Elephant

Pretty soon, with the hair almost all gone, Jenn started wearing this Rasta hat that I had given her. You know, one of those black, yellow, green, and red knit Jamaican berets from which your dreadlocks are supposed to dangle, unless, that is, you decide to tuck them underneath. You see, that was one of her cancer jokes -- she told everybody she was going to start growing dreadlocks! That's why I bought her the hat.

I got it for her when we were playing Charlotte. I found it in this, like, hippie gift store, and I was real pleased that she liked it. She had such a pretty face that, even without hair, she was just so fucking beautiful. God, I loved seeing her in that hat!

It brought out, what I told her were her sharecropper eyes, those hazel-green orbs from which the life was slowly, almost imperceptively, draining. They always looked sad, even before she got sick, and even when she was the happiest. They just struck me as the kind of eyes that you'd see in those Dorothea Lange photographs of Dust Bowl victims, albeit in black and white, not hazel-green.

As she got weaker and weaker, it became harder for her to drink. It seemed to take a lot more out of her. So she just smoked more, and when she did, so did I. And for some reason, the pot made us even more nostalgic, and probably more philosophical. One night, I remember Jenn raising the last big spliff of the night in a sardonic toast, "We burn these joints in effigy", she said wryly. Even though it was the only thing that kept Jenn from being sick, we ultimately knew it wasn't good for either one of us. Besides, we both felt like we'd gone backwards.

At the end of last year, Georgia legalized medical weed for certain patients, and Jenn went straight down to Dr. Weber's office on the very first day to get her prescription. Georgia wasn't like some of the more progressive states where medical and even recreational pot was legal. You could only get cannabis oil, which didn't bother Jenn at all. She just mixed it with the pot I was already buying for her. It just made it that much stronger.

You were supposed to get the prescriptions refilled by the doctor, like, every few months, but Jenn was fucking sick of doctors, so instead of going in, she made up her own doctors' notes for the scrips. She said she was pretty sure that sooner or later she was going to get caught, but she reasoned, "What the hell are they gonna do to me?" Besides she didn't think she'd last that long. She was right.

Nine months ago, I quit New South so I could take care of Jenn. I was dragging them down, and I knew it was my fault that our fortunes had turned. Every guy in the band, as well as our publisher, told me I was wrong, that we'd only gone as far as we had because of me -- that it was my songs that people related to in the first place -- but that was little consolation for the fact that we'd missed our opportunity.

The only exception was Jason, our manager. He pretty much blamed it all on me, and I could hardly argue otherwise. Everybody knew that my drinking had fucked me up... we all assumed, for good. That's when I decided to quit again.

Jenn couldn't drink anyway, and it was really her wish that I stop. She reminded me of something that she'd said to me all those months ago, that first morning we spent together having breakfast, "Andy, you're better than your past." She said that our using was ultimately just a lame way to "cry about what we used to be." And that's what finally did it. I just quit cold turkey, and for several days, I was as sick as Jenn was.

Unfortunately, after a couple more months, even the pot didn't help her. It was all just pain medication now. So I completely stopped using, too. I was too busy trying to take care of her; that was pretty much a full-time job.

Jenn was so weak now that she couldn't go out anymore. But one final time, in one of her very last wishes, I took her out to Sandy Creek Park, at night, so she could look at the blanket of stars that filled the night sky.

I had to push her in a wheelchair, and we could only make it into the parking lot next to the lake, but considering it was her last visit anywhere, I could tell that it was really important to her. No one else was around, and so that was when she told me her theory about the heavens. It was the one and only time in the year we were together that she cried.

It was a crisp spring evening, so I had about ten blankets wrapped snuggly around her as she stared up into the crystal clear darkness. We were far enough out of town that the artificial light from the city, light that normally hopelessly dilutes the brilliance of the stars, was non-existent. For a long time, she just gazed up, not saying anything.

Finally, after 10 minutes or so, she started to wax poetic. She told me that to her "heaven" and "the heavens" were indistinguishable. She used those words interchangeably. She said the reason that writers and thinkers had long called the night sky "the heavens" was because it was the closest thing to perfection that any of them had ever imagined, and, therefore, it had to be named for eternal paradise.

