The Stars In The Sky

By Jennifer James

I was sitting in the dermatologist’s office, waiting to be seen for what I was convinced was a killer mole. Killer. I couldn’t quite get a full lung full of air, but over the last few months, and several futile visits, my general practitioner had listened to my chest, put me on antibiotics, and assured me I could breathe just fine. After my third visit to her for what was apparently an imaginary ailment, I went on with my life, hoping that she was right, that I could breathe just fine, even though I really, really couldn’t. My oxygen levels were fine, according to the professionals. But those fuckers had missed my malignant mole.

I was determined to live, against all odds, so I bypassed my worthless primary care doctor and took myself straight to the specialist. I waited for forty-five minutes, which was normal for this dermatology practice, I knew. The doctor in this office was notorious for his friendly, long-winded office visits. I’d seen him a time or two before for warts and skin tags—definitely minor issues—and had left the office in in a little under two hours, from check-in to walking out the door. Large medical conglomerates would seizure over the disturbing amount of time this man spent with his patients—often discussing his children’s college plans or the weather, or anything else that crossed his mind. But I knew the guy, and at this point, I just wanted to get what I knew would be the bad news and get on with an aggressive treatment plan.

Dr. Pike bustled into the room like Santa Claus. He was jolly and friendly and happy. He shook my hand and asked why I was here. I took the deepest breath I could manage and showed him the offending, obviously atypical mole on my right wrist. He adjusted his glasses and examined the spot thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully, for my taste. Just say it, I thought. He took off his glasses and looked at me.

“What we’re looking at here is a kind of pigmentation change that comes with age, Mrs. James. It’s normal, nothing wrong with this bit of skin at all.”

“Okay, thank you…” I said shakily. Dr. Pike smiled encouragingly and checked my chart. “So you’re thirty years old, right? Do you have any high risk factors regarding your skin? Because you’re pretty young to be worried about this sort of thing unless you had some specific reason to be concerned.”

I recognized this routine now: it was a kind of variation on the talk my general practitioner had given me about my breathing. The message was essentially, Lady, you’re fine. We’ll check you out because you’re here in front of us, but you might be just a little nuts. This was familiar and increasingly becoming true: I WAS a little nuts.

“No, not really,” I said.

Dr. Pike looked me in the eye and smiled gently. “So … how’s your health otherwise?’

I could feel my mouth turning down and my chest opening up wide. I sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t make words come out, and all the while, Dr. Pike looked on kindly, passing the tissue box and making reassuring, non-judgmental noises. I loved him for this.

After a while, I blew my nose, and wiped my face. Dr. Pike sat patiently, perched on his little stool with wheels, waiting for me to get my shit together. When I could talk again, I told him, “My mother died. She died almost six months ago. Ever since then, I can’t breathe. And the doctors can’t find anything. But I can’t ever get a big, deep breath and I don’t think I’m ever going to be okay.”

Dr. Pike nodded. “I understand. There’s something inside that breaks when your mom dies. I remember going outside one night not long after I lost my own mother. It was a perfect night, kind of cool, but not cold, and the stars were bright, bright, bright, bright as I’d ever seen them. And I looked up at them and thought: Huh. Just stars. I knew they’d never look the same to me, that I’d lost something so enormous that even the most beautiful starry night meant nothing.” He paused and I don’t remember what I did, but I remember feeling a tremendous lifting, the feeling that finally someone understood how fucked up the world was because my mother had died, that someone spoke my language.

Moving on to actual medicine, he said: “Now, as for your breathing, let’s do this one thing at a time.” He concurred with my general practitioner that it was probably nothing, but also strongly recommended that I find a new doctor. “I believe in the power of negative test results,” he said confidently. “We need to be sure that it’s nothing, and the only way to do that is to test for the things it could be.” He continued talking, lapsing into his signature story-telling mode, telling me all about a friend of his who’d displayed all kinds of horrifying neurological symptoms, had undergone extensive, invasive testing, only to learn that his symptoms were a blip…benign. No underlying, lethal cause. “You need to have some testing,” he said. “Get some answers and then go on.” He didn’t offer any bullshit assurances that everything would be fine, and that I didn’t have anything to worry about—another reason to love the man. I was relieved to be talking to someone who got it: things were fucked and they could get more fucked. Get your shit together as best you can and take a step.

•••

A year earlier, I’d still been nuts but in a much more manageable way. I’d been working at a dead end job as a receptionist. I was looking for a new job and had romanced myself into thinking that if I returned to teaching, I’d finally be happy. I applied and applied and finally found a position in a classroom. The job description was fluid—I’d be an assistant in a classroom, unless a full-time teaching position opened up. I didn’t care; I was excited to be getting out from behind the receptionist’s desk and to be making more than seven dollars an hour.

My husband and I had no children at the time. We’d made some sketchy decisions early in our marriage, beginning with our choice to make his rural hometown our permanent home. It turns out that small hometowns make lovely movie backdrops but don’t provide a robust job market. We started out really poor and managed to become really, really poor. Right before my mom died, we were on the verge of getting our collective shit together. My husband had landed a job with health benefits. I had resumed my education, trying to fashion a career that I didn’t really want from classroom experience and good intentions, and about a month before we found out my mom was sick, I’d started as the director of the infant program at a Montessori school. I was really trying to love it.

My grandmother, Gladys, was an interesting woman. She was cultured and funny and kind. She was also the kind of person who could suck all of the air out of any room she passed through. My parents had divorced about fifteen years earlier and as my grandmother grew older and my mother grew poorer, they combined households. My grandmother moved in. These two women had been the most imminent, consistent presences in my life and even now I have trouble explaining how they got along. Or didn’t. One phrase might be: unconditional love, as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. Another phrase might be: toxic codependency, also as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. It was quite a mess. Like most families.

It was a cool, September evening in 1998 when my grandmother called. In her throaty alto, she said, “Well, dear, don’t be alarmed, but your mother was admitted to the hospital this evening. She was having just a little trouble breathing. She’s much better now, though! Everything will be fine. But it would be so lovely for her to see you…” I planned to come up the next day after work, leaving the classroom full of babies behind and spending a long weekend with my mother who was, reportedly, “much better.” I would only miss one day of work at my new job and could go see about my mom. It was manageable.

My classroom full of babies was not so manageable. The babies themselves were fine. But I had some serious doubts about my return to the classroom. The business of caring for babies is sacred to me; they are some of the most precious, vulnerable people on the planet. I went into the classroom with the idea that my mission was to care for the children. I had forgotten about their fucking parents. Parents who drove up in their Mercedes to drop off their twelve-month-old with an ear infection. Parents who demanded that their child nap at school, even though the child sobbed through nap time. Parents who dropped their babies so they could go golf. Not that there weren’t lovely parents there, too, parents who came at lunch to breastfeed their babies, parents who took days off of work, just to spend time with their babies, but I wasn’t seeing those folks as clearly. I committed a cardinal sin in teaching: I judged the parents. Now, twenty some years later, a parent myself, I have a little more compassion for everyone involved. At the time, I thought, Jesus. I fucked up again. I need ANOTHER new job.

So when my grandmother called, there was a part of me that was actually relieved, grateful that I would have the coming Friday off from the babies and their whiny-assed parents. I would see my mom and my grandmother, they would annoy me, and I would go back to my life and try to learn to love it as it was, or at least grow into it gracefully. I didn’t feel particularly sad, even. Rather, I had a kind of dysfunctional anticipation of a crisis. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out,” wrote Chekhov. I wasn’t very good at the day-to-day-living. A crisis sounded a little bit lovely.

My sister and I talked later that evening too. My sister is four years younger than I am, but many years wiser.

“It’s cancer,” my sister muttered. “You know it’s cancer.”

On my end of the line: “Maybe. You don’t know for sure…” I believed myself, too. My mother was…well, my mother. She had survived all kinds of unlikely, life threatening illnesses, and it seemed silly that life would smack her down at this point. My sister, on the other hand, took the view that it was a fucking miracle life hadn’t smacked her down before this point. It seemed too soon to say.

