Last year my former nephew died (nephew by marriage, former by divorce) at the age of 41, leaving a wife and three small children, ages 2, 5, and 7. About three years ago he joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, where something in the water may or may not have caused a rare form of liver cancer that is less rare among young men of Middle Eastern descent and particularly young men in Iraq. It is mysterious if or how he could have contracted the disease while in Iraq, as he was primarily confined to the military base where the water is carefully filtered. Nonetheless, it is a troubling coincidence. It is this oddity that attracts my attention, and I wonder whether his decision, his insistence, on this choice, was driven by a deeper call than patriotism, adventure, politics, rebellion, duty, or defiance. It reminds me of a strange story that I heard years ago while visiting Hawaii. I was with my children, who were 6 and 8 at the time, on a tiny motorboat, heading out to a snorkeling spot offshore, a famous submerged remnant of an extinct volcano that is invisible from the surface or the shore. The caldera had a strange magic, located seemingly in the middle of the ocean far from land. Inside it, the snorkeling is beautiful, the water warm and shallow and so very clear. I remember swimming to the edge of it and slightly beyond, the rush of suddenly finding myself in extremely deep water, inky and teeming with mystery beyond the visible world. The sloping outer edge was a yellowy pale white tinged with blue as if seen through a blue lens (as, in effect, it was). The root of the caldera faded, then disappeared into blue nothingness. On our way to and from it, sea turtles flitted like shadows beneath the boat.
The skipper told us that some months back he had had a client who was a middle-aged woman who hired him to take her snorkeling. On the way to the caldera, they saw some kind of disturbance in the water in the near distance, and she asked him to take her closer to have a look. He told her that it looked to be a feeding shark, likely a tiger shark, and said he didn’t think it wise to go any closer. She insisted, and he took her there. As they neared the roiling water, she jumped in and disappeared. My nephew’s insistence on joining the Marines has a similar quality to it, a quality of leaping off the boat of safety, common sense, the urgings of family and friends, driven by what seems to me to be the irresistible arrival of fate.
What is the landscape of each of our fates? For example, that the seed of a certain disease finds us somewhere, and develops into a rare cancer? That we dive off a boat in Hawaii and disappear? And what of the inner landscape of these fates? Liver, breast, mind.
However and whyever it happened, my former nephew’s death had an unexpected effect on me. Though I hadn’t seem him in more than twenty years, I wept for three days. The only way to sleep was to create a nest of quilts and pillows on the floor by the window where I could see the moon and the night sky. I phoned my ex-husband, with whom I have not spoken more than once in the last decade and we talked for an hour. I wrote to my former sister in-law and told her that I wanted to plant a grove of trees in Danny’s honor. She wrote back, a sweet and soulful note. I spoke to someone at the Arbor Day Foundation and learned that they plant memorial seedlings for $1 each in national forests and state parks that have been devastated by fire, in groves one can visit. A snapshot of my former nephew’s legacy: moonlit nights spent weeping beside a curtain of stars; three children under ten without a father; a young widow; a grieving family; young Iraqi men dead of the same inexplicable disease… and a hundred trees near Yellowstone reforesting a hill devastated by fire.
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