I Imagine...

I hate when stories begin with the end. The absurdity that I am even at the end of my life at thirty-three is nothing but a cosmic joke that has played out not unlike the rest of my life. I've always said I am not afraid to die; that of course was before the doctors told me my prognosis and I became the elephant in the room. 

I imagine that the day will come all too soon, that I will have to say my goodbyes and not unlike the stories I have read, rekindle relationships with distant and more likely forgotten friends. I imagine that the anger I have held all these years for my father will turn to forgiveness, and the mistakes I have made in my life will somehow make sense.

I imagine that I will appreciate the calendar not as a place to write down future events but a stamp of recognition that another day is gone. I imagine that I will sit with my daughters and be brave while they cry tears that do not fully have meaning yet. I imagine that while in the pain of the end, I will be grateful for the loved ones around me that are not too scared to see me die. I imagine that when I close my eyes for the last time, I will have the peace that I have earned.

It’s funny how we live our lives with the full recognition that someday our parents will die, and often we experience the death of a grandparent as a rite of passage. We acknowledge that this is the proper order of things, and so be it. Death is spoken about in terms of the inevitable but not the logical. Each time we experience a death in our lives, whether it be a family member, friend or even a pet, the experience is not truly ours. We grieve the loss and mourn the upcoming awareness of holidays not attended and birthdays not celebrated, but in truth we grieve for ourselves. We grieve for our memories and the lack of future ones. Now being on the other side, I have come to fully understand that death is not about the dying but about the ones that are left behind. I am just a player in the makeup of your experiences from death on. 

This of course pissed me off at first. I am the one dying and the reality is that it really isn’t even about me, it is only happening to me. Think about it, you come over to my house to profess your love for me, your anger at this disease, the unjustness of this plight. You bring a casserole and well wishes from your family. You then proceed to lose your composure and cry uncontrollably on my couch. I then spend the next twenty minutes getting you tissues, assuring you that it will be okay, and serving you the casserole you so graciously presented me. The unfortunate truth is that death is very little about the dying and more about the continuation for the living. I have heard “what am I going to do without you”, “how will I go on” and my favorite “I just had to come see, I would never forgive myself if you died and I hadn’t said goodbye.” Believe me I understand that my death is not going to sustain mourning beyond a certain period, apart from my mother and children, so as the day’s sashay by, I take in the broken winged and wounded allowing whatever emotion you need to express.

I have become enamored with how it will end, the conversations that will take place, the confessions released, the passion for life that has never been. I have come to love my fatal disease; it is the first time that I have felt alive, awake, and real. The need to satisfy the most basic yearnings has left and yet been replaced with the knowledge that my life will no longer be about the struggle against all that I have fought so hard to keep at bay. All that I have needed is already here. The beauty of dying is that the answers come much quicker, as time is shorter. I no longer have the need to know everything. Soon, the answers will be free. When they do come, I hope I can pass along the message. I am not sure how this exactly works, but I imagine that I will have beautiful wings and fly gentler and more graceful than I could ever dream. My wings will be white with flecks of silver that shimmer against the sun, they will be so bright that when I rest on your shoulders, your skin will warm and you will feel safe. I know that you grieve for me, but soon I will be free. 

There seems to be a need to blame God for this, there seems to be the desire to get angry with an entity that we thank for the abundance. The juxtaposition of this brings strong men to their knees, so I imagine that this push pull feeling of anger and gratefulness only adds to the already confusing issue of settling the feelings of helplessness. Truly the anger is that there is nothing that can be done, I am going to die and what just God would have this tragedy at his feet? The idea that I am being punished for the deeds or maybe the lack of them seems all too punishing, is it a karmic thing? Did I poison someone in a past life, am I paying for the sins that I don’t even remember? I am told that this line of thinking will not help me in aiding me to heal my body, that the energy is lost in the negative and that I need to focus on bright white light, healing light. So, the confusion is that while I believe that the body can heal itself, what if this is my penitents, what if this is my Hail Mary?

I imagine that someday all the black will turn to pink, that the darkness that I have lived in will be bright and full of flowers. This is what I hope for every night, after I have put my girls to bed and braved the day’s pain of cancer burning my bones. I dream of tomorrow, putting braids in golden hair, making grilled cheese sandwiches and having one more truly remarkable day.