Andrew Roe
Another famous person dies, and my wife and I do our usual debrief, at night, in bed, lights out, after the day is done and once again it’s just the two of us.
“How old?” I ask.
“Fifty-eight,” she says, consulting her phone for more details, her eyes eerily lit by the screen’s glow.
Now that we’re both in our mid-fifties, anything under eighty is young. We feel that weight.
“That’s not old,” I say, picking up my phone, which is the same model as my wife’s. We’re always mixing them up: which is mine, which is hers.
The famous person is—was—Michael Gerson, a speechwriter and advisor for George W. Bush. Also a columnist and someone who appeared on TV. The name is vaguely familiar.
“Cancer, kidney,” my wife reports, stating the cause of death per our unspoken but firmly established and strictly adhered to structure of these nighttime conversations: always include, up front, along with the age, how the person died. “This is interesting: He’s the one who came up with ‘axis of evil.’”
Weather-wise, we’re into winter now, the temperature cooling and asserting, and so yesterday an extra blanket was added to our bed. We feel that weight as well.
“The original phrase,” my wife continues, “was ‘axis of hatred.’ Somebody else wrote that, and then apparently this guy Gerson changed it to ‘axis of evil.’”
“That’s way better,” I say. “It isn’t even close. One word, one tiny little tweak like that, can make all the difference.”
“Married, two sons, evangelical Christian. Died in a hospital.”
This last piece of information is also part of our tacit agreement: always end with where the person died.
I search for the man’s name and bring up the story on my phone and verify everything my wife just told me. This is how we move toward sleep and rest now, going back and forth, conversation then screen, a pause, conversation then screen, a pause. We have our individual devices, tapping and typing, scrolling and investigating, navigating the world from our respective vantage points, together yet separate, trying to make sense of it all, and our bed is a sturdy ship and everything beyond is the dark and stormy sea.
The worst is when they say the person died of a weak heart. No one dies of a weak heart. Whenever I read this explanation, I want to send a note to the obit writer and point out that we all have big, beautiful, bursting hearts, and they do the best they can for us, no matter if temporary, no matter if imperfect or damaged or full of folly.
“Fifty-eight is so young,” I say, just to put the statement out there, to affirm to my wife and the larger universe that I stand against such cruelties. “You think: at least sixty. That’s the minimum these days.”
“That’s not enough.”
“Nothing is enough.”
I say this without really thinking. But I firmly believe it, I realize; it sounds right, feels right, is right.
And the facts of a person’s life—someone who has died, famous or not—can be known, tabulated, scrutinized. But as onlookers, as outsiders, can anyone ever truly understand the depths and capacity of another single human soul? Even those close to us, with whom we live and love and eventually expire? I’ve shared this thought with my wife before, and she never knows how to respond (and how could she). I decide, after a wisp of internal deliberation and after realizing I’d forgotten to floss my teeth, not to take the conversation in this direction, which is already bleak enough, and plus it’s getting late. I check my nightstand to make sure I have everything I need: ear plugs, sleep mask, mouth guard because I grind my teeth. It’s a whole production.
“Do you remember the French guy from Hogan’s Heroes?”
“Him too?”
“Ninety-six,” my wife says. “Last living cast member.”
“That’s old. That I can take.”
A sudden memory flare at the mention of this show: I used to watch reruns of Hogan’s Heroes when I was a kid, afternoons, after school, alone, empty house, only child, preoccupied parents, time and space, internal and external, the world known and the world imagined, curled up on the couch, peanut butter sandwiches and milk if there was any left. That boy still lives, somewhere.
“He was actually in a concentration camp.”
“The actor himself was?”
“Parisian, Jewish. Robert Clary. Spent three years in a camp. Performed songs and dances for the other prisoners, even the SS guards. That’s how he survived, he said, how he got by. Lost ten of his thirteen siblings and his parents in the Holocaust. No cause of death listed, at least not that I’m seeing.”
As before I search for the man’s name and verify everything my wife says.
“Born Robert Wax Widerman in 1926,” I add, because reciprocity and balance is part of who we are, generally, and something that’s part of these exchanges, specifically. “Parents moved to Paris from Poland after World War I. Came to the U.S. in 1949. For a long time he didn’t talk about the war and the Holocaust. Then he gave talks to high schools and colleges. He came to understand the benefits of sharing his experience with others. Died at his home in Beverly Hills.”
“We should probably stop. Start winding down.”
“You’re right, we should. No more obituaries, no more death. You’re right.”
I have another thought, another memory flare that sparks to life: the time my parents and I were driving on the freeway and it started to snow, I was nine or ten, and I said look, it’s snowing, and my father said it doesn’t snow in Los Angeles, that it was the garlic shavings from the truck in front of us, and my mother said you could have just said it was snow and let him believe.
“Do people even remember Hogan’s Heroes? Gilligan’s Island? Get Smart? The Brady Bunch? Family Affair? All those old shows?”
“I don’t know,” my wife says. “Maybe there’s reruns on some cable channel or you can stream them somewhere. There are so many ways to watch now—I don’t even know where to look.”
Then it’s quiet for a while, I scroll some more on my own, I hear the house settle and what’s either an owl or a mourning dove (I can never tell the difference), and I think that may be it. I glance over at my wife to confirm if she’s asleep. But no: she’s still awake, phone at her side and eyes no longer aglow, staring straight ahead and into something she appears to be trying to picture there on the blank wall but it won’t quite come into focus. I regret not flossing but there’s no way I’m getting out of bed at this point.
“Didn’t one of the kids in Family Affair die young?” she asks.
“The girl,” I say, utilizing my vast and useless knowledge of popular culture and movies and TV shows (it was the girl who played Buffy, the actress’s name was Anissa Jones, and she died of a drug overdose), but I stop myself and don’t say anything more, because once again we find ourselves back on the topic of death, and we both know—also unsaid and understood without having to summon language—that it’s too much and we are too saturated; that it’s time to put away our phones and pull up the covers and underneath the warmth entwine our bodies as much as they can possibly be entwined; and that if we go on like this for too much longer, it will affect our sleep and, perhaps, even our dreams.
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Andrew Roe is the author of the novel The Miracle Girl, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, and Where You Live, a short story collection. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and The Sun. He lives in Martinez, California.