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There are many hidden awkwardnesses in hospice, like when you say things like “This gelato is so good I’m dying,” or “Oof, I ate too much gelato, kill me,” and then remember that there’s an actually dying person also eating the gelato, or a person who might genuinely wish you would kill them.
She is unfailingly sweet with Honey, which I appreciate. It seems fair, somehow, that she saves me all her spitfire and claws and tornadoes. The poisonous cobras and rotting Halloween pumpkins and shouty talk-show guests of her soul.
Junior has been here for over a year. “He’s technically dying,” Dr. Soprano explained to me. “But his insurance company wouldn’t mind if he, you know, applied himself to that project a little more rigorously.”
assume it’s not a coincidence that the closer people get to death, the more you see the extent to which we’re all just skeletons in elaborate, fleshy waiting rooms.
She’s looking into my face, nodding, even though I am fully winging it now, panicking, words pouring out like I’m a hose on the weepy consolation setting.
Even under the best of circumstances, a pregnancy feels like racing over uneven terrain with an egg in a spoon.
“Nature abhors a vacuum cleaner.”
But sometimes I worried that marriage was just a series of these small deflations, our dreams floating around invisibly near the ceiling like escaped gas.
I had been feeling catastrophically disconnected from Honey—we seemed to alternate at that time between pointless meta-arguing (“If you would have just said you were sorry instead of blah blah then I wouldn’t have had to blah blah blah”) and something more like a frozen tundra of arctic silence, and the sled dogs were exhausted and we were out of food and next we were going to be slicing off pieces of each other to roast and eat.
It’s monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.
It’s the anticipation I can’t handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare?
Edi’s memory is like the backup hard drive for mine, and I have that same crashing, crushing feeling you have when the beach ball on your computer starts spinning.
I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been poisoned by a fairy-tale witch.
If there’s a metaphor for our friendship, it might be this. The blind faith. The absolute dependability. The love like a compass, its north always true.
“A penis,” she clarifies. “It’s just soft and small, like a little innocent baby sea creature. And then it suddenly turns into this terrifying thing that’s basically, like, a giant alien squid tentacle.”
Throughout elementary school, Edi and I were lectured about power-tool safety and best practices by Mr. Sumner, our shop teacher, who was missing three fingers from one hand and a thumb from the other. I have become the sex-ed version of Mr. Sumner.
Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.
One thing I’ve started to suspect about myself is that I’m some kind of confusingly extroverted introvert.
My kids did this too, when they were little—they looked into my eyes to make sure they were okay. On a turbulent airplane, their two small faces swiveled over to me to ask, wordlessly, “Are we safe?” We are safe! I beamed back at them judderingly, because what did it really matter if I was wrong? By the time the plane exploded, the fact that they couldn’t trust me anymore would have become quite immediately moot.
keep thinking of that John Donne poem ‘Death Be Not Proud,’” Jonah says. “But I feel more like, ‘Death be not so messy and exhausting.’” I feel the same way. I’d pictured something more linear. More constantly, soaringly momentous. Not these dribs and drabs of decline and lucidity. Not so much . . . moisture.
“We are stardust,” Cedar is singing. “We are golden.” All of us—we really are! Just a skyful of fourteen-billion-year-old stars that collapsed and supernova-ed their way into our cells via comets and Shakespeare and Chief Tecumseh and whoever all else ever lived and died and decomposed and became human again.
If cancer had seen as many romantic comedies as I have, it would understand that what’s next on the schedule is delightful plot twist. But cancer has mostly just watched gritty documentaries about war and famine. Also melodramas. Cancer has seen Beaches and Terms of Endearment, and it has no imagination for joy. There will be no turn of events.
It’s occurring to me only now that the dying and the loss are actually two different burdens, and each must be borne individually, one after the other. It’s like after a grueling delivery, when they hand it to you and you’re like, Oh! The baby! because your focus had become so narrow and personal during the birth. But now here was the actual end point, which you’d always known but then forgotten in all of the incarnated drama and suffering.
It’s been so arduous, Edi’s dying. It’s like we’ve all been digging and digging, shoveling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there’s this hole here.
Is it better to have loved and lost? Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no. And yet. Here we are, hurling ourselves headlong into love like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief.
