If there was one question I could ask the Creator/La Luna/Prince/the Orishas/the magical love force that knows all, I’d simply ask:
Why?
Why the heartache? Why depression? Why mosquitos? Why all the pain, the insecurity, the uncertainty, and most of all, why life itself? Why death?
The “why” of life is ever so potent when greeting death. The urge to know the answer is strong, and our emotional need for it can feel so urgent, so overwhelming. Sometimes, a client straight demands to know the answer, looking to me as if I’ll reveal all of life’s great mysteries for a fee. I have compassion for them. It is all I can do, in those cases, to help them gaze into that unknown, and to hold them in their fear and doubt about whether their lives were good enough. I know that fear well, myself.
When I meet Leslie, she greets me, breathless, on the front steps to her humble apartment. At sixty-seven years old, she’s been hooked up to an oxygen machine that has been her constant companion for months. She is in the late stages of a lung disease that has hardened her airways and the few steps from the armchair to open the front door make her lose her breath.
Leslie’s apartment is decorated with various knickknacks—porcelain owls, framed decorative spoons, Russian dolls, pictures of her only daughter, Kathleen. Kathleen has called me to support her mother, who is struggling to come to terms with the disease that will end her life. I help Leslie get back to the armchair, which is in her main living area, facing the door and window. In the twelve steps between the front door and the chair, we stop twice.
She lowers herself into the chair and reaches for the side table, which has everything she needs over the course of the day to steady herself. Remote control. Medications. A book of daily Christian devotions. Cell phone and landline. Tissues. A bag of almonds. Her daughter’s picture. The dirty plate, with remnants of breakfast. A notebook and a pen, which she gathers from the table.
We exchange pleasantries, and then Leslie cuts bracingly to the point: “What does dying feel like?”
It’s her first question. In all the years I’ve done this, I have never been asked this question so directly. I’m floored. “Oh. Well, I don’t know,” I stammer. “But since I have been around a few people who are dying, I can tell you what they have shared about their experiences while they could still communicate. Would that be helpful?”
“Mmm, not quite,” Leslie responds. “I really want to know what the moment of death actually feels like.”
I am at a loss. “I don’t know. I haven’t done it yet, so I can’t speak from experience.”
She cocks her head to the side and looks at me quizzically. “Okay, then let’s move on.” Leslie draws a line on the page, presumably through the question she just asked, and scans her questions again. “What happens after we die?”
I feel a smidge of relief—not because I know the answer, of course, but because I’m asked this question constantly. Most of us have some beliefs about what happens after we die, but people who are at the end of their lives are particularly confronted with it. Beliefs are often like a murky lake for those on the precipice about to jump in. There will soon be evidence about what lies at the bottom. The best I can do is help people get clear about what they think happens. I’ve noticed that even the most religious among us quietly begin to second-guess their beliefs when they know they will soon find out the answer.
“I don’t know that answer either,” I tell Leslie, “since I’m still here with the living.”
As a rule, I don’t much discuss my viewpoint about an afterlife with my clients. It’s private. Plus, I want to be an unstreaked mirror for the dying, as they work through their own ideas. It is their death. I get to have mine later. In a classic doula move, I turn the question back to Leslie. “What do you believe happens when we die?”
“I don’t think it matters what I believe since I want to know what actually happens,” she answers. “Can you help me with that?” She takes another pained breath as the oxygen machine next to her whirs softly.
“I can’t tell you for sure since no one who has been all the way there has ever been back to tell us,” I say. I tell her that it might be more helpful to talk about what she’s come to believe, because we pick up bits and pieces from religion, science, culture, movies, our fears, etc. But Leslie cuts me off. “I don’t want to play the guessing game,” she insists. “I want to know. Are you telling me that you don’t have the answer?”
Fearing I am failing her but seeing no way through, I nod. “You’re right. I don’t know. I can’t know for sure until I die.”
“Okay.” Returning to her notebook and forcefully drawing another line on the page, crossing out the question, Leslie continues. “Is dying painful?”
Finally, a question I can answer with some clarity. “From what I understand, dying itself isn’t painful. The pain that people experience at the end of life is typically a function of the disease process, and not from dying itself. Your hospice team will be well equipped to give you pain medication so that you are not uncomfortable while you die.”
“So you’re saying that I won’t be in pain?”