And then she reminded me again, that she didn't think that she would go to heaven. She said that the world was too close to perfect, and that she couldn't find her way out of it because there were too many beautiful things to distract her. "I'm afraid, Andy, afraid I'll get lost on my way."

That's when she started crying. I just held her and cried with her. But even then, and so many times since, I have marveled at how someone whose own family wouldn't speak to her, whose hair had fallen out, and who had lost at least 40 pounds. Someone who was so weak that she could barely sing, which was what she loved to do more than anything else. Someone who had spent so many of her days and nights shackled to a bottle of bourbon and a joint that she couldn't even recognize her own beauty. How could that person think of the world as such a beautiful, perfect place? But that was Jenn, and even though I loved everything about her, I think that was the thing I loved the most.

That night in the parking lot, even though her voice was raspy, and she had to warble through her tears, and it took every ounce of energy she had, she sang for me one last time, while I sobbed like a baby.

The song was one of her favorites -- The Carter Family. "Well, there's a dark and a troubled side of life/There's a bright and a sunny side too/But if you meet with the darkness and strife/The sunny side we also may view/Keep on the sunny side/Always on the sunny side/Keep on the sunny side of life/ It will help us every day/It will brighten all the way/If we keep on the sunny side of life." Another bit of irony -- she sat in that wheelchair and sang that whole song in the darkness, looking up not at the sun, but at the stars.

The next day I had to call home hospice. They sent over a middle-aged woman, Mary Beth, who proved to be nothing short of a saint. I don't know what I would have done without her. Jenn was in bad shape, but even through all the pain, I could tell she appreciated having Mary Beth there. Jenn couldn't get out of bed now, and she could barely talk, and someone had to administer the opiates nonstop. It was better that it wasn't me.

I also called her parents. Maybe I shouldn't have, but family is family. They came. The whole lot of them came, just like back in Atlanta. They even brought Jenn's "granmama." But I don't know why they did. Their being there didn't help, with the exception of granmama.

I thought they might stay until the end. It was pretty clear that that was close, but they left that afternoon, only staying for a couple of hours. It guessed that they didn't want to check into a hotel. Maybe I was wrong about their motivation, but they acted as if it was Jenn's fault for inconveniencing them by dying, costing them money that they didn't really want to spend.

The only good thing that happened in all of the time they were there was when I was first introduced to Jenn's granmama. Her granmama was the only person in her family that she thought really loved her still, and so she was real happy that I got to meet her. Jenn told me when they left, that her granmama liked me. She said she could tell.

Her granmama was pretty old, by that time, and she clearly didn't really understand what was happening to Jenn. She knew Jenn was sick, but couldn't comprehend the seriousness of her illness. So I don't know how granmama remembered this, but she told me, with absolute seriousness, that Jenn had once mentioned to her that I drove even slower than she did!

It was the last time I saw Jenn laugh -- it was only a big grin, because she was too weak to actually chuckle, but I knew she got a real kick out of it. On the other hand, her granmama took the whole matter quite seriously and told the assembled group that my driving made me at least somewhat palatable as boyfriends go -- at least I was careful, she reasoned. Now that was funny.

But that was the best thing. The rest of the time they were there, they didn't talk to Jenn, and she didn't have the strength to talk to them. And watching it all was just insufferable. I was reminded of my premonition in the hospital back last year when Jenn had the resection. Now the premonition had come to fruition. There was Jenn lying there, so weak that she couldn't even say goodbye to her own family, and now it was all real -- except for me and Mary Beth -- she was dying alone.

That next week, the second week in May and almost a year to the day after I met her that night at THOB, it became clear that it would be her last, but she was hanging on for something, I didn't understand what until that Friday. It got pretty bad, and when it did, I came to absolutely marvel at Mary Beth and the other people that do the work that she does. I can't bring myself to talk about the things that happened, but there's one thing that's real clear to me: no one dies with dignity. I wish Jenn could have been the exception, but she wasn't.

