by Lindy West
Then, in the driveway, Aham said it out loud—we’d live together, be a real couple—and all of those warnings, overt and covert, that he’d been sending me for the past four months, that he wasn’t ready for this, he couldn’t do this, his divorce was too recent, their fights were too loud and too mean, his life had too many moving parts, were going to fall away. I had been right to ignore him all along. I knew it. I would make him okay through sheer force of will. He said it. Binding oral contract. Breaking it now wouldn’t be fair. That’s how a little girl thinks. Love was perseverance.
Later, I’d ask him, heaving, “Why the FUCK would you say that? Why did you trick me? Why did you come here?”
“I just loved you,” he’d say. “I just wanted to be around you. I told you I couldn’t do it. Why didn’t you believe me?”
I rented the three of us a little yellow house in Eagle Rock with a big eucalyptus tree in the backyard. The house was owned by a church, which was two doors down, and every so often some church people would come by and try to guilt trip us into coming to one of their “activities.” The church owned another, identical house next door to ours, where a middle-aged couple lived with their teenage son. The wife, Kathy, had severe early-onset Alzheimer’s—she couldn’t have been over fifty—and every couple of days she’d wander through our front door, lost and crying. “Where am I? Where’s Jeff? I can’t find Jeff!” We’d try to soothe her, walk her home, back into the house that was a dim, dirty funhouse mirror of ours—towels tacked up over the windows, counters piled with fast-food takeout containers, empty of furniture except for a few mattresses on the floor. One particularly sweltering afternoon, trying to get her settled in the back bedroom to wait until her husband got home from work, I realized with a start that he was there, passed out drunk under a pile of blankets. “Jeff,” I said, shaking him. “JEFF. JEFF.” He just kept sleeping.
Jeff was a really nice guy. Once, when he came rushing over to collect Kathy from our house, his perpetual cheer slipped for a second and he said, so quietly, “She used to take care of everything.”
A week before my life broke, I met my sister for coffee and told her that Aham never laughed at my jokes anymore.
“Dude,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “don’t you know you have to love with an open hand?”
“What?”
Her eyes rolled.
“If you have a bird that you love, and you want the bird to stay and hang out with you and sing for you, you don’t clutch it in your fist so it can’t get away. You hold your hand out, open, and wait for it to perch there. If you’re holding it there, it’s not your friend—it’s your prisoner. Love with an open hand. DUH.”
“Oh,” I said, stuffing the thought far away.
I didn’t see it coming, because I was a child. I didn’t understand what a relationship was—that the whole beauty of the thing is two people choosing, every day, to be together; not one person, drunk on love stories, strangling them both into a grotesquerie of what she thinks she wants. It didn’t help that the little yellow house next door to Jeff and his there-but-not-there Kathy was just a few blocks from Occidental, the college campus where, a decade earlier, the certainty that I was worthless and unlovable had calcified into a heavy, dragging, extra limb. That was the limb I draped eagerly around Aham’s shoulders, without asking—the weight that broke his back and pulled us under. It had never occurred to me that what I needed wasn’t to find someone to help me carry it; what I needed was to amputate.
The descent was swift and boring: I was too much and too little. He was depressed, distant, and mean. I pressed myself against him harder, more frantic. His eyes lost focus; he was always somewhere else. I pressed. He pulled. I cried every day. He was eliminated from the comedy competition. He was angry. On Halloween, he went to a party. I couldn’t come, he said. Sorry. No plus-ones. He came back at five a.m. We had sex, and then I cried.
“We’re going to be okay, right?”
His back was turned.
“No,” he said, and everything changed. “I don’t think we’re going to be okay.”
I had been sad before. I had been very sad. This was something new. I felt liquefied. Even writing this, years later, I’m sobbing like he’s dead.
I had waited so long for someone to pick me. And then he changed his mind.
I went across town to my friends Ella and Owen’s house for a few weeks, and they let me sit on their couch all day and stare and cry; Ella made me a therapy appointment and tried to get me to eat; Owen made me laugh by narrating elaborate parlor dramas between their three enormous, idiot dogs; at night, the dogs would forget who I was and trap me in the bathroom, barking wildly, until someone got up and rescued me.
I wrote Aham a long, impassioned e-mail, like a teenager—the gist of which was, “I don’t understand. We love each other. It’s enough.”
He wrote back, in short, “You’re right. You don’t understand. It’s not.”
I drove him to the airport and he chattered the whole way about a radio show that was going to produce one of his stories; he thought we were just going to be friends now. He thought I knew how to compartmentalize, like he did. “I’ve missed talking to you so much,” he said, beaming. I watched him blankly. He was going back to Seattle for Thanksgiving; I was going too, the next day.
That afternoon, I noticed a weird charge on my bank statement. Someone had stolen one of my checkbooks—I must have dropped it—and written a $750 check to herself. I called the bank’s fraud department; they said they would take care of it. I woke up the next morning with a balance of negative $900,000. Apparently, that’s the policy when someone reports check fraud to Bank of America; the bank subtracts $900,000 from their balance to preclude any further fraudulent withdrawals.*
I was a negative-millionaire. I shrugged and flew home to Seattle.†
At Thanksgiving dinner, we ate mashed potatoes and bad stuffing from the grocery store deli counter down the street. My dad threw up at the table and then started to cry. Aham called me to tell me about something goofy his mom had done to the turkey. I approximated a laugh. Downstairs, I took off my clothes and shambled toward bed. A massive period clot fell, right out of me, like a crimson water balloon, onto my mom’s white carpet. I looked at it and got in bed.