The cold, hard truth was that my mother had been smoking since she was twelve years old. When I got this phone call, she was fifty-five years old and had just celebrated her birthday with a traditional lobster tail dinner that she just couldn’t eat. That should’ve been a sign, my grandmother said later. At five feet, four inches, my mother weighed probably a hundred pounds. She’d looked suspiciously thin for years, seeming to survive mostly on nicotine and pure sugar, with the occasional navel orange (she always peeled them artfully, leaving the entire skin in one, unbroken spiral) or bowl of rice for variety. This was who my mother was, though. Quirky and kind of depressed, relatively happy to go to bed early most nights with a thick novel, a pack of cigarettes, and a bag of gooey circus peanut candies on her nightstand, in her odd little nest of a bed. There would be too many cats sleeping on her feet and two big dogs flopped on the floor beside the bed (they were too big to fit on the actual bed) and she drifted in and out of sleep fitfully, smoking a cigarette or two during the night in the dark.

The following day, I went to school and explained the situation to the Head of School. She nodded, her big brown eyes concerned. “Of course, take tomorrow,” she said. “Hope your mom is okay; we’ll see you Monday.”

My mom was not okay. I got to the hospital and could see that. My grandmother was lovely in a kind of lethal way; she couldn’t hear much, didn’t want to hear much, and couldn’t believe that anything could be really wrong with her daughter. On the trip from my mother and grandmother’s house to the hospital, my grandmother chatted serenely, telling me about the fluid they drew off my mother’s chest, how she was breathing so much better, and how it was so nice that I’d been able to come this evening; I could see the doctors in the morning and surely they’d figure something out. I nodded and smiled—this was always the best approach with my grandmother.

My mother was in the ICU. Her private cubicle (the only fabulous thing about being gravely ill—you get much better hospital care than the less gravely ill) was lined with monitors. The ubiquitous bag of fluids was hooked up and she wore that tiny oxygen cannula in her nostrils. I suddenly felt everything. The corners of my mouth turned down and an actual sob came out of my mouth. My mother, truly one of the kindest people I’ve known, snapped: “Oh for heaven’s sake. Stop being so dramatic, Peanut.”

There is a scene in the movie, Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence allows a match to burn all the way to his fingertips without showing a reaction. When his friend attempts the same trick, it hurts! Lawrence says: “Of course it hurts. The trick is…not minding that it hurts.” This was how my mother lived her life. She swallowed pain as a life mission. She didn’t expect people around her to make a big deal about it—that was incredibly poor form. Which is why she got so mad at my boohooing.

My mother was a complicated person. She was exceedingly generous, funny, and kind-hearted. Once she let a diabetic, homeless man live on our front porch (only on nights when he couldn’t get into the shelter because he was too drunk). When our cat brought her a half-dead mouse, she nursed it back to health and we kept it as a rescue/pet (named Templeton) until spring came and she could let him go without worrying about him freezing to death. When she worked teaching English as a second language to students in downtown Washington, D.C., her car was the only one which remained unvandalized in the church parking lot. To be fair, it was a pretty shitty car, but the real reason my mom’s car stayed intact was that she was a smoker.

When she stepped out to the parking lot to smoke between classes, she’d make conversation with whoever was also out there smoking, which seemed most often to be a group of aimless-looking young men. She would chat amiably, smoking along with the boys, sharing her point of view with such a warm smile that those boys let her say ridiculously cheesy things like: “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You shouldn’t have beat that fellow up. Now—why aren’t you in school?” I never witnessed any of these conversations, but I know her smile and her voice, and I’m certain when she smiled at the guy, he felt like she genuinely cared about him, and was letting him in on a little secret: that he shouldn’t have beat that other dude up and that his ass should be in school! When she scuffed out her butt and tucked it into her pocket or a trashcan (nobody likes a litter bug), she’d wink at him and his friends and say: “Now, boys. You try and stay out of trouble, now, okay?” I don’t think they stayed out of trouble because of her. But her car was never fucked up, either.

The diagnosis was, in fact, cancer. Lung cancer. Advanced lung cancer. Today, I know what that diagnosis means. Then, I had no fucking clue. My mother died five weeks later. In five weeks, and two chemo treatments, she dropped another twenty pounds or so, lost all her hair, and had spongy patches of yeast growing inside her mouth. She was conscious until the last three days of her life, when she slipped into that world between the worlds, the one where morphine and cellular failure meet. One of the hospice workers told us we’d need to start using diapers with her; she died twenty minutes later. None of her family believes that timeline is coincidental—my mother would rather die than wear diapers.

•••

It surprised me how weirdly my mother’s dying fucked me up, what strange ideas fluttered through my brain as she died. For example, I felt compelled to take pictures of my mother while she lay in the funky hospital bed in the den. It wasn’t that she looked otherworldly beautiful or anything at all like that. She was bald and haggard and irritated that death had come to sit on the bed beside her. Even so, I wanted a picture, because I knew that was the last I’d see of her in this life: her frail, bony skeleton wrapped in fragile skin, her breath whispering in and out, in and out, the oxygen pumping, the air purifier purifying, the fan blowing a constant, ridiculous breeze on her face. The nurses had advised keeping a fan blowing toward her, to create the illusion of fresh air, the concept that she actually could breathe. Just so you know, I didn’t actually end up taking pictures of her, I didn’t. But I thought about it a lot.

I didn’t want to wash the sheets after she died. How fucked up is that? Understand, we did wash the sheets. They smelled like yeast and bleach and death. But they smelled like my mother’s death and I didn’t want it gone yet. Not just yet.

The end came way more quickly than we’d thought it would. I kept taking time off from the babies, and each time I’d go back to the classroom, the parents of the babies would say, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back,” and list everything that had gone wrong while I was away. I tried to quit entirely, and the Head of School said no. If my mother had lived another week, I would have, just never returned. As it was, there was no need. I was free much sooner than I hoped.

When I came back after the funeral, and after I’d written thank you cards to everyone who’d attended, brought casseroles, I was changed, not for better. My first “real” day back in the classroom, I brought in a tasteful (I thought) harvest-themed floral arrangement someone had given me as a condolence offering. The flowers looked authentic and added a nice feel to the room (I thought). The Head of School walked in and lifted her eyebrows. She didn’t say a thing. After she left, one of my co-workers said: she hates fake flowers. I will say that having my mother die helped me with my codependency issues quite a bit. Fuck her, I said. See? What a little thing, right? And at least some of you reading this also hate fake flowers. Which is, under normal circumstances, okay with me. That day, I thought I’d take those fake flowers and fling them right at The Head of School. Fuck her very much.

I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand my life without my mother in it.

By the time I got to Dr. Pike with my imagined lethal mole, I was undone. I couldn’t breathe, I hated my job, and I wasn’t talking to God. Fuck Him. I broke up with Him after a flukey ice storm killed the power in our area on Christmas Eve. I’d made it through my mother dying, cleaning out her house, tolerating my job, and when I finally got a break, everything got cold and dark, every bullshit metaphor brought to life.

Dr. Pike helped me, though. He heard me. I think losing a parent is like becoming one. People can help you, be sympathetic, be kind. But until you experience it yourself, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You can’t. It’s another language altogether. And the stars in the sky, they get sketchy. Breathing: also sketchy business. Dr. Pike spoke the language, and in his way, helped me turn back to the living place, a place where maybe the weather wasn’t out to get me, where some jobs just aren’t right, and where maybe, just maybe, the stars would find a way to shine once more.

Finally I could breathe.

•••

JENNIFER JAMES lives with her family in rural Virginia. She writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and has been published in Full Grown People as well as Life in 10 Minutes. She has completed a novel and has just begun work on her second one. In her free time, she enjoys reading all kinds of books and discovering new podcasts. Above all, she loves a good story.

Some names have been changed. —ed.

The Changeling

By Lillian Ann Slugocki

Lucinda shows up in Wisconsin, on September 25 by way of North Carolina—our half sister from another mother. She is the younger, better version of me in every way, but I’m the only sibling that she talks to—there are three others.

She arrives after a twenty-five-year absence in our brother’s life; a seeker, a philosopher, convinced she can carry the weight of his impending death, that she could, in fact, be his angel of death. Like Charon, she has the gold piece for passage in her teeth at all times. She is both midwife and doula for the dying. Our first night together, at the all-night grocery store, Mark wears flannel pajama bottoms, white socks, flip-flops. His eye sockets are purple under the canopy of fluorescent lights. She’s Martha Stewart on crack:

Pro biotic for your belly. Score! Fresh ginger, for nausea, Ooooh, I like this soap, it’s organic, it’s lavender! I love these fruit cups! I love mandarin oranges! We’ll have lasagna for dinner tonight.

