Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
we best acknowledge them, serve them, honor them, remember them, and go on living
without them.
Mike's dying, even though we all knew it was coming—after his operation, he'd been
warned that he would be living on borrowed time—was, for me, the leak in that dike.
From then on I knew people close to me were going to start dying more often and that the
more time went on the more experience I was going to have with loss and grief. I think
everybody must have a moment like that, the moment you feel your mortality acutely
for the first time. The humility it creates in you, not to mention the anguish and the fear,
is made only more haunting by the knowledge that you are not extraordinary in this re-
gard at all.
My mother died five months later, on January 12, 2001, at home in the suburbs of
Atlanta. Her body was shipped north to be buried in Westchester, north of New York
City, near where my parents had lived for a time after they sold the house in New Jersey
where I grew up. I chain-smoked Camels as I composed the eulogy—three months later
I quit cigarettes for good—and felt absolutely desperate the whole time, as if I could,
somehow, reclaim her life for her, change it in retrospect, make it better than it was. If
only I could write about her well enough.
So early Thursday morning I called Jan in Paris and told her the news about Billy and
said I didn't know what to do. I was just beginning my trip, I said, just finding my legs.
I saw Billy just a few weeks ago, I said; I feel like I already told him good-bye. And oh
man, do you know how much it's going to cost to fly from Walla Walla to L.A. on a day's
notice?
She let me talk and then said if I didn't go I was going to be very sorry very soon and
for a long time afterward. Just as she was saying that I understood that I'd been thinking
only of the Billy I last saw, the diseased, diminished version of someone who had taught
me, by his example, what independent thinking is, what original humor is, what a sin-
gular personality is. It didn't serve either of us, me or him, to keep thinking that way.
That afternoon, I made a plane reservation for the next morning. Then I spoke to Tom
Scribner, the Walla Walla lawyer who had invited me to his home, and made a dinner
plan. He gave me a good route to ride that afternoon around Walla Walla, and I rode it,
a sun-seared twenty-five miles through spectacularly golden-white wheat fields under
a spotless blue sky. It was a marvelous ride; the landscape was stark and beautiful and
somehow both fertile and remote. A southerly wind came up and made me work espe-
cially hard on the way back into town, and for two hours, thankfully, I was completely
subsumed in the bubble of a bike ride.
