I’d never flown into Germany in January and pictured it somehow colder and wetter, though resolved to make do for four weeks with just rolled-up clothes in my carryon and not check a bag. Bono had written an essay on freedom in The Atlantic and linked to a Bowie song, “Where Are We Now?,” where Bowie confronted his own mortality and basically filmed it in a video harkening back to his memories of 1970s Germany. I’d first seen it in Loren’s house in Portland after hours of heavy drinking downtown, the last of the whiskey, the video almost sobering, though in 2015 I was nowhere near considering my own death and still untouchable then, at 44.

A year later he did die that January, and Dawn and I planned a weekend getaway to Berlin for what would be Valentine’s Day in the States, an odd and private kind of tribute to the now-dead artist, who’d surely left his mark on this great city, which had left its mark on him.

In a week I’d be booking a Lyft to SeaTac with my beat-up red carryon looking out the window at the gray, picturing myself a day later boarding trains, looking out windows upon Frankfurt, the familiar German countryside and storefront signs somehow still the same, unchanged.

Yet we were different, mom and me, and our ring of loved ones and acquaintances, all of us inching forward or stopped, maybe wandering off course. It was an odd time to journey anywhere save Southern California perhaps. Surely not somewhere colder, as my weather app said.

Bono talks about freedom in his essay and sounds like Bono (like you can almost pick up the accent) but it was more Bowie I cared about when I was through: watching him in that video confronting his own demise, the inescapable look of it, the pain and horror there, the truth. Each scant detail of his remembered workspace and things, his times in Berlin, now lifeless objects holding meaning only to him. Bowie in a T-shirt against the wall just looking upon it now, not Bowie the entertainer, Bowie the human. Different kinds of artists of course, Bowie and Bono.

I watched the video three times in a row on our sofa, the moment at the end where he and his female companion exit the “face in a hole” puppet figures, a distressing effect: it’s Bowie the human exiting the shell of his body, dying, leaving a beat of silence to signify the end.

It’s a hard way to start a Saturday morning. Dawn said she heard a story about someone with a terminal cancer diagnosis whose friend asked, How does it feel to know you’re going to die?, to which he responded, How does it feel to not know you’re going to die?

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Music, Portland