RSVP
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I’ve been thinking about having a funeral for myself.
The invitations will be awkward. How to explain it?
Perhaps:
You might have noticed that I haven’t seemed like myself for a while now. That’s because the person you knew — she’s passed on. I’m sorry. If you’d like to begin the mourning process together, RSVP.
My days are haunted.
I keep slipping under these liminal moments, waves of me-not-me-anymore. It’s worse when I’m doing something that I used to do before.
In the tight circumscribed circles of COVID-19, I slide into them several times a week. Weeding the flower beds; reading on the porch in the evening; driving certain well-worn routes.
A flash of familiarity, then pain so sharp it blurs with the physical. I seem to see her, right there.
Who I was.
I look so whole. I have so much energy.
I’m gone.
She’s gone.
The vision fades, was it ever really there?
I ache, and swallow, and try to breathe.
She shadows me, I shadow her.
She reaches for the toothbrush a moment before me and I flinch back. We both laugh.
Sometimes I resent her so deeply I want to spit acid at her.
How dare you? How could you think you ever had problems? How could you squander every single good moment when you could have been happy?
Sometimes I just want her to hold me.
She disappears at the doctors’ offices, of course.
It’s where she started to die.
This absence is awful, too, but in a different way, as the medical appointments erode from sharp novelty to grinding routine. I know why — it’s my own resistance, my sour resentment, coupled with the expectation of what’s to come: charts, questions, timelines, medications (are you still taking these?), progress reports, mental health checks.
How are you feeling?
I’m OK.
OK.
I can’t tell if I love or despise how inadequate those words are. They’re wrong, they’re lying, but they also protect me. I don’t have the energy to say how I am anymore. Even just trying feels like pressing hard on bruises, so I choose the smallest possible package and tie it up for everyone.
OK.
What can I say?
I don’t know how to mourn for myself. I don’t deserve to mourn — it’s not that bad. People are dying, all my limbs are intact, it’s not cancer, for God’s sake.
It’s just pain.
It’s not even constant, or at least not the way it used to be. That’s progress, I know. I don’t have to scrabble at those bare scraps of moments upon awakening, those flimsy dissolving heartbeats when the pain was absent.
I get whole stretches of time, now. Vast expanses, clear and light. And though the pain returns unpredictably, inevitably, I counsel myself to be grateful (be grateful, damn you).
I remember how it used to be. My body remembers — Hell, I think it may be written on my bones. When the pain never left me. When it curled up next to me in bed. When it was there even in my dreams.
Recalling this terrifies me. It makes me want to throw up.
That’s not how it’s supposed to be, is it? Once you’ve endured something, you become stronger.
Don’t you?
I don’t feel stronger. I feel diminished, incorporeal. Like I’m the real ghost, holding to the forms of my past but lacking the substance.
Nobody gave me a pamphlet. So You Have Chronic Pain Now (During a Pandemic!). Providers suggested therapy, for “coping strategies.”
Therapy helped, it didn’t help, it helped — did I want to be helped?
Do I want to let go?
I don’t have a progress report or a timeline for this unmarked grief. I used to drive myself frantic with the question: Is it better today? Worse? The same? I’m flailing in this alien ocean, I have no maps.
Maps don’t help you when you’re drowning, anyway.
I gather good moments like catching fireflies at dusk. Little bits of shine and light. I can’t ever keep them, but when I focus on them, I can convince myself that they exist.
It’s just sometimes not clear to me if I exist. How I exist, so ill-fitting in my own life.
It’s not all loss, is it?
Parts of her I think I’ve kept. Her love for the absurd — there are moments in the multiplicity of exam rooms that are so ridiculous, so pathetically inane, that I almost laugh aloud. I could chart all of the hold music I’ve listened to across axes of Soothing and Upbeat, though the one with seagulls (seagulls!) will remain a delightful outlier.
Like her, I seek the sublime in nature, watching currents of wind caress the forest behind the house, tracing tributaries down the hillside.
Missing parts — perhaps they’re starting to grow in. New shoots, too tender to even look at.
Who knows what they might grow to become?
I need to let her go. I want to do it gracefully, but it won’t happen that way. I’m not the stoic at the funeral, or even the picturesque weeper. I’m the snotty, broken down, hiccuping mess that you pass the tissues to and try not to look at.
She’s already gone.
I know that.
Do I want peace? Acceptance? Hope?
Yes.
Most of all, I just want to be whole again. Not a patchwork of coping strategies and positive thinking. A true wholeness, one that makes me feel like I can stand again without trembling.
Is everyone here?
We might as well begin.
We are gathered here today to remember.
To love.
And to let go.
