Dead Letter Department #66

(content warnings, so you can take care of yourself: death, suicidal ideation)

this one’s about susan

She had been telling me for a long time that she was ready to go. The first time I don’t even remember how it came up: we were at work, where we met, & the question of being ready to die somehow circulated through the office we were sitting in, although I don’t think we phrased it quite that way. Probably we used a euphemism, one of those softening phrases. My friend D said she could go at any time & be fine with it, and Susan nodded, agreeing. “I’ve done what I wanted to do,” she said, and then, seeing my evident distress, went on. “You don’t understand, you’re so young.”

I was young, 27 or 28, and even at that age had twinned drives: a fear of death so powerful it might as well be another person in the room, a sort of perpetually running existential crisis, & a list of things I wanted to do so long I could have read it to you all day. I did not understand at all, and privately thought it sounded very much like depression, although I wouldn’t have told them that.

She told me again this past summer, when we were sitting in front of the storage unit office waiting for it to open. She had only a few days to go through half a lifetime’s detritus, all of which she’d had boxed up when she left her previous apartment, and had sounded a call for aid on Facebook. I’d gladly answered, even though we hadn’t seen each other in some months. “I just want you to know that I’m ready to go,” she told me. “I don’t want you to worry about it. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

In retrospect, perhaps this would have seemed odd to someone else, but I am used to people talking about mortality over breakfast, or in this case, a coconut milk latte. “I’ve thought it all out, what I want in my next life,” Susan said, and then she told me: next time she’s going to be a singer, an incredibly famous, successful singer, the voice of a generation, & very beautiful. Celine Dion, she said, Barbara Streisand, Beyoncé. She’s going to have so many friends, & because she makes tons of money singing, she’ll be very generous & take care of as many people as possible. Everyone will love her.

We discussed it again, when she landed in the hospital, and she told me all about how there’ll be new food, because it’ll have been so long since she was here on earth, & she’ll get to try all kinds of flavors. She’ll travel, and sing, and have a huge family and friends everywhere she goes.

“Well,” I told her, “I’m glad we talked about this so that I’ll know how to find you next time around. When I hear that beautiful voice sometime in my next life, I’ll know it’s you.”

I don’t think either of us believe in reincarnation, but still, we made plans as though we did.

Susan worked at a newspaper in Texas for a long time, had family there, but from the way she told it, one day decided to leave everything behind & move to Washington, to Bellingham, where there are snow-capped mountains & evergreen islands & always the bright waters of the bay. We met at work, when I was friendship matchmaking for my mom & found out Susan made wearable art, jewelry & quilts. Their friendship didn’t last, but ours somehow took hold, winding through my life even after I left the job where we met, even after my transition, like a stubborn little root. She would surface every couple months in an email. “Hey, Sweetheart,” she would write. “You are really on my mind.”

She made a life here out of nothing, the way people who are untethered from family structures sometimes have to do, picked up friends & connections at work, had a robust online world where she played WoW with a bunch of younger guys, a ton of hobbies. She was funny, in a sharp way that sometimes skirted into withering sarcasm.

I used to bring her lilacs every spring, smash the stems so they’d last a little longer and put them in a jar on her desk. Three desks I did that with, as she crisscrossed the building into different jobs. I brought them to hospice too, although it was at the end of the season, so I left a trail of petals through the building.

The hoarding was a barrier to the outside world. It was a barrier to her home life. She tried different ways to fight it, always had a plan to start working on it, but somehow was never able to begin. “I’ll just go through one box at a time,” she told me. “I’ll start selling things on Ebay, there’s a ton of valuable stuff in there.” I read up, a couple books on the subject and how it’s related to trauma, the Reddit forums, recommended them to her in case something in them would be able to pierce the thick layer of dread. I don’t think anything did.

