"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel

1.12.22

I’m not caught up yet, though I started writing this yesterday. IAre you caught up? I don’t expect you to be. But I do urge you to read Miranda July’s beautiful story “Roy Spivey” so you can tell me what you thought in tomorrow’s comments.

Before sitting down to write this tonight I was listening to a compilation of Fresh Air interviews with Joan Didion. Didion said she likes things as uncomplicated as possible so she can focus on her writing. I still remember the transcendent experience of reading The Year of Magical Thinking, which came out shortly after my mom died by suicide. She got it. I felt seen. In the years after, I pored over everything she wrote; her essays and novels. Everything. In 2012, two years after my mom’s death, I was totally untethered, floating without family or much support at all. I moved briefly to Sonoma County with a long-lost relative who lived in an old barn house. My bedroom had been a chicken coop at one point.

I took a job at a farm in Marin County, right on the Marin/Sonoma County line, at a small organic farm. The farm thrived in the deep bowl of a valley, surrounded by marine-green hills. Over one hill was the sea, and Point Reyes. Over the other hill was inland, and Petaluma. Point Reyes extends into the sea like a small limb cloaked in wispy fog. Petaluma resembles a golden carpet sewn with dry grass and oak trees most days, unless the season is exceptionally rainy.

The small bowl of the farm, where cows and goats and sweet peas and bittersweet chicories grew, had its own microclimate. It could be sunny there and foggy everywhere else, or vice versa. Sometimes we got rain when no one else did.

A writer needs their own microclimate.

I imagine Joan in her house with no distractions.

I sense into what it feels like to be in my house, with the internet.

I spend too much time on the internet. Specifically on social media, but even on news sites. Because I have spent a bunch of time exploring my life without social media, and because I know now that I have ADHD, I feel inspired by Didion to go off social media. I will. Not just yet, but I will again. I need that space. That uncluttered space in my mind.

I’m not saying everyone needs this. Every brain is different. My brain is, I think, one room, maybe two. There aren’t a lot of compartments. Everything lives together. It’s enough to be sorting through that, by itself.

How many rooms does your brain have?

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“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”

Amy Hempel, like many of the writers we’ve read, is a master of the short story. This one broke my fucking heart. Grief and death are often sentimentalized or sensationalized. There’s none of that here. It’s about two friends, one very sick, though we never find out what with. We only know that she’s in quarantine because of the descriptions from the first person narrator, who has to wear a mask when she’s with her friend in the hospital.

The narrator has come late to see her friend. She was too scared, and expresses this by retelling a story about a man who died in a car crash on the 101 (pg. 2). But it’s not the car crash she’s afraid of. The man saw his injury and died of fright. That’s what our narrator is scared of. The fear of seeing her friend, and not living through it.

There are so many moments here where the narrator avoids looking. Honestly, I have never understood the human instinct to avoid looking at grief and illness. I only realized it existed after my mother died, when people were scared of me. So, reading this, I often wondered about the POV we weren’t getting, the one belonging to her friend, who calls a nurse “the best friend” in place of the best friend who comes to see her briefly and then must return home. Home home.

But death is everywhere, not just in the hospital room. It’s at the beach; in undertows and sand sharks. It’s at the Palm Royale, where “someone dies every time the sheets are changed.” It’s in the weather; earthquake weather. Yet the narrator still turns away from her friend’s sickness. But her turning away doesn’t diminish how much she loves her friend. Maybe it is how her love is expressed— in how she cannot bear to see her friend suffering.

What did you think? Let me know in the comments:

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