“I’m saying that any pain you experience from your disease should be well controlled by your doctors. We can talk to your doctors about your concerns and make a plan to address them. Does that ease your mind a bit?”
“Kinda. I want to know if it will hurt.”
“It shouldn’t.”
Leslie takes a few more breaths and stares at her notebook blankly. I can’t tell if she just needs a moment to gather her thoughts or if she is growing impatient with me. She flips the page and drags her pen down it, lingering for a moment halfway down the page.
“When I lose consciousness, how much longer will I have before I am dead?”
Shit. I am starting to feel useless. “It varies from one person to the next. Some people die really quickly after they close their eyes for the final time, and others hang out in the in-between space for days. There is no way to know for sure what your process will be.”
Leslie exhales sharply. It could be her disease, although it sure sounds a lot like impatience. “Can I communicate with my daughter after I die?”
Here is another bit I can work with. I can talk with Leslie about the parts of consciousness she believes exist after we die. We can talk about the little inside jokes she shares with her daughter. We can explore the ways in which Kathleen will feel close to her mother after her death when she hears those key words or images. I can share stories I’ve heard about hummingbirds and butterflies that refused to leave the sides of those who are grieving. But I am losing faith that any of this would serve as an adequate answer to Leslie’s questions.
The real work we are doing together emerges. Leslie is grappling with the great unknowns of death and the surrender it requires. For most of her questions, there is simply no adequate answer. I wonder if, deep down, she knows this. Perhaps a spiritual advisor would have been better for her, and I suggest that she also ask these questions of the chaplain on the hospice team. Maybe I could have offered pithy platitudes or told her whatever I imagined she wanted to hear. Sometimes I wonder if it is the more compassionate thing to do. But the true answer to most of the questions about death is “I don’t know.”
I ask Leslie whether she’d felt any communication with the people in her life who had already died. She tells me her dead aunt’s favorite decorative spoon is the only one that falls off the wall from time to time, and that she loves that her aunt is quietly telling her that she is still there. She softens toward me a bit as she flips through her notebook again. After a thick uncomfortable silence, she asks tentatively, “How much time do I have left?”
My heart breaks. I smile a soft smile and bravely hold her gaze. I say nothing.
“Let me guess,” she says. “You don’t know.” She exhales. I hold my breath.
Finally Leslie shuts her notebook with some force. I am right that she has grown impatient. “So what do you know?”
“Not much, clearly!”
We chuckle uncomfortably.
“So what are you here for?” Leslie asks with a sigh.
I explain my role as a companion and offer to support her in the tasks she can control. I assure Leslie that she is asking all of the right questions and doing all of the hard work. Reminding her that the questions she asks are ones that no earthly person can answer, I encourage her to stay immersed in the questions. Some do not require an answer. Some have no answer at all. This is the hard part of dying. It is also the hard part of living. How can we stay present with today not knowing if there is a tomorrow?
In elementary school we are taught that you can gather enough information to aid in problem-solving if you answer five basic W questions: who, what, when, where, why. However, it’s not remotely helpful when thinking about death. When applying the five W formula from our elementary school education, it is without use.
Who dies? Everyone. No one in the history of time has escaped death.
What is death? Science and experience tell us that death is the cessation of all critical bodily functions and activities necessary to sustain life.
When do we die? Unless a person chooses the date and time of their death, it will remain unknown until that very last breath.
Where do we die? See “when,” above.
Why do we die? Major religions, philosophers, and people on mind-altering substances have grappled with this question forever. And no one seems to have an answer good enough to appease us.
No wonder death makes us so uncomfortable. We can’t gather much information about it, and gathering information is what makes us feel safe. Thinking about death drives us directly into the discomfort of “I don’t know.” In my work supporting people through dying, I meet many who cling to what they think they can control, to avoid surrendering to life’s biggest “I don’t know.”
Getting comfortable with the “I don’t know”s in death work has humbled me. No certainty exists in the practice of death companioning. At times it leaves me feeling powerless to help my clients. I can’t take away their discomfort over the uncertainty, nor can I provide information to make it more comfortable. I can’t fix their fear. The best I can do is be there with them as they try to create answers for themselves, while practicing surrendering into the unknown. There are things we can control, such as handling our affairs and saying our “I love you”s and “you hurt me”s. But the big questions will always remain unanswered.
