The Valedictorian of Being Dead

by Heather B. Armstrong

  I could not fathom having enough paper to write what I would want to say before removing my life from the lives of those I love so dearly. No one who has been spared this kind of pain would understand why I was gone, so why would I offer reasons? Do you take up space in a note with the lies of your depression, or do you instead save that space for expressions of gratitude? Gratitude, however, implies that you know your life is worth something, so why did you do it? If you had such love for your children, why are you gone? None of it would make sense. A note does not make sense. The only way a note would make sense is if it read, “I am a rat bastard who wants you to suffer.” That would be a reason people could wrap their heads around. If the note admits to selfishness, then it would make all the sense in the world. Saying that I love my children so much that I could no longer ignore the truth that their lives would be better if I was not in it? That made sense to no one but me.

  I have been writing about both of my children since their births—stories of their infancy and toddlerhood and the rigorous triumphs and blows of motherhood. I have often thought that if anything ever happened to me, that my children would have all these words I have written about them and to them and for them to pore over in my absence. They’d know just how much I loved them in the notes I had been writing their entire lives. And yet, if something did ever happen to me, wouldn’t they have wanted a chance to say goodbye? And would the lack of that parting gesture haunt them in greater proportion due to the love they’d feel through my writing? Is this why people write suicide notes? Because even though we know no one will understand, at least a goodbye was spoken? Like, This is what I can offer you? How does that make any sense?

  And yet, when someone takes their life and doesn’t leave a note, we scream, “Why, why, why? Why did they do this?” Couldn’t they have at least offered the warmth of that parting gesture? As if that note could possibly make sense to anyone but the deceased.

  This parting gesture was another reason I did not come close to hurting myself. I would not ever want to leave my children without spending hours and weeks retelling stories and reliving memories, and in continuing to live I was permanently inside of that gesture. I had just reconciled myself to the fact that I would not ever feel better, that I would not ever remember what it felt like to want to be alive. I would not ever sit down and write, “Dear Family, I know you don’t understand and I don’t expect you to. But I know your lives will be easier with the space that I am leaving you. I am no longer your burden.”

  I found myself crying when I thought of that word—“burden”—because that’s exactly what I had become. The ongoing, ceaseless fuckup. But I needed to rein it in, pull myself out from underneath my pillow, and relieve my babysitter for the night. The light from the kitchen burned my dry eyes as I ascended the stairs from my basement bedroom.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Marlo asked with obvious concern. She was sitting at the kitchen countertop, watching a Minecraft video on her iPad. I hadn’t eaten in almost twenty hours and I had just composed a brief suicide note in my head that I won’t ever really write, but that’s what my brain does sometimes. I’m not ever going to feel better, and occasionally I try to articulate and sort through that feeling so that I can figure out how to get up tomorrow morning to do it all again, All of the Things Needing to Get Done.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. Then I turned to Lyndsey. “Thank you for all your help today. And every day. I couldn’t do this without you.”

  “You feeling any better?” she asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Well . . .” I trailed off a bit. “Better is relative, isn’t it? Let’s just say that I’m not giving up on it yet.” She nodded, grabbed her purse, and said goodbye to Marlo and to my stepfather, who was sitting on the couch, waiting for my mother to finish that load of laundry.

  I hadn’t given up on it yet. Not yet. I was pinning the only hope I’d felt in eighteen months on something in which I didn’t believe: miracles.

  THIRTEEN

  A NEEDLE INTO THE PERFECT GROOVE

  FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2017. St. Patrick’s Day. The clinic had called me the day before to inform me I was scheduled for 1:00 the following afternoon. I don’t remember much about it being St. Patrick’s Day other than Marlo assuring me and Leta that no one could pinch her because she was wearing two green hair ties around her right wrist.

  We’d found a shirt that morning in her dresser that had a green flower on it, too, so she talked endlessly about her green items on the drive to school: if anyone pinched her, she’d drag them to the principal and very much like a lawyer she’d prove her case. I was listening to her, sort of, but couldn’t really get my mind off my stomach and the knots that were tying it up and pulling in agonizing directions. I’d drunk the poop tea two nights previously, an hour after I’d let it begin steeping. And then . . . nothing. Nothing happened. When I called my mother the next afternoon to tell her that nothing was happening, I managed to pull off something no one has ever accomplished: I made her speechless. She stopped talking for a full ten seconds. I almost hung up and called an ambulance in case she’d stopped breathing.

  “But no one can outsmart poop tea,” she finally said incredulously. “Perhaps you just need to give it some more time.”

  “I’m not trying to outsmart poop tea, Mom. I want it to work. It’s been over eighteen hours since I drank it. It should have worked by now, right?”

  “Yes, it should have woken you up this morning, in fact. We have to bring this up with the doctors tomorrow.”

  “Oh God. No. We are not bringing up outsmarting poop tea in front of Dr. Mickey, no—”

  “Heather, this is serious. How many days has it been?”

  “Ten.” It has been ten days. Who goes ten days? Me. I go ten days, that’s who. This is just beautiful irony that right when I finally gain the maturity and insight to start finding talk of poop unsettling, I have to talk about poop.

