10 I scrolled backward in time, all the way to her.
9 She looked nothing like me, for the obvious reasons,
8 But also for reasons not in plain sight.
7 The auburn locks with perfect, straight fringe.
6 Scarless, porcelain skin, glowing with health
5 But the look in her eye
4 It indicated a stranger
3 I thought, bluntly,
2 "That girl’s
1 Dead."
How did I arrive here?
17 days before the start of my “Jesus year”, I am more suspicious than ever about the fate of the human race and yet, I feel grateful to be alive. I’m transformed—reborn. Spent two years killing off this adorable redhead martyr and now I’m Incredible Hulk-ing my way into my present incarnation. (As a blonde, no less.)
I stopped teaching. That vocation finally beat me down to a pulp and one day, from my bloodied pile of defeat I watched all the marbles roll out of my head across my classroom floor. After giving my resignation on a Thursday, telling my class parents the following Tuesday, and breaking the children's hearts that Wednesday, I returned to my home on June 7th, 2018 feeling that I had relived the mental version of the near-death I had experienced the previous January. I felt cut open—the contents of my heart draining through an apparitional tube into a sack below my bed frame. Nine years of studying, working, volunteering, and paying out my ass to become a Waldorf teacher and I had failed. My entire identity, my philosophy, my ego, my community were all contained in this career and I was leaving it behind. I could no longer sacrifice my own health and well-being in service of others, and I felt like a fucking asshole. But I literally had no energy left to care.
I buried myself under the covers and began setting my alarm for the final day of school, wondering if the meager leftover contents of my brain would manage to sustain me through what would surely be an incredibly emotional day. I turned on the 4:30 alarm, as well as the 4:45 for good measure and exited the clock app. Out of habit, I tapped my thumb on the Instagram icon adorning my home screen in an attempt to find momentary, surrogate joy in the visually perfect lives of my friends of whom I’d seen little since the start of the school year. Oh, a message! Someone sent me a message! Joy! Instant gratification via the tiny computer phone! I opened it.
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My first thought upon reading his message was, “I don’t know what a brain aneurysm is but it can’t possibly be terrible because there is no conceivable way I could endure any more pain in this moment of my life.” The thought was punctuated by a tightening of my chest and a subsequent dialing of every phone number I thought could give me an answer. The flood gates broke and I couldn’t catch a breath. I hoped I was overreacting due to my own fragile mental state, but I suspected that wasn’t actually true. I felt my etheric body trailing like a silken flag in a current of wind above my physical one, which mechanically sprinted out the door. The route to the hospital was traumatically familiar. The scene that awaited me was worse than the one in my own shell-shocked memory—the one in which I was in the hospital bed. This one felt like it would actually kill me.
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The children lingered in long hugs and the parents cried lovingly at me, staring into my bloodshot eyes in longing expressions of gratitude. I faked smiles, continually shifting my weight in emotional discomfort and checking my phone for updated predictions on how many hours she had left. Someone forgot to pick up their kid and I shuffled him impatiently into the office, furious, rather than sad, that my last goodbye would be this abandonment on a tiny chair to reluctant staff ready for summer vacation. I burst briefly into tears in the parking lot and then quickly squelched the hysterics in order to equip myself for driving. The 19-minute ride was agonizing and I suspected every car in front of me on the freeway was trying to ruin my life. I was in such a hurry to be there—to arrive and find a scene different than the one from the night before. I felt I was owed a different scene. Like…a bitch should be able to trade in her cancer card for a 1-Up Mushroom for a friend. That’s only fair.
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The day she died, I finally understood.
I’d spent the previous year and a half feeling completely indifferent to the idea of leaving this earth. 75% of the time I actually felt enthusiastic about the prospect. When I got my diagnosis and found out I wouldn’t physically survive the cancer without chemo, I said “bummer” and accepted my fate. As a card-carrying melancholic and general weirdo, I had never been super stoked about day-to-day human stuff. Life on earth was mostly bogus when I really thought about it. Work is exhausting, capitalism is bullshit and we live in the Matrix. I much preferred hanging in the astral plane amid evening dreams or floating in a ball of light during meditation. But despite all my own controversial opinions, I knew my friends and family members were devastated when they found out I was sick. I knew they were broken by the idea of cancer and frozen in fear of my decision. I saw it in their faces--I was killing them. So I did the damn thing. Despite all my bohemian instincts screaming at me not to poison my body with Western medicine, I fucking went to chemo. And goddamnit, that shit saved my life.
When she died and I felt that insane, strangling loss and feeling of helplessness, I did not say, “bummer”. I took a breath and exhaled. I realized with such clarity that surviving someone else’s death is one billion times more painful than accepting your own. And from the bottom of that deep abyss of sorrow, I felt so grateful to be alive for all those that wanted it.
