3.3. MRS. PALOMAR CONSIDERS
3.3.3. Learning to Be Dead
Eventually Mrs. Palomar finds herself in the confounding and unfortunate position of being very sick. She convalesces in a small house on the coast, where Mr. Palomar also convalesced prior to his own passing. Her children stop in every few days to check on her, less often than the nurse who lives down the road and comes in to cook for Mrs. Palomar, sort out her medicine, and move her adirondack chair around on the deck. Mrs. Palomar likes the nurse. The nurse wears ripped blue jeans and pale summer sweaters, not the creased uniforms and silly clean hats of hospital nurses. The nurseís skin is the color of the wrapped caramels she brings for Mrs. Palomar as a treat. She brings them in fistfuls and fills a blue glass bowl with them, the bowl is always empty when she comes the next day despite Mrs. Palomarís dying teeth. Mrs. Palomar likes the nurse.
Mrs. Palomar soon discovers it to be very difficult knowing that you are going to die. She remembers sitting around outdoor fires as a child, smoke drifting into her face causing tears, discussing what she might do if she were told she had six months to live. Around those fires Mrs. Palomar had a thousand answers. Now she has six months to live and she has no answers whatsoever. So she convalesces. She eats caramels and has the nurse build outdoor fires in the sand behind the small house. She isn't sure if her lack of answers has to do with the fact that in her years she has managed to do many of those things she would've done with six months to live. She isn't sure if it has to do with her fear of where she will be in six months, or her fear, rather, of not being at all. She is sure that she likes caramels and that when dead she will never eat them. Mrs. Palomar sits by the outdoor fires. The heat makes beads of sweat on her crinkled face and she lifts a weak wrist to wipe them with the cuff of her sweater. The fire licks at a sky in the dark so close in color and shape to the ocean beyond that it seems to Mrs. Palomar to dip far below the horizon. She isn't sure if this expanse is part of her future. She knows she has no future but still wonders if she will become a part of such great things.
Mrs. Palomar wonders other things too, like what will become of her memories. She wonders how many grains of sand there are in the 37 square meters of beach that run precisely from the back of her small house to the tip of the nearest wave at high tide. (The nurse measured this distance one afternoon at Mrs. Palomarís behest.) Mrs. Palomar is sure that her memories number the same or greater than these grains of sand, though somehow they've managed to stay packed in the small space of her brain, which is far less than 37 square meters. She is sure that when she is dead something will have to become of these memories. With no one to remember, analyze, name, alter, or number them, might they just disperse into the universe, becoming part of great things, or might they serve a purpose in some otherís brain, in that of one of her children perhaps, or of the caramel-skinned nurse? Mrs. Palomar has a fleeting recollection of a man she once met in the grapefruit section of the supermarket. He is not, however, in the grapefruit section in her memory; rather, he is standing in a dark coat on a bridge with a child, pointing towards the sun. She has remembered this often in recent days in her convalescence. Mrs. Palomar wonders if perhaps the man has died and dispersed his memories among those whose lives heís touched.
Mr. Palomar never could accept the idea of death. The day Mrs. Palomar knows it is coming she sits at an outdoor fire and remembers this about her husband. When he died she felt parts of him die in her, and other parts emerge, as if Mr. Palomarís partial belief in his capacity for death caused some sort of ambiguous effect. Mrs. Palomar believes entirely in her own death. It is difficult for her, but she knows it is coming, today, in front of the fire. Soon, she knows, there will be nothing more for her to remember or know, nothing more to have done or seen or wanted to see or do. She believes this will happen, this lack of being, and it does, when the nurse comes her body is still and a caramel is half-unwrapped in her open hand. The ocean laps at the shore and the sky and at Mrs. Palomar, who no longer does or sees but only is not among the great things of the world.