Living + Dying

I used to write a lot more publicly about my illness and liver transplant - and it's not that I've stopped writing about it, it's more that I've delved into the process of writing a book over the past couple of years and my (oft-limited) capacity to talk about that time goes towards that. It's been helpful for me to take a step back from writing about it in a more visible way (like I used to on my now-defunct blog). This way I can really think about what I want to say (and hopefully, my writing is getting better). Who knows what will happen in the future, but for now that feels good.

As part of Divine Desire, the 21-day course which I got to I co-lead with Adriana Rizzolo, Tiffany Hamilton-Atkins and Kat Mills Martin, people were invited to write for five or fifteen minutes every day. We offered them a prompt each day and everyone was urged to share. It's been really fun for me to get to think about the poems I wanted to contribute and also use many of the prompts myself.

One of my goals for this year was to think more about death: my own death, the death of my loved ones, the process of dying. Not in a grim way, but simply to become more familiar with it so it doesn’t feel so scary and foreign. We talk about death so little in the west, and yet it’s literally one of the only guarantees we have in life. I also think it’s interesting to think about what parts of me have to die in order to move forward, and how often I have to let things fall away to make more space for new life, new experiences, and new ideas. How we experience the slumber-death of winter to then experience the rebirth of spring. I’m living in upstate New York, and honestly, I’ve never seen so many dead animals on the road as I have in this 6-month period. It’s pretty disgusting to see the insides of animals splayed out on the open road so regularly, but it also reminds me how fragile life is (and how destructive humans are).

My goal with thinking about death this year is that it will help me to live with a bit more intention, a bit more love, and fewer neuroses (a girl can dream). I have had the privilege of getting very close to death a few times (and the privilege to stay alive, too). You could say I’m intimately acquainted with it. One of the prompts we gave at the very beginning was ‘dead, then alive’, inspired by a Rumi poem. The poem I’ll share with you today came out of that a few weeks ago. I don’t know how much of a poet I am, but I love poetry and at this moment that’s enough.

But you didn’t die, she said

What she didn’t know was that I did

In a million and one ways

Countless even. Innumerable

She didn’t see what I saw

Near the end

It was a choice - I stepped into that bottomless abyss of love

Dipped a toe in

A whole foot and ankle too

Turned back on my heels

And held on to the rope of life

Joan of Arc by my side

With her teenage smirk and snide remarks

Don’t be such a pussy

(Joan, you say pussy?)

So I stayed in the land of the living

Of the animate

Of dreams and fears and blood and guts

Of newspapers and stale coffee, day-old croissants and rising gas prices

But there in the underworld

I died

I died along with the scalpel

Sinking into my skin

I died with broken ribs

That made room for new life

I died through the plastic tube that hooked my insides up to plastic bags full of blood

I died in the hours I spent immovable

Tied to a bed

In the hours watching a clock

Waiting for time to pass, nothing else to do

I died learning to walk again

The blimp of my body unsteady

I died when I didn’t recognise my own voice

High pitched and child-like

I died when I looked down and all I could see was a sea of staples

How will they get all these out?

Anyone have a stapler remover I could use?

I died in front of the daily pill box filled with forty different pills

The cold oatmeal careening through my digestive tract

I died in the fentanyl drip

The little red button

Click click click release

I died hearing my doctor say ‘she’s not thriving’

Angry he wouldn't say it to my face

I died in the MRI tube

trying my best not to breathe

I died in the phlebotomist’s needle

Looking for veins in my foot

I died in the shock of the faces of strangers and friends

Wondering how we’d move forward

And still, all that to live,

And still, all that to say - you’re only as alive as you

want to be

I died and I died and I died one more time

(For good measure)

Only to be alive

Animate

Heartbroken bruised and breathless