The car horn blasts, snapping me back to my senses just as I slam my hands on the hood and instinctively pull my body away from the red and yellow taxi. It screeches to a halt an inch before it hits me. Shock waves run through my body like electrical currents, and my breath catches in my throat as the gravity of what almost happened jolts me into the present. Adrenaline has taken over. All the hairs on my body are at attention. Everything is moving in slow motion, like in the Matrix when Neo dodges a bullet. I just almost died. And the accident would have been my fault because I wasn’t paying attention.
Get it together, Alua! I admonish myself in a familiar way. In the past year I’ve decided that I don’t know how to do anything right. I don’t know how to be a happy Legal Aid lawyer anymore. I can’t figure out how to feel joy. I don’t know how to do life right. I don’t even know how to cross a packed street at 8 a.m.
Until that moment, I had never given my death much thought. Yet instantly, I am clear that I don’t want to die on the street in Trinidad, Cuba, half drunk, last night’s makeup still on my face. My parents would kill me. Being the good Ghanaian daughter I am, I think of the shame I would bring to my family’s name by being splattered on the packed street because of my own negligence. I also think about the thong I am wearing underneath my denim shorts. Thongs embarrass my mother. Like most moms, she spoke at length while I was growing up about what kind of underwear I should be found wearing if I were in an accident. This is not the kind she approves of.
The streets pulsate with the business of daily life: mothers taking young children to school, bike taxis herding people to work. The air is filled with honking cabs, and a few horses clickety-clacking as they carry wheat and other goods along the cobblestone streets. I had thought I was outmaneuvering them all by running down the middle of the street, away from the pastel-colored houses. It was a poor choice. With all the chaos, it is no surprise that I didn’t see the taxi approaching.
Gathering myself after the near miss, I jump to the sidewalk, next to those who’d stopped to take in the scene I caused. I slow down and move more purposefully, but still too fast. I’m late. Yesenia, a woman I’d met only yesterday, is waiting for me. We’d spent the previous night dancing in a limestone cave like our knee cartilage would last forever, our bodies slick with humidity.
When we met, she was standing in the doorway of her house, squinting and waving as I ran past. I was at the end of an eight-mile jog, heading back to my rented guesthouse. “Amiga! Amiga!” she yelled.
When I turned to face her, she began waving more furiously: “Ven aqui!”
I slowed and she joined me in the street, a woman in her mid-thirties with heavily kohled eyes. She had seen me earlier and asked why I was running through her town. In fragmented Spanish, I explained that I was visiting Cuba. As a woman who traveled alone a lot, I was familiar with the next question: Where is your husband?
“No hay esposo,” I replied. No, nor a boyfriend either. Yes, I had chosen to come alone. And no, there was nothing wrong with me—aside from my poor decision-making, my aimlessness, and the depression coating my brain like a cloudy lacquer finish. How could I translate my need for freedom, my questionable taste in man-child musicians, my commitment phobia? How would I find the Spanish words to describe a short-lived, six-month marriage that had ended four years earlier, when I could barely understand what happened in English? How could I explain my abject wanderlust, my desire to escape my skin and a life that strangled me? With no clear answer for what I was doing in Cuba, I shrugged.
Yesenia cocked her head to the side, weighing whether or not to fix my man-free problem. Then she offered to hook me up. We’d go to a well-known hot spot later that night, she offered, in the beautiful historic town of Trinidad. I was curious but not optimistic. After three weeks in Cuba, I’d flirted with my share of Cuban men, and noticed how effortlessly they managed to juggle women. Plus, for one of the first times in my life, I was trying not to disappear into a man.
