The Death We Live: Personal Stories of Love, Loss, and Legacy
Terminal diagnosis or not, life is terminal for everyone.
I knew that children died, but certainly not children I knew and then my brother’s friend died. And though he wasn’t my friend, and I didn’t know him well, I knew of him and couldn’t help but think what is this death? What happens when people die? I didn’t really understand it. We don’t talk about death much, so we fear what we don’t know, and in we make sense of whatever we can.
Dying to Know: Personal Encounters with Life’s Hardest Truth
Death in Childhood
The first funeral I remember attending was for my brother’s friend when I was in early elementary school. He died of brain cancer, I think. I didn’t even know what that really meant. I just knew that it was sad and bad because there were so many people crying inside this ginormous temple. While they mourned and grieved inside, I played outside with some kids, ignoring what I knew I didn’t know, making sense of what I could. I felt sad for them.
And the next funeral I attended was when I was in middle school. It was my grandfather’s, and he was old—in his 80s probably— and old people die. I knew that was normal and expected, and it’s sadder when kids die. My grandfather lived in Jamaica and when he died, we didn’t have this closeness that some grandchildren have with their grandparents. Our relationship was as distant as the miles that kept us apart. And at his funeral, I played outside with other kids, too.
And so, I had one outlier with my brother’s friend and one expected-to-me death that I had experienced. By then I understood that death is death. Dying is dying. Once you leave this earth, there’s no returning to it.
Experiencing Death in Adulthood
And then when I was in my late 20s, my grandmother died. She died long before her physical body died because she was diagnosed with dementia about 10 years before her death. And it was hard to get the diagnosis, but it truly became painful when she didn’t recognize me. I could tell by the longing in her eyes that she knew me, but she didn’t know me. She called me by my mother’s name and she got visibly and viscerally uncomfortable because she couldn’t identify me. Rather than make her uncomfortable in her own home—the building and her body— I pulled away. And so, my grandmother died long before she died.
Though I didn’t personally know my grandfather, I knew my grandmother. She lived not too far from me and I grew up spending weekends at her house. All my cousins, my brothers and I would show up. She birthed 15 kids so not only do I have a ton of aunts and uncles, I also have fifty eleven cousins, too! So weekends at grandma’s house were big fun! There was always someone to play with… And get teased by. My older cousins, parents, aunts, and uncles always spoke so highly of her. About how she cared for all her kids by baking and sewing. About how she even took in other people’s kids and adopted one, too. I knew she lived boldly and faithfully by how they spoke about her. I knew she lived!
My Sisterfriend’s Death
And then in my very late 20s, my friend, well, my sister really, Lakia bka Lark was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Triple negative breast cancer. I didn’t even want to know anything about her diagnosis because I knew if I knew, I would go to Google and search and find things that I didn’t want to find. And I also believed, I chose to believe that if I didn’t know what was going on, then it wouldn’t be true. And I can assure you, that is not true. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, honey, if you deny something being true, it doesn’t make it less true, it just makes you ignorant.
I showed up for my sisterfriend. I showed up so much for my sister that some of her friends didn’t even know that moved from Massachusetts to Maryland because I was visiting so frequently. I was there. I was as present as I could be. The phone calls and the text messages and the surprise and scheduled visits and some doctor appointments and hospice. I even signed up for Instagram because of her. She twisted by proverbial arm because that’s where she was sending her updates and I wanted to see what she was telling other people. I wanted to see her pictures of her daily life. I just wanted to see my friend and I saw and experienced her any way I could.
And despite her six month prognosis, she lived for FOUR more years! And she didn’t live a little bit she wasn’t what the Bible calls “the walking dead”. No. She lived out loud! She took life by the horns. She rode that mechanical bull called life and though it tried to buck her she held on tight. Some people disagreed but when staring death in the face, who cares about disappointing others when living your one and only life?!
Some people say some foolish things like “the battle is over” when someone dies. But she didn’t succumb to cancer. She thrived in it! She did everything she wanted to do while she could do it. It was beautiful and majestic and courageous. She got a dog, go married to her rockstar boyfriend, they bought a house which she decorated, had a beautiful baby boy, she worked when she could, she hosted parties. She thrived, she didn’t just survive. She taught me how to live!
After she died, I was reaching for my drug of choice—food. I ate some of the foods that she loved and that I disliked. I ate them hoping that it would draw her closer to me, that it would connect me to her somehow. Surprisingly to me, I gained weight compulsively eating foods that she loved, even the ones that I didn’t, hoping so that I could feel her presence. But I can assure you that her presence was not found at the bottom of the Lay’s lightly salted potato chip bag. I promise you that. The fog of grief has you do some crazy things.
Until finally finally finally!, I came to. The dark glasses were off. I took them off. I was desperate to see and live differently, better. My eyes were open, and I could see clearly again in the Light. And then I chose to begin living my life like my friend lived hers. Thankfully she had already been living her life well and outloud, boldly, long before her diagnosis. She explored things with curiosity. She pursued her passions and she traveled, and she tried, and she failed, and she tried again. Excuse me. She didn’t try she actually did! And then, as we all do, she died. We don’t get to choose how we die, but we do get to choose how we live. And she did more in her four years with her cancer diagnosis than some people do in 10!
Enjoyed this post? Discover the ending of this two-part series in The Inescapable Journey: Embracing Life with Purpose and Passion.
