Planet Claire: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers Akashic Books, 2021

Excerpt

Anyway, when your partner dies, everything around you seems to collapse. You look deep within yourself, not for courage, just for the wherewithal not to lose your car in a parking garage. Please don’t let me lose my car tonight in the hospital parking garage. The bigger question, which you don’t dare ask yourself, is how to keep the nothing that is now you from exploding into bits and pieces that spiral out into space. My hair crackles with static electricity even as I write that sentence. Nothing is more real than nothing, wrote Beckett. Nothing is a word that sticks around, like flies in August or shadows in October. Outside my study a road worker in brown overalls is breaking up my street with a T-shaped jackhammer and is making ear-shattering sounds. Better that, though, than silence. Silence is scary. When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, says the book of Revelation, there was silence. Now that’s spooky, like dead air on the radio. Life is deafening.

In the Bergman film Seventh Seal, Death follows a Medieval Knight returning home from the Crusades. He is a bitter man, weary and disillusioned, troubled by the silence of God in the face of so much dying. He meets a stranger who doesn’t look too chirpy. Who are you, asks the Knight? I am death, says Death. You have come for me, asks the Knight? I have been at your side for a long time, says Death. The Knight is worried that life is nothing more than senseless terror, so he asks Death to play a game of chess, to extend life just long enough to find some answers. If death is the only certainty, what else is there? Death shrugs his shoulders and accepts the challenge. The Knight suddenly feels empowered. “I, Antonius Block, am playing chess with Death,” he says. Death doesn’t really care one way or another. He just looks bored in his ominous black cloak. His indifference is beyond terror.

The crazy jackhammer pounds the street, bashing through concrete. Bone-jarring steel on stone, bits of rock flying off. How does the road worker survive that commotion? Bang, crack, whack. Things are always flying off, more than we know, I think, sometimes disastrously. It’s the law of centrifugal force. Everything is in flight from an imaginary center. Dragon flies, beetles, turtles, swallows, desert nomads, comets, asteroids. Asteroids are the worst because they’re rocky and bulky.

A hundred years ago an asteroid from the Kuiper belt exploded over Siberia. It just flew off into space. It had no business crashing in Siberia but there it was, a large flying rock. The fireball wiped out 2,000 square miles of taiga forest. There was a mighty boom. 80 million trees went up in flame. The explosion rocked the earth, split the sky in two.

The jackhammer has stopped. The peonies are exhausted and there hasn’t been rain in weeks. I’m wearing a black sweatshirt, blue jeans, and Converse sneakers. I look like a man who is quietly at work, but in my head asteroids are crashing into earth with the force of atom bombs.

Reviews

“Few readers will fail to be gripped by this tragically common story about death and what comes after for those left behind . . . A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and ‘how utterly it rips apart our lives.'”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED Review

“Planet Claire left me awestruck. I don’t know how he did it, but on every page of this incredible book, Jeff Porter manages to convey devastating sadness while also being delightful company. His grief does double duty as an almost otherworldly sort of introspection, pulling the reader into a continuum in which time, space, love, loss, art, and nature constantly play off one another until they become one another. This is not just the best grief memoir I’ve read in years, it’s one the best memoirs, period.”
—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything

“An inherently absorbing, thoughtful and thought-provoking read, "Planet Claire: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers" is laced with unexpectedly effective blend of humor and heartbreak, love and loss, that is as intimately personal as it is recognizably universal. The result is an account that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself is finished and set back upon the shelf.”
—Midwest Book Review

“Through his turmoil and grief, readers are plunged into 274 pages of Porter’s past and present, and through space as he navigates what he calls ‘Planet Claire.’ The piece beautifully describes what his life with her was like and what it will be like with her not there.”
—The Daily Iowan

“In elegiac prose, the bereft Porter grieves by reminiscing about the life [he and Claire] shared together . . . Porter’s memoir is a wistful, often painful, but beautifully written account of the trauma of grief, and also embodies the way writing provides solace from the bleak absurdities of life.”
—Booklist

“[A] warmly rich, wholly enveloping and vividly ambient memoir.”
—Exclusive Magazine

“A searing account of love lost.”
—MuggleNet

“Jeff Porter has given us an incredibly warm, rich, vivid memoir, a love letter to his deceased wife and an autobiography of love attained and lost. When a person dies a world passes away, yet Porter has created a cabinet of wonders out of a thousand bits of the world that vanished when his wife died. The sentences are sharp and surprising, perfectly formed, by turns painful, funny, haunting, and inevitably right.”
—Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone

“Jeff Porter indelibly conjures his lost, beloved Claire in a ‘spiral galaxy’ of memory, while offering the story of a delicious marriage in prose that is elegiac but also gorgeous, funny, and endearingly modest.”
—Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter

“The pleasure is in the circling intelligence of the memoirist, each gyre bringing us closer to this very specific, endearing individual’s life experience and his love for Claire. Paradoxical as it sounds, this book about death and grief is charming, humorous, poignant, and vital.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell

“Porter has written a memoir about the year after [Claire] died, a year he spent grieving and grappling with how to live and how to remember.”
—Talk of Iowa