“The Options” by Elizabeth Cohen

As Susannah prepares for her nephew’s memorial, a stranger and his family appear in her backyard, forcing grief, guilt and privilege into the same uneasy space.

The Facts:

1. The naked man in your backyard looks familiar.
2. While you are nervous, certainly, you are also curious about how he got into your backyard and why he is there.
3. Then you remember— this is that man who asked you for money when you were watering your Japanese maple, a tree planted two-and-a-half weeks ago by your nephew, Adam, just before his decision to leave this earth.
4. You went inside the house and came back with five dollars and a packet of instant noodle soup, all you could fine.
5. As he was leaving, the man offered some ad hoc advice on the care of Japanese maples. “Water early in the morning and again late at night,” he said.

Yes. This is that man. Here. Now. In your backyard. Naked.

            It has only been a day, but it seems like over a century since that advice was offered. You had to have your car fixed for overheating. You took your dog Mabel to the vet (in an uber, because of the overheating car). You planned your nephew Adam’s funeral. On the highway of life, you’ve traveled to the moon and back.

      “Is there something you want, sir?” You ask, realizing as you speak now, in your back yard, that you are being very formal while not allowing your eyes to travel down from his face to the more sensitive real estate below.

       “Might I have a drink of water?” The man asks. Considering all the things he might have said, this seems a reasonable request and is equally formal to your question. You nod and he picks up the hose, which is busy watering your fig tree. After he slurps down water for about two minutes, he gently replaces the hose at the base of the fig tree.  “They like a lot of water,” he says, gesturing to the tree.          

        “Anything else?” You ask the man. You notice Mabel, who usually barks at everyone, is walking over to him, quietly.

        “No, that covers it,” he says, petting her, walking to your back gate, pulling on some shorts he apparently hung over the top of your fence, then letting the garden gate slam behind him.

     Your Options:

1. Call the police and report that a naked man was in your back yard.
2. Go online to the “Next Door” chat and see if any neighbors are discussing polite, naked men making small (yet reasonable) requests in their yards and offering advice on tree care.
3. Just let it go as a peculiarity of life in this troubled city where you live. Hell, people are murdered every day. All this man asked for was a drink of water.

            Two days later you find a small pile of blankets in your yard and some fast-food wrappers. Someone has been there during the night and apparently ate a meal from “Chicken King”. You find yourself wondering, oddly, what this person ordered, thinking, in the realm of fast food, “Chicken King” is really the best local option. So much better than food from the chains like KFC. Recently, you were watching a documentary about China and were intrigued to see that KFC is very popular there. They have it in all the train stations. You wonder what the Chinese would think of Chicken King and that logo of a chicken wearing a cute little crown. But you digress. You walk to the back of your yard, pick up the trash, and fold the blanket neatly, placing it on the top of your fence, where the man’s shorts had been hung. You do not know that the blanket belongs to him- they could be anyone’s, really. It’s just a hunch.

        Now you really do have a dilemma, however.  Revised List of Options:

1. Call the police and report someone eating and possibly sleeping in your back yard. However, you realize this might necessitate telling them about the naked man who was there earlier, which might prompt them to ask why you did not report that earlier incident. And why didn’t you, anyway? Well, one reason is you had just read how thinly stretched the police are in your town, with many car thefts, barfights, stabbings and murders, daily. A naked man asking for a drink of water seemed a negligible infraction.
2. Go on “Next Door” and ask if anyone else has had someone leave a blanket or food wrappings in their yards. Ask what they did.
3. Just let it go as a strange and sad occurrence in which nobody was harmed or hurt, nothing stolen, really…so what? And how entitled to think that law enforcement should come running to the white lady’s house because of some fast-food wrappers. Really! That seems the height of privilege. Oh, help! Someone left their fast food trash in my yard.

            Anyway, you’re busy. Your car is still acting up, Mabel keeps puking, and Adam’s memorial service is tomorrow. Over twenty-five people are coming from out of town and another twelve or so from around here. An entire family from Costa Rica are coming. They hosted Adam in his six-month Spanish immersion course last year, right before he moved in with you. His parents are coming, of course, your brother and sister-in-law. That is top-shelf terrifying. She (the sister-in-law) basically blamed you when you told them the news. Right after you explained finding him, wrapped in his sheets, the pill bottle open on his bedside table, she screeched, “what did you do to my son?”

             “It wasn’t Susannah’s fault,” your brother interrupted.  Although maybe it was. You knew Adam was struggling.  “He seemed fine!” You lied.

