DEATH BECOMES ME

I watched all of the series Dying For Sex on Hulu. I ate it all up in the most glutinous manner and I sort of regret not savoring it more. The whole candidness around sex and women who want to try different kinds of sex, along with the discussion on actual death made this series so….charming? Delightful? I’m not sure how to sum up the feelings this invoked, particularly the final episode. The hospice nurse, played by Paula Pell, is the hospice nurse I wish we had had when Chris was dying. Her candor and enthusiasm about the miracle of death is infectious.

The biological process of death is a miracle.

And of course, watching stuff like this stirs up the sludge that tends to settle at the bottom of a really good fish sauce. I ended thinking about moments in Chris’s last week, the memories of which I keep shoved into a cluttered back corner. I hate thinking about or remembering anything related to the last two months of Chris’s life. Favorite shampoos and soaps from that time frame have been completely eradicated from my life so that their smells don’t trigger memories. Any time water starts to back up in the basement, my heart seizes not with the anxiety of home ownership, but with memories of Chris being in the hospital while we had sewage backup into the basement. My body tenses with the memories of scrambling to take care of all the things at the same time and how everything had literally turned to shit. These are the reasons I avoid those memories and would prefer to shove them in a dark corner.

I had a week where I was consistently on my mat every day. This doesn’t mean I’m back to any kind of a routine. I am not. It just means that in this particular week, I managed to do an exercise I love doing more than once. After one of those yoga sessions, as I was walking back to my cubicle from the gym, I started thinking about that day after we all celebrated Chris’s birthday and I had to drive our friend Todd to the airport. He hugged me goodbye and told me that I was doing so good. He told me that I had this and there was comfort in his words. At the time, I was the first of us, our group, to experience death in this way. Our experiences had all been slightly removed before this one. There would be no phone call from another one telling me the news. I suppose maybe that I had at least done a good job of making it look like I was doing a good job? 

I think I still do that, make it look easy or like I know what I’m doing. Not too long ago, one of my coworkers was presenting in lab meeting, talking about a project I’ve heard about a half a dozen times already. I straight up stopped paying attention at one point and was scrolling Insta on my phone when suddenly I heard “I don’t know. Cindy, you’ve done that technique before. What do you think?” I think I deserve an Oscar for what happened next. I shrugged and said “You know…sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all voodoo really.” And everyone in the room chuckled and nodded their heads in agreement. I did pay attention after this, but was also pretty proud of the performance I had just given. I would never say I am a great pretender, but I just might be a great masker. 

In the breakdown of what happens when a person dies, one of the steps near the end is called ‘the rally’. During the rally, the person who is dying experiences a sudden burst of energy and engagement. The person is alert and talkative and aware. I had read about this in the little book of death left behind by a hospice nurse. Chris and I joked about how it was nothing like The Handbook for The Recently Deceased. We found the booklet to be dull and uninformative. Any change in Chris’s demeanor or language or sounds he was making, I would pause and ask “what stage is this?!?” I was looking for signs of the rally, but either I missed it or Chris skipped this part. Now that I think about it, it is very possible that the rally happened during his birthday when the house was filled with people who love us. At least I hope this is true. The TV series made the rally look really very nice. I hate to think that we missed it, that we were present only for the real crap parts of dying. 

I wish we had celebrated the very act of dying. Instead, every moan or gasp or ugh made me panic and pace our room while asking “what do I do?” over and over and over. There are so many times I should have never listened to Chris. My fault lies in listening to the men in my life and believing them word for word. I do it now with Michael. I did it always with Chris, believing every “no, really, it’s fine.” or “we don’t need hospice just yet.” I was so distracted with “the what do I dos?” that I didn’t allow time for just being present in the miracle of death. Maybe I could have never been present for it. I was too mentally close to the person dying. When we did finally have a hospice nurse come in, I left the house for twenty minutes and in that time, Chris died. The nurse said Chris had been waiting for me to leave. There was no way he was going to die in front of me because he knew it would also kill me. 

Chris was stupid. 

So was I for listening and believing every word. 

I’ve started watching the last season of Andor and I know I shouldn’t be watching it all, because it just makes me sad. Of all the movies and television I’ve watched since Chris died, this for some reason is the thing that makes me want him here more than ever. To sit in silence next to him on the couch while we watch the beginnings of a rebellion and then to dissect each scene, each line, in discussion would be… The audacity of anyone to add to Chris’s bible, his religion, with him not here to approve or disapprove, to be his own Council of Nicaea. This is all of the cliches. It is not fair. It is infuriating. It is impossible. It is unimaginable. Which that part is fine. I don’t need to imagine the loss, the grief, the heartache. I am fully present in all of that and how there is always a layer of it with me always. Even while I move forward and make my own way. 

I am fully present.