Livvy struggled near the end.
Breathing labored. Fluid filling her lungs. Without a doctor or hospital, all
of those normal courses of action to relieve pain were inaccessible for us, and
this was the one time having taken to the dimness of our family cave seemed to
be an act of selfishness more than survival. Had we stayed behind, with all of
the crumbling society around us, we were close to the hospital, there were
bound to be some people who had once been a nurse, maybe we would have had
simple access to a drug.
'The pain, David. So much.' Livvy
trailed off far too often when attempting to speak because it just took too
much strength for her to string more than two or three words together.
'Shh,' I whispered softly. She was
clammy as she struggled. Softness. That is the way I remember her, though. Her
forehead, sweat no longer dripping as her sweating, much like someone who had
undergone sun stroke, ceased.
'Take. Me. Sunshine. Please.'
Simple words as she could not make a
full, complex sentence which should have been sad. Livvy was once so lucid, so
vivacious, so loquacious, she was, after all, the daughter of two college
professors and her ability to speak was something to behold. While she was not
a public speaker in that traditional sense of giving speeches, or making herself
known, when she talked, especially about those things which brought her joy,
her voice was so strong, so confident, she was not full of life, she was the
example of life. She was something to look up to for all, and it was the way in
which she commanded a conversation. Strength. Beaming eyes. Hands confidently
placed, and only moving for any particular effect she might be caring to
express. Livvy would have been a wonderful orator at any level, but she simply
wanted to live life and be an example.
'You can be smart without being
obnoxious about it,' she had once assured me. 'I don't need to be on
television, or in movies, television or any other look at me medium. I
just need to help those who can make a difference do what they are supposed to
do.'
That's why she wanted to be the
person in the background, helping the powerful orators, those men and women who
had ideas, charisma, a future, the future of the world, become better speakers.
A speech coach, she called it, but really she was a magician. Taking the least
capable person and turning them into brilliant speakers. It's what made our
word play so interesting those early days in Portland. We were falling in love
with more than a face, more than a body, more than any individual part, we were
falling in love with something beyond even a soul. A soul leaves this earth
behind and all of its inhabitants. But there is something more, a special
connection shared by a few that survives death, and she was that kind of
remarkable.
To see her struggle with something
that used to be such a simplistic, taken-for-granted, basic conversation was
more than heart-wrenching, but we were touching the sky together.
'David, why don't you just let me
go. It gives me such pain to see you like this. You look so defeated. The tears,
they have etched into your cheeks leaving a permanent scar along their path.'
Livvy loved to make things easier for everyone. But I could not walk away.
'Livvy, we are to be together beyond
this life, and to join you, I have to know where you are, where you go. I have
to be here with you, side-by-side, to share your journey. I do not want to hide
from you. I don't believe in ghosts, which you fully know after all these
years, but I do believe in the human spirit, it is a condition with which we
are all blessed, but few ever embrace. We leave this earth and simply vanish.
But a few, a select few, know love so deeply that it never leaves.
'You will be the wind on the back of
my neck on a cool morning. Or the soft kiss of the suns dying light each night.
And I need to be there, to feel those things, to know that you will still be
there with me.'
'But, you are in pain. You are so
sad. I cannot bear your sadness.'
'Livvy, my love, my sadness is not
for myself, and it is not even for you, it is for this world which will never
have the chance to experience the spirit of someone like you again. So many
people, so many idealists who were so wrong. Us included. But your spirit, your
love, that is something that was never wrong and it seems a cruel hoax by whatever
god exists that the universe, not just this planet, but the universe, will be
stripped of something so beautiful.'
'it won't be.' Livvy had gained a
moment of lucid clarity. The end was too close. As we looked up at the sky, we
could not help but smile, it was more of a melancholy smile than in a previous
life, or in another parallel universe, but it was a smile between the only two
people in that desert that evening as the sun began to set.
'I have a secret to tell you.'
'What's that love.'
'I read your book. City of Hope, the
one that I told you was fake, that someone was trying to piggyback off of a
famous author, that it was an illusion of a bygone author created to trick
those who wanted desperately to believe in their own discoveries.'
'So. The skeptic of all the world
succumbed to the temptation, I see.' Livvy had told me City of Hope was my
fantasy. The author, J.J. Faulk was a pseudo-nym, but many had tried to
speculate it was the work of William Faulkner, who had gone by his own fake
name of 'Junius Junior' and that it was his own attempt to write without having
to make it one of his works. The truth was that I had thought it never
the work of Faulkner and more likely the work of Ken Kesey, who had idolized in
his own way the works of Faulkner. It was Kesey who had written the
quintessential Northwest story Sometimes a Great Notion. It was he who I
thought had created the pen name JJ Faulk so he could write this shorter
novella without the need to stay within some expected boundaries of prose.
'Weary is the man whose path is
unknown for he must travel in the darkness of life.' That's a brilliant line. I
really liked the book. But, David, you do not have to travel int eh darkness of
life. You do not have to be weary. Those days are over, and you have found a
path no longer dark and lonely. Cold and weary. With me or without, I think you
would be in a spot where you had put that all behind you. You're better than
Anthony. You always have been, you just never saw it until you came to
Portland.'
She really had read the book. I was
impressed with the return, no matter how brief, of Livvy's acuity in these
waning moments. It was like the light of where ever she was going had taken
away all of the pain, all of the anguish, and had made her whole again. For
whatever amount of time she was whole, I would revel in her beauty.
Drifting clouds, fading light,
colliding from nothing into the brilliance of a fire raging in the minds of
children. Sunset brought out the magnificence of the sky for a too brief moment
of perfection which could remain so only in my mind. It was gone too soon, yet
her beauty would live forever. She smiled. The wind blew.
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