Towards Healing

This piece is an exploration of the aftermath of loss + working in hospice; the tensions between one's own life continuing as another one ends.

She once told me that we aren’t born into this world alone. We are born from and born to. I don’t think we’re meant to die alone either. The day you started to die -- I’m dying too, I know, but really die -- started out like any other. I showed up wrapped in scrubs and nerves for your daily 9am sponge bath, and you clasped my hands to roll onto your side; you couldn’t do it today. We pushed, you struggled, beads of sweat lining your forehead, knuckles white against the black hospital bed railing. A single tear leaked out of your eye, and I think we both knew it then.

I could feel it in the way you squeezed my hand so tight that day, and I asked if you wanted your wife instead. A silent nod was all it took to signify the inevitable surrender to a year-long battle against cancer. Edson was right: the distance between life and death is indeed not a semicolon, but a comma.

The trouble is life goes on.

It’s Tuesday, but not just any Tuesday: my first day off in two weeks straight. Like clockwork, we’ve done the same dance every morning and every night for the past fourteen days, 9-12, 6-9, do-it-again. A pang of guilt nags me, but I’m tired and there are plenty of other caregivers who can come tomorrow. Adventure awaits.

Instead of See you tomorrow it’s I won’t be here tomorrow but I’ll see you Wednesday! and I’m met with a laugh and a wag of a finger and a That's not in my contract! Instead of someone wringing my neck because life is precious, I’m left with the myth of infinity and the mirage of forever. It’s not true, you know. Hug them while you can.

My favorite tag at the rock park is spray-painted purple and blue, my happy colors. You are conscious matter, it reads.

We take some pictures, climb into Elaine’s Kia, decide to order burritos instead of Chinese. Time to switch it up, I guess. I fall asleep by 9pm for yet another early morning shift, my short reprieve at its end.

We called hospice Wednesday morning. You are made of matter, and natural laws are out of my control, but I wish I didn’t take a day off.

***

On the day you started to die, I had an eye doctor’s appointment. You were drawing your last conscious breaths of life, and I had to go refill my prescription in that soot-stained city an hour away. You lay confined to bed entrenched in the pain of fate, and I could get in my car and escape from it all because I needed some new goddamn contacts. You had to die; but I had to see. So it goes.

***

It’s been four days since my hand lay on your chest as your last breath escaped, and now I’m crammed into the back of my parents’ Honda for a twelve hour drive to a place where nobody knows your blue eyes or your effortless elegance. In two days, I start orientation training; in ten, organic chemistry. But how can I pretend to care about reaction mechanisms, carbon chains, memorizing vocabulary, when I now know secrets of life and death? When I have seen what it means to lose your soulmate? How am I supposed to care about meaningless, trivial facts and figures when I haven’t called my family in ages? I’m studying, I tell myself, so that they’ll be proud. But I’m starting to wonder if I got it all wrong, and maybe I don’t know what matters anymore, and I’m spiraling down, down, down, clutching at any foothold to break my fall, ground my experience.

***

The application stares blankly back at me: Roybal Center for Translational Aging Research. I don’t know what to make of it yet; words like “healthy longevity” seem to academicize the pain in your eyes each time you were forced to admit defeat. Scholarly studies scrawled on a page will never equate to what you went through, what I saw, but I’m learning phrases and theories to name what I’m feeling. I’m enrolled in a class called Death & Dying, and my classmates do not know that every time I raise my hand to speak, it’s your image reverberating in my brain, leaving me reeling afterwards.

Loss turns the intangible tangible,

but I need to feel,

need to remind myself that you were real.

***

It’s been a year now, and I’m standing on your porch knocking on the crimson door again. We trade stories and reminisce the best we can. I tell her how I took a job with the aging center, and then a cancer lab, how I want to carry on your legacy through improving care for others. She tells me tales of how you two met and created a life together.

The house is no longer empty because laughter lives here now, alongside the kids and the garden and the new puppy. Like the hydrangeas under the window, hope is beginning to make roots here again -- never to replace you, but maybe to sprout some life into the cracks and crevices left behind. She sits straighter and smiles a little brighter than the last time I saw her, and from the outside through the library window, one can see a family and friend huddled together, grateful for the times we shared with you.

***

The miracle is life goes on.