Getting comfortable with the “I don’t know”s in life has also humbled me. Life is an “I don’t know.” We don’t know what will happen in the next minute. When we are present to this, we feel piddly, pathetic, and powerless. So we busy ourselves, staving off the existential dread with chores, tasks, addiction, work, sex, and anything else we can do to avoid our discomfort.
When we open ourselves up to the discomfort of not knowing, that’s where all the juice lies. When we think we know, we are not pliable. We are stagnant and stuck. Opening ourselves up to the discomfort of not knowing means opening ourselves up to the magic of what may be—the place of pure boundless potential where anything is possible. It allows the humans we meet along the way to guide us back to ourselves and our individual truth. Life unfurls before us. This is the only knowing available. The unknown is precisely what makes us human. I rely on this truth with every client.
Leslie dies less than a year after our initial meeting. In the time between our first meeting and her death, I come to her home and sit with her several more times. Her big questions remain, but rather than looking to me for answers, she’s getting comfortable with not knowing and listening to her own truth—the only one that matters. My job both as a death doula and a human is merely to witness her in the discomfort and her vulnerability of not knowing what’s to come, and to hold her there until she finds out the truth for herself.
In my favorite movies, the main character always experiences a blinding revelation: Celie finds her power and curses Mister in The Color Purple, and Cher Horowitz realizes she’s in love with her stepbrother, Josh, in Clueless. There are big fireworks and a fountain erupts as it dawns on her.
In real life, the truth of who we are and what we want doesn’t often reveal itself in one climactic moment. The path toward personal truth is slower, maddening, excruciating, and piecemeal. Life leaves us bread crumbs to follow. It is up to us to follow these bread crumbs down the path, one by one. They can lead us somewhere that finally feels like home. At the end, we might have an “I love Josh!” moment ourselves.
I was one of Leslie’s bread crumbs.
Elián González, of all people, was one of mine.
After a few frustrating weeks trying to settle into my meditation practice at Kristin’s, where time moved like molasses and my mind wouldn’t stop wandering, my practice started to stick. As if on well-worn train tracks, my mind constantly wandered back to my disease and whether I would get healthy again. I wondered how I’d gotten here and about the choices I’d made. I wondered about my mistakes and people I’d hurt. I wondered about my ex-boyfriends and how they put up with my flighty, noncommittal nature. I wondered if my family would be heartbroken about how much I’d been hurting.
During one morning meditation, my mind wandered to Elián. A Cuban citizen, he emigrated to the United States in an inner tube with his mother. She drowned along the way and Elián, who was six years old at the time, was thrown into an international custody battle between his relatives in the US and his father in Cuba. Elián must have also been in the deepest grief. His name dominated the news; you couldn’t enter a gas station without hearing about him.
In June 2000, a US court of appeals ruled that Elián had to be returned to Cuba and he was forcefully removed from the home of his paternal relatives. The front page of every newspaper showed the image of a scared little boy with Border Patrol guns pointed at him and his uncle, hiding in a closet. I was horrified at the force used to retrieve a child, and the image haunted me for months.
Twelve years later in meditation, Elián’s face resurfaced in my mind and I couldn’t shake him.
After that, I was eager to find out what had happened to Elián. I learned that he had become a member of the Cuban army, which led me down a rabbit hole. I read about the United States embargo, the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, and the history of Cuba’s leadership. I looked at Cuba’s geography and culture. I was reminded that one of my favorite bands, the Buena Vista Social Club, was from Cuba.
I was intrigued in that way that felt familiar to me. I was also wary of my own tendencies: In one of the toughest moments of my life, was I seeking out another distraction? Why was I so curious about him?
Unclear on the answers, I dragged myself away from the computer and ate the baby carrots and hummus Kristin had left for me on the counter that morning. Then I headed to the library on Luke’s red Schwinn ten-speed, pumping my legs against the pedals, wind in my hair. I was returning a book called Dying to Be Me. It’s the memoir of a doctor, Anita Moorjani, whose organs failed after a dance (not a battle) with cancer. She details her near-death experience and comes to acknowledge the root of her disease, thereby healing herself. The book had jumped off the shelf when I was at the library a few days earlier. I was inspired and wondered if I could find the root of my disease and heal myself.
