The Small Things, Counted

I have written a lot about what this disease subtracts. I keep a careful ledger of it, because precision is the only dignity available when your life gets this small, and because I refuse to lie about the size of the loss. The loss is real. None of what follows revises it.

But a ledger has two columns, and I have mostly been keeping only one of them. So here is the other. Not to balance the books, because they do not balance, and not to tell you the small things make up for the large ones, because they do not. Only to report, with the same precision I give the losses, that there are entries on the other side, and that lately I have been able to see them.

This week Beth was at work and I was in bed, and a date surfaced. June 16. Thirty-one years ago Beth and I saw our first movie together in a theater, and the movie was Batman Forever. I remembered it lying there alone, with the house quiet and her gone for the day, and the memory made me smile, so I put the movie on. Just me, in bed, watching the thing we watched when we were two young people who did not yet know they were going to get all the years they got. She did not know I was doing it. It was not a shared moment. It was me reaching for her while she was out earning the life we still have. That is the kind of thing that is large now. At this size, a memory you can hold in an empty house counts as an event.

We are watching a show together, in pieces. It is called Widow’s Bay, a new one, and it is good, and we take it an episode or two at a time because an hour is the most I can spend at once now. That hour is not a consolation for the day I did not get. At this scale the hour is the day. Me flat on the couch and Beth on the loveseat next to me, both of us in the living room, watching something fun and saying the small things you say to the person you have been saying small things to since 1995. I am not going to dress that up. It is just good. It has been good in a stretch where most things have not been.

The community has been part of this too, and I did not expect that. I write about this disease and people who have it write back, and somewhere in the exchange a comment lands that makes me smirk, or nod, or feel for a second like I am in a room with people instead of alone with a body that has betrayed me. Camaraderie is the word, though it is a bigger word than the moments are. The moments are small. A reader gets the joke. A reader gets the thing nobody in my regular life gets. I read it and something in my chest unclenches a quarter inch. That quarter inch is worth reporting.

The smaller things, the ones that barely have a shape. My father-in-law comes and feeds the cats, because bending down to the bowls is a cost I cannot always pay, and so Geno and Genie get fed without it coming out of my account. My mother-in-law sends food back with him, so there is dinner. A man crouching down to two cat bowls and a container of something his wife made. Quiet, ordinary, easy to miss. And on the days they happen, the difference between a manageable day and one that costs me the next three.

Josh and I have known each other nearly twenty years. He is a Flyers fan, which I have mostly forgiven. He will drop a random “how are you, buddy” out of nowhere, and I tell him straight, no managing it, and he just listens. Then he hands me his own life back, the update on his wife, the dogs, the new cat. We agree, again, that neither of us can stand John Tortorella. A Penguins fan and a Flyers fan, twenty years in, still doing this.

It is not only Josh. Joe checks in and sends his thoughts, and every so often an Indigo Girls song comes on the radio and he tells me it made him think of me, or a Clarks song does it and we are both back commuting to Pitt for a minute. Bob drops a Star Wars picture into my phone with no warning, or gets me going on Masters of the Universe, or razzes me for being behind on The Boys and Invincible, which I am. None of these are big exchanges. They are a song, a picture, a guy giving me a hard time about a show. They are also someone, on an ordinary day, deciding I crossed their mind and that I should know it. None of it is about my disease, and that is exactly the gift, that for the length of a text exchange my mind is on a coach I will never meet and a cat I will never meet instead of on the thing it would otherwise be on.

There is a group text, too, a circle of friends Beth and I share, and most days I am barely in it. A heart tap on someone’s message. A laughing emoji. A reply that is just the rolling-on-the-floor face because that is the most I have to give that hour. But Beth is in it, fully, and she loves it, and the thread takes her somewhere that is not this house and not my disease for a while. We try to get the group together for dinner once a month when we can, drinks and discussion, a few hours that are a diversion from real life. They show up for both of us, but what I notice most is what they do for her, the way an ordinary night out gives her back a version of herself that does not have to manage anything. That she still gets that is one of the things I am most grateful for, and I did not put it on the list for me. I put it there for her.

Let me be clear about what I am and am not saying, because this kind of writing usually curdles into something I have spent the whole series refusing. I am not saying these moments are why everything is okay. Everything is not okay. I am not better. The losses I have counted are still counted. None of these small things is evidence the disease is lifting, and I will not pretend otherwise. They are just good, and they are real, and both of those can be true while nothing else improves.

What I am saying is narrower and, I think, truer. A life can get very small and still have light in it, and the light does not have to mean anything beyond itself to be worth keeping. The hour with Beth does not redeem the twenty-three without her. The cat bowls do not redeem the back that cannot reach them. The smirk at a comment does not redeem the isolation that made the comment matter so much. They sit in their own column, unredeeming and unredeemed, and they are real, and lately I have had enough quiet to notice them.

That is the whole report. The small things are small. I am counting them anyway. Some weeks that is not a lesson or a turn toward hope. It is just what was true, written down, because it was good and I was there to see it.