That evening at the appointed hour, I climbed the two crumbling concrete steps into Yesenia’s apartment. The wooden door was open and the entrance to her home was covered in a cloth curtain. I could hear the radio blasting the popular Cubaton music I’d grown accustomed to on the island. Yesenia sat me down at her small table with its disintegrating, purple-flowered plastic tablecloth and got to work making me beautiful for the man she’d chosen for me. Apparently he was young, handsome, and would love me in such a way that I would never have to travel alone again. Cuba is for lovers, she reminded me, as she gathered up my locs in a high ponytail and secured it with a bright red scrunchie at the top of my head. The look was 1990s Janet Jackson, circa Poetic Justice. She chose a lipstick color that certain generations call “whore red” and enough frosted blue-gray eyeshadow to make the 1980s jealous.
We set out for the club, climbing a steep, rocky dirt path in the dark. I recognized it as the one leading to the Ermita de la Popa church at the top of the hill, from my earlier wanderings in the day. It was pitch black with no humans in sight. As soon as I began to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake, we found a small crowd smoking and chatting beside a large hole in the ground. When we got closer, I could see that the hole was a set of stairs leading down into the earth.
“Espera aquí,” Yesenia said.
I was happy to wait on the earth rather than follow her down into it. Yesenia charged forward to see if the spot was open for the night and, moments later, waved her arms for me to join her. She had not told me that we had to descend into hell to find a man. We took a long flight of uneven stone stairs down and entered a maze of tunnels, which eventually opened to a dance floor. Disco Ayala was set deep in a limestone cave one hundred feet underground. Before long, our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and rows of lights, seats, and a dance floor in the middle became clear. It smelled of old cigarettes, sweat, and wet stone. At midnight, the party was just beginning. Surveying the older European male tourists in tight, acid-washed jeans and the young Cuban sex workers dancing alone around them, I figured I was in for a bizarre new experience. Just how I like life.
The night did not disappoint. But the startlingly large man Yesenia had chosen for me did. He was baby-faced but quite tall, with massive muscles, as though his body had matured much faster than his face. He was handsome, but in the way aunties think of their nephews. Carlos and I were not destined to find everlasting love, but we were all entertained by the performances of shirtless Cuban men lying on shards of glass and performing tricks with swords and fire while we listened to Cubaton and Eurotechno.
The brightness of the early morning sky stunned us when we eventually stumbled out, dripping in sweat and pores leaking alcohol. We meandered down the steep hill back to town, laughing, singing, and promising never to forget the night, in broken Spanish and English. As I went off alone to the room I’d rented in a casa particular, I realized I still had Yesenia’s red scrunchie in my hair. Two hours later, I would need to be up to catch a bus to Santiago de Cuba—a city brimming with vibrant art, music, and the largest population of dark-skinned people on the island.
When my little travel alarm beeped and jerked me awake, I looked at the time and groaned. Then panic set in. I was going to be late for my bus. But first I needed to see Yesenia to thank her and to return her scrunchie, as there were not many new goods in Cuba because of the embargos. I moved as fast as I could to gather my things, which were untidily strewn around the room. My backpack barely closed after my hurried packing. Grabbing a piece of soft, ripe papaya left by my host, I set out to Yesenia’s house to return the scrunchie, take her picture, and make it to my bus—all in twenty minutes. It was in this state that the taxi nearly hit me. In the chaos of it all, I reflexively smooshed the piece of papaya in my hand against the hood of the car and felt it squirt up between my fingers. I cursed.
After my near miss with the car, I finally make it to Yesenia’s home, clammy and sobered by the experience that, it turns out, will shape the rest of my life. She offers breakfast and another meeting with Carlos. I laugh it off, snap her picture, and thank her, running out the door and promising to keep in touch.
The Viazul bus stop is teeming with people when I arrive, panting, with a couple of minutes to spare. Fumes from the idling buses seep into the doorless ticket office. There are two desks, one with a long line and the other without, and a yellowed, laminated sign hung between them: “Boletos.” I join the line behind a white woman in her mid-thirties. Her overflowing backpack, army-green windbreaker pants that zip at the knees, and sensible shoes give her away as a fellow traveler. A tattoo of a red quill pen on her right forearm catches my eye.
“Great tattoo,” I say.
She smiles. “Yeah, I like to write.” Who gets a tattoo of something they merely like? I think.