When I got to the library, there were a few people milling about with petitions I was not in the mood to sign. Despite the bike ride and listening to the Buena Vista Social Club all morning during my Cuba/Elián deep dive, I was grouchy and irritated. I’d been that way for months—depression’s fault. But the library was one of the few places that lifted my spirits. I was looking forward to getting inside. Reading books still provided a reliable ticket outside myself. I returned the Moorjani book and grabbed a few more: The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho, My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, and Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra.
Outside the library, a lanky young man holding a clipboard tried to catch my eye. “Excuse me, miss!” He raised his voice while he moved toward me.
I looked to the ground and kept walking. Isn’t this universal language for leave me alone? Evidently, he didn’t speak it.
“Hi, do you have a minute for the environment?”
“No, I’m really busy,” I lied, knowing damn well I didn’t have any place else to be for months. The man followed me.
“It will only take a minute. Have you ever heard of Greenpeace?”
Turns out it didn’t matter, because he was gonna tell me anyway. As the fellow extolled the virtues of the environmental organization, his squeaky voice all out of proportion to his tall, sinewy frame, I felt my heart soften. His passion for his work made me slow my pace. After talking with me about the dangers of climate change and its effects on the rainforest, he made the pitch: “So would you consider donating?”
I told him I was on a fixed budget and asked if there was something I could sign instead. He kept pushing, and I started to get impatient. I had a whole lot of nothing to get back to! Finally getting the picture that he would get no money from me, the man offered me a Greenpeace pamphlet as a parting gift. He reached into an old, dark blue leather messenger bag to retrieve it. It had cracks on the single strap and a few frayed strings hanging off it. Across the front, emblazoned in red, were the Spanish words Cuba te espera.
I motioned impatiently toward his bag. “What does that mean?” I knew the answer with my rudimentary Spanish, but I still looked outside myself for an answer.
The young man looked confused. “You mean this?” he asked, pointing to the slogan. “It means ‘Cuba is waiting.’”
I caught my breath. My eyes narrowed. Juicebumps.
Apparently, Cuba te espera was an advertising slogan from the days when Cuba was widely open to U.S. tourists. Nowadays, there is no getting there for Americans (at least not officially) unless there is a legitimate learning purpose. The guidelines seemed strict, and only to be violated by the adventurous. Or the foolish. Or the desperate. I was all three.
“Have you been to Cuba?” I ask, my curiosity piquing by the second.
No, he answered, but a few friends of his had. “You’ve got to go through Mexico or one of the Caribbean islands so you can do whatever you want there,” he told me. “You also have to tell them not to stamp your passport when you get there because if you get caught, there could be a hefty fine for not following the rules.”
I nodded slowly, leaning toward him, hanging on to his every word. “I was researching Cuba this morning,” I told him tentatively. I went on to mention Elián González and some of his life updates I’d just read about.
This guy was way too young to remember Elián. He squinted at me, politely uncomprehending.
I nodded at his bag. “You think this is a sign?”
Shielding my eyes with one hand from the sun, I waited for a response from this clipboard-toting kid. I was desperate and would have accepted anything, from anyone, as confirmation that Cuba was a good idea. I saw everything as a clue about how to get out of depression.
The young man shrugged, while I tried to ignore the champagne bubbles forming in my blood. “Might be,” he offered.
That was enough for me.
I raced home on the Schwinn with my backpack full, my heart near bursting from exertion. It was the fastest I’d moved in months. Throwing my backpack on Paco, my trusty sleeping pad, I hurried back to the desk I’d left only an hour earlier. The search page I’d left open about the Cuban missile crisis was still open.
A few hours later, I’d found a route through Cancún and a tourism company that would help me complete official documents to enter the country legally, using the educational purpose loophole. The tour was strict as to not violate the U.S. travel restrictions—but after the first three days, I was going to go AWOL and travel on my own. I just needed the tour company to get into the country and to get my treasured passport stamp legally.
The plan was coming together seamlessly—except for the fact that I was clinically depressed, hadn’t cooked myself a meal in six months, and relied on Kristin for my most basic needs. How was I going to navigate international travel by myself? I didn’t know but I didn’t care. I was still doing stupid shit. But Cuba was waiting.
Before Kristin got home from work and could talk me out of it, I’d booked a flight to Cancún for two weeks from that date. I figured that would be enough time to regain some basic life skills, learn a little Spanish, and convince my family and friends that I would be fine traveling alone. Right?
