Goodbye for Now (39 page)

That is why e-mail is better than video chat. That is why video chat is more absence than anything else.

Love,
Sam

DYING ISN’T DEAD

J
anuary is a hard time of year in Seattle. It’s true that every day there are a few more minutes of daylight, but absent the light and lights of the holidays, it feels very dark indeed. Night falls around four thirty in the afternoon and stays until eight or so the next morning, and since the sun never gets much above the horizon and since the total cloud cover and incessant rain mean you wouldn’t see it anyway, they are days shrouded and vague. Sam was starting to conclude that Jamie was right to prefer the British response to such conditions—pint over latte. The dim cornery closeness and numbing sedation promised by a pub seemed a much better approach than the cheery bustle and stimulant of the every-corner coffee shops. What was so great it warranted waking up and getting stimulated for anyway? Sam was depressed, but every Seattleite who could chose indoors and back-to-bed as well. Livvie was quite cheerful, but she was the only one. And she was in Florida. Not to mention dead.

RePosers stayed home too. It was the darkness and the wet. It was the exhaustion of holidays without loved ones, of having made it through only to discover on the other side a whole life alone and missing stretching out ahead. Or they came, but the wonder of RePose was wearing thin, wearing off, wearing on them all. They tired of having the same conversations again and again. They tired of avoiding the same topics, of shaping their conversations about only the past, never what happened next. They tired of only ever being the person they were, never the one they were becoming. They couldn’t give it up, but it wasn’t the elation it once had been either. David Elliot wondered whether, like a drug, they should do it more and more in order to maintain the same high as before. Avery
Fitzgerald suspected David might have missed the point of his drug education programs.

Sam was over the whole thing and tried not to emerge from the bedroom if possible. Dash had given up his gentle cajoling about fresh air and real people and changes of scenery and resorted instead to guilt. You are half of this company, and it’s unreasonable to expect me to run it alone. I need you to staff the salon every day, not just when you feel like it. Morose, moping, and mean are unprofessional attitudes in the workplace. Our entire livelihood is in RePose, and you are trying to sabotage it. Etc. And then guilt, when it didn’t work, gave way to pleading. It’s only been a year. You have to give it a chance to work. Growing pains were inevitable. You’ve helped so many people. We need to play this all the way out. We owe that to Meredith.

Sam said, “Let it die. Everybody else does.”

“What about all our users?” said Dash.

“They can stay. They’re barely using anymore anyway. We’ve become a support group. Frankly, they could find that anywhere, but they’re welcome to the space. They don’t need me for that. Support groups are very low-tech.”

“Just because people take a week off doesn’t mean they’re done RePosing,” said Dash. “And besides, we get new users every day.”

“Who will also soon grow weary of our little computer program.”

“But that’s the whole point, Sam, remember? This was your point all along. It was Meredith who said, ‘Death is for life.’ You said we help people get over it and move on. You said it was never meant to be forever. That the wonder of it fades is a good thing, not a bad thing. Otherwise you spend all day every goddamn day in bed with your dead girlfriend. They die. You hurt. You RePose. You feel a little better, heal a little wholer than you would otherwise, mend, and move on. You and Meredith set yourselves up for failure. When users want to stay and use and wallow, you feel bad that you’re not letting them mourn and get over it. When they need it less and less and eventually leave, you think the whole project’s a failure and should be shut down. If it’s helping people, great. If it helps them to be with others who’ve recently lost a loved one, great. If it helps them enough that they don’t need to RePose anymore, also great. This is all good news, Sam. I don’t understand why you can’t see it.”

Sam couldn’t see it because he wouldn’t turn on the light or take his head out from under the covers. Sam couldn’t see it because everywhere he looked he could see only Meredith—Meredith meeting him in the cafeteria at work, Meredith video chatting with him in London in the middle of the night, Meredith making airplanes, making plans, making love, Meredith in a box on fire being burned down to rubble, Meredith flung into the sea. Sam couldn’t see because he had neither the will nor the energy even to look anymore. Then his phone rang. It was Katie, Penny’s daughter. “We think Mom had a heart attack. We called nine-one-one, and they just took her to St. Giles. We’re all on our way, but it’s going to take a while for anyone to get there. She’s okay, but do you mind going over there until we can come?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” said Sam.

At St. Giles, they wouldn’t tell Sam and Dash anything because they weren’t family, but they would let them sit with her. She was sleeping anyway but seemed so far as Sam could tell to be doing so peacefully. They kicked them out when visiting hours were over, and on the way back to the parking lot, Sam and Dash ran into Dr. Dixon. He’d read about Meredith in the paper and said he was very sorry. He thanked them for making David take down his posters which, he allowed, hadn’t put a stop to parents torturing their dying children unnecessarily but had certainly slowed it down. Then he wanted to show them something, a friend of a friend. Sam remembered what Dr. Dixon had shown them last time and wanted to run screaming from the building instead but couldn’t find a way to do so politely and so followed mutely through labyrinthine fluorescent hallways.

Dr. Dixon stopped at the open doorway to Gretchen Sandler’s room. She was in bed and very pale but awake and smiling pleasantly, if a bit vacantly, at the laptop on the tray over her bed. A man Dr. Dixon identified as Burt sat in a chair next to her, stroking her hand and RePosing with a woman who must have been Gretchen’s twin sister.

