This Time Tomorrow

“The longer it went on, the more the question turned into an empty phrase, the way one might say How are you? to an acquaintance passing on the sidewalk and keep walking. There were no tumors to excise, no germs to fight. It was just that many neighborhoods of Leonard’s body were falling apart in a great, unified chorus: his heart, his kidneys, his liver.”

Alice struggles to put into words the experience of watching her father slowly die. This experience is an intimate one that can’t include others, so Alice necessarily tells people her father isn’t doing well while simultaneously being unable to express her true stresses. The issue is that her father is dying in a way that supersedes intervention; people want to know what’s wrong with him, but the truth is more complicated. There is nothing in him that needs fixing; his death is, maybe cruelly, a slow, final breakdown of his body. The “great, unified chorus” of Leonard’s body dying suggests imagery of cohesive beauty, highlighting the complexity of the human body and the human projection of meaning onto it.

“‘I’ll be back on Tuesday. I love you.’ She touched his arm. Alice was used to it now, the affection. She had never told her father she loved him before he went into the hospital.”

Leonard’s impending death has erased boundaries of affection between Alice and her father. Though Alice didn’t tell her father she loved him in the past, the bigger narrative of their relationship suggests that they didn’t need to express their love in words. Now that there is little Alice can do for her father, the words “I love you” make her feel more connected to him. It is unclear if he can hear her, but she hopes that he can.