It's Death calling... again.
Could you please take a message?
The first time I consciously met death, I was siting in the front seat of a minivan parked two blocks from school. I was 15, and Cal had a heart attack in his sleep the night before. He was 49. His daughters were younger than me. That was the first time I felt the ground underneath me literally open up and try to swallow me whole. The following week, it was negative temperatures here in the midwest when we stood at his graveside, tears freezing on our cheeks before they could even hit the ground.
Death came back to visit twice my senior year. I vividly remember Colleen calling one night when I was sitting in the kitchen after dinner right before Halloween to tell me that Lauren was gone. We all knew it was a possibility, but she’d been in remission. We knew nothing about the transplant list or the wait time, or the effects on the rest of her body in that season. We just knew that she never came home, and in away, neither did we.
Death called another time just three weeks before we were leaving for college with the news of the accident where Andy walked away but Brett died. They’d kept him on life support for four days, just to be sure. But they were sure. He was gone.
I stood at all their graves before I was even 18. I watched their parents crumble. I wondered how I could best support any of my friends in death besides keeping their names alive.
After that, death would sneak into my life sometimes intermittently - a relative, a family friend, a friends family member - but nothing like the ones that had already paralyzed me.
I was 21 when death really changed everything. It was a Thursday morning in the rain, I’d been up all night cramming for an exam, and when I walked back out to my car I had three missed calls from Ellen. It was urgent I get home. I found the police in our living room, and only from a friend on the other side of the house did I hear the words - it was Jen. She died by suicide.
That was in 2008, and it was the year and the reason I found TWLOHA, incidentally setting up the rest of my life in that moment. I’ve written so many times about this but maybe because it came up now, it means something different? I’m not sure. I promised myself that I’d write, so here we are.
I feel like the next call that made my earth shatter was a one via Facebook video, from a younger friend who didn’t have my current cell phone number. She was urgently trying to reach me before someone else did. She thought she could tell me tenderly or kindly or slowly or somehow in a way that made it burn less that Jordan was gone. I still cant type that or even think about it without my eyes flooding with tears. What an absolute freak accident. What a horrible moment. What an experience that changed how I lived the rest of my life (PS if you’re not CPR and first aid certified, go to www.redcross.org now to sign up for the virtual training. You have no idea when you might need to save someone)
I remember in the weeks after that phone call, I was merely a shell of myself. I couldn’t operate. I couldn’t function. I didn’t know what life would feel like without her. It’s been nearly 7 years since that day, and I still don’t have a solid answer to that question. Just that there are moments I miss her like hell, moments I know shed still be the one I called - even though everyone else can say in reality who knows if we’d still have been this close after this much time. Me. I knew. I know. We’d have always been silver glitter toms, Des Moines Hell Yes Raygun wearing, Dammit Doll throwing medical nerds who held on tight to the friendship we had as long as as life wold’ve let us. And we did. We lived the hell out of our long distance friendship through real actual cards in the mail, through “i thought of you:” gifts, through skype calls (this was circa 2016, people) and texts and all the ways that long distance friendships used to work.
The following summer death took Todd. It was a cross between expected and not, once we learned all the circumstances, and although that story impacted my life quite a bit, it’s not my story to tell - it’s Ricks. It changed us both. It impacted not just the season we got married in, but the marriage to which we committed, and to the perseverance we’ve put into standing behind each other for eternity.
In the interim I lost two grandfathers, who met their maker in their early 90s, who completed the circle of life, and who very much left an impact on their family.
I met a cousin of deaths in 2018 when I lost the embryo we transferred before Brooklyn, and again in 2020 and 2021 when we lost two more.
Death came barreling into my body in 2021 when Victoria died, and the night I delivered Noah alive, the seconds of watching his heart beat - it’s sometimes all I can think about. That was a different kind of death. It was the kind that you feel from head to toe forever. The kind that lives in the crevices of your body and your mind until the end of time.
That death was wound tightly with the one death we tried desperately to avoid. The one where we knew daily, weekly, it was creeping around corners and leaving sneaky messages that we refused to read. I captured this about a month before she was gone:
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Death is present today, as I hang up the phone and begin writing out a packing list. It's present as I mull over in my brain the catalog of facts and as I mindlessly wipe the tears streaming from my eyes. It's present as I think about how unfair the world is, how much my heart aches, or how hard this trip will be.
In a few days time, I'll find myself on a plane, traveling from the midwest to Orlando, Florida. I'll check into a hotel, where I'll spend most of my waking hour, but my heart won't be in my body. It'll be a short distance away, in the home of a close friend, as she settles into this new reality of hospice care. I'll spend maybe an hour or two each day with her if I'm lucky, but that's all her stamina will allow, and she'll apologize when she dozes off from exhaustion or when she cries out in pain.
Together, across the country, we've navigated this life of her Stage 4 Metastatic Breast Cancer for the last four and a half years. She's fought relentlessly, giving every option careful consideration, weighing every pro and con, trying new treatment options time and time again after each one failed. We've wept together on the phone, we've sent hundreds of texts back and forth, often my asking simply if we still had time.
I needed to know when time was running out.
When death was waiting on the doorstep.
When to book this very specific plane ticket.
I needed to know when I had to go to say goodbye.
Death is present in every moment of this trip as we do just that. And death has been present every moment since I've returned home, waiting for the phone call that she's gone.
In the interim, death is present in every text message and in every update from her sister. Death is very clearly standing down the block, making its way towards her door, getting ready to barge in with no warning and take the very soul that is so precious to us.
If only we could ask death to leave alone.
The last text message I received from Amanda herself was March 26, 2023. Then, there were two caring bridge updates from her sister, and the one I woke up to on April 4th had the words I was never ever going to be able to stomach. She was gone.
Two weeks later, we went to Florida, Rick and I and so many people who loved her and we sat together and cried and shared our memories and lamented the the ceremony and the service and the location and the intention - it had Amanda written all over it. She died with grace and love, finding any way she could to make it easier for the people she was leaving behind.
We all knew at that moment she had no choice but to let go, to surrender, to stop experiencing the worst, most unfair, most brutal pain in life, but it didn]t make saying goodbye or feeling grief any easier. It’s been 16 months and I know in many ways I miss her more now than I did immediately after her passing. Adjusting to a life without her it just hasn’t sat well with me.
Twice in the last year, death tried to come for me. Sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like if I’d let it take me. If meningitis had gone untreated and the abscess in my brain had grown. If the internal bleeding from my ruptured fallopian tube had gone unchecked, I would have too.
And then there was Rowan. The sweet baby that was created against all odds, and yet, didn’t get to live long enough to be held in our hands. What a miracle baby they would’ve been. And I know, to make this a happy ending a lot of people would encourage me to see them as a miracle in it of itself - that Rick and I were truly able to conceive in a way we’d previously been told was impossible - but... I’m not there. It’s only been four months. I’ve only had two cycles since then. So many things changed in my body that day, but what has been infinitely harder is the things that changed in my brain that day too.
Things I’m still desperately trying to claw my way back from. Recovery is a bitch when you don]t have the right chemicals or neuropathways in your brain. And that, friends, is what led me here. To Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy. To a medication (drug) I never expected to take. To questions I never expected to need to answer. To some of the hardest and most desperate therapy sessions of my life.
Death is a real bitch, and if it would be so kind as to not show up again for a while, I’d still take it seriously. I’d still give it the respect it demands. I’d still remember all of the people it’s taken before me, and all of the people it’ll take after me. And the day it’ll take me, too.
Death has been present more often than not in the last 23 years of my life. Death of the people I love. Destruction of the places and things and relationships I worshipped. Death inside my organs - the removal of a gall bladder, a fallopian tube, the fixing of multiple hernias, the ravaging of my intestines, the space been the breaks in my bones - body parts that other people spend their whole lives with, just fine.
If I never saw another doctor, If I never took another pill, If I never had another infusion - well, I probably physically would break down pretty fast.
But maybe too, then I’d get to surrender.