A few days ago, while working in the library, I came across a book about the mystery of death. Well, I thought, This is something I could write to Yo about. I often think of writing letters to her, but then I realize that the things I want to say to her are not relevant to her; they're actually about me. When I saw that book, an image came to my mind: our sunlit world a tent, shrouded by a canopy of black fluffy darkness, like the stuffing of a quilt. The surrounding starry black blanket of death had corners poking into our living life.
As I worked putting the books on the shelves I composed a letter in my mind: Dear Yo, I finally can write to you about you - about what you are doing now, or what you are now, be you everywhere watching, having that omnipotence ascribed to you by those of us who loved and tried to know you; or be you folded into the peaceful eternal quiet. Or re-born and reveling in the beauty of New Mexico's Jemez mountains... Oh. This is back to being about me instead of you, because it is my wondering or speculation about you now.
And so, death is, by definition, subjective. We can only know two things about it, and the rest that we know is about us: the ideas and beliefs of We Who Are Not Dead Now. These two things about death that we are certain of, within our frame of reference:
1. The body is no longer animated from within.
2. We spend more time dead than alive.
After work that evening, my partner and I happened to walk past the place where I had a studio for a year, the garage to a large Victorian house now divided into several apartments. Just as we were noticing how the vines had grown to thoroughly obscure the gate in the front fence, it opened and the owner, Robert, and his twin brother emerged, pushing their bicycles out onto the sidewalk. We chatted for a bit, Robert pointing out some morning glory vines that had grown up the building and telling us how one has grown in through his window and now sports a blue bloom in his room. I asked if his brother lived there now, and he said yes, that he is in Carson's room. I asked where Carson was, so gently Robert told us a tragic story: Carson winding further into a mind-place that impelled him to "go up buildings" downtown, and to be put into a hospital for a week, and then move from one friend's place to another, not being able to stay long before he felt paranoid and uncomfortable, and finally his family having him stay with them in San Luis Obispo. He had begun to talk about the 5th dimension. He climbed up a radio tower in San Luis Obispo and jumped. "And he's gone. Last summer was awful."
The year that I had the little art studio I would work while cancer worked in Yo, and something else worked in Carson while he labored in his tiny mad scientist studio. In breaks from painting - itself a pause from praying, really - friends would come by to do rituals with me, trying to keep my sister alive. And Carson worked on building a guitar that was mechanically alive, that could play along with its player.
He would smoke out in the yard and I would close the small studio windows to avoid it. He would sit on the large red velvet couch on the patio, watching "Fringe," the weird science TV show, on his laptop. Sometimes he would look at my paintings, and one time he gave me a can of paint primer, with a look on his face that seemed intrigued in the act of giving. When Robert installed a lawn, Carson took naps on it a lot. His whimsical presence made us laugh a lot: my friends Heike and Ralph, who lived upstairs, when we had our little afternoon breaks around the glass table in the yard. Carson and I would chat sometimes, and often the technical nature of what he was saying about his new, improved mechanical guitar project would go just beyond my grasp. He often showed me the components as they were formed, talking about the process of designing it in the computer and programming the equipment to cut the wood and metal pieces just so. At one party he played his big first mechanical guitar invention, with all its cables and repetition of sounds, his voice singing into the circular strains in a pleasantly unique way. I didn't get to see the second guitar, but Robert said that Carson did finish it.
His living space was 100% functional: a big wooden bed in a recessed space at the back; the rest of the room a workshop with saws, tools, equipment, ashtrays, speakers.
I seem to remember Carson in a long overcoat, smoking in the winter at the time I moved out of the studio; Heike and Ralph had already gone back to Germany. I saw him on the street a couple of months later and chatted for a minute. Several other times, friends and I spotted him through the windows of Mission cafes or restaurants as he walked down the sidewalk with his tall to-go coffee and cigarette, sometimes carrying a burrito in a paper bag, having called in the order to Taqueria Papalote from his cell phone.
The space we live in can be measured in three ways: height, width, and depth.
The fourth dimension is time.
So what is the fifth dimension? Where we go when we die? Spirit space?
When Carson jumped, did he surf the radio waves into the 5th dimension, joining Yo and Lawrence, Sharafat, Mom, Daddy, Luis Cervantes, all of the others, so many of them?
I can imagine thousands of things - and ask as many questions - about what it's like where they are. Or if they are.
I felt so sad after hearing that news. I still do. I had been thinking that Carson was still walking around the neighborhood, progressing, building, creating.
It brings the sadness of losing my sister to the surface, and also the shock. It's seeming like it happened too soon. I thought that Yo's disappearance had taught me not to believe that we'll all be here til we're in our 80's. Yolanda was 55, Carson was around 30. I'm still shocked. I guess I'm still learning.
See how fragile it is; how precious and brief.
Photos are stills from the movie "Macario."
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