             
            Everyone coming to the funeral has theories. The grapevine is overloaded with them and some have trickled back to you. You realize you even have one yourself. Adam basically told you. The world is rotten. Humans ruined it. “Humanity,” he liked to say, “not a fan.”

Perhaps, just maybe, he decided to reduce the plague of humans by one, you think. Or maybe, he was upset that Mirasol, his beautiful girlfriend, broke up him with rather abruptly a month earlier. Anyway, you are feeling very nervous, and somehow guilty (could you have done something here?), and that nervousness inspired you to hire a caterer way over your budget. “Local,” you said. “He only ate food from around here.”
            Adam called himself a “localvore”, and when you asked what that was, he said “it is something like an omnivore who keeps to a twenty-five-mile radius.”  You once read an article about people who build houses like that. If the materials came from further away, they won’t use them. Everything has to be from close by, re-purposed and sustainable. You remember thinking that was probably how all houses were built in the past and probably still are in many places on earth, from sheer necessity. Anyway, you nodded to him and from then on only bought food at the farmer’s market (inquiring how far away each farmer lived).  This meant, naturally, no rice. You love rice.

            This evening, the evening before the memorial, which is going be held in your back yard, you decide to go impromptu funeral shopping. The caterer is taking care of everything regarding food and beverages, plus setting up, bringing plates, tables, etc. But you have to take care of you,  and you need an appropriate outfit. You will take an Uber to the mall, which closes at 9 p.m. But what does one wear to a memorial in one’s own backyard? Is there some protocol?
                a) Black would be way too hot in these dog days of summer.

                b) “Pretty” seems insensitive and inappropriate.

                c)  Wearing clothes that you already own or often wear seems disrespectful somehow, although you do briefly consider wearing Adam’s blue hoodie. But then that also seems disrespectful.
            In the end you choose a brown dress and brown sandals from J.C. Penny, with zero notable features. You realize that what you want from this outfit is to be made invisible. This is an invisible-making dress. These shoes you chose are so mundane they defy description. After the funeral, you think you will throw them all away.

            This whole ordeal has been so challenging. Every night, when you go to bed, you collapse in sobs. You cry so hard you fear you might crack a rib. You briefly worry you might weep out all the fluids in your body. Can a person cry themselves to death? You cry for the fact that your beautiful nephew is gone, absolutely one hundred percent forever gone, reduced to a cardboard box of ashes, and yet you keep finding his things. His wooden toothbrush. His rhododendron shampoo. Mabel, who loved him mightily, still waits outside his bedroom in the mornings, as if he is somehow going to emerge. Then, when he does not, she commences her morning vomiting. 

“I know how you feel, girl,” you say, petting her ragged head. Adam found her wandering around in the snow last winter and it took a month just to comb out all her matted fur. Now her fur is getting matted again and always smells vaguely of dog puke.

You, yourself, are holding back a lifetime of puke at every moment. You want to throw up for each-and-every day you didn’t make special for Adam. The day you said you had too much to do to go hiking. The day you said you didn’t care for a glass of the beet and garlic smoothie he blendered. That day you said you couldn’t lend him your car as you had a meeting. Were you afraid something would happen to your ten- year-old Honda Civic? And how ironic that now that he’s gone that car doesn’t even properly run.

            That day before the before memorial and right before your evening shopping trip, a florist drops off a gazillion floral arrangements. The ones you ordered and many others. You guess everyone, from far and wee, used FTD. You are getting to know the FTD driver, a mustachioed man with a neck tattoo that says “carpe diem” who nods to each arrangement with a certain vague approval. Like he’s seen them all so many times before— the tall lily stalks, roses in bunches, mums in every possible hue. Scorpion grasses, hydrangea, and gladioluses. Or would that be gladioli? (You actually wonder this.) How many death arrangements has this man has delivered in his FTD delivery career? Does he know the plural for gladiolus? Can the amount of love for a person be measured by details in floral arrangements? If so, Adam was loved in whole fields and mountainsides and nurseries. He was loved in every hue. He was loved in frilly blossoms and smooth, serious ones, architecturally simple ones, white calla lilies and liniope grass.

            “What a waste that the dead can’t attend their own funerals,” Adam once said over a localvore dinner you prepared for the two of you. “They would probably enjoy them, like a party with everyone they loved.”  He said he thought it would “be cool for people to pay their respects in advance”. A good idea, but too late for him, obviously. Everyone coming missed their chances. All their flowers will soon wilt, you realize. And then you remember you better water the fig tree, the lilac and the Japanese maple he planted, like the naked man advised, or they will die, too.

