Introduction

July 2004

It was clear to me then, that I had to get the hell out of there. Maybe I had died in a car accident or something else I couldn’t remember. Whatever it was, maybe there was still the possibility of Escape. I had to try, give it a shot. There was nothing to lose, as long as I wasn’t already dead.

How did it happen, this idea of Escape? What brought it on? How did I realize I might not be dead? How on earth did that occur to me?

What force propelled me out of the chair and over the state lines?

Where did the courage come from? God? Pre-Ape? As far back, as the pikia? Did God make the pikia, or is there a God at all?

No, whether it was because of something in my genetic wiring, or my conservative Methodist upbringing, I’ve never felt at the bottom of everything, there was no God. I wanted to so very much at times. There seems to be something there because of the dreams. That was perhaps the only evidence. Something complex, something massive; but in the end, if it wound up the Judeo-Christian God, then for some reason this God hated me, and possibly hated my mother more. It sure seemed like it at the time. It is hard to tell. My mother, on the other hand, kept her faith to the end.

To the bitter, bitter end.

My mother, her body eaten alive by itself, sang hymns with the hospice nurses until the last day of her life.

I couldn’t join them.

The lung cancer had spread to the bones where no morphine could reach. Bedridden for a year and a month, she couldn’t walk because her bones would break. It was less painful for her to just lie there and let them eat each other up, along with the other things they would take. The waves of pain came in cycles every minute to a minute and a half; but there she had lain through it all, singing hymns, saying she was looking forward to going to God.

I was left behind. In terror.

Did she, Marc, and my father go to someplace in particular? I seem to hear them sometimes. Hear what they would have said. There is no way to tell for sure. No one has the answer to these things.

Some people think they do. For instance, my mother was certain that God was taking her back.

My father believed she was going to get better. He was convinced, including the minutes after she died, that she miraculously was going to be saved. He felt his belief would make it so, even though she had dwindled to less than seventy-five pounds, even though she was dead. He believed it was only an illusion. Things were going to straighten out. They didn’t. For him, that is.

My mom got what she wanted. Didn’t he hear her singing those hymns? He was right there by her side, the entire time, often sleeping in a chair next to the hospital bed in their bedroom. He and Mom were trustees to a Methodist church. He knew those hymns. He knew them and he heard them. Why didn’t he look forward to my mother going to God, the same as she did?

He didn’t. After he realized that she wasn’t coming back, he stopped going to church, and died. He would stop going to church only for six days, six months; six days before Thanksgiving, three weeks after my best friend committed suicide. The only three people that I talked to every day were gone. Wiped out. Complete silence.

Wherever they went, or didn’t go, I’m still here. I had wondered if somehow I joined them, for some time; been sent to another compartment. There but not there. Kinda? Sorta? Maybe. Why not? So many things have stopped making sense anyway.

At this time, I have determined I’m not dead. That seems reasonable. I marvel at these other people, huffing and puffing, for they have the answers to the Great Vague Things. It is or it isn’t. It can’t or it could. I’m happy for them. Really. It must be nice to know so much, to be so certain, to know the unknowable, to speak the unspeakable. Good for them.

The one thing of which I’m absolutely certain, the one thing I can count on today, which can change at any time, the right here and now: I am not dead.