I always used to cringe a little upon hearing stories of old men dying a week after their wives did. About people who could not live without their other half. Perhaps because I knew I would never find a love like that. Or perhaps because those stories — always so special and yet ubiquitous! — seemed to possess a sentimentality that bordered on oppressive. They seemed to have an agenda to buttress a kind of heteronormative, Disney-esque vision of one love for life, love at first sight, love until death. And I suppose sometimes people possessed this kind of split-self, split-soul, if you will, with their homelands, especially if they were forcibly removed or compelled to flee from them. A country, a home, a mother, a love; these felt like noble and literary vessels for one-half of a person’s selfhood.

But as I listened to Nasra describe Akerman’s shared self with her mother, I felt my heart pang in recognition, a pang for the loss of my fucking laptop, and then a pang at how repulsive I was to be equating this woman’s shared self with her mother to my shared self with a personal computing device and how clearly I had never known a true love and I never would and I was, most likely, a defective human being for it. And what kind of half-thing would I be if I never felt for you, or for any human being, the intensity of Chantal Akerman’s love for her mother?

XI

XI

When I was eleven, you picked me up from school one evening and told me we were going to visit an old friend of yours for dinner. We drove over the bridge into Quebec and for about an hour into the Gatineau Hills. As the last light slipped from the sky, we turned off at the exit for Wakefield, a town populated in the nineties by a smattering of back-to-the-land hippies and hobby painters that had, in the years since, suffered an onslaught of retired civil servants and latte-toting young professionals. We drove through the town and out the other side, back into forest, before turning off on an unpaved side road. As we approached what looked to be an old stone church, I could hear barking. A front light was switched on and two men appeared with a rickety white dog on the porch.

As we parked the car, one of the men, who wore what I’d later learn was a Kurdish knitted wool cap, raised his hands and called: “Marvellous Monica.” I could hear his reedy voice through the car doors and over the barking. When we got out he walked over to you and gave you a long hug before turning to me and placing a hand on my shoulder. “Wow,” he said. “Look at you. You probably don’t remember me, but I’m Clyde.”

“Hi.”