All the legal training in the world couldn’t have prepared me for the fight everyone put up when I told them I was going to Cuba by myself. I protested that I’d been traveling alone internationally for fifteen years. Kristin reminded me of the day I cried for hours over my missing shoe. My therapist asked how I’d be able to get in touch with her. My mom—always nervous about my international travels anyway—could barely disguise the worry in her voice. I could see her furrowed eyebrows and rounded shoulders over the phone: “Oh, okay,” she said, her telltale response to one of my cockamamie ideas.
My sisters tried to convince me to go the next year.
My dad reminded me that Cuba has terrible international relations with the U.S.
They were all correct. It was a terrible idea. And I was listening to the exact same voices that had propelled me all around the world in search of myself only to wind up with nothing. After all, I’d spent the last decade leaping into escape pod after escape pod whenever I hit a rough patch. How could I be sure that Elián and his heartrending story wasn’t an excuse I was beginning to concoct, to sow chaos and run from my life, when what I needed was to stay still, confront it, and find some peace?
I’d found an inkling of peace in my meditation practice, but the deeply ingrained impulses that send us running away from ourselves run far deeper than inklings. Sometimes these impulses crash us directly back into ourselves and force us to confront something we’ve always known but fear to acknowledge.
All I knew then was that I felt a hint of a tingle in my blood for the first time in—I couldn’t remember how long. Everything in my life, at that moment, was a big NO. Cuba felt like a thundering YES. I had to go, even as I fought with myself about it. Each night I tossed and turned, nightmares of being lost in the country with no one to rescue me. It was a possibility. Would I fall back into old habits and patterns? I’d tried this “travel cure” before and it never worked. What was that old line about the definition of insanity? What made me sure this time something would be different?
But the little bit of light I had inside my body—the tingle that whispered “Cuba is waiting”—was louder than my fear. I told my parents I’d email them daily, and they would share the info with my sisters. I planned a lengthy check-in with my therapist once a week. I promised to continue my meditation practice. I gave myself permission to not have the answers. To take my time. To fuck it up. To tell myself the truth about how I was feeling. And to forgive myself regularly. To hold myself with all the tenderness of a baby bird. I felt like one. Fragile. A walking nerve ending.
Kristin’s home had been a womb. For six weeks, I’d let myself be needy. I’d let Kristin see all of my broken parts and let her help me put them back together. Now, I was walking back into the world, whether I was ready or not.
At the airport, finally walking away from her into the terminal, I shivered. I worried I wouldn’t remember to eat. I stood at the terminal, looking at the “Cancún” sign. Was I the same me, going around in the same sad circles, or was something . . . different? If so, was it me or the situation that had changed? I couldn’t be sure.
After all, here I was again, running again. Was I succumbing to boredom and restlessness once more? I had come to think of my restlessness as my Achilles’ heel—the fatal flaw guaranteed to keep me unhappy. Restlessness was that voice screaming at me to put down the paperwork, to break up with the partner, to book tickets to dubious locales. It was the voice that kept me unfocused in school, unreliable at work, flighty in love. I had been locked in a mortal battle with that voice for so long and had suffered so much.
And yet.
Maybe the voice hadn’t caused my suffering. Maybe, instead, my suffering had come from my refusal to heed it. Maybe I was forever fidgeting because I was fighting against the urgent message it was sending me. Maybe what I needed, finally, was to wake up to that voice inside of me, and acknowledge, finally and fully, what it was trying to tell me:
ONE DAY YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.
It is the simplest truth of them all, and yet it is the one we fight the hardest.
We push it away. We procrastinate. Death is something that happens to other people, or else to us in a future so distant it’s the same thing as “never.” We prioritize all the things that matter the least at the expense of those that matter most.
People wait entire lifetimes to see the Great Wall of China until they are too sick to travel, and save the bottle of Veuve Clicquot till they can’t drink anymore.
We wait till tomorrow to make that important phone call, until Friday to wear the purple lipstick, or for the summer to start working on the clubhouse for the kids. Before we know it, we have an illness, then a diagnosis, then we are knocking at death’s door.
Life is now. It’s right here. This is it.
The past is just a series of memories coded in the hippocampus. Tomorrow, forever a day away, is a myth and an illusion of our brain’s insistence on linear time. This moment is the only one that exists. In the very next moment, you could also be gone, a memory in someone else’s hippocampus.