And he’s in absolute thrall to her: a school-boy crush, for this paragon of love and light. My god, so much light, so much energy—it crackles from her skin like static electricity. This girl is lit up. I trail behind the two of them; so animated, so colorful, it’s like watching a passion play. He willingly hands over all his power to her. I am completely stupefied, silenced, erased. Back at his apartment, breakthrough pain! Lucinda calls her mother, who is not our mother. Mark takes the phone, turns his face to the wall. He might be crying. I don’t know. I can’t bear to see him like this. It unhinges me. I smoke at the window in another room. Lucinda enters, crying—she takes my hand. She wants to be the doula for my pain and grief, too. But here’s the thing. It’s not what I want from her, at all.

I want her to get out of my way; I need her to shut up, be humble, bear witness, and respect a bond she knows nothing about. But she’s too high on her mission to help, to fix, to redeem—and doesn’t see this, or if she does, chooses to ignore it. I’ve been dispossessed in my role as the oldest sister, his oldest friend. She is the changeling who replaces me, and then tries to help me. When he’s passed out on his pain meds, she wants to go to a salon and get a pedicure, go shopping for new clothes, sample cheese curds, go for a drive. I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep, too. This is not a vacation. And does it really matter if your intentions are pure, and your compassion is real, but your actions ultimately create even more chaos? Who can really tell when times are so fraught?

I can see her mind working: He’s a cool guy, after all, full of flaws, like we all are, but also charismatic and funny. And I see her guilt and her regret, for ignoring him all of her life, but I can’t fix it for her. I can’t fix it for anyone. And I don’t want to. I don’t have the bandwidth. I have my own path to walk—this is my mandala. Go find your own.

At the V.A. clinic the next morning, his doctor examines him. He sits on the table, emaciated, yet still very much in his power, in his body, and still very hip, a rocker—in his black hat, purple hair, and Tibetan beads. We’re in an air-conditioned, windowless room, beige walls and tiled floors. Lucinda and I sit on folding chairs, facing them, doctor and patient, as if it’s a performance. And he’s the star of the show. At one point, the doctor says to him, So yes, you could die in your sleep, and that’s when Mark got up and left.

As I leave to follow him, I hear Lucinda still with the doctor: He needs a higher dose of Fentanyl, now. Today.

In the parking lot, in the sunlight, Mark leans against her neon blue rental. His beads are loose around his wrist and his neck. We don’t say anything. It’s too much; I try to hold him, but we both pull away. What if Lucinda sees? But also the idea of his death is just too crazy. We try to square up to his mortality—the white clouds roil in the sky above our heads. It’s a perfect September day. The leaves are just starting to turn. We’re on the south side of town, in a neighborhood I don’t recognize. He has six weeks to live. Lucinda triumphantly emerges from the clinic,

The patches, she announces, one thousand milligrams, will be in your mailbox, tomorrow! Fed-exed, baby.

Back at his apartment, she draws up a complex schedule for his complex meds, puts it in a spreadsheet, gets it printed, and tacked to the refrigerator. Also tacked to the refrigerator are all her cards and letters to him—spanning the entire length of their relationship, almost six weeks, including a selection of her favorite quotes from their time together:

Screw break out pain!

You’re like a real sister to me!

And taped to the purple wall in the hallway is a hand-painted birthday card from her son. It hangs next to a Xeroxed copy of a prayer by Tecumseh, a Shawnee Indian chief, which reads:

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

•••

In the kitchen, she heats up the lasagna, and I pour vodka into a green plastic cup. Mark eats a tiny sliver of his dinner, and then they’re off to the dunes of Lake Michigan, so he can smoke his evening joint .I don’t go. It’s not my ritual. It’s theirs. I pour more vodka into the green plastic cup, which I drink in silence and utter confusion in his empty living room. The hospital bed is to my right, Tibetan prayer flags overhead, courtesy of Lucinda. When they get back, she kisses me on the cheek, says, I love you, and is gone. She sleeps at my aunt’s house. She’ll get her hands dirty, but not that dirty. I’m happy that I’m getting out of here tomorrow.

In the morning, I’m confident, at the very least, she’ll give me some space to say goodbye to him. I have to go home. I have a full teaching load. I have a dog. I pay New York City rent.I’m at the limit of how many classes I can miss before my pay is cut. In his bedroom, I’m packing; she arrives precisely at ten a.m. to take me to the airport. She picks up my hair brush, and pulls out a new one from Walgreens: Look! I got it for you on the way over! The old one is so gnarly. She marches into the living room, calls out his name:

Mark! Honey, hi, you up? Did you take the anti-nausea meds? Let’s look at the schedule.

He’s been avoiding me all morning, will not talk about how this might be my last morning on earth with you. I don’t want to go there either, but I do want five minutes at some point in the day, before I get on the plane, to say goodbye. Because it might really be goodbye. So, will you, Lucinda, will you give me that space? But it’s not looking good. I stand in the shadow of The Changeling, a sister he never really knew, who now controls everything. Because in the land of dying, everything is upside down. Everything is topsy-turvy. It’s like the circus has come to town. Lucinda and Mark make plans to eat lobster, in downtown Milwaukee, after they drop me off at the airport.

And I see as I get in the back seat, and they get in the front, that this is the way he wants it. He’s not going to say goodbye to me. It’s a much smoother ride with The Changeling in charge. It’s easier on him. He hardly knows her. He basks in her reflected light, as they talk cornfields and lobster rolls. I’m in the back still holding out hope—two minutes alone at the airport, that’s all I’m asking. This is all I want. And Lucinda is an exceptional woman. We’ve been friends for 20 years. She will honor this connection, which doesn’t include her, and step aside, but when we are pulling into the entrance for my airline, she says,

Let’s take a family picture!

She gets out, helping me with my bags, I whisper furiously to her,

I do not want to take a family picture.

And I can’t even manage to sound like a sane person. I’m acutely conscious that my head might explode. She wants a picture to post on social media? My brother looks terrible. I look terrible. I don’t want a digital snap shot, or simulacrum of any kind, of this day, this moment. This moment can burn in hellfire, the second I don’t need it to move to the next. Mark stands at the curb, says, What’s wrong? Lucinda, on the verge of tears, replies, She doesn’t want a family picture, and points at me. I pick up my suitcase and throw it at her. It’s too big and too heavy to make much headway, but I make my point.

I’m out of control.

Mark calls out to me, as I walk away, You’re coming back, right?

In the lounge, at my gate, I call my younger brother of the same mother, and tell him what has just happened. I stand in front of a row of floor to ceiling plate glass windows, overlooking a 747, illuminated by a brilliant afternoon sun. I’m center stage, on the red carpet, in the brightest spot in the room, practically blinded by the light, and I weep. It is such a relief to finally be the despairing, messy, breaking-down woman that I’d been holding back for so long and so hard. Everybody in the terminal watches me cry. It’s the happiest, and most satisfied I’ve been in weeks.

•••

The next time I fly back, The Changeling has vanished, for good, dethroned when my brother didn’t want to go along with their suicide plot. She said it was time, and he said, no. He texted me: She’s Dr. Kevorkian! Tell her to stay away! She got on a plane anyway. She called me from Atlanta. I knew her heart was breaking. I told her, don’t go. Turn around and head home. She didn’t listen. She didn’t know him. When he says no, he means it. She pounded on his door. Crying. Let me in. But it was over.

This long-lost half-sister brought him, for a brief time, what he needed—organization to the chaos of his dying. This must’ve been a relief, and maybe it even promised a different ending, a kind of redemption. But in the end, she didn’t prevail. She was banished. Two weeks later, I flew back into town, at his request. Left to our own devices, we watched movies and smoked pot with cousins and siblings, ate frosted cinnamon muffins for breakfast, and a candy bars for lunch. I didn’t try to fix him, redeem him, or help him.

I bore witness, and believe me, this is infinitely more difficult because it’s acknowledging that you are helpless, and power greater than you is in control. I tried to stay longer, but he said, no, go home. I knew better than to argue. He died a few days later.

He died like a hero going home.

