Funeral duties

Several weeks before you died, I admitted to myself the grave nature of your condition and asked you for your Passcode. And since you’ve been gone, I’ve visited that digital tomb numerous times. Today, on this gray Sunday, I’m scrolling through all the photos you’ve taken over the last decade. Selifes in San Diego with your sister. Selfies with me when we drove the Pacific Highway to Cow Hollow. Panoramas of unknown landscapes and screenshots of memes.

And on this gray Sunday, it’s as if I’m traveling back in time. We looked so young and happy, totally unaware of the forthcoming fracture that would break everything. My tears force me to pause (images are indecipherable when one is crying), so I stand, pace around this apartment, and try to become unrestrained. Open yourself to the pain. Ease the pressure from the shadows. But lately, the loss feels like forever, and I sometimes feel it so strongly in my chest I feel I may collapse and never collect my bones to stand again.

I’m lost, and for the first time since you died, I cried out to a god I’ve dismissed and asked it to take me. And before I can complete the command, I’m reminded of my mother, who cried the same words in the days after her second husband died (she would pass just 30 days after his death). I eventually compose myself, enter the Passcode and continue scrolling, knowing I must compose a slideshow of you for your funeral, just five days away. And as much as I desire to put you to rest, I’m terrified, fearful I will no longer have these funeral duties of which to cling. My source of devotion shall be no more. And what will then become of me? This apartment feels like a mausoleum washed in colors only the living can appreciate. And so, I drag my bare feet and feed the cat. And I can’t shake the feeling we’re both just waiting to die.

practically always

We are still alive, but since the diagnosis, we now use the past tense to refer to the lives we now occupy. Every morning the sky is gray, and I hear her hacking cough crashing into walls. It reverberates everywhere. I remove the mask from my eyes, sit up, slouch forward, and the screen drip begins. Reddit. YouTube. Twitch. Twitter. Gmail. Yahoo Sports. Then rinse and repeat. Refresh. Rehash the same empty data that seems to serve no other purpose than feeding data and moving colors to a crippled brain. It's all just different colored distractions. It's something to push out the anxiety and grief and general unwellness. And since the diagnosis, I haven't worked. That's over four months. Since the diagnosis, I've been with her. Practically always. And slowly, day by day, I'm forgetting how to live. The routines are like slow nightmares. The anxiety has me twisting and turning, wishing to contort myself out of this scenario and into something whole and beautiful. Like it used to be. But there's no going back. It's a statistical anomaly, and there's no carcinogen to blame. No purposeful ingestion of something toxic. Just bad luck. Terrible luck. And so now she's planning her funeral and making arrangements. And I'm fearful of what it will look like on the other side of this. I'm wondering how I will shake the terror of living in a place void of you. A vacuum of time and space. Like a ghost sucking up all the air, it will hit me square in my chest. I'll barely stand steady, staggered, and gasping, and I...

But now-- right here-- we are still alive, but since the diagnosis, we occupy lives we never could have imagined.