This Too Has Merit

In graduate school, I wrote a short story about a old man with colitis. The only reason why was my professor challenged me to stop writing about love. She found my work cliché. (Though she was the same woman who wore a t-shirt that read, “Would you like fries with that?” to my Master’s defense, as cliché a joke about English degrees as there is.) But I didn’t love ugly truths then, so of course the story was about love, about an old man who rejected love because he couldn’t control his bowels. But I did give the man a dog, because otherwise he’d have had no one to commune with. Dogs think nothing of shit. In fact they seem to have an appreciation for all the meaning to be found in a pile dropped on the curbside. There is a lot of who’s, why’s and when’s to be learned from what is left behind. I thought I was edgy when I wrote about shit, but now that I know how it represents the very mundanity of life, not the extreme, it seems ridiculous to bring elimination to the page. And that’s the irony, certainly. I have a husband with blood cancer; chemo and a stem cell transplant aren’t terribly kind to his insides. I have a disabled son who is afraid of the toilet at age 10. So here is what I wonder: Is it my responsibility now to write here about loose stools and “BMs” and colonoscopies and Miralax and pull-ups in size Large and the guilt I feel when my friend takes my dog for a walk and he’s eaten something that doesn’t agree with him and they must wipe up the liquidy mess from the neighborhood lawns or park sidewalks? Will there be a reader who says, yes, my life is shitty too, in a similar way that you write it? Maybe. Now I think I wrote that story about the old man all wrong. Ridiculously, love is revealed when we agree to clean up after another living being’s literal or figurative shit, especially when you think you cannot bear it even one more time. Even when you gag and wonder what your life has come to, and how maybe you wanted a more elevated life, not one that reminds you, without consideration of your own desires, of the most base element of humanity besides death. Maybe Rosa, the old man’s love interest, had once been a nurse or a doctor, a mother, a veterinarian, and she wouldn’t have batted one of her false eyelashes at his trouble. But no, I didn’t even given her the chance to say yes to a man neurotic about his own shit. Instead, I’d wanted him lonely, alone except for his beagle. So he (or I?) couldn’t even ask someone to love him. Because I couldn’t imagine someone loving him, not if they had to discuss shit. But that is an obvious difference between true life and fiction: we are not asked about what we are willing to deal with, or what kind of life we will accept. We are presented with a thoroughly messy life, and the only choice we have is to keep picking up after ourselves and the ones we love with a fierce determination and a very short memory.