The Other

“Yes,” I wrote to my friend Mr. Kansas, continuing an ongoing discussion over email, “you need the other to find meaning. No quibble here. But why? Why do you have this need for the other so strongly?” I was referring to his difficulty seeing the point of anything after his wife’s death. His answer? Genetics. He knows enough about the subject that I couldn’t easily dismiss what he said. And yet, what good is genetics to someone like me, used to dealing in hopes, fears, wishes, and motivations? It is a different language. It explains nothing.

Alice Munro wrote a thoughtful pair of stories about the two sides of her narrator’s family, paternal and maternal. In the second story, “The Stone in the Field,” the narrator is in a field where a big boulder once sat, marking the spot where an old hermit was said to have been buried. Though it must be in the vicinity, she can’t find the boulder. Or any other sign of a grave. As she stands there, near the only marker of his life, a marker that might not even exist anymore, she reflects that the hermit’s life, not just his burial spot, is a mystery.

When she was younger, she says, a mystery meant a secret, and a secret could be discovered. But by the time she goes looking for the boulder, she says of herself, “I no longer believe that people’s secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings, full-blown, and easy to recognize.” Now, she can only repeat the facts, including this, about the families she’s described: “However they behaved they are all dead. I carry some of them around in me. But the boulder is gone, Mount Hebron is cut down for gravel, and the life buried here is one you have to think twice about regretting.”

And that is the end of the story.

Wondering how to answer Mr. Kansas, I recalled these stories and the narrator’s search for an explanation—for her family, for herself—in the people she came from, in the genes that she shares with them, but also in the almost antiquated notion of learning by example. In the multiple threads of the histories woven together and then tugged apart and examined, she finds much that helps explain herself and others in her family. Such an examination is what I suggested to Mr. Kansas, to answer my question of why he must suffer bereavement so deeply when many others have found they can go on, despite their loss. What’s different about him, I wondered? Could he puzzle it out, and make the solving last? According to the narrator of Munro’s story, mysteries are not communicable. But the attempt might keep Mr. Kansas busy and distracted.

I wound up the letter, noting in a last aside that my running partner was coming in a few minutes to take me around to the auto salvage yards to look for a new seat for my car. I did not go into much detail about how I broke the seat by forcing the release lever when the back stuck and wouldn’t lie flat for my sick dog, Oso, for the drive to the vet. Not quite the same as lifting the proverbial car off the trapped child, but I hadn’t guessed my own strength. In the next email, I might turn that anecdote to use—an example for Mr. Kansas of the unexpected strength one can bring to bear.

My running partner, I noted to Mr. Kansas, wanted me to sign up for a couple of races, and I was resisting. He was unable to run because of a particularly persistent tendon injury, and the best he could do was participate vicariously through me. We all have our other, I thought, sending off my email. Mr. Kansas has his departed wife. For my running partner, it is running. In the spirit of “do for others” and “pay your debts,” I’d made my decision before we found the replacement seat at the fourth junkyard: I’d run those two races that weekend—a 5K on Saturday, in windy, wet, cold weather, and a 7K on Sunday, even colder and just as windy. You have to do what you can, so I would run because my partner couldn’t. If there were a race today, February 25—my running partner’s birthday—the best present would be for him to run. Barring that, the second best would be for me to run in his place. One must do these things now—soon enough we will be like the hermit, lost in the murk of history.

I collected two first-place trophies that weekend. The least I could do—and the most. After the second race, we bolted in my new seat. Then I sat down to write about it, because writing is my other.

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