We strike up a conversation. Her name is Jessica.
In deeply accented English (German? French? I know better than to try to guess), Jessica tells me that she is headed to Camaguey, Cuba’s third-largest city, on the same bus as I and is surprised that I don’t yet have a ticket. Buses are the cheapest way to travel in Cuba, and seats on the Viazul line go quickly. I’m in the wrong line, she informs me. Realizing I’d wasted precious minutes chatting her up, Jessica offers to hold on to my bags and promises with a wink to stall the bus for me. I trust the wink and believe Jessica. Just as I trusted Yesenia enough to follow her into the earth.
While I haggle over ticket prices in a mixture of Spanish and English, I catch sight of Jessica out of the dusty window as she tries to board the bus wearing both of our large travel backpacks. The driver motions for her to take the bags to the underside of the bus. Jessica ignores him. I can hear other people chiming in outside. She ignores them too. I chuckle, recognizing that she is making good on her promise to stall.
Eventually the ticket vendor and I settle on 47 CUC$ for the fare. The ticket should have only cost around 36 CUC$, but I quickly wave it off. Losing 11 CUC$ is not the worst thing my impulsiveness has cost me.
Avoiding the glares of the crowd, I pass through, ashamed when I spot a Cubano who did not get a ticket on the bus and I did—and only because I could pay the higher fare. It stings me, but I barely pause to lament the injustices of my privilege as the bus slowly starts to pull off. I just enjoy the perk, like many who carry privilege do.
I run for the bus, and the driver barely slows down before opening the door for me to jump in. Jessica cheers as I take the last seat next to her in the front row.
“I made an ass out of myself for you!” Jessica giggles, settling in. Besides her shenanigans to hold the bus, turns out she’d convinced someone to switch seats, so that we could sit side by side.
“I know! Why’d you do that?” I ask, still panting. The Viazul’s engine rumbles to life again underneath us. Its passenger cabin is strung with Christmas lights and blaring Spanish love songs. Now we are safely underway: two new friends united by the special and strange intimacy of people traveling alone overseas.
Jessica shrugs, giddy. “It worked, didn’t it?” She asks what brings me to Cuba. I still don’t have a good answer. The truth is less “I’m going through my bucket list” or “I’m a sexy and sassy explorer willing to skirt US travel bans for an adventure,” and more “I’m adrift and taking on water in a big dinghy of depression so I took the first float I could find to see if I could save my own life.” I’ve been wandering around the country, riding horses, going on long runs, drinking rum, practicing Spanish, and hoping to find my way back to myself, back into my life, back into my body.
Until this point, life had come relatively easily to me, despite the dark brown skin I wear. I have a tight-knit, supportive family that emigrated from Ghana to the United States, a stellar formal education, a healthy body, and great lovers. I’ve gone on international trips that most people envy. And, professionally, I work as a Legal Aid lawyer who is supposed to be able to advocate my way into or out of anything. Yet here I am, on a trip for no particular purpose, stuck and deeply unsatisfied.
Back during my senior year of college, when it was time to make big plans, I contemplated how I could be of service. I’m not diplomatic enough to be a politician, even though my dad’s politico friends called me Madame President because I’d debate international human rights policies with them as a teenager. I don’t have enough patience to be a teacher. I don’t want my own kids, and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for the care of other people’s kids.
The law gave me the most options. So I went to law school because I didn’t know what else to do with my one, brief life. Now almost nine years into the profession, I had fumbled my way into a life I despised. I was in the midst of a major depression, a houseguest in my own body. I knew that if I died right then, my last thoughts would be ones of regret.
I spare Jessica the too-soon overshare that I’ve been told scares people away and give her a nonanswer instead: “I’m seeing what I can see.” And I turn the question back on her.
“I’m on a trip around the world,” she says. “I started in the States, now I’m in Cuba. Next I’m going to Argentina, Brazil, then South Africa before I go home to Germany.”
“And you’re on this trip just because?”