The plane shook and lurched in the Santa Ana winds, but we returned to Burbank without particular trouble. I took a cab home. Solomon was out of town. Aham was still in Seattle. The wind picked up. The power went out. The windows rattled. I took an Ambien and curled into a ball and tried to hide from the dark and the wind in the bed that had been ours, the first bed I’d ever shared with someone who loved me and picked me and then changed his mind. At a certain point, a groaning started, then a cracking, then a pounding. It sounded like enormous beasts were hurling themselves against the house. Nothing had ever been louder. Growing up, I’d had a recurring nightmare about a flood, where the water rose right up to the level of my bedroom window, and animals—monstrous hippos, rampaging elephants—would lunge out of the storm, smashing their bulk against the glass. It must be the Ambien, I thought. A nightmare bleeding into real life. It sounded like the walls were coming down around me, like something was prying away the roof. I took another Ambien and shook.
I woke up in the morning embarrassed at my hallucination. It was just a storm. Was I really so pathetic? I walked into the kitchen.
The world was gone. Everything was leaves. Leaves pressed up against every window, through the screens, over the sills. The glass back door was a wall of leaves, Solomon’s room was leaves, leaves, leaves. Someone banged on the door. I jumped.
The Santa Anas had been too much for the old eucalyptus tree; it had keened and struggled as I half slept, eventually cracking right in half and crushing our little yellow house. The little house that was supposed to be our love story. It’s a metaphor you couldn’t use in fiction. Too on the nose. Any good editor would kill it, and probably fire you.
M
y mom called. She was crying. It was time. I went back to the airport.
The End
Until I watched a death up close, I always felt avoidant around grief and grieving people. It was one of the things I hated most about myself—my complete loss of social fluidity among the heartbroken—though I know it’s common. I am a shy person at heart, and a grieving acquaintance is a shy person’s nightmare: The pressure to know the “right” thing to say. Seeing a person without their shell. The sudden plunge, several layers deeper than you’ve ever been, into someone’s self, feigning ease in there so you don’t make them uneasy. Navigating, by instinct, how much space you should be taking up—or, even worse, bringing yourself to ask.
I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I’ve never been an easy hugger. The social conventions that keep human beings separate and discrete—boundaries, etiquette, privacy, personal space—have always been a great well of safety to me. I am a rule follower. I like choosing whom I let in close. The emotional state of emergency following a death necessarily breaks those conventions down, and, unfortunately, I am bad at being human without them.
I never caved to the impulse, of course—it’s repulsively selfish and I’ve chewed my cheek bloody just admitting it here. Other people’s grief is not about you; letting self-consciousness supersede empathy is barbaric. I’m the first to drop off a casserole, send flowers and a card. “Anything I can do.” “Thinking of you so much right now.” But before death had ever touched me directly, those interactions felt like trying to dance, sober, in a brightly lit room.
Someone picked me up at the airport and drove me to my parents’ house, where my dad either was or wasn’t, I can’t remember. He was in and out of the hospital so often at that time it was hard to keep track, elation swapping places with despair at flickering speeds like a zoetrope animating the last days of my childhood. Flick, flick, flick.
Even though my mother was a nurse and I grew up immersed in hospital culture—talking eyeball surgery over dinner, specimen cups full of mandarin oranges in my school lunch—I didn’t understand shit about hospitals. I didn’t know that even the best ones were miserable and lonely places where you couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch; where, with each second you weren’t discharged, you could see the outline of your death shiver into focus. Hospitals were full of medicines and machines and doctors and hyper-competent people like my mother. I thought they were a place you went to get better, not a place you went to die.
Cancer doesn’t hand you an itinerary. It’s not like, up to a certain point, you have an okay amount of cancer, and then one day the doctor’s like, “Uh-oh! Too much cancer!” and then all your loved ones rush to your bedside for some stoic, wise good-byes. Cancer, at least in my dad’s case, is a complex breaking down of multiple systems, both slow and sudden. You have six months and then you have six hours. Treatments are messy, painful, and often humiliating. The cost/benefit is anything but clear.
My dad didn’t want to die. He turned seventy-six that year, but until his prostate fucked everything up, he radiated the same tireless exuberance as he always had. My mom said he didn’t like hearing his own prognoses, so she met with the doctors herself, carried the future inside her all alone. She, the realist, and he, the fantasist, as ever.
In those final weeks, though, even Dad couldn’t deny that his body was failing. That horrible Thanksgiving, when he vomited into the empty margarine tub at the dinner table, was when I first noticed it. He had begun grieving—for himself, for the life he wasn’t ready to leave behind. I, true to form, was terrified of his grief.
