*
Later that night Tita texts to say she got back to Greensboro safely but that Drew has just been in a car accident down the street from our house.
“He’s okay,” she writes. “Maybe a broken rib. He ran the red light down at the corner. Didn’t have the kids in the car. Other person is fine, too. He says he was distracted and never saw the light. Car likely totaled. But he’s okay—I promise. Do some Nurse Jon breathing. Get some morphine sleep.”
Later, when I am home from the hospital, she tells me the story of getting the phone call and packing the kids into the car in the rain and driving the three blocks down to the corner. The sirens and the ambulance and people standing around and the cars in the wrong places in the road. “I knew he was alive because he had called me,” she says. “But I couldn’t figure out how to believe that he was okay, given what I was seeing.”
I know just what she means. It’s how I’ve felt every second since the doctor came to see me in the emergency room.
Much later Drew tells me he had been crying. He had run to the nearby grocery to buy eggs and pork chops after Tita returned home from seeing me. He was half-aware in the store that he was not thinking clearly.
“I really don’t remember any of it,” he tells me. “Only screaming in the car, after the airbag.” I know Drew at Christmastime: He cries in front of the tree late at night with all the house lights off, drinking scotch and listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. He cries when his sons pad down the stairs in their footie pajamas.
I know this crying is different, and that my situation is complicit. I am still waiting to cry, and to feel the slam of my steel body crashing into another.
*
When my family comes to the hospital on Christmas Day, everyone squeezes onto my bed for lack of a better option. Where would my mom sit? I am thinking. There is no room for my mom in this new situation.
The boys completely ignore the helicopter when I point it out, and I don’t push it: Perhaps they have already outgrown these sorts of spectacles—driving around town, I pointed out John Deere tractors and earthmoving equipment for years after they stopped caring. They are dying to show me a PowerPoint presentation that Jennie has helped them make on their new laptop of the Christmas I have missed at home. Merry Merry Merry Mom, it says. Wish this wasn’t happening!
As they are getting ready to leave Freddy asks me: “So, have they had to send that helicopter out today?”
“No, not today,” I say.
“That’s good,” he says, resting his head on my shoulder.
3. Little Disc of Ruin
For years I have had a recurring dream that I am choking on a battery. Different types of batteries: triple A, 9-volt, lithium watch. Each time, I awake with panic, and I can always feel the very real sensation of the hard shape disappearing down my esophagus. The crisis has passed, I think, coughing and gasping for breath, but I am still doomed.
My first night home from the hospital, I wake up from a battery dream around 2:00 a.m. I had fallen asleep hard without brushing my teeth or washing my face or taking off my clothes.
But then suddenly: the battery, panic, then everything else—the unreturned library books on the table by the front door; the unplayed voicemails; the unwalked dogs; the uncollapsed recycling; unread emails; unwritten thank yous; unfinished parenting; the universe coming undone at the seams.
What is the hard thing you are swallowing tonight? I lie there asking myself. Oh, just mortality. Oh just a little disc of ruin.
Forty minutes into the freak-out, I think of Nurse Jon: soft belly, support of the world, a positive mantra embedded into the inhale and exhale of each breath. Thank / you I find myself saying. Thank and then you. And then the sun is brightening the sky and the kids are crawling into the bed.
Emerson’s journal, 1838: “I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and life to the very horizon. That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as the World.”
*
My cousin Bonnie arrives in Greensboro several hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve. She has taken the train down from Washington, DC, where her girlfriend’s father is dying of prostate cancer.
“Bonnie’s Mortality Tour, 2015!” I say when we do a modified version of one of the fierce hugs we’ve been giving each other our whole lives. She’s been living in San Francisco for the last sixteen years—working as a massage therapist and now training to be an occupational therapist, and we don’t see each other very often anymore. A few days at the summer house in August, if we’re lucky.
“Put me to work right now,” she says, rubbing her hands together, then over my head, my neck, my back. Bonnie has always represented to me the very epitome of my family: She’s strong and fearless and brilliant and magical, and her startling blue eyes look unnervingly like RWE’s. She sailed around the world with her parents and brother as a kid. In one of my favorite photographs of her she is shimmying up a palm tree in her bathing suit. She rode for an all-lesbian bike messenger service in San Francisco. She has a huge scar shaped exactly like Newfoundland on her inner calf from a motorcycle accident she had as a child.
“I have brought massage oil and board games and origami paper and spices for the most delicious Moroccan stew in the universe,” she says.
Later in the evening—an assortment of family and friends downstairs playing charades and drinking and laughing, the kids running around like wild animals, John and my dad grilling New Year’s Eve lamb—I’m lying on my bed while she rubs my feet.
“So, it turns out I’m kind of dying,” I say to her. I haven’t spoken this directly to anyone yet.
“Yeah,” she says. “So, what’s up with that? Why do you always have to be the first of us to do everything?”
“Can you teach me how to make origami cranes?” I say.
“I thought you would never ask,” she says.
*
Back when I was in the emergency room, the attending had said, “I don’t know what exactly will happen next, but you know that metastases put you at stage four. This is clearly an aggressive cancer. It recurred before we even finished treating it. It’s probably time to put your affairs in order and make a bucket list, as hard as that is to hear.”
I had been stumped by the bucket list. It depressed me: “Oh my God I am so lame I can’t even come up with an interesting bucket list,” I whined in the hospital.
“How about a ‘fuck-it’ list?” John suggested at some point. “Sort of the opposite. What can we just say ‘fuck it’ to and send splashing off into some sewer and not bother ourselves with anymore?”