This Is How (19 page)

Maybe you both have been at this for a while. But now, even drinking from a straw is almost too exhausting.

The water rises, reaches the neck where the straw bends like an accordion, but then so suddenly it falls back down into the glass again.

Until, as you watch in such suspense you actually hold your own breath, and the water loops into the bent neck of the straw and into their mouth. Because you know this person so well, even though they say not a single word, you can read in their eyes exactly what’s on their mind. “See? Five bucks, cough it up and then hand me back my life.”

When death arrives, it will arrive in its coach: death rides the last breath in.

There is no exhale.

THIS MAY BE THE
moment—it is for many—that what has been given to you will be unwrapped.

You see, dying is not the same as dead. Going is not yet gone. Dead is dead and it is unmistakable. Death does not resemble peace; it resembles gone.

When the person you love is gone, even if it has seemed to you for so long only a small part of them has remained, you see now how much of them was really there. You see, too, that it was the last few moments—hardly enough of them to walk from the far end of a parking lot to the front door of a mall—and yet these several moments were the most pure, most essential, and most
alive
moments in your life.

When you reflect on the water rising in the straw, you will see now what you missed then because you were there, inside the straw, inside the moment, inside the disease: that was the closest you have ever been to another person. One person can be no closer to another.

As the liquid flowed into their mouth and you saw a tiny shine of wet and felt their joy at the achievement of a single sip, you had become as close as two people can be.

Life tucks its rarest, largest, and most D-flawless diamonds deep, deep inside the folds of the greatest loss. You do not know they are even there, glittering in the dark, right beside you.

When you reach the very interior moments of the end—a tiny breath, one flash of the person you love in their eyes, just the fluttering of eyelashes—these are the diamonds that will shine all the way into the future, for as long as you are alive.

These last moments, diamonds: the hardest thing known to man. But, too, the most brilliant, the most extravagant, and utterly worth whatever price we had to pay to have them.

I
KNEW A WOMAN
who was approaching forty and had not yet experienced the death of anybody close to her.

She had never even attended a funeral.

She told me once, “I guess I’ve been really fortunate in that way.”

But when she said this, it may have been the first time she had ever considered aloud her status as a virgin of another sort.

Because I saw something like a shadow pass over her face, as if she were standing beneath a very low and quickly traveling cloud. And I think it might have been her realization that the good fortune she had experienced of never losing someone would end.

She perhaps saw that her luck in this regard was finite.

She had not escaped this loss. It had only been delayed.

But there is nothing a person can do to prepare for the death of someone close.

I tried this and it backfired.

I loved somebody with a terminal illness. What I did was try and love them not quite so hard; I tried to need them less.

In the hope that I could more evenly distribute the weight of loss.

As such, their death was on my mind for years before they died.

It was as if I made eggs and arrangements in the same black iron skillet.

When they died I saw instantly that I had failed entirely to lessen the impact of loss. I had instead overpaid for death by living so long with the idea of it in my mind, planning for its arrival, making sure the sheets were fresh.

I learned that the proper way to prepare for someone’s death is by being alive in the same room with them for as long as you are allowed.

There are two kinds of death: the good death and then every other death.

In a good death, there is time.

And the dying person retains their mental clarity.

Sometimes a good death will be a great one and there will
be many days for you to spend together. You will be able to say good-bye. Maybe even use that word. In a great death, people do not pretend they don’t know why there is a morphine drip in the room. In a great death, no one is afraid to say the word
dying
.

But a great or a good death is not something you are allowed to ask for or expect. Planes do go down. Hearts do suddenly stop. People are alive and then without any prior notice they are not.

In this case, you will struggle to say good-bye but because good-bye is by nature a mutual affair, the good-bye will be only one-sided. Necessary but so terribly hollow.

If the death is a good death, there will be a bed.

And the bed will be the world.

It may be at home or in a hospital. It may be that the bed is not located where you want it to be and this can be cause for tremendous distraction and upset.

“But dad should be at home in his own bed.”

Know this: as death itself approaches, it does not matter where the bed is located because the bed is all there is.

In a good death, people who love the dying person will be clustered near or even on top of the bed. A hand or a leg will be in constant contact with the dying loved person.

Off the bed is where the unessential falls; it’s where you dump your jacket, let the papers slide, reach for something to bring to the bed. In death, the bed is the very center of life; anything off the bed is merely in orbit.

It’s hot there in the center.

You may feel feverish. But your hands will not sweat, they will remain clammy.

Even if you hold out hope for a miracle, if the person is in fact dying, you will know this. Though you may be unable, just yet, to allow this to be true.

In this case, you will find you have many things to do: people to call, supplies that must be purchased. It will feel like you have taken over as the CEO of a company in chaos. But you will not mind these tasks; instead, you will feel grateful for them.