It meant she couldn’t have people in her home. She stayed in the apartment and even the job longer than she might have wanted otherwise, because it became overwhelming, impossible to address. It meant even when she needed more help, she didn’t want to let me see what her house was like. We had arguments in the parking lot about whether or not she was able to carry her own grocery bags. Sometimes I won, sometimes I didn’t. When I picked her up, she squeezed herself out of her front door so carefully, making sure I didn’t even get a glimpse of the interior.

It meant she spent a lot of time, I think, in a state of uncomfortable dissociation, because of her nightmarish surroundings. It compounded over time. There was help that would have been good to have as her health began to decline, but she couldn’t allow it.

The apartment complex found out about the hoarding, the second time that I knew of, & I started trying to figure out what kind of low income housing lists she might be able to get on, convinced she was about to be evicted, but someone in the office instead had the whole place cleaned out for her, let her start fresh, a colossal, unexpected kindness. She started over again. “I’ll just do a box a day,” she told me, & I offered to come over and help.

All she let me help with was the storage unit, when she ran out of money for it. We took rolls of trash bags and my camp chair, since her hips were bothering her every day at that point, & I sat her in front of the rolling doors and brought pile after pile: the box from her desk at old work, full of Minions & post it notes, guidebooks, diet books, jewelry making supplies. I only did the first round, filled half the dumpster with it, offered lavish praise for everything she let me throw away. Her other friends came and cleared the rest, throwing most of it out & hauling the rest all down into her daylight basement apartment, which became a wall of boxes.

One of the times I was trying to convince her to go to the doctor, I had passed the point of asking her to call & had moved on to asking if I could call for her instead. “I’ll just pretend to be you, and you can sit there & feed me the information & we’ll get you an appointment,” I said.  She was triaging her medication, because it had been so long, only taking the most urgent prescriptions. “I’ve had to do that, I’ve had to have people make calls for me or get me to go to appointments.”

She looked completely shocked, as though this was something she’d never heard of before. “You have?” she asked. “You’ve had to do that?”

“Yes,” I said as convincingly as I could. “Lots of people do, lots of people need help sometimes.”

She didn’t let me call. I wish I’d pressed that point harder—not trying to make her do something she didn’t want to do, but knowing that other people had to get help too. She’d seemed so surprised.

It’s hard to explain just how spiky she could be about certain things, how worried I was I’d cross the wrong line, push too hard & get summarily dismissed, not hear from her for ages. She was almost pathologically independent, and I think now she thought she had to be, but whether you think someone’s boundaries are good or not, you have to honor them.

We stopped hearing from her in the spring, her other friends & I, who all still had the Facebook group chat from when we’d been helping her with the storage unit. She sent a couple of scrambled messages to the others, and stopped responding to me at all, and that’s when they started the welfare checks, first with the apartment management company, and then with the police, who knocked, got no answer, and & informed them that was all they could do.

For a while it seemed that none of their phone calls were going to do any good, and then I heard from the hospital.

It turned out I was still her emergency contact, from a time she’d been ill at work, and that information seized my heart a little. We hadn’t been in particularly good touch. It didn’t seem right that I was her closest contact, not because I wouldn’t do what was needed but because she deserved so much more. There were calls from social workers & meetings with palliative care doctors, & careful conversations with Susan, who was, at that time, still able to speak, to make her wishes known. We had to track her sister down, and make sure she had the information she needed to make the legal decisions, but Susan was absolutely clear: she wanted me to be her medical proxy. When I agreed, essentially promising to be there until the end, she took off the necklace she’d worn the entire time I’d known her, something she’d had since college, a little gem on a gold chain, and insisted I take it.

I tried to demur, to get her to put it back on, but she wouldn’t. “I’ve had it long enough,” she said, when I gave in. “It’s your turn to wear it.” I wore it every time I visited her after that. I’m wearing it now.

They thought she’d had a stroke, sometime in that period when she stopped responding to any of us, and it turns out that the couple of weeks after a stroke are the most important in terms of recovery. “A lot depends on the patient, and what their goals are,” the palliative care doctor told me. “Some are willing to do anything to extend their time a little more, regardless of quality of life, and some are ready to let go.” She had spent those weeks alone in her apartment, with no medical care, no care of any kind, alone. By the time she’d been taken to the hospital, “This is hard to hear,” the social worker said, she was starving.