  “They need to know this for their research—”

  “I do not want my poop to be part of their research!”

  When we ended our conversation, I had a sinking feeling that proved prophetic. When we walked into the clinic at 1:00 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day and I grabbed the clipboard to sign my Just How Awful Do You Feel About Yourself Today? papers, my mother leaned over the counter and whispered to Greg, “We really need to talk to the doctors today about Heather’s bowel movements”—as if Greg must adhere to a chain of custody that required him to pass along any information about my poop. Also, can we just acknowledge how awful a euphemism “bowel movement” is?

  This would be my fifth treatment. Almost halfway through. I filled out the paperwork with answers almost identical to the ones I’d given ten days previously, before they ever tried to stick that oversized needle into my arm. When I finished the questionnaire, I slumped into the seat next to my mother and leaned to rest my head on my mother’s shoulder. She was telling some story about one of my nieces or nephews, I can’t remember which one—you can’t expect anyone in a Mormon family to remember how many nieces and nephews they have—and I was just too tired to arrange what was coming out of her mouth into any coherent narrative. About fifteen minutes later they called me back for needle prep, where I was happy to see Molly.

  “Oh, thank God, it’s you,” I said as I slid into my place next to all the supplies. She’d been preparing for me, so the gear was already laid out.

  “Oh yeah? Well, it’s good to see you, too!”

  “No, I mean it. It’s not like anyone here is bad at what they do. It’s just that . . . I don’t know. Coming here . . . doing this . . . you find comfort in certain things, and you’re part of that for me. Also, to save you some time: still no action in the sack. They should officially reinstate my virginity.”

  She laughed with her whole chest. “I totally get it. And I’m sorry we’re all still getting the hang of these needles.” After entering in all the information concerning my meds, she tied a tourniquet around the top of my left arm an
d had me hang it off the side of the chair into a straighter line. It would be the first and only time someone would get the needle all the way in on the initial try.

  “See!” I said. When I looked down to see the needle hanging out of my arm, I realized just how bruised and beat-up I looked. Brown and yellow clouds bloomed from injection sites three to four inches in both directions, the colors so saturated that it looked as if someone had clubbed me with a hammer. Molly could see me inspecting the carnage and apologized again.

  “Really, we aren’t usually this bad at our jobs,” she said. “This specific needle, though, is just a lot harder to wrangle than what we’re used to.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “In fact, there’s something about these bruises that feels emblematic of this whole experience. There really isn’t an outward manifestation of going through all of this. I know there doesn’t have to be, but I see these wounds and realize that I’m actively doing something about the last eighteen months of my life instead of screaming obscenities into the phone with my Mormon mother on the other end.”

  She nodded and suddenly I felt a little exposed. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you’re not my therapist. I just had that realization sitting here.”

  “Don’t apologize,” she offered. “We are here to help, and sometimes that help takes very different shapes and forms.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And I meant that. It takes a village to raise kids, right? And I had my village to help me with that. It also felt like I had another village here to help me get better, and I’d started to want to get better not just for me and my kids but for these people, too—for the doctors and nurses and assistants. I wanted them to feel that they were good at what they do, because they were. They were so good to me.

  After Molly wrapped some paper tape around the needle, I returned to the waiting room only to find Dr. Mickey sitting next to my mother, the two of them deep in conversation. Oh God. I was certain she was talking to him about that. And I was right. As I took the seat next to my stepfather I heard her say, “Ten days. I mean, that’s unheard-of, right?”

  Please let me be dead if only because two people who were not me were talking about my poop.

  He nodded at my mother’s question, scratched his head, and paused for just a few moments. “You know, some of these drugs have side effects that happen so infrequently that the documentation on them is lacking. We’ll definitely research all the possibilities.” He then looked at me and smiled, as if saying words to me was too much and he wanted to offer me dignity. He got up, straightened his suit, and told us it’d be another few minutes: they were getting the room ready for me. When he turned to leave, I remember looking at the wooden arm of my chair, the blond curve of it. I remember wanting to memorize the way the rows of chairs were arranged, one along the opposite side of the room, another perpendicular to that, below a giant window.

  There were two rows of chairs in the middle of the room, one facing the window overlooking the corridor leading to the entrance of the building, the other facing the check-in desk. I studied the fabric on the backs and the seats and traced the lines in the pattern with my eyes. Then I looked up at the fluorescent lighting dotting the ceiling, the way it left some parts of the room darker than others. I wanted to remember all of it, because I knew that I was one of only a few who would get to sit there in that room waiting to walk across the hall to have my brain manipulated by an anesthesiologist. I was just the third patient in this study. Dr. Bushnell had not violated anyone’s privacy when he looked at me over the tops of his glasses to emphasize the gravity of his words when he said, “There have been two before you. And you? I have no doubt that this is the answer.”

