Dear Life

It’s a funny thing the way we’re always marking time, or our place on the timeline. Birthdays, anniversaries, the day we met someone, or the last time we saw them. A moment we wish we could erase, another one we wish we could go back and re-live. At least a handful we’d go back and do differently.

There are events that seem to exist outside the timeline. The day my grandma died comes back to me in snapshots even though I was only four — my mother’s face as the elevator doors closed on the way up to her mother’s hospital room, pale and stricken, eyes as wide as the moon.

I might have understood on some cellular level that she was a whole person that day, and not just my mother.

The firethorn bushes that lined the sidewalk outside the hospital, and the family members who took turns walking me around the block for hours, because I was too little to go and see my grandma myself. Every face I knew and loved so well looked different than usual. Serious, scared, sad. Trying to seem okay.

Photo by Mr. Pugo on Unsplash

I picked the berries off those bushes all day because what else is there to do when the person who holds your world together is going to Heaven? You don’t have words for that at four, you don’t know where that is or how to get there, you can’t say goodbye, and everyone you love is crying. Picking berries you can’t eat, and crushing them between your fingers is as good a thing to do as any.

By the time she was gone my palms were stained orange and there was an ache around my heart I couldn’t name. I never did say goodbye to her. Still haven’t. I think the ache was called Evelyn and I’m not sure it ever left me. Maybe I should say I’m not sure she ever left me. I don’t think love like that cares about time or space or death.

It’s likely these things are on my mind because Sunday will mark four years since my mother exhaled for the last time. That’s not quite it, though, because that sounds peaceful, like a thing that just happened. Like she was asleep and her lips parted and she exhaled and that was it. She didn’t exhale on her own, a machine did it for her.

It sucked that last breath out of her, just like it had been forcing air into her. She hated it even though it was the only thing keeping her alive that last week. Oxygen in, CO2 out. I can still hear the sound. Too much CO2 buildup and a person hallucinates. I know because she kept refusing the machine. Started thinking her dog was going to get crushed in a stampede of elephants, or that she was trapped in the basement of the apartment building where I grew up — where I happened to be standing as the texts came in — as I was getting ready to head back over to the ICU which is a place where time doesn’t exist at all.

When the bipap machine forced that last exhale out of her, she’d already left her body. I’d felt it happen a few minutes prior. She was with me, and then she wasn’t. I was holding the hand I’d always known, but suddenly it was just her hand, stiffer than it should have been. No her there anymore.

I say “just” her hand, but my mother’s hand was sacred to me. I would have known her hand anywhere, even blindfolded. In the last few weeks of her life, she’d used that hand to pull my mask down twice, to stroke my tear-streaked face and look into my eyes. The way a mother should look at you. The way I’d always wanted her to look at me.

When I was little and then not as little and then older still, she raised that hand in anger so many times, but I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted her to stay. I wanted more of this new mother. This mom. My mom.

She was suffering, so I’d told her it was okay to go, that I would be okay, that I would take care of everything and that she didn’t need to worry.

I’ve done my best to keep those promises, but the part about me being okay was a lie. I was not at all ready for her to go, but it wasn’t up to me and it wasn’t up to her, she was going and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Fifty years of us together, but only three weeks the way it should have been. Which is weird, considering where we were, and that she was dying. I told her not to be scared, I said her mother was waiting for her. I hoped with my entire heart that it was true.

I used to have an incredible “power through” gear, but it left with her and hasn’t returned, for better or worse. I do my best and that’s as good as I’ve got. I try not to beat myself up, and succeed a decent amount of the time for someone who used to take every opportunity to make lists of the ways I was not getting everything exactly right. I don’t get as much done in a day, that’s how it is.

Maybe it’s losing my mom, or the combination of losing her and all the losses that came after in rapid succession. Maybe it’s perimenopause. Maybe it’s having my heart broken by the smug cruelty that dominates the airwaves and the internet and the feeds, and has for almost a year. Imagine choosing that — I find it unfathomable. It could be that losing people teaches you that time is not linear, and whatever is happening here is precious and wild, and not a thing you squander.

Sometimes I worry that I’ll end up leaving this planet in an unforeseen way on a random day through no fault or desire of my own, the way some people do. It isn’t fair and it hurts like hell, but it happens every day, so why not me? If it’s a particularly bad moment, I might even start imagining how it could happen. There have been times when I’m driving that I have to stop the film that starts playing in my head, because it involves images of my car hurtling through space in a way that can’t end well.

What wrecks me more than anything is the thought of my children and the time I would miss with them. The things I wouldn’t get to say and do and see. My daughter’s high school graduation, both kids’ college graduations, wedding days, babies. Not being there on their birthdays. Not getting to tell them how proud they make me just by being who they are, even though I know they know.