•••

LILLIAN ANN SLUGOCKI has been nominated twice for Best of the Web, a Pushcart Prize, and was winner of the Gigantic Sequins prize for fiction. She’s been published by CCM, Seal Press, Cleis Press, Heinemann Press, Spuyten Duyvil Press, as well as Vol 1: Brooklyn, Bloom/The Millions, Salon, Entropy, The Nervous Breakdown, Hypertext Magazine, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Manifest-Station, The Forge Literary Magazine, BUST Magazine, Angels Flight, literary west, and others. Her latest book is: How to Travel with Your Demons (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2015). She founded BEDLAM: New Work by Women Writers, a reading series @KGB Bar. @laslugocki

We Carry Our Losses Inside

By Sarah Meyer

The new Executive Director’s father is dying. Her name is Angela; she moved here from northern Virginia and has brought him with her. She holds his elbow, and together they learn this small town in North Carolina. They walk carefully over the cobblestones in the parts of downtown still cobbled. They examine the construction, having never seen the slender strip of grass that used to be where these cement blocks and this mound of dirt now sit. In a year or so the block extending east from the obelisk will be a bigger expanse of grass, a real park: with benches, one of those water spouts for kids in summer.

Her father is old and has dementia. She wears what she can of his condition inside her own body and it shows. She worries, calls her new rental house from the office throughout the day to make sure he answers. When he doesn’t, she drives home and back, reports that he was asleep. This is how she learns her way around.

The Asheville Citizen-Times and the free weekly run articles announcing her hiring. I watch her try to fix her hair for the photos: she stands in the gallery next to a banner I’ve never seen, retrieved from the basement. It has our logo on it. Asheville Area Arts Council: AAAC. Our town is glad she’s here. We shake her hand with both our hands. Sometimes we clasp her forearm. We nod our heads, tell each other Oh, her father. We say to ourselves, It’s so sad. We say, She has so much on her plate. So much to do. We’re a town of artists and college students and retirees, and we have been waiting for her. We radiate excitement to watch her try to live. We love seeing her walk her dad across the street from the office to get ice cream.

•••

In Florida, in the ’90s, families that we knew and did not know were buying tarps and specialty fencing and in other ways trying to prevent this thing that took over like a wave, like an accidental fad. It was the thing that kept happening: people’s children were drowning in their own pools. My dad, a pediatrician, was interviewed on the local news and my sister and I felt famous by extension.

One family we knew bought a pool fence to prevent this exact thing from happening, but their baby followed a cat through the crack between the latch and the rest of the nylon fencing. A grandparent was babysitting and had fallen asleep.

And another: my third grade classmate’s baby brother, a fat toddler who accompanied us on school trips when his parents chaperoned. He was famous for this wiggly dance, probably the product of just having learned to stand upright, that was like the chicken dance only shorter and unplanned. The memory I have, that I return to every few years, is of this baby wobbling around in a diaper outside the Arlington Street pool. We had gone on a field trip. My friend’s brother did his dance and our whole class stood around him, and his dad was there and we laughed.

These things did not happen in public pools, though, only in the carefully planned backyards of the people who loved their babies. And so, weeks or months later, my friend’s father fell asleep while his baby was awake and curious. It was the first funeral I ever attended. I sat with another classmate, and I don’t remember if my parents were even there. The baby’s dad stood at a podium and sobbed. He said he would miss that little dance so much. He held tight to the podium and we watched the rest of his body try to collapse and he shook. His hands were the only still parts.

•••

Four days after Ryane’s dad dies I email all of our friends. “I wanted to let you know that Ryane’s dad died on Monday morning. If you have a chance and are inclined to send her a note, I know she would appreciate it. We don’t yet have email at the house, but the physical address is…”

He died three weeks after his fifty-first birthday. Ryane was twenty-five. Three of our friends respond to my email, telling me to tell Ryane they are sorry. One person delivers Tupperware ravioli while we’re in Indiana for the funeral. One sends a note in the mail saying she wishes she could give Ryane a hug.

•••

At funerals, the idea is to look around: to see the group you’re given to grieve with. A temporary family, or an actual family. A room full of people with similar, complicated feelings.

The idea is once you walk out of that room, away from those people who understand what you feel because they also feel some version of it, subsequent acquaintances are less likely to understand. They might not understand at all.

A friend drops off a Tupperware of ravioli while you’re out, never to mention your loss again.

A friend asks, within months, why it’s still a topic of discussion.

People extend birthday party invitations, or they don’t extend them at all. Both situations feel the same.

No one mentions it.

Or a few people mention it, asking, How are you? when there is no answer. Thinking about you, xo.

I study the grief around me to understand my own, which technically hasn’t happened yet. I grieve a family that still exists, parents I can call on the phone today, who were always just themselves instead of the people I needed them to be.

Waiting to actually lose someone can become confused for actually having lost them, after a while. We humans float around each other in so many ways.

•••

Angela has moved her father back into his house in Florida. At first he manages with the help of nurses whom she pays to stop by. But he falls, forgets who they are, becomes upset when they unlock his front door one by one and enter as though it were their house. He calls her at work, and through the drywall separating her office from mine, I hear her whisper insistent Spanish into the receiver. Mira, Papi.

She has him transferred to an assisted living facility somewhere east of Orlando where he has limited telephone privileges but nurses sometimes call with updates. Every six weeks or so she flies on Allegiant air—tiny planes to tiny airports, something like $86 round-trip—to Sanford, rents a car and drives to visit him. She flies back frazzled, calls from the car on the way back from the airport, asks questions the answers to which she does not hear and says she’ll be in the office later.

•••

“Thanks for coming,” Dad says to us at our gate, before we board. My sister and I are in the Montgomery airport. Because Mom and Dad flew up early, we’re on separate flights and they don’t leave until tomorrow. When he says, “Thanks for coming,” he refers to our attendance of his mother’s funeral. Breast cancer. “Thanks for coming”: we hadn’t thought it was optional. We board our plane and return to high school. Our friends say, “Sorry about your grandma,” and we say things like, “Thanks,” and “She was old,” because we don’t know how else to respond.

She’d been sick for a while, in and out of the hospital, and when my dad wasn’t addressing her by her first name in exasperated tones over the phone he was arguing with my mom about the money he was sending to his brother to care for her. This serves as a reminder to us that it is always possible to walk around something too vast, to fight about something like money instead.

•••

We’ve just moved into a new house and are sleeping on the floor, on a mattress exhumed from the pullout couch. It is seven-thirty in the morning and Ryane is dreaming that her father has died. In the dream, she’s misheard someone. At first she thinks her grandmother is dead. Then she realizes her grandmother is alive, that her father has died instead. She asks again to make sure. Yes, he’s dead, someone tells her. In the dream she cries and cries and cries, and when she wakes up she thinks she’s been crying in real life but hasn’t been. She wakes up because my cell phone is ringing. The light outside is lazy. Did we set an alarm? The phone is plugged in, ringing next to the bed on the floor. I look at the area code. It’s Bloomington, Indiana. I hand the little phone to her and know.

“Hello?” It’s her grandfather. Her phone is dead and he’s been calling it for hours. I watch her start to cry and I hold onto her shoulder. “This morning?” she asks into the phone.

When she hangs up she says, “I dreamed that he died!” She is wearing a white men’s undershirt and she sits upright in the bed, hunched over like another broken thing.

•••

There are the religious concepts. Let us confess the faith of our baptism as we say I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,

They do not help. Rather, I do not know whom they help. Rather, they do not help me.

At the funeral of a man who had waited for his wife and children to leave for work and school, walked to the shed, grabbed a shotgun and sat down under a tree in his backyard to shoot himself in the face, hundreds of us pour into a Western North Carolina hillside chapel to hear the minister say, If God is for us, who is against us?

This was when I dated Zoe. The dead man was her coworker. I had never met him or his wife or his children. The day before, after the body was removed and the grass under the tree was cleaned and the shotgun destroyed and the widow and her children had gone to her parents’, Zoe and her coworkers and I drove to the widow’s house with boxes and duct tape and markers. Into the boxes we put his clothes, their photo albums, framed images taken from the walls and coffee tables of their wedding, vacations. We took the sheets off the bed. We collected anything that seemed like his and wrote things on the full boxes like “clothes,” “photos.” Half the house went into storage for when she was ready to come back. She would look through the “clothes” and “photos” when she was ready.

