What Comes Up With You
# What Comes Up With You
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I spent this past weekend in New Hampshire, and most of it on a dock.
Lake, mountains, nothing to do. The kind of weekend where you finally stop moving long enough to notice you have been moving.
And I sat there looking out at the water and a memory came up that I had not touched in twenty years.
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When I lifeguarded at the lake, we had a drill called a deep water body search.
Once a year. Somebody throws an object to the bottom, and the guards go in and work a coordinated grid until it is found — a line of people diving and surfacing and diving again in water nobody can see through.
The lake is dark. The lake is cold. And the bottom of a lake is horrifyingly still. No current, no light, no sound, nothing moving at all. You reach the bottom and it is as though the world has been switched off.
To prove you had actually gotten there — that you had gone all the way down and not just far enough to be plausible — you had to come up with a handful of dirt in your fist.
Which is a strange requirement and a very effective one. You cannot fake the bottom. You either bring back the mud or you did not touch it.
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Here is what I remember most about that drill.
I did it alongside a friend named Cooper. We lifeguarded together — the YMCA, the lake, long nights at an empty pool and the specific mayhem available to two teenagers with keys to a building. He is in that whole era of my life.
And the thing that surfaced on that dock, ahead of every technical detail of a certification I completed a dozen times, was Cooper coming up next to me between dives and dumping his handful of lake bottom on my head.
Twelve feet of dark water, a drill that exists because sometimes people drown, and a seventeen-year-old putting mud in my hair because I was there and it was funny.
Cooper was killed by a drunk driver.
I am not going to write around that. Somebody made a choice, and it took a whole person out of the world.
I did not sit down on that dock intending to think about him. I was looking at a lake.
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I have alluded here before to the fact that I am writing a book.
I have been vague about it and I am going to stay somewhat vague about what is in it. What I will say is that it is the actual account — the rooms, the years, the season that took me apart, the parts I have not said out loud to anyone.
And what nobody tells you about writing something like that is how much it resembles going down into cold water on purpose.
You know roughly what you are looking for. You go down after it. And it is quiet down there in a way that is genuinely unsettling, because the bottom of your own life is not in progress. It has all already happened. There is no version where you get down there and something is still unfolding and you can adjust it.
You just have to be with it long enough to get a handful.
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Here is the part I did not anticipate.
You do not get to choose what comes up with you.
I have gone down after specific things — a conversation, a document, a room I needed to describe accurately — and surfaced holding something else entirely. A detail I had not thought about in two decades. A face. A sentence somebody said to me in a hallway years ago that I would have sworn I had forgotten.
The dirt comes up in a fist. You cannot sort it on the way.
I went looking for a lifeguarding drill and came back with a boy who is not here anymore.
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There is something else about that drill I only understood recently.
We were teenagers, being certified to locate a person who had drowned. Nobody said it in those words. It was a requirement, a line on a list, one cold afternoon a year.
But that is the skill. Go down into the dark, where it is silent and nothing is moving, find what is there, and bring back proof that you touched the bottom.
I went into hospice at thirty-one. I have spent my career walking into rooms most people would not enter and staying in them.
I was practicing at seventeen and had no idea.
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One more thing about Cooper, because I do not want to have used him as a metaphor and moved on.
He was killed by a drunk driver. That is not an accident and I have stopped calling it one. Somebody decided, and my friend does not get to be forty.
He was seventeen when he taught me to find things in the dark. He was funny. He was kind to a girl who was afraid of cold water. He grew up and had a whole life going and there were people counting on him being here.
None of that had to end the way it ended, and there is no version of this where it resolves. It is not a lesson. I refuse to make it one.
What I have is a memory of him putting mud in my hair, and I would rather hand you that than anything I could say about how he died.
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I do not have a tidy ending, because I am still in it.
The book is not finished being hard. There are sections I have written and cannot yet read back. There are weeks where I do not open it and tell myself I am busy.
But I keep going down, and I keep coming up with a fist full of something, and some of it is not what I went looking for.
That is the deal, as far as I can tell.
You only get to decide whether you are willing to touch the bottom — or whether you are going to go down far enough to look convincing and surface with clean hands.
I have done both.
Only one of them was worth anything.