“She’s been saying she’s ready for a long time,” I repeated, in one of those terrible little hospital meeting rooms, holding a sheaf of information about my friend. They were asking me about how much intervention she would want, explaining the differences between diagnostic pathways and hospice care, what we could expect, what it would be like for her, and we talked about the muddy waters between suicidal ideation and self determination at the end of a life. I had to honor what she’d told me regardless. She’d come in with a DNR bracelet already on, a real gift of clarity. I signed the paperwork. I expected to have to argue about everything, having heard horror stories about the hospital, but they were all so kind.

I went to the hospital every day. She still seemed tethered here, with us, until the day they had to move her to another hospital room, and then the confusion settled over her like a fog. “That’s bullshit. You’re full of shit,” she told me, when I tried to explain what was happening, so I made sure to be there when she arrived at hospice, hoping that one familiar face would help the next step not be so frightening. She was convinced they’d kept her in a hallway for three days, not feeding her, not medicating her, when it had been less than a day since I’d seen her, so I spent a long time talking about how hospice was going to be different, how none of that would happen to her again. It seemed to help, a trusted voice saying she was safe, and she surfaced into recognition again.

There were flowers everywhere. I realized later someone must be donating them, dropping them off at the entrance in enormous buckets: tall pink peonies, full and fragrant. The rooms were large and private, with doors into the garden, and when the nurses opened the windows, I could hear a fountain from the plastic chair by her bed.

I am not a great talker, but I told her everything I was doing when I visited, usually on my lunch break, and counted up the times I made her laugh, describing myself splashing around in the lake like a baby beluga, or getting sprayed by a clam at the beach. We held hands a lot, and when she started to wander, fingers searching for something on the quilt they’d spread over her, she’d play with my hands, bring them up to her face or squeeze hard, like she was making sure I was still there. At first I brought food: two kinds of ice cream, ginger candy, but her appetite sunk away rapidly, so I instead I brought rose water tonic for her face, and a little vial of amber perfume for her wrists. She told me not to come if it was stressful, said she didn’t want me to spend my money on her, but I insisted that I wanted to be there. She always wanted to know what I was writing, clear brown eyes so focused on mine, & I told her that too.

She’d worked hard to get my pronouns right the summer before, and my new name, would stand in the parking lot waiting for me to pick her up repeating them to herself.

One day at hospice, I’d been telling her stories about my friends, people she’d met once or twice or heard about over the years, and the only thing she’d been able to say all day was “Good for her.” She said it about J, & her trip across the country, and C’s business, and my niece. When I told her about working in the garden, some project I’d finished, she paused for a long time and said, very slowly, “Good for him.”

They took good care of her. It was terrible, at the end, but I never doubted she was in good hands, and that’s more than I thought there would be.

I said, “Even when I’m not here, I’m thinking about you. My love is following you around like a little cloud right above your head.” I knew she was picturing it, smiling with her head leaning against the pillow, eyes closed & half upright in the hospital bed. When I said her I loved her, Susan said it back, even when the words fell out of reach, making sounds in the shape of them so I’d understand her anyway.

The nurse called last Tuesday morning to tell me she’d died overnight. “I’m the one who took care of her, and I want you to know that I loved her. She was very special.” I could tell it was something the nurse said to everyone, and that she meant it with total sincerity every single time.

I will not reduce her life down to the worst moments, to the tragedies at the end. She took risks, flung herself away from the past, across the country to something new, saw orcas and mountains and mossy forests, found people to love who loved her back. She fought the battles she could & had to live with the rest, the way we all do. She was brave & stubborn & she was my friend. If I see her in my next life, a songbird, beloved, I’ll know her right away.

Thank you for reading the Dead Letter Department. If you want to write to me, send an email to departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here again soon, and in the meantime, may someone offer you just the help you need in in a way you find yourself able, perhaps miraculously, to accept.