They come to me alive. Their presence there is more real than their absence here. Their lives so much fuller with meaning than their deaths.
The lucky ones live out their days and then they go gently, quietly out of this life. Memories, too, will die, and dreams will fade, and sometimes all we are left with is a single moment, held in time like a photograph, an image made real in the moment it is lived. An image that may come from time to time unsummoned and leave us with a fleeting glimpse of what might be serenity.
~~~~~
Nina Sichel’s previously published work explores themes of memory, identity and place, and the tension between belonging and observing. She is co-editor of two books about Third Culture Kids — those children raised internationally crossing cultures in their growing-up years: Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global (2004) and Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids (2011). They include her reflections on growing up American among expats in Venezuela. Her work has also appeared in The American Journal of Nursing, International Educator, Brain,Child, Tales from a Small Planet, and elsewhere, and she’s blogged about TCKs for the Children’s Mental Health Network (www.cmhnetwork.org).