That was over a decade years ago and I wonder how long it took her to be ready. Has she retrieved those boxes yet? Has she sold the house? Did she even ask for us to do that? All I remember is being invited to join.

If God is for us, who is against us? The packing day and the funeral day: one felt like prayer, the other just something to be done.

•••

After we found out Ryane’s dad had died, there were logistics. We needed to drive to Virginia to pick up her mom and youngest brother, and from there go to Indiana where her dad’s body and Ryane’s grandparents and middle brother were. But first I had to do two things.

When I called Angela to say I wouldn’t be coming to work for a few days she said, Oh my God I’m so sorry and Can you drop those prints at the framer’s before you leave? Ryane and I had been moving from the house on Arbutus to the one on Larchmont, and were supposed to finish cleaning out Arbutus that weekend. Instead we were driving to Indiana. After hanging up with Angela I called the Arbutus landlord and told him we needed more time. He said he had renters moving in on Thursday and couldn’t give us any. I told Ryane I had to run errands before we could leave and she said that was fine even though I knew it wasn’t. She sat very still in the deep-cushioned yellow chair I’d gotten at Goodwill the year before. “I’ll pack a bag,” she said, but she didn’t move.

During the drive to the framer’s I held two thoughts in my head: I’m doing the wrong thing by running this errand and This absolutely has to get done right now. The Arts Council had contracted with a new Hyatt to provide art for the walls, and it was a disaster. The artists were being underpaid for their work and asked to sign away rights of ownership. Because Asheville is a town of struggling artists, they all said yes but hated us for suggesting they do it. For the last week I’d been taking call after call from frustrated painters, trying to calm them and failing. And the framer, who’d agreed to take on the project at a significantly reduced rate, had been waiting for Angela to bring the prints all week. On Friday Angela had finally just stuffed them all in my car and told me to do it Monday morning.

“I have other customers, you know,” the framer said when I got there.

“Michelle, I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why Angela didn’t drop these off.” I suspected she’d just forgotten. Sometimes grief takes over before the person you’re grieving has gone.

Afterward at Arbutus I stuffed everything I could from that house into my car. In the years that followed, every once in a while Ryane and I would realize something else left behind in that basement.

On my last trip to the car I stopped in the front yard. We’d planted sunflowers along the fencing and walkway that spring, and few had bloomed. The soil wasn’t very deep and elms shaded our corner of the neighborhood. But next to the mailbox a mammoth sunflower had been growing up and up. When we’d last left Arbutus, Ryane’s dad was alive and the mammoth’s face had appeared but not opened and Ryane was wondering whether she should go up to Indiana for a while to be with him. I stuffed some loose kitchen utensils in the trunk of the car and stood there. Ryane’s dad was dead. We would never live in east Asheville again. Peter was dead. Later I would see his body. I would need to know the correct things to do and say this whole week. I would need to say the soothing things and first I would need to think of what those things could be. And I would need to say goodbye to someone who had started to become a parent to me.

The sunflower had opened overnight. Half of its fingery petals extended from its face, and the other half still held to the big center circle. It was an eclipse. I convinced myself our one sunflower had opened part way because Peter had died. I texted Ryane a photo and left to pick her up for our drive to him.

•••

At a gallery opening Angela has one glass of red wine and yet appears to be deeply intoxicated.

“Have you seen The L Word?” she asks me, because I am a lesbian and the show is about lesbians and because she is newly brave and apparently has been waiting for the moment to ask. She leans across the sales counter behind which I stand. Patrons mingle around us. Here we are, the only two staff members left. Everyone else has quit.

“Yes,” I say. “But it’s not a very good show.” She agrees and then switches topics.

“Have I told you I have fibromyalgia?” she offers.

“No,” I say.

“For ten years. I’ve been to many doctors.”

What I know about fibromyalgia is that it’s contentious, that some doctors don’t even believe it to be an actual medical ailment, that rather some believe it to be a psychosomatic manifestation of emotional problems: physical repercussions to psychic issues. I know that it presents as a series of seemingly unrelated pains, sometimes diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis, other times as the flu, other times as fibromyalgia, other times as depression. Fibromyalgia has no cure or known cause.

What I now know about Angela, as I stand at the sales counter watching the minglers adjacent to her slack body, is that she takes painkillers and occasionally mixes them with alcohol. What I know about Angela is that certain chemical reactions are happening in her bloodstream in possible parallel to the bodily emotional stress of preemptive grief. I know she is suffering in a number of ways.

•••

Of course it’s hard to know how to close the gaps between us. We spend the most trivial moments together: at work, in classrooms, splayed on couches talking on the phone, and when the inevitable happens we look each other in the face and don’t know what to say. We are suddenly strangers and this is how we lose each other in little bits. When my grandmother died, I wrote letters to my mother and her three siblings saying how sorry I was, that I couldn’t imagine their grief at losing their only mother, and none of them responded. I assumed writing the letters had been the wrong thing to do. When Peter died, our friends waited quietly at the edges of Ryane’s grief for her to return to real life. But the place she was in was also real life. Our friends were so patient with their furrowed brows and genuine concern, waiting. Eventually everyone forgot they were waiting. Eventually everyone but Ryane forgot that her father was dead. Inside our little house on the steep hill on Larchmont Road, inside her grief, Ryane and I talked about how what they were doing was the wrong thing.

But how do we do this?

What is supposed to help?

What is the right thing to do?

“Tell me how you’re feeling,” I say to Ryane as she sits upright in bed sometime later, after everything has been moved into the new house. She has tears on her face, but new ones have stopped coming. “You can just feel however you feel about this,” I say, because granting permission for the things I can’t control seems like a possibility somehow. She hears me, and doesn’t respond. She sits propped against two pillows, her shoulders tilted inward, and I rub her back as she looks out from opaque blue eyes toward nothing.

•••

SARAH MEYER is a writer and illustrator who lives in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in VICE Magazine, Paper Darts, and The Manifest-Station.

Death and Dying, Or Laugh Until You Wet Your Pants

homeandcommunity — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.etsy.com/shop/ebethfuller

By Shaun Anzaldua

My brother Josh and I are walking through the cold San Francisco mist. It’s four in the morning and we have just left the ICU at University of San Francisco Hospital where our stepfather, David, lays unconscious. He has countless tubes being fed by drip bags filled with saline and medicines. He has tubes down his throat which push air into his lungs, and a dialysis machine which is filters his blood for his failing kidneys. Electrical sensors are attached to his skin and connected to machines by plastic coated cords. The outlets in the room look like plates of spaghetti, covered with twisted cords. The monitors by his bed have five rows of lines in different colors, each forming its own pattern as it moves across the screen. It looks like a child’s Spirograph with its red, blue, green, yellow, white designs.

Earlier that day, we got the call from our mother that it wasn’t looking good. David had been in ICU on an oxygen tank for a week while he tried to fight a mystery illness which had taken hold of his lungs, weaving spider webs throughout, making it impossible for him to get enough air on his own. Day by day, the opinions change as to what exactly is wrong and now to whether he will survive this. Today they fear the worst. Our sister has gone home for the night, exhausted by days at the hospital. Our brother is stuck in Houston; he and his wife are trying to get in by the next day. We all thought we had more time.

Back when death was theoretical, David told his doctor, wrote in his papers, that he did not want invasive procedures should he fall critically ill. No machines, no rib breaking electric paddles. But then the moment comes when his doctor presents him with a choice. He is not responding to treatment, his body is shutting down, and the oxygen tank alone cannot sustain him.

“David, you can remove the oxygen mask and die peacefully with your family around you,” the doctor tells him. “Otherwise we’ll have to sedate you so we can insert the necessary tubes down your throat and into your lungs to get oxygen in there. You may not survive the procedure. Even if you do, you’ll be unconscious and won’t be able to talk. And there’s still no guarantee.”

Given the choice of certain death or invasive procedures, David decides on the procedures. He doesn’t want to die. He dreams of the cushy retirement community where he and our mother are going to move, far away from the never-ending work of the ranch where they now live. He is ready, and has been for years, to while away the hours reading and playing music and never fixing another irrigation head, feeding another horse or mowing another lawn, even if it is on a riding lawn mower.

