1When David Was Dying
I'd like to say that I picked up where my life left off after my best friend, David, died of cancer. I'd like to say it was the only real problem I had at the time. I'd like to say that I wasn't alone in dealing with it. I'd like to say it almost ended well. I'd like to say a lot of things, but saying them would only make me a liar. It wasn't peaceful or sweet or the least bit inspirational. It wasn't any of those things. It was just sad. And nothing else.
David and I became pen pals when I was in the third grade. My teacher helped me arrange it, saying that it might do me some good socially. He was homeschooled, which wasn't exactly rich with opportunities for peer interaction, and me, well, I just had issues. I first met him in person at a festival the following winter, along with his older brother, Nick. I was 8, he was 11, and his brother was 16. David was pale and thin, with long-ish dark brown hair and yellowy-orange eyes that almost always seemed to be laughing.
He was a wacky sort of person, always with odd ideas, or funny things that just occurred to him. The funniest thing about him, though, was that he loved peanut butter. And by loved I mean that he'd have eaten it and nothing else every day if he was allowed to. Once he'd gone at a family sized jar of the stuff with a spoon and had it half gone in less than an hour. Him and his peanut butter were like me and my books: tight. And by the time he relapsed a year later, so were we, as pen friends went. He'd been in remission since the summer before we became friends and they'd hoped it would stick this time, it hadn't. It scared me, the cancer. The medicine they said would help only seemed to make him sicker, and in the large gaps of time between the occasions we saw each other, the sickness seemed to eat away at him one bit at a time.
In the end though, we knew. All three of us did; long before the doctor even said a word about it. David was dying. I was nearing the end of the fifth grade when the verdict came. David had a year, at best. Best being if all went well with chemo treatments and they kept him hooked to a machine for the remainder of his life. Maybe best wasn't quite the right word for that scenario. David stopped chemo in May. He said he didn't want to die emaciated and bald. I was disappointed that he wasn't going to try at least once more, but I didn't blame him. How could I have? When he first stopped the chemo, he seemed to be getting better. He put on weight, there was color his skin, and his hair started to grow back.
Naively, I thought it meant that he was actually getting better. Needless to say, he wasn't. His condition peaked, then slowly but surely began to decline, and it showed through in his letters. One time, he wrote, "…Some days, I just wake up feeling fine, like there's nothing wrong with me. But other days, most really, I can barely get out of bed and I'm sure I'm going to drop dead right then." It was the longest, most heartbreaking goodbye possible, and I cannot honestly say that it was better than if it had been quicker. When the fall came, Nick took the semester off college to stay home and help take care of him.
The very last time I saw David was at a block party. He was sicker than I'd ever seen him, even on chemo. He could barely walk and he shook like a leaf in the 84 degree September air, even though he wore at least 3 jackets. I pretended not to see the bottle of painkillers in the pocket of the outermost one. He, Nick and I sat in a corner of the parking lot, playing cards for the most part. There were long silences, in which none of us had anything to say, had anything to say. What was there left to say when we all knew that this was probably the last time we could all be together? When it was time to go, I hugged him as tight as I could without hurting him. It wasn't very tight at all. After this, I'd like to say there was a miracle and that this has a happy ending, but that would be a lie. On November 18, 2006, his 14th birthday, at 3:14 am, David died at home.
Just before Thanksgiving, I got the letter from Nick, telling me that David was gone. He said it was peaceful, and that it had been what he wanted. I didn't doubt it for a second after what he'd been through in the last months, and I couldn't help but be a little bit relieved that it was finally over because the waiting was the worst. Nevertheless, I cried when I saw the note about the funeral that was attached. It was just too much. I didn't go to the funeral. I couldn't, really; my parents didn't know I had a pen friend, much less that he'd died. So for the next month, I wondered around in a dazed trance, which honestly wasn't so far off from normal. Nick sent another letter closer to Christmas, asking if I would be at the Festival of Trees this year. I replied that I was. When the Festival finally rolled around, I split off from my Girl Scout troop there and met him near a funnel cake booth. He looked as bad as I'd felt. There were sleepless shadows under his eyes and he'd lost weight from what I could tell. He gave me a small package.
"David got it for you, but, ah, he didn't get to give it to you so…" I started crying at this, and I couldn't stop. Nick awkwardly patted my shoulder, waiting until I stopped, drawing in deep shuddering breaths.
"I'm going away." He told me, fixing his eyes on something behind me. The way he'd said it scared me, and I haltingly asked him if it was because of the same problem he'd had earlier in the year.
"Something like that," He muttered with an absent nod.
"I should get going." He said after a long pause. He gave me a brief hug and then he was gone. I was almost sure it would be the last time I saw him for a long time, but it couldn't have prepared me for the elegantly-scripted funeral notice I got in the mail a few weeks later. That was the breaking point. I couldn't stand the way that, in short order, my world had fallen apart. The same day, I methodically burned every letter I'd ever gotten from David or Nick, locking everything to do with them away deep in my mind. I never wanted to even think of it ever again. And for a long while I succeeded. Every day, it sank a little farther out of my reach, and every day, I was functional. But there's nothing you can run from forever, and this wasn't any sort of exception. Eventually I had to come to terms and eventually, I had to stop ignoring it. And slowly but surely, I did. I'd like to say it was a simple thing to do, but that would be a lie.
The next year or so seemed a comfortable blank. It moved slowly, like wading through molasses. When thoughts of David or Nick showed themselves, which was rare enough, I felt nothing, only slight bewilderment owing to the fact that I knew I should be feeling something, but I had no idea of what or for who. I didn't tell my parents, or anyone else, for that matter; I barely acknowledged it myself. That was the way it stayed; distractions presented themselves and I took advantage of them. I occupied myself with my schoolwork and my books, and later on even a few friends. But around the summer before I started eighth grade, all that changed.
Suddenly, there were memories that seemed to be dragged from deep inside the recesses of my mind solely to torture me. And there was sadness. Crippling, all consuming misery. And at the heart of it was something that had happened over year and a half ago. It wasn't until much later that I learned there was a name for this; dissociated grief. When it did re-associate itself, it was every bit as devastating as if it had just happened. And maybe the worst of it was that I was utterly alone in it. My parents didn't know and I had a grand total of one friend who had known me at that time, and she also knew nothing about the situation other than what I'd told her, which was a sweeter, embellished version. Yet somehow, I moved on. For good that time; I'm not entirely sure how, but it was slow and it hurt. There are no words for that. There just aren't. But then there is after, and only words are left.
So the words I had were the important ones. The ones about doing things when you can because maybe you won't get another chance. The ones about how much your best friend means to you. The ones about being alone. The ones about living and and knowing when it's over. The ones about dying. Maybe that's what was meant to come of this. Maybe it's all that was meant to come of it.