Those days eat at me. Why didn’t I spend more time sitting with him? Why did I sleep so much? Why didn’t I read out loud to him, our favorite books, the ones he read to me when I was little? Why was I so fucking chirpy in all of our interactions, desperate to gloss over the truth, instead of letting myself be vulnerable with him? Why the fuck did I move to L.A. three months before he died? What was wrong with me? Who does that?
He wanted me to go, though. That was before he admitted he was dying—if I had stayed, it would have been confirmation that something was really wrong—and there was nothing he loved more than watching his children stride out into the world and flourish. “Knock ’em dead, kid,” he said. And I did. It’s so fucking unfair that he didn’t get to see it.
Eventually, I ran out of chances to sit with him, to be vulnerable, to tell the truth. We went to the hospital for the last time.
As Dad drifted in and out of consciousness, my sister and I read to him from the book he was halfway through at the time: A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson. Aham once told me that Oscar Peterson, my dad’s hero, was the lovable dork of the jazz pantheon. “He’s incredibly well respected,” Aham hedged. “He’s amazing—just the least edgy player ever. He’s kind of like Superman.” Peterson never had a drug problem; he loved his wives; he was huge in Canada. Unsurprisingly, then, where my sister and I picked up in A Jazz Odyssey, Peterson was describing a hobby that I can confidently declare the exact opposite of being a philandering New York needle junkie: pottering around America’s parks and monuments with his wife Kelly in their brand-new Winnebago.
My dad roused every once in a while and chuckled as Peterson detailed with reverence the Winnebago’s gleaming chrome accents and spacious over-cab loft bed. The open road, the great plains, Kelly by his side—this was the life. Until it came time to empty the Winnebago’s sewage tank. Oscar was pretty sure he could figure it out unassisted.
I looked up from the book, into my sister’s expectant face and over at my dad’s unconscious one. Was Oscar Peterson about to tell us a story about gallons and gallons of his and his wife’s liquefied feces spraying out of a Winnebago? Was I about to read it out loud, in a soothing voice, at my father’s deathbed? Yes. Yes, I was.
Dad’s hospital room was small—only two guests could hang out in there comfortably—so my mom, my sister, and I took turns sleeping in the chair next to his bed, holding his hand, while one of us lounged on the cushioned bench under the window and the odd woman out decamped to the cafeteria or the “family lounge” down the hall. The family lounge was a small, windowless room with an old TV, a couch upholstered in what looked like leftover airport carpet, and a pile of battered, cast-off VHS tapes, because nothing takes the edge off your father’s slow suffocation like Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Did you know that sometimes there just isn’t anything else that doctors can do to save your dad? I knew it intellectually, before this experience, but I didn’t understand it in practice. In practice, it means that, at a certain point, a fallible human being called a doctor has to make a subjective decision that it is no longer feasible to mitigate both the internal bleeding and concomitant dehydration of your father, so all you can do is give him enough morphine that it doesn’t hurt so much when he drowns inside of his own body. And you have to go, “Okay,” and then let them do that. And then wait.
My dad lost consciousness on Saturday night. My mom told me to go home and sleep, that she’d call me if it looked like he was going to go. I passed out on my parents’ couch, making peace with the fact that I would probably miss the end. It was okay. I had said good-bye, told him I loved him. But the next morning, when I woke up, he was still holding on (he was always strong, he didn’t want to go), so back I went. We picked up our routine again—chair, bench, family lounge—and we sat there. Waiting. All day Sunday, into Monday. Each breath got slower and rougher—I use a French press now because I can’t bear the percolator—and we sat and listened to every one.
Sometimes a team of doctors would come in and loom over us with well-rehearsed but clinical concern. “How are you doing?” they would ask. Oh, you mean besides sitting here on this plastic hospital chair listening to the world’s best dude struggle for breath for the past thirty-six hours? Um, fucking gangbusters, I guess. “Is there anything we can do?” Apparently not, considering this whole long-slow-death thing that’s happening in this room right
now. Also, you’re the doctor. You tell me.
I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted that shitty purgatory to be over. Except for one thing—which was for that shitty purgatory to never be over. Because when it’s over, it’s over. And eventually it was. Monday afternoon, my dad stopped breathing, faded to black-and-white like an old movie, and—I don’t know how else to describe it—flattened slightly, as though whatever force was keeping him in three dimensions had abruptly packed up and moved on. He was, and then he wasn’t. One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack.
A nurse brought us granola bars and juice boxes on a little rolling cart, like a “your dad died” door prize. A guy with a mop came in to start cleaning up the room for the next patient. There was someone with a clipboard, asking questions. “Could you give us a fucking minute?” my mom snapped. “My husband just died thirty seconds ago.”
We sat with the body that used to be him. I didn’t understand the point, honestly.
Back in November, before Thanksgiving, before the tree fell on the house, before the hospital, Aham and I met up at a bar on Capitol Hill. We hadn’t spoken in a week or so, and my pain and anger had cooled to something more permeable. I’d spent that time with friends and family, eating and drinking and carrying on, coming back to myself—getting reacquainted with the person I’d been before Aham, even before Mike. I had an identity other than my relationship—I remembered it now—and this grimy fish tank I built around us hadn’t been good for me either.