Now he lies in a room full electronics, looking gray and pale and thin, while our mother and his son speak quietly about how long they should let him linger if he doesn’t respond to the medicines. If his heart doesn’t give out, he might live for days on life support with no hope of regaining consciousness. When do they let go? They decide to give it a few more days, to pray for a miracle. David had made it clear he wants to fight.

•••

I shiver from the cold as Josh and I make our way to the parking lot to retrieve his cell phone from his car. I wish I’d brought a heavier sweater. The streets are empty of people and cars, and yet we pause automatically at the Do Not Walk sign blinking red in the dark. We are on automatic pilot.

“We don’t have a road map for this one, Sis. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to do it,” Josh says as we cross the deserted street. This six foot four man and me, both in our fifties, we feel like children. While we’ve lived through the death of our grandparents, being in the middle of the experience this way is new. We want to protect our mother, and we have only instinct to guide us. We’re exhausted and more than a little punch drunk. He’s just driven six hours from Los Angeles, his second trip down here in the last week. I’ve flown in from Houston and we have been up way too long now.

We reach his car and he hits the electronic car door opener on his new pimp-green Mercedes. The headlights flash their recognition.

“Nice!” I tell him. The interior is softly lit with an amber glow that reflects of the deep brown wood paneling. The soft-as-butter, tan leather seats are calling out to me to come: take a test sit, take a test sit.

“Let’s just lie down for a few minutes,” I say. “Just a few minutes.”

We lie there, reclined in the sumptuous bucket seats, and drift into our familiar combination of banter and revelation. He tells me about the drive up from LA, how the nice electronic lady in his car suggested several times that he might want to stop for a cup of coffee. We both think the warning system is sadly incomplete because while it cautions you that you may be sleepy because you are now driving erratically and so you just might want to pull over for a cup of coffee, not once does it offer to brew it for you. We laugh about how tired we are, we laugh about how two of my kids are in therapeutic boarding school, how he’s lost his job and his son is on the streets. How as a result we’ve had to learn to lower the bar to ground level with zero expectations. We laugh about how in the midst of our game of My Life Sucks More Than Yours, our mother has swooped in at the last minute to steal the prize by tossing down her “My Husband is in ICU and May Die” card. Competitive bitch. She always has to win.

“So, have I told you about my dog?” I ask Josh. He looks over at me with his bloodshot eyes half closed.

“Nah, what about your dog?”

“Well, she’s white, right, and when white dogs lick themselves a lot in one spot, the fur turns rust colored. So her fur was all rusty and yucky around her butt and she was always licking and when I really took a look at it, it looked like maybe something was wrong with her vajay-jay. So I took her to the vet. You’ll never guess what the vet told me.”

“What did the vet tell you, Shaunton?” Josh asks me.

“The vet says my dog has an enlarged clitoris and I need to rub steroid cream on it twice a day. So I asked her, like, with all this licking, is she, well, enjoying herself? The vet wasn’t sure. Don’t you think having to rub cream on a dog’s enlarged clitoris trumps losing your job?”

“I could have gone a lifetime without ever hearing about your dog’s clitoris.” he tells me, but I can see his chest heaving with suppressed giggles.

“Josh, you know how you said we don’t have a road map, any instructions on how to do this?” I ask him. “I’m pretty sure we aren’t supposed to be doing this.”

“Fuck it.” He says. “Guess we should go back in now.”

“Do you think there’s a chance he’ll make it?” he asks me.

“I don’t know.” I answer.

We walk slowly back the hospital and ride the empty elevator up to the ninth floor. There are people sleeping in the waiting room, curled up on chairs. A nurse pushes the button to let us into the ICU ward where all is quiet but the beeping of monitors. For what must be the tenth time, she has to tell me to step back, the doors open outwards! We make our way to David’s room. Our mother and David’s son and daughter look stricken. Mom is leaning over David and frantically gestures to us to come to her side.

“Oh god, he’s passing! His heart is stopping! “ she cries. We all watch the bright red line on the monitor which blips as his heart rate drops, beat by beat, 24, 20, 18, 16, 14, 12, 11, 10, 6, 3, until it finally stops all together. It is less than a minute since Josh and I walked into this room. Ten minutes ago we were laughing, gathering our strength in the soft leather seats of Josh’s car. Now we hold our mother as she sobs, her eighty-two-year-old body shaking. We’ve never seen her like this, never seen her look so lost. “But he was fine two weeks ago,” she keeps saying. “How did this happen?” We have no answer for her. We hold her close.

The room is quiet now. The endless beeping of the monitors, David’s labored breath as the oxygen pump fills his lungs and then releases, all of it is silent. His skin is still warm to the touch. The nurse asks us to leave the room so she can remove the tubes and clean him up so we can say a more natural good-bye. We wander out into the hallway. There are family members to be called, arrangements to be made. David wanted his body to be donated to science, but there is a possibility he had TB. We need to talk to patient services about this, speak with a funeral home, write an obituary, plan a memorial. We are given pamphlets, all neatly collected in a manila envelope labeled “Bereavement Papers.” It includes lists of helpful books for people who have lost a loved one, lists of important papers to file and agencies to contact. The detritus of death. We need to get our mother home to rest. She has not slept in almost two days and she looks frail.

Josh and I are alone in the hallway as the others go back into David’s room for a bit. I am as tired as I can remember being in a very long time. “Okay,” Josh says, “I know this is going to sound really bad. Really bad. It just tells you what a weird fuck I am. But you know when we were standing there in all of that craziness of machines and drips and pumps? I was thinking about when people talk about ‘pulling the plug.’ How do they know which plug? There were at least twenty plugs in there. What if you pull the wrong one? Do you just keep going, just keep pulling and pulling until you get the right one?”

He looks childlike at that moment. It’s more than gallows humor. He has a good point. Things often sound clear in theory, only to turn out to be quite different in reality. We can’t help ourselves; we laugh at the inappropriateness of our inappropriateness.

“You know I’m going to write that you said that, right?” I say.

“Whatever,” he tells me, “We’re both going to hell anyway.”

•••

The early morning blends in to the next day. Arrangements are made; David’s body can’t be donated and must be cremated instead. We separate; Josh takes care of our mother, and I go to the airport to pick up my teenage son, also named David, who has just missed being able to say goodbye to his grandfather. He’s devastated. We talk and talk as we make the long drive to mother’s ranch. He’s better by the time we get there, hoping to be helpful and supportive to his grandmother. My siblings fly and drive in. They have been on high alert for days, and the house quickly fills. Platters of food and comfort come from loving neighbors throughout the small farming community. Our mother finally lies down to sleep.

And we siblings and our spouses do what we always do. We laugh, delight in each other’s company, deliberately needle each other, tease relentlessly, and together we get the job done. We make the necessary arrangements, we write the obituary, we plan the memorial service and write the program. We find pictures of David and have them printed to make a memorial display. My brother’s wife, Jackie, my best of friends, cleans the house until it shines and smells like oatmeal cookies.

After lunch the next day, as she washes the dishes in the Martha Stewart mint green kitchen of the old farmhouse, Jackie looks across the kitchen at my mother and me and asks, “Where’s David?” My mother and I both look at her in shock. “He’s dead!” we say in unison. For just a moment there is complete silence. Jackie’s jaw drops. “I meant your son,” she says. Oh, well of course she did. We double up with laughter, all three of us, until the tears stream down our faces.

The memorial comes. It is sad and joyful and beautiful. The simple Grange Hall is decorated with flowers from nearby farms; David’s bass cello and his tuba sit at center stage in tribute to his deep love of music. It is clear that this is a man who was loved by many, a man who was an integral part of his community. The tears come and they flow, and a pile used tissues grows around the room. There are more than one hundred people in the Grange Hall, people from David’s church, from the homeless shelter where he volunteered much of his time and talent, and from the brass band in which he played the tuba while dressed in red regalia. People speak of his generosity and his humor and his deeply intellectual nature. We think he would be pleased.

“I think you and I better have private services when we die,” my sister Lisa says to me as we stand in line for food. The potluck table stretches the length of the room and it is piled deep with casseroles and salads and breads and desserts.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“To cover up the fact that no one would come!” she answers.

It’s true. We haven’t lived in the generous fashion of our mother or stepfather. We’ve been recluses, wrapped in our own worlds. Clearly it’s time to step up our game. At least if we want those we leave behind to be fed and cared for by our neighbors. At this point they’ll be lucky to get room temperature string cheese and a bowl of stale saltine crackers.

