On 'Death, Dying, Talking About Death'
3/6/2022: On Death, Crispy Gluten Free TJs Cookies, The Ringer article on Cancer & Fatherhood
I’m sitting on my dark green suede couch with the blinds closed. It’s almost 9pm now. The glowing blue light from my computer screen shines onto my face as I take the last sip of my now lukewarm ginger tea. I watch the pixelated faces on my Zoom screen stare back at me – They look open. Ready for whatever I might blurt out. It’s my turn now.
“There was a lot of blood.” [pause]
“A lot of gurgling.” [pause]
“There was that steady beep of the hospital monitor … you guys know it.”
Still, nothing. Blank faces. So I continue.
“I can still hear those struggling last gasps for breath. I remember that I ripped my sister’s T-shirt when none of the nurses would come help her. Fuck the healthcare system, you know? I’d never felt that much blinding rage in my life.”
I don’t look up. I just keep going.
“We’d give her towels that she’d spit into and they would turn from white to red with blood. There was so much fear in her eyes. The throwing up, the yellow skin, the bloating. You guys know it. Just so much struggle. It’s made me terrified of the body – how it can fail you, how it can betray you.”
I take a breath.
I still avoid looking directly into the screen. When I finally do it’s still just blank faces. They don’t look shocked or scared or scandalized. Their eyes have that knowing look and they seem ready to receive whatever else I put out there.
It’s Wednesday night and I’m in my virtual grief group. I’ve been in the group for almost a year now. Every other Wednesday I sit in front of my computer screen for 90 minutes and talk candidly about death to complete strangers. Well, now they are no longer strangers. They are some of my best friends. There are 9 of us in this group. We are all between 20-30 years old and have all lost a parent within the last two years.
This week was the most intense week yet. We are prompted to talk about our parents’ death stories. Not the short version that we are used to reciting to new friends when they ask us “what does your mom do?” or to prospective employers when they ask us about the time we took off from school. We tell one another the unabridged, unfiltered death stories of our people. No matter how long it takes.
When I first heard this prompt I was scared. I’m so used to telling the tightly packaged, sanitized version of my mother’s death that I wasn’t sure what would happen if I let myself go back into those backlogged memories of bodily demise.
Death doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. The room isn’t quiet or still. The dying person doesn’t peacefully close their eyes at the very end. If there is hand-holding, it is not soft and calm and beautiful. It is fierce and terrified and longing not to let go.
My mom was extremely private about her cancer up until the very end. It was really only me, my sister, and my uncle who saw her up close, day-to-day, in those last six months. Many of her closest friends were shocked when she died because she always put up this fierce facade. “I’m ok… how are you?!” She’d always turn the conversation away from herself. Most of her friends hadn’t even known she’d gotten sick again.
At her funeral and since people have asked me how she was when she died. I can never tell if they actually want to know or if they are just being polite. I always give a kind, closed-mouth smile and say “oh, you know we were with her. So that was really nice. It was really hard, but it was ok.” But it wasn’t ok. She was overwhelmed, in pain, delirious. She shrank and disappeared into her existential distress.
Death doesn’t happen in a moment, or a scene, or a neatly condensed, frozen piece of time. For many, it happens over months, years, sometimes even decades. Most of my friends in the grief group told long winded, complex stories like my own – a life full of sickness or addiction or depression that slowly withers a person away.
My mom fought her cancer for over a decade. Luckily the type of cancer she had didn’t become life-threatening until the end, but living with a cancer that can act up or act out at any given time does odd things to your psyche and your soul. It’s easy to live in fear – passing the days until the next flare up, the next blood transfusion, the next round of chemo.
My mom knew she was going to die, but it happened much sooner than we thought it would. When people ask me about her death I always leave this part out. It’s too painful to remember that sudden swirl during those last few days: the hazmat suits we had to wear to see her for the last few times, the way she’d open her mouth to talk, but nothing would come out, the fact that she wanted to die at home but instead died in the antiseptic hallway of a hospital.
When each of my friends from the grief group began talking about their parent’s death story, I felt my jaw relax and my shoulders slacken. I could feel myself breathe again. I didn’t realize how much I’d been carrying for the past two years. None of them could condense their stories into neat little novellas either. None of them tried to filter out the gory and gruesome details of sickness and death. They all paused and mumbled and cried and asked themselves questions in the process, too. They said what they needed to say, did what they needed to do. Didn’t worry about how others might react. And it empowered me to do the same.
There’s no way for me to condense my mother’s death story into the three minute snippet that people expect when they ask me about her or even into a 1200 word piece here, nor do I want to. What I do want to do is to speak truth to her story – both her beauty and her suffering.
I used to think that speaking in pretty platitudes about her death would be better for everyone. I was so concerned with how uncomfortable I might make other people feel when telling her story.
Especially as a writer, I always feel the need to package things into something easily digestible for my readers, create a story with a moral, and tack on a happy ending.
Society tells us that we should try to fix painful things. I wish I could tell people that my mom died free of pain or that she was at peace or that I’ve come to peace with it all. But the truth I’ve been grappling with since watching my mother die is that most painful things cannot be fixed.
All we can do is sit with people in their pain. Maybe by really hearing each other’s painful truths, we can help untangle the knots of suffering and leave feeling a bit lighter, if only by knowing that we are not alone with our pain.
Trader Hoes:
This Green Bean rec from my Grandma Sue
These Gluten Free Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookies from my friend Lauren
Media Recs:
This poignant article on Cancer and Fatherhood
This episode of The Moth
See y’all next week
Bex
On 'Death, Dying, Talking About Death'
I love you. I’m sorry. ♥️