Memento Mori
It’s much easier to say than I thought it might be. It requires only one breath, one pause, one flicker of courage before I just . . . say it. “I’m dying. They don’t know for sure how long I have left. Maybe six months. Maybe not. There aren’t really statistics on this for someone my age, so it’s all basically just guesswork from here.” I am building steam now. I have taken this thing, this death, and removed it from myself, so that it's what I am, but not part of me.
It's not so easy for her. It was my body that turned traitor, so I was prepared. From the moment they saw the tumor, I felt the shift, like taking a deep breath before plunging deep under water. I felt my body do this, and I knew. I knew I had become no more than the sole resident of a condemned building. She did not know this, and I could not explain.
“I can’t bury you,” she says. “I can’t bury my baby.”
I hug her now, and it is like the first time. I am telling these arms to hug her. To hug their mother. But it is not me hugging her. It is my body hugging her body. She grips me tightly.
* * *
Mark has understood what I know for some time. “After the accident,” I ask him, “did you feel different? Disconnected from your body?” He smiles the smile of someone who has been rescued from a well after ten years of waiting. “Thank God someone else finally gets it,” he says, looking down at the wheels of his chair. “The only thing worse than knowing this is being the only one to know it.”
He was in a car accident five years ago. Thrown from the backseat into the dashboard, he woke up to the sound of his neck breaking. All these years of physical therapy of allowed him to have limited movement of his head and right arm. He takes it as a blessing.
“This thing,” he says, gesturing down at his body, “has almost nothing to do with me. It’s a vessel. The host for a parasite. Nothing more. Sometimes the host likes the parasite, but sometimes,” his right arm gestures weakly from his body to mine and back again, “it doesn’t.”
* * *
My doctor rubs my head affectionately, like I am a dog who has brought him his paper. He is indulging me. I am dying, I think. I deserve to be indulged. He increases the dosage of my medication, and my nerves hum with gratitude.
* * *
Every day is a battle.
* * *
I am drafting my will. I have almost nothing to give, but I thought it might be therapeutic. Mostly I am just writing a love letter to the world, giving something to everyone who touched my life.
“I would like my organs to be donated,” I write carefully, in bold print. “Let them take anything they can use, and dispose of the rest. No ashes. No grave.” I will not have them remembering me as something I never even was -- like keeping the collar when it’s the dog you miss.
* * *
As a child I loved to ride carnival rides, laughing at my clumsiness when I stepped off feeling dizzy and weak in the knees. Today I feel that way every time I stand, the world zooming and fading as if seen through a funhouse mirror.
“Dying,” I tell my boyfriend, “is a lot like being a kid again.”
He says nothing in response, only pulls me into his lap to hug me against him. I think I hear a choked cry.
Is this how he will say goodbye?
* * *
The nurses come and go all day, hurrying through my room. Their fingers flutter like butterfly wings, brushing against me, my bed, my chart, my tubes. Butterflies are not human; they are unable to smile.
A new nursing student starts coming late at night, and I know she dreads my room. I heard her telling another nurse. “She’s my age exactly,” she said. “We share the same birthday and everything.”
How many times does lightning strike?
She stops coming after a few days. They switched her to another set of patients.
This is what I do to people.
* * *
I have come home to die. No one will say this out loud, but we all know it is true. My aunt comes over to whisper to my mother about the things I will never get to do. My friends stop coming, stop calling. They have buried me already.
I lie in bed, slipping in and out of myself.
I wonder if there is a God.