I watch my son David through all of this; watch him watching me with my siblings. I hope he is sees the love we feel for one another, the fun we have together, even in this time of sadness. He is loved by all of us, treasured by his grandmother. I hope that love will fill him up, help him to love himself a little more.

And then it’s over. The neighbors go home. The food gets eaten, the flowers begin to droop and drop their petals. After a couple of days we disperse, home to our own families. I stay a few more days with our mother to help tie up loose ends and to give the others reports on how she is doing. She and I talk long into the night, look at photographs, write to-do lists, cross off what we can. My mother rides the waves of feelings that go up and down. The tasks are like an inflatable life boat. If she lets go of all there is to do, she might sink beneath the waves. It is important to her to hold it together, and she does.

•••

My son David has gone back to his boarding school, and I have a conference call with my husband and David and his therapist.

“So David, how did your family deal with their grief? People have a lot of different ways of handling pain and stress. Could you relate to any of them?” his therapist asks.

“Well, they were all kind of laughing a lot. I don’t know. I didn’t really get it. It was weird,” he says.

“Were they laughing the whole time?” she asks.

“Yeah, pretty much. Up until the memorial. Then they got more serious and sad,” he says.

“It’s interesting, David. People deal with stress in many different ways. It’s important to get to the underlying feelings, to process them. But as long as you do that, humor is considered one of the more mature ways of dealing with stress.”

None of the books on death told us to laugh until we cry or wet our pants, whichever comes first. But here we are. Sad, dealing with loss, worried for our mother. And laughing. Because we are, if nothing else, a very mature group of people. Particularly when we are stressed. Particularly when we are together, finding our way down a path without a map.

•••

SHAUN ANZALDUA has a graduate degree from the University of California at Davis. She is a writer, real estate agent, and licensed private investigator. Shaun currently lives in Houston with her three teenage children. She is a contributor to Brain, Child and is currently working on a collection of essays.

Soul Mate 101: Don’t Marry Him

balloons — by Gina Kelly www.etsy.com/shop/ginalkelly

By Susan Kushner Resnick

My soul mate’s hand was warm, so I felt safe letting go for a few minutes. I had calls to make, people to summon to his bedside. While I sat next to him and spoke to his only living relative, a nurse walked into the room.

“He’s gone,” she said almost in a whisper.

I put down the phone and lifted his big hand again.

Cold.

I kissed his forehead then immediately called my husband.

David had been supporting me for the entirety of the relationship that I’d just lost. He wasn’t threatened by Aron, a ninety-one-year-old Holocaust survivor, although he became appropriately alert when I’d announced our first rendezvous fourteen years earlier.

Aron had approached me in the lobby of a community center as I put my baby in a car seat.

“Vhat’s his name?” he had asked.

I summed him up as harmless. I figured he was approaching strange women and babies because he missed his own grandchildren. But a few more questions revealed how wrong that assumption had been. Aron didn’t have children or grandchildren. All but one of his family members had been killed by Hitler.

“I was in the camps,” he said. “All the camps.”

Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau. Places of infamy where he learned to sort the blouses of the dead and to witness a hanging without flinching. Yet his eyes sparkled during that first conversation and he delivered lines like a Borscht-belt comedian. The contrast—so seemingly jolly for a Holocaust survivor—hooked me. I asked him out for a coffee date.

“You buying?” he asked.

And so, for $1.25, a beautiful friendship began.

In the early days of our relationship, we flirted. He’d drive by my house to see if my car was in the driveway. I’d make sure my make-up was right before ringing his doorbell. He would regularly tease David about the potential for romance between us.

“If I was thirty years younger, you’d be in trouble,” he said over and over.

I even imagined romantic scenes starring Aron and me, circa 1946. In these fantasies, I played the strong American lass loving the young Polish survivor back to life. I would soothe him after he woke screaming from the nightmares that plagued him from the end of the war to the end of his real life: dreams of vicious dogs and men shooting at his father. He would be so grateful for my patience and tenderness that he would take me as his bride. And for the rest of our lives, he would never construct slag heaps of laundry in the corners of the bedroom or forget every logistical detail I ever told him, as my actual husband does.

I conjured those fantasies because like most humans, I was conditioned to associate strong attraction with romantic love. I was drawn to Aron, therefore I must have a crush on him, right? And though I always knew that wasn’t the course our relationship would take—he was forty-four years my senior and the picture of elderliness when we met—I had a hard time labeling our bond. I played with all kinds of combinations: grandfather and granddaughter; sister and brother; best friends. None of them fit.

•••

The soul mate, we’ve been taught in our rom-com culture, is the brass ring of romantic love. Find your other half and you can start searching for wedding caterers. A soul mate knows you and “gets” you and will never let you down. Therefore, you should marry him.

Don’t.

At least not if you believe in soul mate as mirror image. There’s an old myth that says humans started as four-limbed double creatures, but the gods worried that we’d take over, so they decided to split us in half. Ever since, we’ve been searching for our other halves so we can feel complete.

How marriage became part of the equation I’ve never understood. It seems as though marrying your twin would be exactly the wrong thing to do.

For four years, I dated my psychological echo. At first it was wonderful: so familiar, so comfortable. He got me. Then it turned disastrous. This nice guy and I, with our tendencies toward depression and inertia, were bringing each other down. Because we were so similar, we made the same mistakes. There was no counterbalance—no one to pull either of us back by the belt loops when we got too close to the edge.

In a pairing of opposites, there’s always someone to see how crazy you’re getting and metaphorically slap you straight. The boyfriend and I didn’t have this. Thankfully, we didn’t marry.

My husband, by contrast, can pull me back from the brink and I can do the same for him. We are not soul mates. We are complete individuals, not two halves of each other. He is science and I am art. He is awake and I am dreaming. He saves and I spend. I’m better at parallel parking, but only he can remember where we left the car. Of course, our differences can sometimes be infuriating, but our pairing has worked for twenty-one years. I like to think that’s because David is my intended: the best husband the universe could have picked for me. A unified soul has nothing to do with it.

Aron also ended up with a romantic opposite. His girlfriend, Nerry, was a highly educated Russian professor of foreign languages who never complained about her serious medical issues and who read poetry recreationally. Aron, by contrast, graduated from fifth grade, complained about every twinge, and watched pro-wrestling for escape. At their cores, he was sand and she was steel.

Both of our relationships worked fine when we met, though I was yearning for something I couldn’t name. David and I balanced each other, made each other laugh, and agreed on the big things. But he didn’t get me unless I explained myself because he didn’t see the world through the same lens. I missed that. Then I found Aron.

•••

He identified our similarities first. He had tumbled into an anxiety-depression hole that led to a hospitalization that brought me to the first of many uncomfortable chairs by many institutional beds. He’d been admitted for chest pains, but the doctors and I knew that cardiac weakness wasn’t causing his distress. PTSD from four years in the Nazi system was making him sick, but he refused to see that or to speak to the staff psychiatrist about treatment. It was my job to convince him to surrender to help. As the sunset turned the industrial rooftops outside his window into art, I told him my story. I’d been anxious for years until a case of postpartum depression forced me to face and treat my brain’s chemical inadequacies. I’d felt fine ever since. Accepting help didn’t have to be shameful.

“Nothing bothers Nerry,” he said.

“Same with David,” I said.

“Good thing we have them because we’re both nervous,” he said.

He looked at me and grinned. We were both nervous. We laughed at the same things. We interpreted the world in the same cynical way, spoke in the same blunt manner, even liked the same foods prepared the same quirky ways. Because he’d been raised in the days of privacy and dignity, our conversations didn’t involve dribbling our vulnerabilities all over each other. But we still knew what the other would say or how the other was feeling most of the time. We didn’t have to work at trust and love, or worry that either would fade. Neither of us could be described as easy-going, but even after he hung up on me during an argument or I scolded him for being so exceedingly stubborn, we didn’t have to apologize or explain ourselves. It was easy. It was not marriage.

We were, I believe, the purest of soul mates. There was no romance or sex. Just the deep comfort of being seen and known and accepted completely. For a brief period in both of our lives, we got to feel whole.

•••

Then his hand went cold.

