The Eleanor Effect

Dead.

Eleanor didn’t know what she was looking at first. But as she looked closely. It was a dead bird. She stood there for a moment. At first, she was in a state of disarray, which then morphed into shock. Right in front of her apartment building. A man was walking by, and it looked as though he was about to step on it, but he passed right beside it. She loved these small creatures so much. The sight was painful to see. Though without a life, it still held so much beauty.

“Should I bury it?” she thought.

If anyone sees it, they’ll think she is mad. “Making a funeral for a bird”. She believed they’d ridicule her.

A woman walked by, looking at her for a moment. They exchanged looks until she walked past her.

She could be late for work.

“Could she just leave the bird there?” she dithered.

She decided to take that small, beautiful thing into her hands. She wanted to cry for a moment.

She took it to the building’s backyard. With her bare hands, she dug a hole and placed the bird in it.

With its lively colors still in mind, she went to her apartment to wash her hands, then finally took her bicycle and went to work.

The first funeral was that of a young man. She was to stand there and observe as many details of the funeral as possible. The temple was teeming with people. A priest was also there. And her boss was there to oversee her.

In the eulogy, the words of the priest felt to her like an attempt to infuse meaning into both his life and death as he spoke of Cassius’ successful endeavors as a business person.

She felt he didn’t succeed.

Eleanor wrote the biographies of those who were gone. She spoke to family members, friends, and acquaintances, asking about the deceased. She did everything she could to gather as much information as possible. It was an arduous task, to say the least. She would then compile all of that information to draw a beautiful collection of accounts from that individual’s life into pages that would turn into the book that would forever conserve the life of that human. This compilation would then be given to the family, and the family would then place it in the space carved for it in the tombstone of the lost member.

The cemetery of Ashlen, where Eleanor worked, already contained thousands of compilations. All of which were available for anyone to read. Anyone could enter that cemetery and borrow the written life of any person who was settled there, and thus get to know those who are gone.

But no one ever borrowed one of Eleanor’s compilations. She was also in charge of lending the copies to those interested, but in the year since she began working there, she had not recalled lending a single compilation.

“What was the purpose of writing them?” The thought kept creeping into her mind. She used to believe she had made the right career choice.

She stopped taking notes for a moment. Her mind went off on a tangent. A flood of uncertainty.

“I used to think, ‘I can make people immortal. I will make sure their memories are never erased. ’ And so I became a biographer of the deceased.

“However, once those pages are finished and placed above their tombs, they remain untouched. How can pages unread preserve a life?

Does writing their biographies really mean anything then? No one ever reads those. And here I am writing those pages. Thousands of words no one will ever read.

That’s what we’re all waiting for, isn’t it? It actually hurts to exist knowing that all we do is walk towards a cliff.”

As if sleeping, she heard a voice seemingly distant.

“Eleanor! Eleanor! Eleanor!”

Her boss was calling her. She snapped out of her own mind.

“What are you doing? Are you paying attention? Pay some respect! Are you recording this moment?“ He asked.

”Yes, of course.” She responded.

But Mr. Leary didn’t seem convinced as he scowled at her.

She left at dawn. Arriving at home, she sank into the couch. The questions that had been on her mind came back. Now, she was also wondering what to do with what was left of the day. Work was done. Now what? She could read a book, watch TV… but she felt like she needed to do something that would be the most valuable use of her time. None of these things would bring her the feeling she was hoping to find. What would then? What could be done that would make the night hours golden hours? Where every minute was worth any kind of pain she had experienced until this moment in her life.

She couldn’t make up her mind.

On a whim, she decided to write in her journals.

At first, she wrote all the questions. Then she recalled her younger days, writing everything that came to mind.

Her old friend, Rebecca, came to her mind and heart.

Rebecca seemed to know life. She once asked her:

“Do you ever feel like you’re wasting time? Like with the things that we do every day. Going to school, not really learning anything or very little, not really experiencing anything.

“Yeah, all the time. But at the same time, I wonder if it’s fine to just waste time sometimes.” Answered Rebecca.

“I don’t know. The way I feel is that ‘we’re already sixteen, but we’ve never lived.’

“Another way to look at it is that ‘we’re still sixteen, we have time to live.’ I think whatever age we’re in, it’s always gonna feel like we’re too old, because it’s the oldest we’ve ever been. And there will always be too many things to experience, so it’s always gonna feel like we haven’t experienced enough.

“A thirty-year-old would look at us, see how young we are, how we still have time to waste, but they don’t. And a forty-year-old would think the same of someone who is thirty.

“I think it’s a privilege of youth that we have time to waste and to make mistakes.”

“I didn’t quite agree with that at the time you said it. But you made me smile. Nowadays, I find myself agreeing more and more every year that passes.” Wrote Eleanor in her journals.

“You had this tranquil look in your eyes as if nothing would ever upset you. I guess I was wrong. I’ve always felt like I knew you. That was one of the hardest things to grasp after your death. I thought I knew you, but I didn’t, and I’m so sorry. I must never have given an answer to your concerns. Never held you with the strength you needed—so you fell.

“If only I were strong enough.

