Consumer Report

A small portion of this essay previously appeared in the “Lives” section of the New York Times Magazine.

— Ed.

Consider this a kind of consumer report. I am not a car gal. I have little interest in vehicles, and the ones that I have owned I’ve driven until their grisly deaths: burst gas lines, generator poof-outs, whole-engine cardiac arrests requiring that the massive mechanical muscle be lifted from the steel cavity and dropped onto a junkyard heap. It is easier, by the way, to dispose of a dead body than a dead car. When my little white Hyundai died at seventy-five thousand miles — died beyond repair or resuscitation — I had to pay a few hundred dollars to have it hauled off to the junkyard on a sunny autumn day, the crisp, clear kind when the sun is so bright the scrap metal glitters and the gutted tires give off the smell of heated rubber. I went along and watched them finish off my car. The Bobcat took one swift bite, and it all came crashing down, with dust and seat stuffing and shattered glass and rainbow streaks of oil dripping from the pile. I was sad to see the vehicle go. I had bought that car brand-new twelve years earlier for four thousand dollars. That car had carried me through my thirties and into my early forties. With it went a lot of good times, a lot of books dreamed up behind its sticky wheel, a lot of crying babies and hauled wood and late-night conversations with my sister, who has since moved to Japan.

I miss my sister. I never imagined she would spend her midlife years in Osaka, eating seaweed and teaching English as a second language. When I first bought my Hyundai, my sister was in her twenties, with long brown hair and her whole life in front of her. Her plan was to get her PhD and teach gender studies in some suave city like Boston, where she could occasionally contribute smart, iconoclastic essays to smart, iconoclastic academic reviews. She did get her PhD, but she didn’t get the college teaching job she had hoped for. In that, she is like most of us: she has achieved what she wanted in some ways, and in other ways she has missed the mark.

She has a Japanese fiancé named Turu, whom she met the summer before my car died. Turu is a businessman. As is common in his culture, he foresees a lifelong allegiance to his corporation. That my sister will marry a man so devoted to bureaucracy seems sad to me, almost as sad as the death of my car.

When my sister first told me of her decision to marry Turu and live in Osaka, she started to cry. We were in my Hyundai. The engine was running. (This was maybe six months before the end, when my car still had some vim, some vigor.) It was a soft spring night, dew glittering on the grass. “You know what I’m most afraid of?” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m most afraid of being buried on another continent. I can’t believe the whole family, all you guys, will be buried here in Boston, and I’ll probably be buried in Japan, with Turu and his family.”

“Well,” I said, “you could have your body shipped back to Boston for burial. That’s not out of the question, is it?”

“But then I’d be so far from Turu!” she said, and she started to cry harder.

This all seemed a little absurd to me, and, at the same time, absolutely apt. “Why don’t you have Turu agree to be buried in Boston with us?” I said. “I mean, you’re agreeing to live your life in his country. The least he could do is agree to do his death in yours.”

“I guess so,” she said.

We were idling in front of her apartment building. “Let’s go,” I said.

“Where to?”

“Blue Shirt,” I said, which is a great cafe near Harvard Square, every wall a different fruit color: mango, melon, grape, green apple. The place pulses with life. The foods are fresh. With every bite of a Blue Shirt meal, you feel yourself getting younger.

My sister is now back in Osaka, a wide and windy continent and an ocean away, a place that feels lonely, a place as seemingly distant from me as death itself. I wish she would come home. I wish I could wake up one night and look out the window and see her flying home over the clouds, borne by my shining white Hyundai, mysteriously resurrected, puff-puffing across the enormous black expanse of sky.

For more than a decade I tracked my maturation by my car’s repair schedule. Every three thousand miles, when it was time to change the oil, I had a teeth cleaning. At thirty thousand miles, when it was time to replace the clutch, I went to see the eye doctor. When the Hyundai hit fifty thousand miles, I hit thirty-five and got my first bone-density test, because my bones have always been thin and brittle. The test came back with bad results. I needed calcium the way a car needs gas: keep it coming. Now that my car was gone, dead, I wondered what was next on my health-maintenance schedule. I was forty-two. Lately I had been seeing a lot of TV ads for burial plots. I thought perhaps I should buy one.

But according to my sister, our family had its own burial plot somewhere in Brookline, Massachusetts. I vaguely remembered that my grandmother, who’d lived to be ninety-six, had been buried in Brookline a few years earlier. I drove out there — not in the Hyundai, of course, but in my husband’s red Jeep, which is astonishingly, aggressively healthy, with its four-wheel drive and humongous tires and hemoglobin color. The graveyard was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and had a wispy, rusty-looking Jewish star perched on a pole beside its gate. By the time I found my grandmother’s grave, it was nearly five o’clock, and the sun had sunk into a flaming slit and was gone in four seconds flat, the world suddenly yanked back into darkness. I stood there in the desolate Northeast winter evening, by my grandmother’s grave. Sure enough, just as my sister had said, there was a bulging apron of unused land around her headstone, room for half a dozen coffins: my mother and father, my two sisters, my brother, me. But what about my husband, my children? There wasn’t room for them. And did I really want to be buried next to my mother? We don’t get along that well. I decided I would find an alternative.

Still, before I left, I lay in the space I imagined had been reserved for me. This is as morbid as it gets. The ground was hard and freezing. Up above, the moon hung like a yellow earring fastened to a corner of the sky. The air was clear, and the galaxies glimmered, their light millions of years old. I had always envisioned death — or, rather, the transition into it, the last moments, whether on a flaming airplane or in an oncology ward — as fraught and fluorescent, soap-opera-like, saturated with significance: Goodbye, goodbye. But it occurred to me, lying not in my grave but on it, that I might find the process ultimately manageable, even banal, as much a part of ordinary life as leaving for overnight camp, far more dreaded than dreadful. Someday I will die, just like my car. Maybe I will go to heaven and be reunited with my car, but I doubt it. It just might be that the passage is unremarkable, a trip taken, a candle blown, my very last nanosecond spent thinking, This isn’t nearly as scary as I thought. I wish I’d worried less.

Yes.

Of course I have no way of knowing, and when the time comes that I am availed of that information, I will have no way of reporting back to you, I’m sorry to say. I would like very much to write an essay about how it is to die. This would surely win me the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding reporting. But I will never win the Pulitzer. I will never claw my way into the canon alongside Virginia Woolf, just as my sister will never teach at Harvard. This is what midlife reveals: not what you will do, but what you won’t do; not how far you might go, but the limit of how far you can go. Once, I hoped to be brilliant. I hoped to be the female Faulkner. Once, the fact that I was not the female Faulkner was agonizing to me. Now, in my forties, I accept this. I take what I can get. I cherish my oil changes. I am grateful for brakes that work, a brain that works. I may not be a brilliant novelist, but I have become, after a lot of hard work, a writer capable of chugging along, crafting a story with a well-made engine. I write Ford or Pontiac paragraphs: decent, smart enough, but not top of the line. Not even close.

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