This is where a large error is easy to make: every moment you spend texting somebody an update or attending to other such clipboard tasks is a moment that will in time be seen as
more
lost from your life than any others.

Only from the great height of perspective much later will you understand that those last moments with the person you loved were among the most cherished moments of your life and it will feel special, like a brief holiday, to recall them.

So I will tell you now: spend as many moments as you possibly can with the dying person you love. It is not necessary to do anything or say anything. It is plenty to sit in the same room and feel drowsy.

It’s difficult to do this.

If you sit still, you may be overwhelmed with the most terrible feeling that everything is spinning out of control, wildly so.

This is why it will be a relief to make calls or run petty errands that you normally would avoid. These things provide an artificial relief, a sense that you are “managing” the death.

It is better to realize and accept what is true: the feeling that everything is spinning out of control comes from the fact that it is.

We have no control over anything large in life; only the small details are under our direct management. But even then, we lack any real authority.

We can move the paper clips around on top of the desk, but what is the desk? And how did it get there? And will it be there tomorrow? We don’t know.

As the moments progress further still and your loved person transitions from sitting upright to lying down, and from lying down to curling up, when death is very near, something happens to time: the minutes themselves suddenly expand and develop the ability to absorb more activity.

The quality of each moment will be raised to an impossibly high level. Sometimes, a single one can contain more substance than even an hour.

At the same time, these moments will pass much faster than they ever have before.

Never glance at a watch. Never look at the time.

Death, when it finally arrives, does so in a surprising fashion: it adds nothing to the room, not a light or a spark or a sound; death does not stir a molecule of the air.

You know it arrives because there is suddenly a subtraction. You will feel it before you know it.

When you look down at the person you have so carefully loved, you will see only their body and all that remains of them will be what remains in a pair of jeans stepped out of and left behind on the floor by the person who wore them.

If their death was a long and painful process you may have
come to believe that when the moment of death itself arrived, it would be, in some terrible way, a relief.

In which case the very first thing you are likely to feel is the simple stun of a slap across the face, the sting of truth: this is not a relief, not in even one microscopic way.

You will want to withdraw the thought from time.

Madly, it might even occur to you that doing so could possibly postpone what has happened by a very, very small though essential amount of time.

And your mind will crash into the wall of, but how?

You may cry very, very hard right now.

Even if you never felt there would be relief and you only tried to accept what was happening and experience the grace of the moments until the last one was there, the first thing you may feel now that the person you love is dead is that you weren’t quite ready.

Possibly, you needed only ten more minutes. Maybe not even that much time. The amount you need will be utterly reasonable.

And therefore, doable.

You will occupy the same state of mind as if you were in line at the market and you stepped just ten feet from your place to grab a box of trash bags and when you turned around, somebody new had arrived and so you pry ahead of them with kind, polite authority and explain, “Hi, sorry. I’m actually here, I just had to step over there for this.” Of course, in line the person nods and even feels a little embarrassed.

You will say, “I thought I was ready but I wasn’t, you see. Just not quite ready.”

But this is death. And they are dead.

You do not get your place back.

You may not have so much as one one-trillionth of a second with them. The door has closed and vanished into the wall and not even an outline of where it once was is visible.

Additionally, you may feel nothing at all. And if asked to describe how you felt, you might consider this and then reply, “I feel like off-white canvas.”

Or you may feel as though the bottom, the floor of the world has given way and you are in a free fall.

I wonder if there is a biological reason, one that is coded into our genetic profile, that requires us to experience fully the heavy pain of loss.

Because thrill and joy and triumph and achievement and orgasm and surprise—these things are so fleeting.

But grief endures.

If not all of us will ever know certain joys, we will know loss. It’s as if at birth, a baby’s foot is inked and stamped onto a contract in agreement of the terms: the price of life will be losing someone you love. Nobody remembers signing anything of the kind. Yet you cannot live a full, natural life without experiencing a full and natural death.

It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.

Death is a head-on collision with your plans.

But everything in life—the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat—everything there is was born from a collision.

Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.

Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.

And something new is created when the person you love dies.

Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.

This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

W
HEN MY AUNT IN
Dothan, Alabama, lost her hair during her treatment for cancer, she did exactly the right thing: she shaved her head and posed near a motorcycle even though she, herself, would never ride a motorcycle.

This is exactly the right thing to do because it’s exactly what a kid would do. If a kid woke up bald, a kid would want to
be
bald. That might include wearing a wig. But it would always be a wig on top of a bald kid. The kid would tell you this much.

When disease happens to kids, the parents wish it had happened to them instead. Many times, the parents want to know how God could allow their kid to get sick.

No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes,
why
is not knowable.

If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don’t stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible.

Why doesn’t matter now.

Even though nothing in the world seems to matter except why. In fact, the desire to understand is so powerful that it feels almost like within the answer is salvation or rescue.