Out of Breath (Exposed Series Book 2) (17 page)

Dawn finally fell asleep in the late afternoon. I don’t mean
finally because I was sick of taking care of her. I mean finally because it
meant she might actually go a few minutes without coughing.

To be honest, I wasn’t responsible for anything other than moral
support. Dawn’s friend Tina hired three private nurses to come to the apartment
and take care of everything else. They administered her medicine, took her
temperature, and changed her catheter. Everything.

Sometimes when they were all there at once it got crazy cramped
in the apartment. I swung back and forth between finding it claustrophobic and
being relieved I wasn’t on my own. Even if I didn’t have to go to school, I
couldn’t have done what the nurses did. Neither could my Mom.

And everyone agreed that it was better for her to be at home
instead of in the hospital.

Only Tina knew what it cost to bring the nurses and all their
beeping, rolling equipment to Dawn’s apartment like that. But she didn’t seem
worried about it. I never once heard her discuss anything other than whether
everything was being done to make Dawn comfortable.

And she always talked really fast like she didn’t want to have
to acknowledge what she was saying. Most of the time she barely looked at me. I
don’t think she was trying to be rude or anything. I think she was just doing
her best to hold it together. We all were.

Even though there’s not much you can do for someone who is
waiting around to die. Which I found totally frustrating. I can’t imagine how
it must have been for Dawn. Each day was more demoralizing than the one before.

I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t help but think that it
would be great if a madman broke into the apartment and just smothered her
really quickly. Or if the nurses accidentally dosed her meds wrong so she could
just die instead of struggling for every breath, wondering if it would be her
last.

I didn’t like to see her suffer. I didn’t like to see anyone
suffer, but I’d never been around someone who was so sick before. It didn’t
help that she was family, family that had devoted the last few months of her
life to helping
me
get better.

And I couldn’t help but feel that the sickness I was suffering
from seemed so senseless compared to hers. I mean, here was this woman whose
body had completely turned on her while I had been attacking my own body for years,
indulging in systematic self-harm.

Not only had I completely taken my health for granted, I’d made
it a priority to make myself sick every day. And for what? To distract myself
from my feelings? To manipulate my body so it would be a different shape?
Because I thought I’d feel better about everything if the tag in my pants- a
tag that no one ever saw but me- had a smaller number on it?!

It was so stupid. Dawn was at the point where she could barely
breathe on her own, and she was trying to teach me, an eighteen year old
student athlete, how to eat on my own.

It was embarrassing. Not that it was that simple. I mean, my way
of thinking was diseased, and it would be a long time before it felt more
natural for me to feed my body than abuse it. But I was more determined than
ever to keep moving in the right direction. 

Because if there was anything I’d learned from my Aunt’s
illness, it was that nothing was more important than my health. And I’d let my
own illness steal my life for too long. I was ready to take it back and live
better. For both of us.

In her last days, I did my homework in the chair next to her bed
whether she was awake or not. When I couldn’t concentrate on my homework, I
just looked at her and wondered if she was in pain and if I should pray for
her. Even though she’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t believe in that
stuff.

She told me that even though some people found hope in the idea
that they would be judged, she found peace in the opposite. In the idea that it
would be over. She said the only people whose opinions mattered to her were
here on Earth, and that she had thoroughly enjoyed her time with them.
Especially her time with me.

Which was a lot to take. To know I meant something to her, too.
After all, coming into her life when I did was the best thing I’d ever done. As
far as I was concerned, she saved me. I mean, I would’ve kept on living, but
she saved me from the way I was doing it.

So whatever distraction or fun I had given her during her last
few months didn’t seem like much compared to what she’d given me. But it would
have to be enough. There was nothing else I could do for her. Except be there.
And she seemed grateful for that.

The last few days were the hardest. Every time she looked at me
it felt like she was trying to memorize my face. It made me nervous. Like she
knew something I didn’t. But I let her stare and smile at me as much as she
wanted.

Sometimes, when the nurses were going to drug her up again, she
would say she wanted to wait a few minutes. Then she would spend the time just
holding my hand. Other times she would ask me to read to her from whatever text
book I’d been highlighting. Physics always knocked her right out.

I was actually reading to her when it happened. I was half way
through a poem called “If” by Rudyard Kipling, the same guy who wrote The
Jungle Book. It’s about a father who gives his son advice on how to live and be
a man. It’s really beautiful. Anyway, that’s what I was reading when she
started rattling.

Of course, I didn’t know that’s what it was called when it
happened. Or what the implications were. I just knew that her breathing, a
sound I had become quite accustomed to, changed ever so slightly. All of a
sudden there was a crackling sound mixed in with her wheezing. It was like a
fuzzy radio connection going static.

As soon as I heard the change, I looked up at the nurses to see
if they’d heard it, too. That’s when they told me it was time to call the rest
of the family.

I was relieved when the time came.