Jessica’s tone changes and her eyes darken. “Like you said, I’m seeing what I can see.” She breaks eye contact for a moment, then continues. “I have uterine cancer. These are the places I want to see in the world before I die.”
“Holy shit!” I instantly regret my outburst, but she chuckles. What is the socially acceptable response to this kind of revelation?
I might be sensitive, but that doesn’t mean I’m tactful. Never have been. By virtue of naivete, curiosity, boredom, or in this case, lingering tipsiness, I often miss social cues that say a topic of conversation is inappropriate. I forge ahead. “Is this disease going to kill you?”
Jessica’s face softens. She looks past my head, across the aisle and out the window. “It might.”
“Then what?” I ask. I bite the inside of my lip, instantly wondering if I’d put my big foot too far in my mouth. Again. But I couldn’t help myself.
She doesn’t skip a beat. “Well, then I guess I’ll be dead.” We laugh, the deep kind of laughter that quakes with life’s fragility.
At thirty-six years old, Jessica is only a couple of years older than I am. We both have illnesses that might kill us if left untreated.
I could die of my depression, I think. Until this point and my near-miss car accident earlier, I hadn’t properly considered my own death. The closest I’d come was when teenage AIDS activist Ryan White died in 1990, when I was eleven. That made national news. But this time, it feels . . . different.
I don’t know if it’s my recent brush with death, the festive setting, or whatever else is stirring inside me, but I begin asking Jessica really pointed and personal questions about her life. What will be left undone in her life if cancer kills her? I ask her if she wanted a family. What got in the way of her having one thus far? I ask about her work, her lovers, her dreams, and her sorrows. Finally, I ask her about the end: “What do you think death will be like?”
Jessica tells me this is the first time anyone has asked her these questions or wanted to listen to her talk about her death. Although her oncology program has paired her with a psychiatrist, he is only concerned with how she is living with the disease. He hasn’t asked her about dying. Nor have her family and friends made space for her to talk about this fundamental, existential question. She says that whenever she talks about death, they encourage her to have hope, look on the bright side, and focus on healing.
I immediately wonder why we don’t make space for people to talk about the questions that lie heaviest on their hearts. Maybe because we think it is too painful to hear. I mean, I’m sparing those closest to me from knowing the depth of my own mental anguish. I don’t want to burden them with it. And so my life is full of pretending. I want to protect them from my pain, even as my pain deepens. We all know what’s going on, but no one is saying. This strange loop must be infinitely more distressing for an incurably ill person, who cannot afford to pretend that what is happening isn’t really happening. When someone is dying, this evasion is a form of existential gaslighting.
It breaks my heart that Jessica is dancing alone with death. I feel called to dance with her in that lonely place, turning and turning in the strange beauty of life, the curiosity of it all. The call is clear and unmistakable. It doesn’t require me to be anything other than who I am in the moment. It doesn’t require me to think or to know. It only asks me to feel. With all these thoughts rushing through my brain, my next question for Jessica is purely instinctive. “When you look at yourself on your deathbed, who do you see?”
Jessica closes her eyes and considers my question. “I see the scars from my surgeries. I see gray hair. I see my tattoos. Age spots . . . I see a woman who didn’t do what she wanted to do.” Jessica opens her eyes and tells me how she always wanted to publish a book, to write something for herself. Then her eyes light up: she’s had an idea. Maybe she would write a blog about this trip. Maybe that could be her book!
I’m so excited for her that I squeal. Her quill pen tattoo suddenly makes more sense to me. She pulls out her notebook. Her words begin to flow out so fast that she can barely catch up with her own excitement. I watch in joy, knowing something is unfolding, but unclear about exactly what. We drift into amiable silence as she writes, furiously at first and then, after a while, trailing off.
Jessica smiles to herself after one final sentence, then leans against the window. Her eyes flutter and her shoulders soften. The wrist holding the pen slackens, and the pen falls out of her hand. Asleep, she looks so peaceful.
I put on my headphones, beaming. Together, Jessica and I have stumbled onto something that can make her life feel more meaningful—a handle she can hold to pull herself closer to the life she’s always envisioned.
