Two Lucky

The initial energy and positive thinking I brought with me to Singapore two months ago has whittled. Life, measured hour after hour, is barely manageable. To eat, or not eat; sleep or not sleep. At least Hamlet sought an answer. Mine - to his august question - makes no difference to me.

To say that I have hit rock bottom is not true. I have not, and I cannot imagine returning to that dark time. Instead, I am suspended at its margins. I walk above the reassuring pull of earth’s gravity. I lie under a sky from which no stars bewitch the imagination. There is a sense of disconnect between my tangible self, and the self that wanders like a shadow. This morning, I looked into the mirror and smiled, and I did not recognize myself.

I have spent months striving. If I cannot be happy, then at least, let me be calm.

Three years ago, we celebrated our first Valentine’s Day together. It was three months after we’d met. We exchanged presents. He bought me a facial at Nickel, an upscale men’s spa in New York; I bought him a bag of weed through a classmate who dealt out of his fraternity house.

“This is the best Valentine’s Day present, ever!” he whooped, and fished out the bong.

After an hour, we were both hands deep in bags of Doritos on our couch. Jon Stewart was on. I always remember his laugh this way: he rubs his fists into his eyes, and laughs so hard he can’t stop.

A year later, we had left New York, and were in different cities. He was in Seoul. I was in Singapore. On Feb 14, I called him at night when he got home. All afternoon he had been hooked up to tubes and needles at Samsung Hospital, getting his chemotherapy. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” I said to him. He was too tired to say much: “I thought about you all day. I miss you.”

We hung up and went to our separate beds, full of words we didn’t say.

Back in New York the following year, our last Valentine’s Day was spent together watching the sun rise from a hospital uptown. He, on the thin bed. I, in the chair next to him. His left hand, heavy with sleep, rested in mine.

At New York Presbyterian Hospital, he had just endured six days of high-dose immunotherapy. By the fourth day, the chemo had taken his mind. He asked for the Indians to stop knocking on our door. He wanted to see the circus at North Carolina. He no longer knew who I was. On Valentine’s Day, our seventh day at the hospital, he finally woke from his nightmare.

When I opened my eyes that morning, he was already awake.

“Hey baby, how long have I been sleeping?” he asked me.

“Not long,” I said. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.” I leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. “What day is it?” he asked. “Wednesday.” I looked at the clock on the wall. 6 am. I’d slept a few hours.

This is what I wrote on that day:

“For the next 10 minutes, we chat a little in the dark. He is full of questions, gaining strength in lucid conversation. His eyes come alert. He’s finally turning the corner, I think to myself. In the window, shadows peel away. A band of mauve is on the horizon. It is almost daylight.”

Another year has passed. Happy Valentine’s Day, my love. It’s four in the morning. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. Are you awake, too? I thought about you all day. I miss you.

Nine months

It was in that moment, when Rusty died, that death became possible for me, too.

I wasn’t suicidal; I did not want to make myself dead. I merely wanted to be dead with him.

That first thought filled me, as I stood next to him, not knowing to speak, or move; I, whom to myself seemed suddenly misplaced, and oddly living. It came to me quickly: there was death’s door. It became clear that if he could die, so I could, too.

He was so freshly present, I thought: I could follow him.

Death is our most common experience. Every person will come to know the pain of loss. Every person will die. Losing someone is not the same as experiencing death, but it can come close. There are those who live, but carry the dead next to their hearts. We call them the grieving.

For to experience such closeness with death is beyond the scope of mortality, or the display of sadness. It is something quieter. There is no excess to its expression; the hurricane drops. It is to know that when death opens its door, to step through it is as insignificant an idea as the act is uneventful, as if a leaf turning on the ground.

I was 16 when my uncle died. I did not know death then. Nor did I, when my grandmother died a year later, and my grandfather a year after that.

Death had happened; it was all around me. But in those relationships, death was still not real to me. The pain I felt did not change me. I did not let it touch me.

It was different with Rusty. I became a widower. Death became plausible. To know that I could die was my first thought; that I should, my second.

To know death is to await it, without hesitation, without fear. The unknown is known, because the grieving see in everything its shadow, hear in every word its song. We call out for the dead to give us answers. We are not so much haunted as we are sustained by specters. We endure time, not because living is difficult, but because it has become, for us, a provisional exercise.

And it is not possible - when a spouse, a child, or a parent dies - not to live this double self, because if the dead are still a part of us, even while they are part of death, then death is a part of us, too.

Our past interred in the present; that is how we keep our dead.

It is nine months since Rusty died. I have lived through the worst of it. In the last month, I’ve even achieved a likeness to life: work, food, friends. Sleep is more fickle. It is at night, when the day grows old, that I come home to Rusty, and in spite of my exhaustion, I cannot shut the door.

There are days I wonder if it will ever close. I am not impatient, but my eyes still struggle to see what lies beyond it, to see on the other side if Rusty is waiting for me, as I am for him.

And so the hours are counted down, neither one easier, nor more difficult than the next.

When the day finally comes for me to cross over, I shall do so with much trembling. It will come willingly, or unwillingly. My eyes will be closed; not for fearing death, but for the joy of feeling, once again, his fingers running through my hair.