  Just then a research assistant walked in and asked, “You ready?” Then she gestured for us to follow her. The three of us stood up from the wooden chairs, in the row along the south side of the room underneath a different window, one that looked out toward the room where the phlebotomists wrestled with the 22-gauge needle. We all walked across the hall into the room where my gurney awaited me. After I confirmed my name and date of birth, I climbed onto that wheeled cot and watched my mother huddle with Dr. Mickey again. Soon the Velcro from the wire across my forehead started to itch, and Dr. Mickey asked Dr. Larson, who was sitting on a stool with wheels, “Do you think Zofran could cause constipation? I just looked it up and think it’s a definite possibility.” Dr. Larson made a face indicating that while what Dr. Mickey was asking wasn’t completely insane, it wasn’t a question he’d been anticipating.

  “How have you been feeling coming out of the anesthesia?” Dr. Larson asked, and it took me more than a few seconds to realize that I was now a part of this horribly intimate conversation about the state of my bowels.

  “Oh . . . me?” I blurted. As I did a quick survey of the room, I noticed that more than one person was trying not to laugh at me. “Oh, so . . . I mean . . . other than a little drowsiness? I mean, that’s really it. I know I’m never getting the year right and saying some stupid things, but the only side effect, really, is I’m just a little tired.”

  “Most people say very weird things when they’re coming out of anesthesia, so don’t worry about that. Are you ever nauseated? Do you ever feel like you want to throw up?”

  “No, that’s never happened,” I answered. Dr. Larson asked me if I’d be willing to forgo the Zofran this time to see if it made any difference. I shrugged to indicate that I didn’t see why not and then apologized for making them rearrange the medication for me yet again. They certainly didn’t see me coming! One of only four percent of the population who hallucinates when given the tiniest dose of fentanyl and now I was constipated because of a small dose of anti-nausea medication.

  Soon Dr. Larson was showing me the vials of propofol and lidocaine—the ritualistic, symbolic gesture of “We are about to do this to you, remember?”—and I gripped the blanket laid over me and found my mother’s gaze across the room.

  “If she talks your ear off while I’m out, I apologize,” I announced without breaking eye contact with her. She slowly lifted her hand to flip me off. Yes, my devout Mormon mother flips me off routinely and once told me that because I love sex so much I should just find a stable man and get a gigolo on the side. I guess I hadn’t realized just how much I had overshared until my Mormon mother used the word “gigolo.”

  “Dr. Mickey,” I said, right before Dr. Larson set the lidocaine in motion, “my mother is flipping me off. This is what you have gotten yourself into.”

  His face instantly turned red and he laughed. “I love your mother’s stories. She can talk all she wants.”

  I set my head back on the gurney and heard Dr. Larson say that he was beginning the propofol. Oddly, it burned going in this time. It hadn’t ever burned, but I didn’t care. I felt a line of fire sizzle up my arm into my shoulder. It didn’t hurt, it just felt incredibly warm, and I thought the burning sensation might help my odds of outwitting the propofol. I began to say something about it; I opened my mouth and then . . . nothing.

  I opened my eyes as they were wheeling me into the recovery room. I could feel the tiniest bit of a sticky residue on my left eye where they had taped it shut. They were so good to me, all of them—remembering the things that had made me uncomfortable or outright sick and adjusting their care to make it more pleasant. I didn’t blurt out anything after waking up—which made me wonder if they were disappointed when they didn’t get to go home and regale their friends and family with the crazy things that came out of our mouths when we were drunk on anesthesia.

  I barely remembered the nurse’s face, couldn’t tell if I’d met him before, and when he asked me what year it was, I answered, “It’s 1979.”

  Everyone in the room got really quiet again except for my step-father, who started laughing uncontrollably. I mean, it was objectively funny at this point. Why was I fixated on that year? Why not 1993, when I graduated from high school? Why not 1997, when I graduated from college? Why not, you know, the actual year?


  The nurse asked, “Would you like to reconsider that answer?”

  Listen, I love my kids and fight hard for human and animal rights, I always hold doors open for strangers, and I’m mostly a good person. But when he framed the question in that way, he flicked my drunk nerve and I answered, “Would you like to reconsider your face?”

  Not my finest moment, I will admit this. Within a few seconds I realized it was 2017 and I felt so terrible. I apologized again and again and he kept reassuring me that he’d heard far worse things during his time doing this job.

  We arrived home that afternoon, and for the first time since the treatments started I didn’t want to be alone or rest or lie down in my bedroom. In fact, I felt an odd surge of energy I hadn’t felt since before I’d begun training for the marathon.

  My mother and stepfather offered to take my kids overnight to give me some time to reflect, maybe catch up on the work that was piling up, or just get some more rest. Since it was a Friday night, and because I had showered that morning and dressed in something I wouldn’t wear to a Bikram Yoga class, I spontaneously drove over to a man’s apartment, completely unannounced. He was a musician and the last person I’d met on Match.com before I canceled my subscription. Although I wasn’t attracted to him, we talked about music and bands like we’d known each other for decades. He had played in bands that were popular in Provo, Utah, when I attended BYU. We knew several people in common, including a redheaded Mormon I’d dated who played guitar and reeked of sandalwood.