Looking out the window toward the cirrocumulus clouds blanketing the countryside, I think about what I want for my life and who I want to be at my death. It’s the first time I’m asking myself these questions. I am thirty-four years old.
I realize that the Alua I want to be on my deathbed is a woman who has filled her life cup all the way up and has built a life she feels comfortable leaving. On that bus in Cuba, sitting next to Jessica, I feel far off from being that Alua. I’m a shell of a human, with a mere pinprick of light left inside my body. I feel the heat of shame for not knowing I’ve been living dead for so long. My insides tighten. But at this moment, having talked to Jessica about death, I feel inches closer to the person I want to be on my deathbed than I did in the moments before.
My iPod shuffles and lands on Bill Withers’s “Use Me.” I think about how perfect this song is for the life I want to lead. I’ve always wanted to be of use, useful, used up. That calling led me to my career in legal services, serving low-income communities. But there were parts of me that still weren’t being used: my emotional sensitivity, my penchant for the absurd, my love for humanity in all its messiness. A lawyer must see the world in black and white, legal and not legal. I want to bear witness to the full, three-dimensionality of life instead: the confusion, the stubborn love and loyalty, the cognitive dissonance of it all. The both/and.
What would it take to feel fully used up on my deathbed? If I died happy, what would I look like at the end of my life? I see that future self in my head: lifeless hands that held pain and created pleasure, a slack face wrinkled with smile lines and crow’s-feet, a lifetime of love shimmering outward from the vessel of my body into the hearts of my family and friends.
Looking around the bus, I take stock of the individuals aboard and wonder what end they will meet. There is the bus driver, focused intently on the road ahead. The grouchy woman Jessica convinced to trade seats so that we could sit together. The old man fanning himself with a piece of cardboard. The young mother breastfeeding her child. The child himself.
These people are currently distracted by the daily business of living. One day, they will die. If they sensed the immediacy of life—the preciousness of it, the insignificant significance of it—what would they be doing differently right now? How many unwritten books, undeclared loves, and unfulfilled dreams lie dormant here in these seats and in these bodies? Would they be content dying from the lives they live, or do they hunger for more?
I wonder if they’ve avoided thinking about dying. I wonder if they’ve ever had an experience like the one I’m having with Jessica: sitting peacefully with a new friend in the presence of our shared mortality, comparing notes on death with humor, love, and curiosity. Would an experience like this change their lives the way it’s already changed mine?
I could be that friend, I think.
I could be that friend for a lot of people.
For the first time since my depression took root, I feel tangible signs of life in my body. Talking to Jessica about death has awakened something within me. Eyes wide. Heart open. Spirit engaged. Pulse audible. Breath measured. Laser-focused. My whole being is present in this moment. Scanning my body, I find no resistance within myself. My natural curiosity, compassion, and ease with difficult emotions has helped Jessica make a little peace with her death, and subsequently, her life. It doesn’t require anything more of me other than to be exactly who I am. Death? I toss the idea back and forth in my head like a spiky tennis ball, in disbelief. I feel more alive than I have in years. Talk of death is starting to bring me back to life.
After a few more hours of nonstop talking, save a catnap once my hangover finally hit, we reach Camaguey: Jessica’s stop on the bus. I’ve been dreading the moment of her departure and the subsequent seven hours alone on the road to Santiago. I can’t tell if the effervescence I feel is because of her or because of my newfound awareness. Jessica stands up and slowly gathers her things. I avoid eye contact. We fumble a goodbye, and she takes a few steps and then turns around abruptly. “What do you think of me coming to Santiago with you?” I yelp a whole body “YES!” and she runs off the bus to make sure her luggage doesn’t get pulled off for the Camaguey stop. Then she plops back down beside me.
Jessica and I have no plan, but we have each other. Her caustic sense of humor is a good match for mine. We covet the snacks of the toddler across the aisle, swap horror stories of romance and sex, and make fun of the videos of the Spanish balladeer Camilo Sesto playing on the bus as night falls. The Cuban humidity, bus fumes, our hunger, and the infrequent bathroom stops are inconsequential in our bubble.