I didn’t think I would be, but I was in a lot of pain by then,
and the life was already gone out of me. I felt like a hollow shell except for
my two bubbly lungs. Which carried on like broken kitchen appliances, becoming
louder and more useless by the day.

I’d had so many stops and starts in those last days I’d become
indifferent to my changing condition. But when everyone showed up to say their goodbyes,
I knew something was up. Even though everyone did a good job hiding it. Except
Carol.

Which isn’t surprising. I would’ve been a mess if our situation
had been reversed.

To be honest, the whole thing was kind of funny because I wasn’t
quite dead yet. So even though everyone came to say goodbye, they felt
compelled to think of something else to say. Like anything but goodbye. Which
was so bizarre. Like why not say your real goodbye when I can still hear you?

Mostly, they went with
“how are you?”
and
“are you
comfortable?”
Which are thoughtful questions in real life when people’s
conditions may have changed for the better. But when everyone knows you’re just
going from bad to worse, it’s a lot of pressure to come up with something to
say that isn’t totally morbid. Like
oh I’m great, I wish I’d started
breathing like Darth Vader earlier in life.
Or
comfortable? Are you
kidding? Have you tried morphine?!

So for the most part, I just smiled through it.

What I really appreciated was when someone told me something
trivial as if I had all the time in the world. Like Chris who told me about the
excellent deal he negotiated on his new floor mats and the songs he’d chosen
for the glee club’s spring show.

Which reminded me that it was spring and I liked that. Spring
was a good season to die. There would be plenty of life and sunshine right
around the corner. And most importantly, it was early enough in the year that maybe
it wouldn’t completely ruin Christmas.

But it was exhausting to see so many faces, and I was relieved
when everyone finally left. Including Tina. She was a mess. Which was
understandable. I wouldn’t have liked to watch her die either. I told Ed to
take her home.

In the end it happened quickly. Which was good for everyone’s
sake. My death had been dragged out long enough, and I was finally at peace. Which
probably meant the nurses got the balance just right on my meds.

But I was still fairly coherent, too. For better or for worse. I
couldn’t stop thinking about the contradiction between what a Big Day this was
for my family and the utter insignificance of my death in the grand scheme of
things.

The truth was that I would be lucky if I were remembered for
more than two generations. After all, I was like most people whose lives didn’t
even warrant a Wikipedia page. Future generations would not be able to see my
“early years” summed up in a neat paragraph curated by strangers eager to
immortalize my life.

My views on philosophy, religion, and society would never be of
real interest to anybody despite the countless hours I spent pondering those
subjects. Even the circumstance of my death wasn’t particularly interesting.

Though inadvertently, I had brought my family closer to the
millions of other people who have lost a loved one to cancer. But that still
made me- and them- sound insignificant.

Of course, that didn’t mean I hadn’t enjoyed myself. I didn’t
need to die an original death or change the world to know I mattered. I wasn’t
an island.

Between my teachers, my classmates, my lovers, my friends, my
patients, and my family, I must have met hundreds of people. Some of those
relationships had a profound effect on me, and maybe that’s what counted. Not
my life individually, but my life as a cog.

Of course, most of the people I met in my life probably forgot
my face minutes after meeting me. But there were plenty of others who had at
least one memory of me. And even if that memory was hardly ever called to mind,
it still existed. Which meant I would still be alive in a way in all these
people.

I used to like the idea that my soul would rise out of my body
after I died, but I didn’t know where it would go.

But now I knew. I knew that instead of staying together, my soul
would scatter into hundreds of pieces. And each piece would travel the world
until it found someone I’d already given a little part of myself to, and it
would live on in them.

Which meant I wasn’t really dying at all. I was just changing my
mode of transportation.

I didn’t say any of this out loud. Because I knew it was crazy.
But in life as in death, whatever works, right? And in those last minutes crazy
was working for me.

And who knows? Maybe I was right. Maybe in my last moments I had
finally developed a theory of life and death that was actually worthy of a
Wikipedia page! But no one would ever know about the Theory of Soul
Fragmentation because I hadn’t thought of it until it was too late to say
anything!

Of course, there was also a chance I was wrong. Which was at
least equally likely. After all, my blood type at that point was O. For
opioids.

But what happened to my soul didn’t really matter.

The important thing was that when everyone else left, Kate and
Carol stayed. And they lay down in my bed on both sides of me and held my
hands. And that’s the last thing I remember.

Dear Awesome Reader,

Thank you for taking the time to read this story. I hope you
enjoyed it.

If you have a spare moment, PLEASE give me some honest feedback
by leaving a review on Amazon
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OR send me a note directly on Facebook or at
[email protected]
so I can
thank you personally for giving my work a chance. It really means a lot to me,
and I would love to hear from you.

Thanks again for your time and support and until next time,
happy reading,

Xo Hazel

Ps- If you liked
Out of Breath,
check out the final book
in the Exposed Series,
Truth Undressed
http://amzn.to/1rret2m