As it turns out, having a personality like mine—passionate, sensitive, creative, curious, quirky—has made me uniquely awake to this truth. As a lawyer, my impatience for bureaucracy and focus on ultimate truths and compassion had me crawling out of my skin. In death work, this focus helps me be present with my clients and to help them be present with themselves. Firmly rooted in my body. My habit of forever seeking without any promise of finding helps me guide clients through the terror of the unknown. If there was an answer to the eternal why, I wouldn’t want it. This way, I can keep savoring the delicious mystery of every facet of existence. Who I am is not a defect. Who I am is a gift.
So yes, I was running away from something as I waited for my flight to Cuba. But I was also running toward something. I didn’t know why or who it was yet, but I knew she was there somewhere. I found her in Cuba on a Viazul bus, in the electrifying company of a German woman traveling the world to see what she could see, before uterine cancer might end her life. I found her by imagining myself on my deathbed for the first time. And with my death as my guide, I will find her over and over again, continuing to follow my curiosities, my truth, and my bliss until—at last—I die too.
Every single person I’ve had the honor of accompanying toward their death has left me with an invaluable lesson about life, showing me the myriad ways you can choose to live it—and die. They all live inside of me, and their lessons do too.
But when it comes to following your truth fearlessly, naysayers be damned, there are few who moved me as much as Ms. Bobbie.
I meet Ms. Bobbie a few years after I start my death work practice. Her daughter has asked me to sit with her once a week on the days she and her sister can’t be there as a companion. In a short time it becomes clear that my work with Ms. Bobbie is to do a long-life review, strolling down memory lane and creating some context to her life. I glean this from the stories Ms. Bobbie tells and retells as she keeps her focus on the past and the life she created in an attempt to wind it down. Nothing remains undone in her life, and there are no tasks left to complete.
Born in 1923, Ms. Bobbie has just turned ninety-four years old and is confined to a bed in an eldercare facility in Los Angeles after she’d lost the ability to live by herself. Her bed is the first of three, separated by curtains in a dim room, farthest from the old box television bolted to the top right corner. Parkinson’s disease has shriveled her hands, and her legs can no longer hold her body’s weight. Yet her spirit is full, and Ms. Bobbie is enthusiastic for company. “Baby, look at you! You came to see me looking goooood!” she says with twinkling eyes every time I walk in the door, so I make sure to dress up for her and sashay. She asks questions about my outfits, my relationships, my jewelry. I usually put one of the pieces on her to wear, moving the rings past her knobby knuckles. She looks at it and smiles, pretending to pose. She is also eager to share the stories about her life with a fresh set of ears. I imagine that her family members have heard these stories dozens of times and might be tired of them. I pull up a seat on her left side away from the cream-colored curtain, slightly dirtied by the hands that pull it repeatedly during the day to restore a semblance of privacy to the residents.
During our visits, Ms. Bobbie entertains me while I lotion her thin hands, paint her nails plum, and tweeze her chin hairs that have grown wiry in neglect. The maroon velvet photo album on her nightstand holds a lifetime’s worth of memories and smells faintly of Shalimar perfume. As a traveling nurse, she had been afforded rights to travel during the Jim Crow era even though she is Black. She brags about the places she’d seen that her friends had never heard of. Ms. Bobbie has been to China and wishes she could show me the pearls she’d bought as evidence. They’d been sold to pay for her stay in the eldercare home. She tells me of the husband she’d run off with a gun once she found out he’d cheated on her. She shared her other divorces—four in total, with many lovers in between. While I brush her hair, Ms. Bobbie insists she was one of the first Black women to wear her hair in a French roll in the US, because she’d seen it in Paris. She’s lived in twenty-six homes in Los Angeles and holds pride in integrating a couple of neighborhoods. “You shoulda seen their white faces when I walked out in my robe and curlers on Sunday mornings to fetch the paper.” When asked about how many great-grandchildren she’d had, with a snort Ms. Bobbie replies, “Baby, I lost count.”
While she is nearing the end of her life, she is also still full of it. Even though she often repeats stories, Ms. Bobbie’s memory for detail remains sharp. Over the course of a year, I watch her health slowly decline. Her stories get shorter and she’s lost interest in eating except for the oatmeal cream pies you find at the gas station that I sneak in to her. They are soft enough for her to chew without her teeth. Her interest in having her hair brushed and nails painted also wanes.