Upon reaching Santiago, we scout local stores for Havana Club Añejo 3 Años Rum and a mango juice mixer—as though my liver hasn’t had enough—and make it to the guesthouse I’d booked for the night. A middle-aged man greets us on the porch and brings us inside. This casa particular is a faded pink, one-story house decorated with aged photos of a woman and lace doilies. Yellowed plastic covers the green velvet furniture. Walking slowly through the house as though on a museum tour, the host shows us around.
He shows us a room with two twin beds and a dresser with a box fan perched upon it. The beds are covered with the kind of flowered quilts one would expect at a grandmother’s house. Negotiating a new price for two guests instead of one is easy given our foreigners’ currency. Swigs of rum and the Backstreet Boys playing on my iPod eases the evening with my new friend, while cockroaches the size of rodents scurry across the floor. Our luggage sits on the dresser unpacked to avoid our scuttling new friends.
Jessica and I quickly decide we will find a new place to stay tomorrow. We dance for a while, jumping on our beds whenever our insect friends make their appearances. As the night wears on, signs of Jessica’s illness become clear. She moves slowly, and her legs and abdomen have built up fluid after the long bus ride. She teaches me how to do lymphatic massage while we talk about where I was when the Berlin Wall came down, how old we were when we got our periods, and how her grandparents helped raise her. Jessica’s backpack has a special compartment for the medications she carries—pill bottles of various sizes and colors, daily dispensers with the days of the week printed on them, and loose pills. Medicine galore. And yet here she is living life and bringing her illness along. Living while dying.
Eventually, we settle into the twin beds in this red room with a sun mural on the wall. As I turn out the lights, I hear Jessica turning restlessly in her bed. We laugh that the cockroaches are going to have their own party now. Then she gets serious. “Please don’t freak out, okay?” she says in a whisper. I don’t say anything, but hold my breath, straining my ears and body to pick up on any clue that I should, in fact, freak out. Was she on the run from the German government? Was she sent by my family to keep an eye on me? Would she try to kill me in my sleep? I’m alone in a room on a little island with someone I’ve known for only fourteen hours. Maybe I should be worried.
Tentatively, Jessica begins. “Remember when that car almost hit you?”
“Yes,” I say slowly, confused as to how she would know about my almost-run-in with the car in Trinidad that began my day. It was before I’d met her at the bus stop. I keep holding my breath.
She continues. “I was in that car.”
I don’t believe in coincidences. But I do believe in synchronicities and glitches in the matrix. That said, here’s what I know now, many years later, in my new life: if not for my “coincidental” encounter with Jessica, I would likely be dead. The burden of living an inauthentic life crowded with societal and cultural expectations was suffocating me. I felt like a failure and couldn’t find reasons to continue. Each day I wondered, What is life for? Only the thought of reaching the end of my life as the same broken and empty human made space for me to create the type of life I wanted to lead. By envisioning who I wanted to be on my deathbed, I invited life in: the wonder of sustaining thoughtful eye contact with my lover. The joyful tedium of bedazzling roller skates for me and my niece for her tenth birthday party. The inspiration in a job that helps others. The astonishment of my nephew turning eighteen years old in a blink. The awe of birth. The mystery of death.
Societally, we shun conversations about death. Like Jessica’s friends and family, who encouraged her to hope for healing instead of considering her end, we pretend we have control over disease and over life. Human beings are funny that way. Our clear inadequacy and powerlessness in the face of death is a reminder of our limitations. And understandably, that is scary. But the idea of death is a seed. When that seed is carefully tended, life grows like wildflowers in its place. The only thing in our control is how we choose to engage with our mortality once we become aware of it. Cuba is when I became aware. If you are not yet aware, what in the world are you waiting for?
At the time of this writing, Jessica is still alive and in remission. But—spoiler alert—she will eventually die. We all will.