Lately I smell like death. That is not a turn of phrase: I smell the way my grandparents’ house did in the many slow years that they were dying. I wash my bathrobe, I shower, I brush my teeth, but I can’t escape it. It’s sweet like bananas, tangy like mown grass, with a faint odor of cigarettes smoked in decades past, which my grandparents did with gusto in the 60s, and which my uncle did in that house for many years before he finally quit.
He, my godfather, was the only one of the seven children who got to keep a bedroom (prim twin bed, college basketball posters, a hanging calendar for the year 1986 from a Chinese takeout place), let alone smoke off the back porch, because he was a priest, and you can’t say no to a priest. Part of wearing the collar is cultivating a special appreciation for hospitality, even among your own family, a constant need for a Good Samaritan. Now he has esophageal cancer—we found out the morning after he sat at my parents’ kitchen table, railing against the archbishop over coffee on Christmas day—but he’s not going to die.
It’s a small tumor, my mom tells me over the phone, crying in a grateful, gasping way that frightens me. The cancer is contained. Nervously, I inhale my own breath.
Lorrie Moore writes of a daughter whose mother is dying. “Do not resent her,” Moore commands (why is she always commanding her protagonists?). “Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, must now contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held.”
This line strikes me—my best friend has told me about the concept of containment, in the psychoanalytic sense. She described it as listening to a thought, holding it, absorbing rather than deflecting it. “Having a container is a really big fucking deal,” she said. “Most people can’t even bring themselves to care enough to do it.” I wonder why this idea was so memorable to me; it’s probably the word itself, which I find dumb and impossibly broad. What isn’t a container? (I am still incredulous there’s a place called The Container Store.) But then, we rarely talk of containment, those of us who came of age after the Cold War. We speak, rather, of connection: access, openness, the imposition of ourselves on the world. Too self-absorbed to know how to contain, not selfish enough to desire it for ourselves. Say what you will about us, but I don’t believe we are selfish.
That story, the one by bossy Lorrie Moore, is told in reverse, all the way back to the moment the daughter enters the world, splits from her mother. I will have to bookmark this for my friend, who is immersed in psychoanalysis lately and always talking exasperatedly about “womb shit.”
For the past few days I’ve been having what would best be described as morning sickness, constant nausea that makes eating anything before the mid-afternoon unthinkable. But I’m not pregnant. There’s nothing in my womb but a smooth, hard peach pit of dread. I think of my uncle’s cancer, of Illness as Metaphor. What Sontag said: “morally, if not literally, contagious.” I worry my desire for self-destruction is contagious, morally and/or literally.
“Do you think it’s possible,” I asked my best friend recently, “to feel a connection so strong to a person that it precludes your ability to feel as connected to someone else?” She said no, and she was right. I wasn’t using the correct word, though. What I meant to speak of was containment. Lately I don’t know how I feel about anything. I am distant to my husband. I have a sense that I am neglecting my place in a hierarchy of containments, that I am the Russian nesting doll gone missing.
The box of trash bags, in the trash. I smell ripe, like the corner of my grandparents’ kitchen by the back door. Toward the end of his life my grandfather would get confused (or maybe not confused—he stayed remarkably sane) and put trash in the recycling bin, then stack neatly folded paper bags in the garbage pail. It was as if he forgot what was useful and what needed to be thrown away. You would think that, but it wasn’t true. He still knew what he thought he needed, he just didn’t know where to put it.