But on that Friday morning, Jenn spoke her last words to me. There were only a little more than 25 of them, but it was all she could do to get them out. I leaned over her bed to kiss her that morning, and when she awoke, she smiled and whispered painfully slowly and almost inaudibly in my ear, "Wish me... happy... birthday... Andy! I'm... so... glad... you could... be here... with me... to celebrate. I can... make it... now... Andy! I know... I won't... get lost. I... love you, Andy!" She was 33.

I didn't know what to do afterwards. Mary Beth held me for a good a long time while I cried, but when I was finally able to extricate myself from her empathetic embrace, she said quietly, "Andy, Jenn wanted me to give something to you." She found her purse, reached into it, pulled out a plain, white envelope, and handed it to me. I could tell by the graceful swirl of cursive script on the front that it was Mary Beth who had transcribed its contents. It said simply, "Andy."

"I'll call the mortuary, Andy, and then, I'm going to leave, and let you read what she wanted to tell you. It's all explained in the letter. Jenn's asked me to take care of everything. She didn't want you to have to worry. But Andy, you should know, she loved you very, very much. I thank God you were here for her."

I'm not going to tell what was in that letter, or at least not very much of it. That's between Jenn and me, but a few days later, I fulfilled her last wishes, she was buried in a little country cemetery outside of Fort Valley. The truth is I've buried her a thousand times since then.

It was a simple ceremony, held in the family's small country church next to the cemetery, but it was nice, and besides all of her family and their people, her colleagues at The Georgia Review, all of our friends and the guys in the band were there. Jenn would have been pleased with it all.

She asked me to play a particular song for the congregation. I really didn't want to, didn't think I could do it for the others and wasn't sure I could make it through the whole thing without breaking down. Finally, I convinced myself that it was possible so long as I thought of it in the right way. I would just play one last song for Jenn. Believe it or not, I think even her family approved. At least, they told me they did.

I smiled when I read about that song in the letter, because it was so ironic considering what she'd told me on two different occasions. Jenn liked irony, so I suppose it wasn't that unusual that she picked that song. Then, again, she knew that it was absolutely sincere -- the honest-to-God truth. Jenn never wanted to be sad or depressed.

It was another Carter Family tune from the 30s, when the country was neck deep in the Great Depression, but for those of us in the alt country community, Uncle Tupelo had turned it into something of an anthem -- even the name for our "movement." It was a song we sometimes played at New South shows.

I tried to do it as well as Jenn would have if she was singing it herself while she made us breakfast or rolled us up a joint. I was never as good a singer as Jenn, even though she don't have a voice to sing with now. Still, she'll always my favorite singer. Even though I fell far short of the goal, I tried to perform it as simply and as beautifully as if she herself had sung it.

"Fear the hearts of men are failing/These our latter days we know/The great depression now is spreading/God's word declared it would be so/I'm going where there's no depression/To a better land that's free from care/I'll leave this world of toil and trouble/My home's in heaven/I'm going there."

"In this dark hour, midnight nearing/The tribulation time will come/The storms will hurl the midnight fear/And sweep lost millions to their doom/I'm going where there's no depression/

To a better land that's free from care/I'll leave this world of toil and trouble/My home's in heaven/I'm going there/I'm going where there's no depression/To a better land that's free from care/I'll leave this world of toil and trouble/My home's in heaven/I'm going there."

Three months after Jenn died, I went solo. I've got a new band now, and we're touring big time. That's what she wanted. Things are going better than anybody, including any of us -- especially me -- could ever have expected.

I just released my first album two months ago, and it's doing real well. In my humble opinion, it's the best shit I've ever done. It's titled Dying on the Day You Were Born, and Jenn's in every word, every melody, every instrument, every nuance of the whole goddamn thing. As far as I'm concerned, she produced it.

I know I said I wasn't going to tell what was in her letter to me. But I will mention this. It was the only thing she said in that letter that I disagreed with -- vehemently. She claimed that it was her fault that I had "given up my place in line" -- that she was to blame for the fact that New South didn't make it.

Fuck success! All it really is anyway is someone else's idea about what you should accomplish. I don't give a damn about that now. I'm done caring about what some fucking record company wants. But I do care about what Jenn wanted, care about it more than anything in this world and beyond, except for her, and I know she would have appreciated this irony. It's funny; once you stop trying, it gets so much easier.