There's This Bear in Honolulu
Draft
There’s this bear in Honolulu that looks exactly like me. No one’s ever mentioned it, but the resemblance is uncanny. Our faces mirror each other. In Hawaii, the bear first lived on Bertram Street—and always on Oahu, as far as I know, though in fact I never saw him in Hawaii. The last time I saw him was in Montana, when I was 33; the first time was in Washington, the day of my first birthday. Between ages one and 33, I saw him almost every day, in every place I lived.
The bear and I are the same age, though I pass for an adult most of the time and he never does. But Cocoa’s face gives away his history in a way mine doesn’t. Mine shows up in my nervous system. Him—you can always tell exactly where there’s been trauma but it doesn’t seem to cause any problems. There’s a discolored, horizontal band across the back of his head from a close call with a baseboard heater; he’s flattened and thinned out a lot since we were one; his eyes are a little cloudy.
I sent him away for what I thought would be a short time. He had helped me for so long and I was trying to help someone else. I shipped him Priority Mail from Nashville to Bozeman when my mother was going through her first round of chemotherapy, to be with her when I couldn’t. I have a photo from sometime later, near her death, when she was far beyond the tantalizing promise of drug cocktails and her puffy chemo face had given way to the gaunt reality of terminal cancer. She is holding him in her arms. My brother is leaning over from a chair next to her bed, kissing her forehead, and she is smiling. The bear is facing the camera, which I am holding. His back is against her chest, his face just under her chin.
My oldest niece, now 13 but just a toddler at the time, was smitten with Cocoa then and carried him around the house during those last months. He sat strapped into her car seat next to her when we went anywhere. We rarely left for long because all time was borrowed time—we thought every day was going to be the last because that’s what we’d been told, and every half hour trip to the grocery store was fraught with anxiety. But driving can also be good for calming anxiety, and so sometimes we drove, caught in the paradox, out into the foothills on gravel roads, through new developments in what were once fields, up to lakes in forests we’d camped in as kids.
I’m not sure of Cocoa’s exact whereabouts in the year between his shipping and the last three months of my mother’s life. I’m not sure if he was with her in Seattle when she went to a hospital there for debulking surgery, a term that makes it sound like she got liposuction rather than having all the organs in her reproductive system cut out, plus some stragglers, in the name of improving her chances of staying in remission. What do the fallopian tubes look like coming out of body? Does a surgeon lift out the uterus out in one piece? Does the formidable apparatus that created complete human beings from a tiny collection of cells go into a bucket on the floor, or is there a laser that destroys everything internally? Does the hospital burn everything once a day in one big incinerator, or do they have to burn like with like, everybody’s ovaries one day, bad kidneys the next, testes on Tuesday? And how, while you have a woman’s body open under bright lights, noticing that there are no apparent tumors in the ovaries you’re removing (an absence later tests will confirm), would you not notice that the digestive tract looks a little…lumpy? Like maybe there’s some kind of out-of-control growth blocking it, suggesting the woman isn’t actually in remission? I wasn’t in Seattle. I have no idea what a digestive system looks like during a debulking surgery. All I know is that parts of my mother were gone when she came back, but not the parts that were killing her. It was all for nothing. Or, no: it was all for further suffering. Was Cocoa there? I’d like to think so, but of course I would.
Sometime after she died, a year or so after the last time our family was a complete unit and together in Bozeman, my brother and his wife visited again, now with two daughters. Ruby remembered the bear. Addie met him for the first time. I wasn’t there, and no one who was knew or remembered Cocoa was a bear on loan to the dying and not a permanent resident of the household, not a childhood toy left behind decades earlier like all the other toys in the house. They thought he’d been there all along, because that would be the normal thing to think. When they returned to Hawaii, Cocoa went with them. How do you tell a three-year-old that her 35-year-old aunt needs her stuffed bear back? What does that phone call sound like? There’s no sane-sounding way to explain this bear is not a toy but something like the thunder shirt the three-year-old's neighbor’s dog wears during storms. That despite its small size, this bear has the ability to absorb pain from the body holding it, for as long as the pain continues, with no adverse effect. That it is because of this holding and absorbing that the bear is so very pancake-shaped in profile. That he was held tightly long past the point at which such bears are usually abandoned absentmindedly by people who have formed or perhaps always had a sense of belonging and connection. Ruby, Aunt Heidi needs this bear so she doesn't have to sit on the floor and rock back and forth with a pillow, which is very unbecoming and inadequate as well as embarrassing, so figure out a way to send him back without telling anyone about it. Thank youuuuuuuu! That’s what that phone call sounds like. So you do not have that phone call. Instead you wait for your nieces to outgrow the bear, because they will and you won’t, and you can wait. (You may find yourself needing to repeat this last part. You can wait.)
I thought 2018 was the year of the Return of the Bear; I thought the nieces would have more than outgrown him by then. They’ve had a sense of belonging from the get-go. They are being raised far beyond the reaches of the cult church their father and aunts grew up in; their sense of God is of a vague but loving, semi-mythological figure "similar to Santa but less realistic," as Addie puts it. The churches and religions they know all have names; they have shared language, a culturally recognized lexicon and context. The nieces love the world and understand the world to love them. They are used to hopping on planes on the spur of the moment and stepping off in Melbourne or Tokyo or Portland or Montana. They experience the world as their home and inhabit it with reckless ease, unintimidated by falling or failing. I rehearse conversations to request the bear’s return with all this in mind. I turn the angle of my perception so that the story becomes funny, and calibrate the tone of my voice to match. I play this over and over in my head. By the time I ask for him back, he’s been missing a long time, misplaced in one move or another after Bertram Street. My then-husband knows this but doesn’t tell me, lets me keep thinking the bear is being shipped back eventually. When I discover the truth, it’s a strange kind of grief. Only my then-husband will ever see it. I’m okay and I’m devastated, I’m okay and I’m devastated, I’m okay and I’m devastated.
I miss the bear in Honolulu in a way I can’t talk about without sounding crazy. So I don’t. But. If you could just see. How much this bear looks like me. The way I did not wake myself up whimpering when this bear was in the room. Us at six. Us at eight. At 25. At 33. I miss the bear in Honolulu as if the bear were some kind of twin, some kind of self, some internal organ gone missing.