In what turns out to be our third-to-last visit, I roll her out to the small courtyard in a wheelchair to look at the orchids she loves. They are finally in bloom and Ms. Bobbie is in awe of their color—magenta in the middle, crowned in white. I ask her if her ninety-four years—almost ninety-five, she interjects to remind me—make some kind of sense to her. She’s had such a complex life. Women of her age typically got married, stayed that way, didn’t work, and had children. But Ms. Bobbie carved her own path. I hope for a magic quote to ease a deep-seated fear that I am still doing life wrong. Maybe I should have stayed at Legal Aid. Maybe I should have stayed married to Kip. Maybe I should have had some kids.
In her casual way, Ms. Bobbie says, “Baby, I ain’t figured shit out. My life was so messy. And I wouldn’t change a goddamned thing.” She pauses, purses her lips, and moves her jaw back and forth, mashing up the oatmeal cream pie in her gums. “Boy, it’s been one hell of a ride.”
Three weeks later, I get a phone call from one of her daughters to tell me that Ms. Bobbie has had a cardiac event. I offer comfort to her daughter and tell her that I am available for updates if and when she’d like to give them. Privately, I dismiss it as a minor occurrence since Ms. Bobbie has navigated much more in her life and comes through with stories to tell about it. A few minutes later, reality sets in. Ms. Bobbie’s wild ride will soon be ending. She dies a few days before her ninety-fifth birthday, an occasion for which she’d planned to wear a red sequined dress with her hair done up in a French roll.
I am honored to be invited as a guest to Ms. Bobbie’s funeral. It is not unusual, as I grow close to my clients and their families during the dying process, but this one is different. I’ve never met any of Ms. Bobbie’s family members—our service agreement was made over the phone, documents were signed electronically, and my visits with Ms. Bobbie were one-on-one. Just me and Ms. Bobbie. I know names and stories, but the only faces are old yellowed photographs of moments captured forty or fifty years ago. Being at her funeral, I can feel Ms. Bobbie there. Most of the people look similar, as many of them are related to her and each other. Her eulogy, delivered by her oldest grandson, is intimate and shares stories more absurd than the ones I’ve heard. It adds layers to the woman who fought to live on her own terms at a time when life was supposed to be a cookie cutter version of one. This is her legacy, and it is stunning. I weep silently in the last pew in gratitude for her example.
There is a societal myth of “having it all.” It’s the one that says we’re supposed to have great jobs, which are also our life purpose and passion, visible abs, successful children, clean houses, doting spouses, and perfect eyebrows. But eyebrows get overplucked in the early 2000s and never quite grow back. Human beings can never be perfect. At some point, every last one of us will weaken, come apart, and die.
Many of us reach the end of life still ruminating on the things we believe we were “supposed” to do. But there is no guidebook to life. We just come in a sack of matter waiting for life to do what it will. Making peace with the phantom-life guidebook is a work many only do on the deathbed, when it’s too late to correct course. While living, we can make a life that we can feel comfortable dying from.
I’ve spent so much of my life trying to untangle myself from the thicket of the expectations of others and unlearn the rules that society gave me about what life should be. Living my life in “supposed to” has brought me more pain than purpose and certainly more sadness than satisfaction. The question I ask myself second most often is still, “Am I doing this right?” (The first question is “Am I hungry or bored?”)
The answer is always YES. I am hungry. And yes, I am doing it right. No matter what anyone else might be thinking. It is my life and I am the only one who will have to reckon with the choices I made on my deathbed.
We only know what kind of story it is once we know the ending, and we want a Hollywood ending. We want to wrap it all up with a shiny bow where there might be a steaming pile of shit. Life doesn’t work that way. Death doesn’t either. It can be tangled, torturous, fraught with surprises and hard left turns. That pretty bow to sit on top of a life might not come. It could be the wreath that sits atop a coffin.
All we know is that everything ends. Our collective death denial inspires us to behave like we can live forever. But we don’t have forever to create the life we want.
For life’s sake, don’t die with a freezer full of bananas. Make the banana bread. Scream into the pillow. Take a nap. Eat the cake. Forgive yourself. Buy the shoes. Apologize to the people you’ve hurt. Watch the birds make a nest. Tell your truth. Tell the ones you love that you love them. Fuck. A lot. And make love. Quit the job. Or take the job. Whatever it is that you know you must do to reconcile your life with your death. Do it. Do it today. And don’t stop until you get enough.