Dying is Easy

The night I was dying taught me how to finally live

They call it a thunderclap. I did not ease into this headache. It detonated my brain.

People say dying is easy compared to living honestly. I didn’t yet know if that was true, but I was about to find out what the popular idiom dying is easy actually means.

One moment I was upright and functional. The next I was on the floor, blinded, gripping my skull, vomiting, then gone. When I came to, my brain still roared. I did what everyday life in 2022 prescribes for the frightened and alone. I searched my symptoms. Brain tumor. Aneurysm. I ordered an Uber to Columbia Presbyterian. When you think you might be dying, easy or not, you stop negotiating with inconvenience.

A Curtained Corner Cubby

The downtown emergency department carried a subdued hum under hard white lights. My body felt distant, like it belonged to someone else. I followed nurse instruction into a narrow curtained bay. There I parked beside a steel cabinet and a metal framed cot, then slipped off my sandals to perch on the cot like a baby sparrow. I wondered if dying is easy for the body even when not so for the mind.

I hadn’t changed clothes. So, I was wearing my regular day uniform, a loose white cotton dress over a pink silk slip. The cubby was cold enough to raise goosebumps along my arms and freckled calves. Pens clicked. Shoes squeaked. Voices murmured just outside the curtain. The light turned everyone a little green. Hospital light makes me look halfway between living and dying. Easy to imagine how thin that line is.

I stared at my hands.

They probably suit my petite frame, but I’ve always felt cursed with stubby appendages. Pink and wrinkled sausages, I rotated them slowly like evidence. You’re a woman with short fingers, a greenish pallor, freckled calves. I began listing my lunatic observations as if sketching a self portrait through Egon Schiele eyes. Distorted and outlined in thick chartreuse lines.

Dying is Easy – a working theory

A nurse pulled the curtain aside. Their name tag read Charlie. Efficient. Kind. Blood pressure, blood draw, questions. The choreography was smooth and fast. Before leaving, they told me the doctor would be only a few minutes. I was the priority case of the night.

I thanked them and for the first time wondered if I might die soon. People say dying is easy. No one says the waiting is.

My hands looked worse the longer I studied them. Now I might die and this was the body I would leave behind. That thought embarrassed me. Vanity does not surrender easily, even if dying is easy.

I used to care about big things. Philosophy. History. Literature. Art. Culture. Getting a dog. Somewhere along the way, I drifted into surfaces and schedules and outfits assembled in advance with matching jewelry already clipped to the hanger. A museum of future appearances. That was what I might leave behind.

Prognosis Critical

The doctor entered and sat at the end of the cot. It was a straight back plastic chair but she sat in it like it was a massaging lounger and she hadn’t been off her feet in weeks. She had me re-tell my headache story. Her face stayed neutral in the way doctors practice when outcomes are uncertain. From her tone, I understood I was either very unlucky or very lucky. There was not much middle ground.

My daughter was headed to college in a few weeks. My son was at a basketball game. I would not be here to protect them. Who would truly hear and hold them the way I could? Dying is easy for the person who goes. Not for the ones who stay.

Mistakes were made

I thought about my closet, bursting with beautiful clothes. Hangers arranged in an orderly color spectrum held full outfits on hangers. Shoes paired below like obedient pets. It looked like a boutique curated by a slightly unhinged ghost of myself. This is what I am leaving behind. A perfectly styled wardrobe and an unfinished novel.

All my life I dreamed of becoming a novelist. But instead I’d been greedy, impatient, and distracted.

How would my children remember me? She dressed well and gave great hugs. She once served a partially raw chicken with confidence and optimism.

Consequences of my cooking included skinny children that I desperately wished to feed.

I uninstalled the smoke detector to keep from setting it off daily.

I was more alone than afraid. It felt like the thesis statement of my life.

My routines repeated daily. Up before everyone. Six mile run. Breakfast for the kids while drinking a matcha almond milk latte. Writing all morning. Long walks along the Hudson at night. Starting with Covid I missed people, yet filled silence with podcasts instead of friends.

I stayed in a job with quiet dread under a hostile boss who attacked me over email. I’d built a professional identity around an industry that didn’t value me and would soon easily replace me. The walk home was my favorite part of each workday.

When I run, I sometimes leave my body to live only in my head. That’s where I went again. Pure thought. No flesh. No pain. Just inventory. I counted the tongue depressors and bandaids on the shelf beside my cot.

I didn’t check my phone. Not once. For the first time in decades, I stopped pretending to be fine.

Everything Ends

I cried without editing it. I regretted things with specificity. If I lived, I would not continue like this. Not one more day. I would quit. I would choose differently. I would organize my days around what I actually love instead of what looks correct from a distance.

The MRI came back clear. No tumor. The CT scan would confirm whether an aneurysm was hiding. I waited, suspended between sentences.

A normal person might have texted someone. Felt relief. I did neither. I kept repeating a single promise to myself. If I live, I live according to love. Not optimization. Not image. Love.

I never believed in God. But I believe in love. It repairs people. It binds them. It enlarges them. That was enough theology for me.

The CT scan came back clear. My brain was fine. Something else had caused the thunderclap, something I later identified and addressed. But this diagnosis almost didn’t matter. Suddenly my life did.

Changing for Good

I walked home from Columbia Presbyterian with two opposite currents running through me like a barber pole. Gratitude and anger, braided tight.

Gratitude for more time, however much there is. Anger that it took the threat of death to make me honest about how I was living.

The scariest part was not the possibility of dying. It was seeing my life without blur or politeness. That curtained corner changed the terms.

I quit my job.

I asked for a divorce.

I started over with a deeper, steadier loyalty to myself and to what I actually value. Love first. Then the rest gets to line up behind it.