Not being there on a “regular” tough day to get on the phone and talk it out, or to send a funny text or to show up and make dinner when they least expect me because everything just feels like too much. Not getting to sit on the floor and play with my grandkids, read to them, take them to the beach the way my grandma took me.

Not getting to watch them grow.

It’s not the fancy stuff, it’s the everyday things. It’s all my people, the ones I hold dearest to my heart. The hugs that wouldn’t happen, the conversations, the walks, the laughter, the tears, all of it. The time I wouldn’t get with everyone. Every single day is extraordinary when you love people, and I do. So much.

I make myself play a different film when it happens, one where I’m me, but older. Long, crazy, grey hair, because I don’t play with dumb rules about how old women can’t have long hair. Old women can do whatever the fuck they want. Those are the rules when you manage to exist in a world that demands everything of you with very little thanks or respect in return.

Keep the species going, but you don’t get to say how or when or if — just do it or we’ll remove any choice you have in the matter. You’ll earn less because you’re probably going to have to take time off since there’s no affordable childcare, and if your partner is a man he’ll be paid more for no reason except men make the rules and too many women keep voting for it to stay that way, and don’t ask questions about it because that’s annoying. Don’t get cosmetic work done, but watch as people tear women down for not looking twenty-five when they’re sixty. Show up with all the things everyone needs, don’t be too emotional, don’t be too assertive, ask for what you want but not like that, don’t be angry, don’t be fat, don’t be rude.

You should smile more.

Something about a little less estrogen clears your head and you realize how much bullshit you’ve been taking and also how heartbreaking it is. I’ll have hair down to my ass till I’m 108 if I want to. I’ll smile if I feel like it. I’ll smile more when we aren’t living under the constant exhaustion of a man who exhausts himself so much he can’t even stay awake at his own meetings. Even when they’re televised. His foul, full-throated racism, misogyny, bigotry and lack of empathy are wearing him out, and none too soon. Sleep harder, old man.

The first Christmas after my mother died was a thing to get through. It had only been three weeks. Mostly I wanted to make sure I didn’t ruin Christmas for everyone else, that I didn’t fall apart at the wrong time, that no one caught me looking as bereft and untethered as I felt. I went to Trader Joe’s at some point. I don’t remember what I was there to get, I just remember holiday music and decorations everywhere. When I left the store there was a woman outside. She was about my mother’s age.

As I pushed my cart toward my car our eyes met. Hers were sparkly, and she stepped a little to the side, even though she wasn’t in my way. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m just waiting for my daughter.” It knocked the wind out of me. I tried to make my face do something that looked like a smile. I couldn’t speak.

I made it to my car, unloaded the groceries as fast as I could and returned the cart in time to see her daughter come out of the exit. They looked so much alike. Same smile, same sparkly eyes. I got back in my car and pulled out of the spot and was driving toward home making myself breathe in and breathe out, and suddenly a sound came out of me and I was wailing. Wailing and driving through tears so all the lights of the cars blurred and were just colors. I pulled my car onto a side street and parked, and wailed until I had nothing left.

We aren’t supposed to be horrible to one another. We aren’t supposed to call people garbage or treat them like garbage or pretend it’s okay to blow boats out of the water when human beings are hanging on for dear life.

These are small, stupid men who want to be important but don’t know the most basic things. We get one go-around here, that much we know for sure. Maybe there’s more after this, I’d like to think so, but I certainly take nothing for granted.

Whatever happens next, you make this place Heaven or you make it Hell, no one can stop you. You’re kind and loving, or you smile with dead eyes and lie through your teeth, selling your soul for people who would step on you without thinking twice if it would get them where they’re going half a second faster.

It is a symptom of how unwell we are that we resist aging, when getting to live a long life is such a privilege. I know when I start imagining horrible outcomes it’s because I’m feeling particularly vulnerable, but there’s no reason to let those films play until the credits roll. There are such beautiful people in this world. Loving, open, wonderful people who make you laugh when you get too serious, or remind you of a thing you said or did once that mattered to them, even if they didn’t tell you at the time.

If you’re lucky, you might have a few friends you’ve known forever. If you’re lucky, you have people who make you feel so grateful to open your eyes in the morning and put your feet on the floor another day. People who make you laugh until you cry, who get you, who would get on a plane for you or drive all night if you needed them. Hopefully you’d be that person, too.

That’s the gold in this world. You don’t get to take it with you. That’s why we mark time. It’s why we take pictures. It’s why we celebrate milestones or take note of how many years it’s been since we met someone, held a person’s hand, looked into their eyes. It’s why we dwell on whether we said the thing or didn’t say the thing — or wish we could go back and get it right. It’s all fleeting, the love, the joy, the grief, the time.

Dear Life, thank you for every minute, and for every person I cherish.

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