Yesterday, Today & Also, Tomorrow (an excerpt)

In 1688, Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer identified a new disease that had become an epidemic throughout Europe. The disease was a mania of longing, an illness pregnant with the need to return home. 

Symptoms included: 
Nausea
Loss of appetite 
Brain inflammation 
Cardiac arrests 
High fever 
Maramus (a severe protein-energy malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency) 
Suicidal tendencies 
Pathological changes in the lungs

“One of the earliest symptoms,” wrote the Swiss doctor Albert von Haller, “ is the sensation of hearing the voice of a person that one loves in the voice of another with whom one is conversing or to see one’s family again in dreams.”


My mother died on a Tuesday in spring, just as the forsythia’s began to bloom and the world ached to be lush again. She had been struggling with lung cancer for exactly one year, April to April; the diagnosis swept in and then swept out her life in the same transitional breeze. I knew the end was coming but refused to look, like when the crispness of fall disappears and winter blows in; I closed the shades and tried to ignore the spin of the planet.

This past May I met with a friend for coffee. We walked along the East River and, as flecks of condensation formed around the waxy lip of my cup, David told me he could no longer remember the sound of his mother’s voice. This is something I could never forget, my mother’s voice when I was young and curled up into the soft space along her belly, hearing her voice transform into a midnight croon. That sound, right before you fall asleep, that’s like hearing things underwater or from inside the womb. Or when I was older, and she would call me by my first and middle name when I was being fresh. Or just simply “My love” whenever she pleased. I can still hear it today, in the voice a friend or a stranger, in an inflection, in a face distorted by the glow of the sun; they make my throat rise and burn. These apparitions, shimmers of nostalgia and longing, do create a pathological change in the lungs.

_ 

Cures: 

Leeches 

Warm hypnotic emulsions 

Opium Purging 

Returning home 

We drive through the Pennsylvania countryside at the beginning of a change. In front of us is a spread of freshly turned trees still clinging, with little hope, to their greens. When I look at the trees I smile and think, “You can’t stop them from dying when the red begins to run.” When I look at the driver, he smiles. I think, “I’ll miss all of this when it’s gone.” A boombox on the dashboard slips around with the rhythm of the highway, falling into my lap once or twice, and someone from inside it sings along with us. There are also cow bones on the dashboard: a row of teeth, a joint, a shoulder blade perhaps. The teeth are unlike ours. They are attached to a curved jawbone that looks like a permanent arc of a smile, or a frown; it depends on where you are in the van.

_

Nostalgia was once considered a disease that needed to be cured, a hypochondria of the heart. During the French Revolution, doctors believed nostalgia could only be cured by terror. They based this on the Russians treatment of nostalgia by the Russian army in 1733 as it ventured into Germany. The General threatened, “the first to fall sick will be buried alive.” All complaints of nostalgia ceased. 


We go to therapy to get inside our own heads. We are paying someone to lead us to answers we already possess; we have the doors, but we need the keys. My therapist tells me that sometimes the things I say are very sad, but I think they sound just fine. When I tell her I’m in love, but can’t stop thinking about the things I will miss when it’s gone, she tells me I’ve one upped myself. I laugh at this, and then I laugh again when I say I hate these things about myself. She asks me why I do this, why I laugh at painful things, and I tell her it’s because I’m nervous. So, when I tell her I can’t stand the thought of losing someone else, I smile. When she points it out, I say it could also be a frown, depending on where you are in the universe.