“It was painful. I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt.

“I don’t blame you for taking a shortcut. Even with your answers, the question, for me, still remains. We’re all gonna have the same ending. What’s the purpose of waiting?

“The day of our first meeting still lingers with me…I was looking out the window, hoping that my sight would catch something that would drown my hearing as my father and my mother threw shouts at each other. I tried to force my eyes to find a comforting sight. It was a very long day, but you arrived with your parents and their moving truck, and you had only your soul and a joyful face.

“At that moment, I wondered, ‘Would we be friends?’ I daydreamed of afternoons spent away from the heart-wrenching zone of my home, in which we played together and were never afraid. We just played. In my mind, we dug time capsules, we followed our treasure maps, we ran to see who was faster, we just were.

“My daydreams never came true, but this one did.

“Neither one of us had many friends, did we?

“It was empty everywhere we went, no matter how full of humans and their likenesses.

“But I felt less lonely knowing that I had something in common with the blue-eyed girl across the street.

“I feel I can talk to you this way. Is it okay if I talk to you?”

The night went. Soon, another day came.

At work, Eleanor needed to be at the reception to lend any book from the cemetery to anyone interested.

As usual, though, no one showed up.

Looking outside the window, to the graveyard, Eleanor thought about how alone everyone becomes after being gone.

She decided to work on the biography of the recently deceased young man. Cassius Errant. The one buried the previous day. So she took her notes from yesterday, as well as journals given to her by his family.

“A biography of someone who died like Rebecca will be painful to write,” she thought.

It seemed Mr. Errant’s life was full of love. But his personal journals seemed to be voiced by an empty heart.

“Days in rooms where everyone is looking at you and no one can see you. You speak, and no one can hear you.

Are we all just waiting for an ending? What’s the point of waiting?” Wrote Cassius.

His words resonated with Eleanor.

His family, friends, and acquaintances might not read his personal journals. But there’s a chance they will read his biography.

Eleanor wondered how honest she should be about the way he felt. Should she hurt his family for the sake of staying true to the life he experienced, or should she record only the good things? The work he did as a successful businessman. The image they would like to see. Was this book for his family or for Cassius?

During her lunch break, she sat on a bench in a park. Her sandwiches didn’t have any special taste. They were actually kinda bland.

To her left, she noticed a middle-aged man with a gentle smile, looking at her. It seemed he knew Eleanor; he waved.

“Hi”, he said.

“Hi,” Eleanor responded, a little confused.

“Do you remember me?”

There was a certain kindness in his voice.

Eleanor worried about forgetting someone she should have remembered. She tried to recall. Still confused.

“From the conference last year. I asked you to do the speech in the place of the priest.”

“Oh yes,” said Eleanor, faintly recalling his face.

“Your words stayed with me from that day onwards.”

Eleanor was surprised and confused. What could she have said?

“I remember your words. Your speech. I remember when you spoke of our lives. I remember you telling us:

‘We treat ourselves as if we were dead before death comes.

When you get to a certain age, there’s a fear that you were never alive, and at the same time, a belief that you can never be.

A fear that you no longer have a role. That you’re old, so there’s nothing more that can be done in life.

I think youngsters feel that way too. After all, we’re always the oldest we have ever been. And have only ever known ‘older’. Never younger. And the fear of other people's eyes is present in all of us.

Life is a gift we can give ourselves any day, any time. Just be aware, and you'll find something that makes you smile.

For as long as we're alive, we should live. '”

Even an old person like me thought about how I should live more. Youth used to feel like life itself, and once you lost it, you lost life too.

Maybe that fear is just the fear of the sneer of others who believe we should look at the majority around and follow suit.

His presence felt so warm. It seemed to be a sort of attribute few people had. He reminded her of Rebecca.

“When I heard your words, an urge was born in me. I sought art, and in it I looked for a way to know who I am, and I felt I existed. I found a place where I belonged. I was alive—it was a newfound realization to me. “

As if awakening the survival instinct my soul has always had, and that another part of me was trying to hunt down.

“Have you ever tried theater?”

“Not really. It feels a little too exposing”, she said.

“Isn’t that a good thing? When you show what’s alive in you to the world in such a way that it can’t help but listen to it? And maybe even marvel at it.”

“Maybe it is,” Eleanor answered, unsure about what to say.

His amiable smile warmed her as much as his words. She was still confused, but also moved. She was being told she did something well. She had always been told the opposite.

There was a moment of silence. Eleanor was thinking about how to react and what to say. It felt like she needed to say more than a mere ‘thank you.’

He got up suddenly, but not abruptly.

“I don’t wanna bother you any longer. Just wanted to say hello.”

He started walking away. Then stopped just as suddenly, turned back to her… and said, “I hope you know you shine with warmth on this world.”

Pensive, she stared at his back while he walked away until she couldn’t see him anymore. He didn’t turn again.

She was a bit lost, but understood what he had to say.

She watched the orange leaves falling. Each had its unique beauty.

The wind blew. It was cold with a comforting embrace.

The tree leaves played their music with the wind. She looked at the sky, and the clouds were gentle to her heart.

She smiled.