I had spent so much time not thinking of the past, or the future. On that day, that night, her last… I wasn’t thinking of the present anymore, either. She lay there, with enough Fentanyl to kill a rhino, gasping for breath. Whimpering for breath. All I could think of was, “Please quit, my love. Please quit. Please.” I’d say it from my chair next to her bed, holding her hand. But what I didn’t say aloud was the thought that would erupt now and then, like a nerve ending being briefly exposed to the air – “Don’t leave me.”
Years became months and weeks and days and hours to… her father waking me. I’d fallen asleep. I looked over and there was no air coming out of her. Her chest wasn’t moving. Heart had stopped beating. And then… they say some see their lives flash before their eyes before they die. I saw my life, our lives. A split-second, surreal kaleidoscope of a slide show – like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And then, BAM! my life was over. Our lives were over. In an instant. Yet, I was still on my feet.
Some days later, I got enough money to pay for her ashes. The cut-rate cremation company’s clerk said, “Okay, it will be a few more days for the cremation process.” They hadn’t cremated her yet; waiting for money, they had kept her body in cold storage.
While I had gone home from hospice with her cat, while friends and family were coming over to see that I didn’t blow my brains out, while I ate and slept and cried… men had come to take her away, put her body in a cold metal box. Waiting. The face that I adored, the body that I had worshipped, the body that I had made love to, so many times… in a cold box, waiting for the fire. People had touched her. Before an operation or a dose of radiation, she’d often give me a smile. And before, and during, a surgery or radiation-blast a voice inside me would scream, “Don’t you touch her! Don’t you touch my baby!”
And there my baby had laid, in a cold metal box. Waiting for the fire.
I thought of all of this in an instant, when a good friend posted this video on Facebook earlier this week. But she shouldn’t feel badly – how was she to know what my triggers are? I didn’t know that this would be one of them. This is something that comes to me almost every day, sometimes several times a day.
I write this in hopes that someone might understand… that I want nothing more desperately than to laugh. I want to get drunk with my friends often, and have enormous amounts of great sex. I want to drive every day with all the windows down and the stereo up. I want to see a sea of familiar smiles, and hear a cacophony of familiar voices. I need this. It shouldn’t be too much to ask for, to work for.
You see, I was somehow granted a bonus round. So far a ghostly existence, but nonetheless an extra inning. I’m still here. Like on the slots Andrea so loved, the colorful characters are spinning by. Spinning for a little while longer. I weep for her, and for us. But I also find myself shedding a tear or three because I have no time, no patience, for anything less than the laughter and joy and love that escapes me.
Because like too many who also weep, I’ve seen a lifetime, two lifetimes, become a moment. End in a moment.
– Steve Stav
