Wreck

by Catherine Newman

Just because you’re a hypochondriac doesn’t mean it’s not malignant.

Why had we all been taught the expression Accidents happen? The presumed inevitability paralyzed me with fear. Was I brave enough to love anybody? Maybe. Maybe not.

Have you ever taken an elderly parent to a juice bar? No? Don’t start now.

He has not historically been a crier, but he is one now, because that’s how life is. You don’t yet know who you’ll become.

WILLA AND I BOTH HAVE a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, which we take medication for, and which is harrowing at times. If, by harrowing, I mean nearly unsurvivable. Brains look so robustly meaty in photographs, don’t they? All of that rubbery pink tubing, like your skull is filled with hot dogs. But mental health is as fragile as a soufflé.

That’s the dream, of course—that your care relieves a burden from your beloveds. I picture it so literally: helping Willa out of her massive backpack of trouble and sliding it onto my own shoulders to walk beside her.

His personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it. Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there’s a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn’t been designed yet.

“You’re not my child, Nick,” I say to him. “You’re actually not a child at all.” But I look at his bewildered profile, and I think: Of course he is. A child. Someone’s child, to be treated with tenderness and care. To be loved and forgiven.

Based on the core biopsy samples, the lymph node has been deemed diffusely abnormal, which should definitely be my stripper name.

To have a child is to have your heart go walking around outside your body for the rest of your life—so the saying goes. Not a pink bubble of a heart, but the bloodied organ itself, dragged through the gutter behind a team of wild horses, returned to you in tatters if at all.

Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove—a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time, though you never get to turn it off.

But every individual question was really a version of the same existential one: People are different from me. How do I survive it? “With as much grace as possible” was our answer, every time. What else is there?

The word disease still took me aback. I mean, just being human is a terminal condition, sure—but disease kind of runs a highlighter pen over it.

“Yikes,” I said, and he said, “A little bit of yikes. You can visit with the fear, but don’t hire a van and move there.”

The lump in my throat was part sorrow and part gratitude. Maybe that’s what it always is, and we just forget to notice how lucky we are because we’re so busy choking and trying not to cry. But what if he dies? I thought. Or I do? And what if I never know anything certain again for the rest of my life? “Except love,” someone said. “You know that for sure.”

Life is a near-death experience. And death is a real-life one.

Only this—loving each other like there’s plenty of room on the life raft. Like there’s no tomorrow—or like there is one, and you don’t want to wake up hungover with regret. You just want to wake up while you still can. While the world is turning and the owls are calling and gratitude is the very air you are still breathing, because, whatever happens next, that’s how lucky you are. You are still breathing.