Death and DoorDash and Goodbye Hello

A few minutes ago I ordered Diet Coke and Swiss Cheese from DoorDash. Oh, and a kombucha. I am capable of many things, but beating this need for a Diet Coke is not one of them. I need the cheese to keep up my streak of eating a meal every two hours today, and the kombucha was just because I could kind of thing.

Before ordering, I’d been on the phone with my brother Jyre who was telling me a little about his day, the fact that he was about to take a nap, and that he was processing some sadness. I could hear the morphine just a little in the slower pace of his words. I asked him about his sadness, and he said he’d been in his body for almost sixty years, and it was like watching a character in a movie you’d gotten attached to, well, I forget exactly what he said because a little bit I was freaking out, but in a gentle, oh, this is weird way.

He’s disappearing, is what my brain was saying. Only he’s doing it slowly and telling you about it. This is amazing. I thought about Sam dying, how there was no slowly there. There was alive and snorkeling in the ocean, and then there was the need to stay above water while having a stroke in a rip tide, and then there was dying on the shore in his wife’s arms despite the doctor’s attempts to keep him alive.

No goodbyes. Just the leaving.

He did not have to endure the burden or weight of goodbyes. He did not have to pay that sales tax on life. But also, as someone who habitually leaves social events without saying goodbye, I have to look at the fact that he did not get to do it and all that we lost because he did not have the opportunity to say goodbye to the many, many people (and animals) who love him. I love you, I will miss you, I’m so grateful and astounded you are/were in my life.

I mentioned this to Jyre—the Velcro slowly pulling apart between his consciousness in his body and the life his body had been in for almost sixty years. The people he knew and loved. The places. The music. The tequila and coffee mix I just discovered was his favorite. While he is having the slower (it may feel fast to him) experience of dying, his brother had the fast experience of dying.

Neither one is something you’d probably reach for on the shelves at Target.

All of this is to say, the answer for me at the time lay in Door Dash and more seizing the day and having the goddamn Diet Coke even though that stuff, down to the can, was not made from love or to make my body stronger. I’m sorry, body. One day I will stop and have water instead. Just not today, okay? I’ll go to the garden and clip some leaves off a few of the greens and eat them first, okay? I’m trying. I’m just not trying that hard.

Remember being young and being afraid to say hi to someone you liked? Or being old and still being afraid?

Isn’t that funny in a certain light?

Remember leaving a room and feeling like you got away with something by not saying goodbye?

Note to self.