    So, you water them all before you go to sleep, and then ever-so-slightly pat yourself on the back. Good job, you. Everything is prepared. People have been calling to let you known their arrival times.  What nobody tells you about funerals is not just are you going to be sad. You are going to be a travel agent. Stay at the Hyatt House,” you recommend. “Yes, there will be vegan foods at the memorial.” Even though Adam is gone, you demanded his culinary practices be respected.

               In the middle of the night, you wipe up Mabel vomit one more time and try to console her as she is trembling madly while outside Aram’s bedroom door. You decide to open it. In she scuttles, diving under his bed alongside his ukelele and dirty socks. You think this is where she will possibly remain for the rest of her life, occasionally letting out a whimper of what you have decided is the deepest dog-grief. You feel it, too. The kind of sad that makes you nauseous. Like it cannot just hang out in your heart but must move on to your stomach, too big for one organ.

              In the morning, you decide to coax Mabel outside thinking it will be hard to get her to emerge from under Adam’s bed. But she rockets out with unexpected verve, into the backyard, which is like an overgrown field of funereal blossoms awaiting the afternoon memorial. She dashes to the back, by the fence. Right over to the man.

            Yes, the man! He is standing there, in the corner. Huddling to be precise. But this time, he is not naked, and he is not alone. There is a woman there as well, and two frightened-looking children. Mabel goes in for a cuddle. It is like she has known this family (are they? A family?) all her life. The little boy shyly pets her head. And then, the impossible happens, she flips over and lets the little girl rub her belly. If you know Mabel at all, you know that is a very special privilege.

             “Um, I have a thing here in a bit,” you say, as if you owe these people some explanation. They don’t say a word, just sort of squeeze in closer to the fence. You notice the little girl is eating the last bite of a breakfast sandwich from Chicken King. She drops the wrapper and hides behind her mother. But is this woman her mother? The woman is holding the blanket you draped over the fence.

             “Listen,” you begin again.

            “It’s ok,” the man interrupts, as if you are the one in his backyard, and he forgives you. “We were about to leave.”

           They make their awkward way to the gate, and the man opens it, shuttling the others through. And are you kidding Mabel? She is acting like she wants to go with them.

          “Thank you,” the woman says, turning toward you one last time before she ducks out.

You are not sure what to say. You can’t even think of any words for the situation. So, you say nothing.  After the gate clicks closed, you think of all the things you could have said. The words are hanging out in the part of your brain where all the things you wish you had said to Adam while he was still alive, reside. Things that never quite made it to your mouth. There is a French phrase for that: l’esprit de l’escalier. Your brain decides to cough that up, as if you speak French or something. Thanks, brain.

         “You’re welcome,” you say to everyone and nobody. Then you go inside and put on the brown nondescript dress and the boring brown shoes and wait. Soon, all the people will arrive. You will let in the caterers and show them where to set things up. You will open the door each time someone new arrives and tell them the memorial is being held in back. You will read your simple eulogy to all the people who loved Adam and stand somewhere to the side, trying to be as invisible as possible in your invisible-making dress, as other people read theirs. What can you say about Adam beyond he was astonishing. In some future archive of beauty, he should have his own page. But now, here, you must keep it simple. You are not the center of this occasion, after all. This is not like you are hosting a party. This is an anti-party. A serious event that may take a long time as Adam was much loved. This could take hours, really, while everyone locates the right words in their brains for their love for this man during his short life. This is an event he might enjoy, as he’d described. Maybe the man and his family should have been invited. But then you have no idea who they are.

            You will try hard not to look at the face of your sister-in-law for there you are sure a vast country of blame will reside. You will try not to look at the face of Marisol, who may feel even weirder than you. You imagine her grief as an ocean, with deep and shallow parts, full of weather. You will hope that Mabel doesn’t choose to puke in the middle of it all, although you will certainly understand if she does. When it is all over you will throw all the flowers in the dumpster, you cannot possibly watch them wilt into decrepitude. Tomorrow is garbage day, thank God. Then, you’ll take off the nondescript brown dress and fold it neatly, tucking the dull brown shoes in the pockets, and placing them over the top of the fence. Maybe they will just stay there. Maybe not. Who knows.

Your options for the future:

1. Create a ritual you can do once a year to honor Adam. It could include:
2. Listening to a certain song he loved
3. Going to a special place he loved to go
4. Cooking up a localvore meal and eating it while watching a movie he would like, perhaps about a Spanish mystic during the black plague
5. walk around the house and generously water the trees he planted, morning and evening, dousing the fig especially generously, leaving the hose right on it while you weed, remembering, as recently advised, they like a lot of water.

Bereavement class family grief Homelessness Moral choice