“What a funny story.” Burt was cracking up. “I can’t believe your dad thought he could sell that pig after everything you and your sister had been through with him. Didn’t he ever read
Charlotte’s Web
?”

Gretchen’s twin sister laughed. “I guess not. Oh, remember the first time we read that to Maryann?”

“She cried and cried because she thought they were going to kill that pig.”

“And then we had to read another chapter and another to prove to her that Wilbur would be fine.”

“It was probably just a ploy to stay up later,” Burt mused.

“She was such a little imp.” Gretchen’s twin grinned. “Whereas Peter wasn’t even sad when Charlotte died. No wonder he grew up to be an exterminator.”

“He’s not an exterminator,” Burt scolded her playfully. “He’s a software tester.”

“So his job is …?”

“Getting rid of the bugs!” they shrieked together, and dissolved into hysterical laughter. Sam smiled in spite of the jealousy that was eating his stomach lining for dinner. Clearly they had had this conversation many, many times before. This had been another of the points he’d been making all along. RePose worked best for the elderly.

“Gretchen is Burt’s sister-in-law?” Dash guessed. “It must be hard for him to be here with her. She looks so much like his late wife.”

“No, that’s her on the computer. That’s Gretchen,” Dr. Dixon whispered.

“No, that’s RePose,” said Dash.

“Yup.”

“But she’s not dead.”

“Nope. Well, not exactly. She’s not dead. But she is gone. Late-stage Alzheimer’s.”

Dash and Sam were speechless, working this out. “We would never have set RePose up for a living loved one,” Dash finally said.

“Not if you knew about it. As I say, Burt is a friend of a friend. He asked for advice, and I pointed him your way. Unlike small children, Gretchen and Burt seem like ideal RePosers. I advised him not to let you know that Gretchen wasn’t dead yet. I figured you’d never know.”

“It doesn’t work if the accounts are still active.” Sam was horrified.

“They aren’t.” Dr. Dixon shrugged. “Look at that woman. You think she spends much time online?”

“What’s his name?” asked Sam, still certain what he was seeing wasn’t possible.

“Burt. Herbert Vanderman. Gretchen kept her maiden name. She was quite a rebel in her time.”

“I remember him.” Sam’s heart sank. “I set him up remotely. I never thought … It never occurred to me.…”

“Of course it didn’t,” said Dr. Dixon. “Look, disqualifying this couple because she’s technically alive makes no sense anyway. We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d say no, but really, no was the wrong answer. Look at her. She’s dying.”

“Dying isn’t dead,” said Sam.

“It’s gone. All the reasons you argue RePose is a good idea make it a good idea for them. In every way that matters, Burt’s lost her. She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t remember their life together, their family, their sixty-plus years. She can’t talk to him most days. She certainly can’t go home with him. Just like a widower, he has lost his wife. He misses her all the time. He’s in pain, lonely, devastated, afraid. You know this part, Sam. But if she’d died, at least there’d have been a funeral. He could have said goodbye with their friends and family. His kids would have invited him to live with them. His friends would have brought over meals and sent flowers. He’d donate her clothes and set up a scholarship in her memory and join a widowers’ support group and accept and find comfort in people’s sympathy and eventually move on. As is, he’s denied all of the latter and none of the former. It’s all the grief and emptiness of death and none of what makes it at least bearable. Now he gets to remember and reminisce with his wife—while he holds her hand—which seems like just about the best use of your software I’ve heard yet.”

“It’s creepy,” said Dash.

“Wouldn’t you give anything at all to hold Meredith’s hand while you RePosed with her?” Dr. Dixon said to Sam, who would have given anything at all to hold Meredith’s hand while he RePosed with her.

Penny’s daughter Katie was wrong on two fronts: Penny had not had a heart attack, and Sam was not a doctor, but she didn’t seem okay to him.
The doctors eventually explained to Katie, Kent, Kaleb, Kendra, and Kyra, who explained it to him, that she hadn’t had a heart attack but did have congestive heart failure which had itself caused, among other things, the severe shortness of breath and palpitations that had prompted Penny to call not Sam but the building manager. When confronted about this last point, she claimed to have forgotten not his phone number, which would at least have been understandable, but his name, which alarmed Sam greatly but not the doctors who explained that confusion was a symptom as well. Sam felt that heart failure was named over-alarmingly. Evidently, one lingered with it and might live for years in such state. “Failure” seemed a much harsher, finaler word than they meant—“heart damage” or “heart decrease” seemed perhaps more accurate terms. If one’s heart had failed, well, that seemed like the end to Sam. But it was not the end. The sisters and brothers “K” settled in for a long haul—some in their mom’s apartment, some in Sam’s, and some in the salon.

Sam had spent the morning with Penny, her doctors, and her children, and then brought lunch up to Josh for an hour, and was headed back to the salon so that Dash could leave and come spend some time with all of the above. Sam had put him on the task of verifying that all of the projections were actually dead, and it had occupied Dash’s morning. The news was good though which was to say the news was bad like when your positive test results are negative: they were all dead indeed. Sam was certain that Burt wouldn’t be the last user to claim his dementia-plagued loved one was dead, and he was equally sure that the check box and signature he’d added to the form where you swore your loved one was literally and actually dead wouldn’t deter anyone. But it was all he could do for the moment. Demanding a certificate of death seemed insensitive, all things considered.