What’s it like to lose a soul mate? The saddest part is suspecting that such a relationship will never come again. I plan on having my husband around for many more years, and I will surely develop new life-changing friendships. But I don’t think we get more than one soul mate per life cycle. Who else on this earth will ever know me so well? It hurts to realize that particular luxury is probably over for me.

I used to panic, as Aron got older, about how I’d live in the world without him. But it’s turned out to be surprisingly painless. I take comfort in remembering how lucky I am to have found my other half. But I also don’t feel like he’s completely absent.

I talk to a lot of dead people in my head—my mother, dear friends who died young—but almost never to Aron. This makes sense to me. Where else would the rest of me go after death? Following my soul mate theory, he is I. To reach him, I only need to talk to myself.

•••

SUSAN KUSHNER RESNICKS’s latest book, You Saved Me, Too: What A Holocaust Survivor Taught Me About Living, Dying, Loving, Fighting and Swearing in Yiddish, was published in October 2012. She teaches creative nonfiction writing at Brown University.

On the Pain Scale

by Jessica Handler

I have become, at fifty-three, a full-grown person. Two years ago, I stepped into the role of midwife to my mother’s death. I chose it. She was with me when I began. I would be with her when she ended.

Lung cancer had colonized her brain, her spine, her right hip and shoulder. Where did this begin? My father smoked, a lot. My mother smoked, very little. My parents and little sister lived fewer than ten miles from the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the morning that the reactor experienced a meltdown in March, 1979; I was away at college. Mom refinished furniture for a hobby, breathed the fumes, handled the toxins. After my father was gone from her life, her late-in-life boyfriend smoked. Where did this begin? Everywhere and nowhere.

“So this is what happens when you have six kinds of cancer,” Mom said the first time she fell. She said it again the first time she couldn’t stand unaided, and the day she threw up the crème brûlêe.

“It’s just three kinds of cancer,” I said, bringing her ginger tea to the table. We laughed, a little. We are dark-humored, and fluent in the language of terminal illness.

My mother had three daughters, of whom I am first and last. Susie has been dead for forty-four years, Sarah for twenty-one. Susie developed leukemia when she was six. I was eight. She lived less than two years. Our little sister Sarah lived with a rare blood disorder and died as a young woman. Mom and I spoke of them often. Often we spoke of them without words.

I told my sisters’ names to Y., our favorite nurse’s aide. “In case she’s looking for them,” I said. For dying people, past and present run together like chalk drawings in the rain. “She was calling for Susie yesterday,” Y. told me. I wondered aloud if Mom was troubled or frightened. “Not at all,” Y. said, relieved to know who my mother had been trying to find. “She was looking out the door, like she was calling in a child from playing.”

My heart broke.

•••

Some mornings I woke in my mother’s bed. Others I woke with my husband in my own bed, ninety-four miles from hers. There was a moment every morning when I didn’t know where I was.

Mom’s pain was usually a two or three. On the Wong-Baker FACES™ pain scale chart, that’s somewhere between a smiley-face with barely knit brows and a smiley-face that appears to have something serious on its mind. The zero quantity of pain-free is represented by an untroubled smiley face with a touch of crazy-eyes. Neither Mom nor I reached a ten, the greatest level of pain. Ten is a crumpled, desperate face shedding drops that could be sweat or tears. Or blood. Her oncologist told us we were lucky.

My pain would hover at five, if pain scales measured the heart. I dreamed that it was me on the blue plastic draw sheet the nurses used to lift her. At the grocery store, I got lost. Which aisle has the cranberry juice? Does Mom have English muffins? This grocery store is in my city, not hers. I’m stocking my kitchen one week, hers another. I don’t want English muffins. I don’t want juice. I have lost fourteen pounds in the last two months. My always-slender mother wasted away. She weighed so little that I could lift her like a toddler. From the bed to the portable toilet, to the wheelchair, to the piano, to the bed.

•••

When I was a little girl, I drew pictures of birds and of girls. I couldn’t draw faces, so I put bird heads on girl bodies and made bird girls. I concentrated while I drew, singing a two-note song to myself, sustaining what I’ve come to understand as a meditative state. What am I focused on now, watching my mother’s face and seeing my own in hers? The bird-girls of my childhood drawings never flew. They went to work and ate and played and smiled their giddy smiles with beaks. They had expressive eyes.

Before my mother flew, before she closed her eyes and dreamed morphine dreams, our eyes locked over the commotion; so much to say, and nothing to say. We spoke without opening our mouths. We spoke without words.

•••

Mom died in her bed at home. She was seventy-eight. Hers was what hospice will tell me is a good death. A great death, the social worker will call it.

Several weeks earlier, to a nurse, a visiting friend, a relative—I no longer knew, everyone seemed interchangeable but my mother and me—I spoke for Mom on her behalf, even though she was right there in the living room with us, in a wing chair reading about Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I spoke as if she weren’t there. “I don’t think Mom will want that,” I’d said, about a sandwich or a painkiller or someone’s insistence that she go outdoors in the wheelchair she loathed. Mom looked up from her reading.

“I can speak for myself.” She was smiling, but I’d hurt her feelings.

Drawing her out, I toyed with grammar, a subject that entertained us both.

“I’ve made you object and subject,” I said, “so what’s the verb?”

“Am,” my mother told me. “The verb is ‘I am.’”

•••

On what would be the last night of her life, I fell asleep just after midnight, curled up beside her. When the nurse woke me, I was surprised by my calm. But that night, we were doing nothing but waiting, my mother and I. She had been on morphine for two days, bitter pills the nurse slipped under her tongue. Mom winced when she tasted them. She hadn’t spoken for two days, and then only a whisper: “I love you,” to Y., who had been part of her life for nearly a year, who climbed into the bed with her that morning to hold her and weep. When I stood beside the bed and asked Mom to rest, to take it easy, she mouthed, “I will.” I told her she’s my favorite mother. She smiled. I’ve told her that for years. Two nurses rolled her like a log and changed the draw sheet. We had a hard night. The oxygen she never used, never needed, became urgent for the first time the night before when Mom suddenly couldn’t catch her breath. I rolled the blue O₂ machine from where she’d secreted it behind a nightstand. The evening assistant helped her with the cannula. “Do you want me to call hospice?” I asked Mom. She nodded, taking in the canned air.

At one in the morning, I sat cross-legged on her bed, holding her cool hand. I thought about how death is the exact opposite of birth. An obvious cycle and a thought not original to me, but I’ve never had a child and never witnessed a human birth. There was no sweat, no blood, no sound but Mom’s subtle breathing, arrhythmic and gentle. Her bedroom smelled of lavender from the bushy plant on the patio and from her hand cream. I held one of her lavender sachets to her nose. She grimaced, then relaxed. “Tell her what you’re holding so she doesn’t startle,” the night nurse told me. I did, then held the sachet to Mom’s face again. This time, she was calm.

The night nurse had woken me, saying barely audibly, “It’s time.” Time for what, I wondered, thick with sleep, then saw where I was, that my mother’s hand was entwined with mine. I was neither anxious nor weeping, not begging Mom to try and live one more day. There’s a falsehood in that statement: I was anxious. I lived with a low frequency of anxious for two years. I didn’t want her to ever die, to leave me. There was not one thing that I could do to change our course.

I asked the nurse to tell my husband, dozing in the den. She vanished, returned with him, tucked a chair behind him. We focused only on Mom. Her breathing slowed; her apnea grew longer and longer. She stopped. I looked up, gestured to the nurse. I remembered her name: M., from the compassionate care team, the end-of-life, round-the-clock team. She held her stethoscope to my mother’s chest, my mother skinny and sleeping in her white waffle-knit long sleeved t-shirt. M. shook her head, told me she’s still with us. Mom took another short breath, shallow, a surprise to me, and then she was empty. As empty as an overturned glass. M. flicked her penlight on and leaned into Mom, lifting an eyelid. She shone the light, closed Mom’s eye, and said, “She’s gone.”

We took from Mom’s pinky finger the silver and jade ring that my grandfather made, and I put it on my own.

•••

Full grown comes and goes with me. I don’t feel grown, and then I do. There is no choice. I wear the ring, and I feel my mother holding my hand. I hear her voice, flying just outside the scrim of my world. “I am,” she says. You are.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the forthcoming Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief (St. Martins Press, December 2013.) Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize.