Games with Death

There are wicked games the living play when death is making it's long stride into our worlds, especially if there is time to consider it's arrival. We play with our positioning: How close do we want or need to be? How will our closeness or lack of presence affect the rest of the living? When do we arrive and say our goodbyes, and will death beat us to the bedside? Do we position ourself to see the decline, to witness death diminish the one(s) we love? And we ask ourselves the questions: Would we rather have death come swiftly, sweep through and pickup the living in it's talons, carry it away? Or does the time left with the dying bring more peace and resolution?

I once had a Scientologist roommate who was reading through one of R.L. Hubbard's massive mahogany leather bound books. That book sat at her bedside and I feared, though was curious, about it's contents. So, one day while she was away I snuck into her room, grabbed the book and took it to my room. I opened the book to the middle and started reading. Hubbard was saying that pain is experienced because actions are too swift. He gave the example of a bullet piercing a body. He said, if the bullet were to be slowly pressed into the body over a long period of time that there wouldn't be pain. I thought about it, even agreed with it, and suddenly felt I was being sucked into Hubbard's prose and brainwashed, so I closed the book and returned it to her bedside, but I've never forgot his philosophy on pain.

I've been avoiding (I am prone to avoidance) the pain that I knew would come from writing about the death of my dear friend, Stephanie, who has fourth-stage squeamish cell carcinoma, cervical cancer which has spread throughout her body to her organs and her lymph nodes. In November, a few short weeks after she was diagnosed, her PET scans revealed that the cancer had fused the lymph nodes around her spine in a large mass that spanned her lower lumbar to the middle of her shoulders. It was when I knew that Stephanie's time would come quickly. It wasn't her doctor's optimistic one-year prognosis that solidified my knowing; in the past two years I've seen two of my people die after the cancer was found near, in, and around their spine. I'm no fool. I knew we didn't have anything close to a year to share our precious time with Stephanie. A few days ago, Stephanie was transferred into hospice care.

So here I am, tweaking cheap-flight websites, trying to make reservations, trying to find the least expensive way to be with and comfort my dying friend, to commune in comfort with her family, and her chosen family, and I'm frustrated and angry that this positioning, this financial game, these questions and obstacles and considerations or even an issue when someone's life whom I care so much about may be gone in an instant. It's a frustrating and ridiculous.

And although all of this emotion of this positioning is so overwhelming that I find myself jolted awake in the middle of the night thinking her time has just come and gone, and pacing in the kitchen with my coffee in the early morning hours wondering how and when I will visit, I am at peace with Stephanie's impending passing. I am at peace with the arrival of death when it eventually comes. It's the time between knowing it will come and it's actual arrival that makes crazy. I've seen it unfurl in in my own family. How they bowed forward in their chairs, and hunched towards the bed with the mouths turned down. And nobody has enough alone time, no one feels they have had their final say, everybody wants for something more. Motivations all seem so suspect.

Whose need is the most genuine, the most important? How do we determine these things as we look upon this intimate process? Whose needs do we put first when there are so many who want to be and are a part of the process, who are dazed by all that needs to be resolved in such little time? I try to leave my own needs out of this scenario, though I am not foolish enough to believe that I also don't have my motivations. Yes, my visit is partially about me and my relationship with Steph, but I also want to be there to lay hands on, and comfort the ones whose pain is more severe than my own. The community of people around Stephanie who love her as much as I do.

I'm coming to you soon, Ms. Stephanie. And although you may not have the appetite, I will be bringing with me your favorite caramels.
With love and with peace in your process.

With love and peace for the many people who love you so much.