The Valedictorian of Being Dead

by Heather B. Armstrong

  The musician didn’t know I was sitting outside his apartment, so I texted him to let him know I was downstairs. This startled the hell out of him. Fifteen minutes later, he’d showered, cleared his living room floor of discarded socks and empty carry-out containers, unlocked his door, and let me inside. It was a total bachelor’s apartment complete with a couch that looked like it had been dragged in from a curb near a train depot. His walls were covered haphazardly with concert posters. A dark blue sheet draped over the north-facing window was held in place by several thumbtacks. Two overturned buckets supported a plank of wood to make a coffee table. I felt like I had stepped into a tree house.

  “I would have rolled out the red carpet if I’d known you were coming over,” he mumbled as he gathered up more trash to hide in one of the kitchen cupboards. “Wanna have a seat?” He gestured toward the scavenged couch, which sat opposite a giant, makeshift stereo system complete with two record players.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, and I patted the cushion to make sure it wasn’t wet before I took my place.

  “Can I get you a beer? I remember you said you didn’t like beer, but I don’t have any wine. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming over so that I could prepare?”

  “A beer is fine.”

  “I can’t believe you’re seeing my place in this condition,” he said as he shoved several pairs of shoes into his bedroom.

  “What condition is it usually in?” I said smirking.

  “Funny. You think you’re funny.” We had this rapport, like two siblings who only communicate by ribbing each other. He brought me a beer from a tiny fridge, and after he handed it to me he turned toward the stereo system.

  On the first and only date we’d been on, he had played me a mix CD he’d made of early nineties music—literally a CD in a CD player mounted in his dashboard.

  He was driving me home from dinner. We’d had sushi and drunk sake while reminiscing about life back in Provo, all the people we knew in common. How that sandalwood-reeking redhead who broke the honor code by piercing his ears and nose was now a straitlaced father of three and recently served as the bishop of his ward. And when one song faded into the next I heard the first note of a certain song and completely freaked out. It immediately transported me into my 1987 gray Honda Accord with a CD system I’d bought at Radio Shack. My stepfather had installed it before I left for college, before I made that thirty-two-hour nonstop drive from Memphis, Tennessee, to Provo, Utah. I impulsively gripped his arm while gasping for air.

  “Wait . . . is this . . . OH MY GOD. This . . . this . . .” I was trying to place it, trying to put it all together in my head.

  “You know this song?” he asked incredulously, and tried to keep his eyes on the road. “I have never been out with a woman who knows this song.”

  The lead singer finally came in with the opening lyric: “And then she smiled . . .”

  It all finally came back to me. The CD I had played over and over again in my car on the drive back and forth between my house, the job I worked at a bakery, and the parking lot on campus. They were a British band called Adorable from the early nineties who put out a couple of albums, and the one I listened to, Against Perfection, was out of production. I’d tried many times to find it on iTunes and then on streaming services but only spotted it once on eBay for a ridiculous amount of money. When the song eventually got to the chorus—“Sunshine smile, sunshine smile”—I was belting the words right along with it like a ridiculous karaoke drunk. I hadn’t heard that line in almost twenty years and it felt like my dog had gone missing and then someone showed up at my door with her safely cuddled in their arms. Total auditory elation.

  Now he went to the stereo system and picked up a large square of cardboard covered with the image of a flower on fire. “You know I have the whole record, right?” He waved it at me.

  “Wait . . . is that . . .” The image looked somewhat familiar.

  “Adorable. Remember? You said you couldn’t get your hands on a copy of it. I have the actual record.”

  “Oh my God—”

  “That’s right, oh my God.”

  “Please. Please will you play ‘Homeboy’?”

  He turned back toward the stereo system, pulled the black vinyl from its cover, and placed it on the turntable. After making adjustments on a few knobs, he placed the needle directly into the perfect groove. The song begins with a driving bassline backed by a minimal drumbeat that is unmistakable. I could smell the bread I used to pull out of the oven at that bakery back in 1996. Floods of memories of joking around with coworkers, walking through campus from one class to another, opening the window in the second-floor room I shared with a fellow English major named Amy, and admiring the blooms on the tree that reached up past the roof. I remember falling in love with Utah.

  I couldn’t move. I just sat there and let the memories wash over my body in one electrifying wave after another. When the lead singer got to the chorus—“You’re so beautiful!”—the song exploded with crashing swells of guitar. I started to cry. I felt each chord in every molecule of my body and the back of my brain began to vibrate.

  “Hey, you okay?” he asked, and walked over to sit next to me.

  “Yeah. I’m good. Let me hear the whole song, okay?” I don’t know how I managed to get the words out of my mouth. My entire nervous system was quivering. By the end of the song the lead singer was yelling, “You’re so beautiful!” and I’d eagerly anticipated it. Every hair on my body stood up from the chills all over my skin. When it ended, I continued to vibrate and cry.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked again.

  I wiped the tears from my cheeks and nodded. “I can’t remember the last time I heard a song that made me feel like that,” I explained. “I mean, it used to happen all the time.”

  “It’s a great song.”

  “It’s not that,” I continued. “It is an amazing song, but it’s just that . . . that was . . . that was like hearing music for the first time. Like I’d been deaf and I finally heard a chord. I heard harmony.”

  “Dude, are you trippin’?” He was asking seriously. He didn’t know that I had willingly let an anesthesiologist flatten my brain waves five times in the last ten days. He couldn’t understand the significance of the sound of that song.

  I had heard music. I had felt it. And while I had listened to that bassline and that chorus and that explosion of guitar before, its beauty was now magnified a million times over.

  We played the rest of the album while chatting about his job, our friends, our common Southern upbringing. His mop of long hair was still wet from the very quick shower he’d taken while I sat in my car outside. It stuck out from underneath a wool hat he’d pulled down over his ears. In the afterglow of that song he looked cute, more attractive than I had found him on our first date. When we reached a natural pause, I told him I needed to head home. I was feeling a bit tired from the treatment and wanted to take full advantage of an empty house and the possibility of sleeping for an indulgent amount of time.

  He walked me downstairs, past the entrance to the auto repair shop underneath his apartment, and out through the wire mesh gate to my car. When I opened my door, he reached out to touch my arm.

  “When do I get to see you again?” he asked. His fingers brushed up against my elbow. I don’t know what came over me or why I did what I did or who I was in that moment, but I stepped toward him and reached up to kiss him squarely on his mouth. I lingered there for a few purposeful seconds.

  “Soon,” I answered as I pulled away. His face was frozen in a stunned expression. I put my hand on his right cheek and stroked it.

  He blinked several times and then put his hand on mine. “I told you that you were gonna like me! And I ain’t ever wrong!”

  I smiled and then climbed into my car. As I drove away we both waved, and I started to cry again. Tears slowly trickled out of my eyes. I let them puddle on my shirt and drove in silence the short distance to my house. When I pulled in
to my driveway, I turned off the ignition and peered at the porch light above me.

  I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. I didn’t want to assign too much meaning to what had happened. I’d felt “Homeboy” enter my body and shake it awake. I’d laughed with him so easily about crazy Southern relatives who yelled things like “I’m hungry enough to straddle a dead pig and eat a bologna sandwich.” And when I’d reached up to kiss him? Kissing?

  I felt so alive. I wanted to breathe in this feeling. This buzzing hadn’t stopped since the bassline of that song. And then I had a very specific thought:

  Do I really want to be dead? Really?

  FOURTEEN

  MELTING SNOW

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS a Saturday. I remember it so vividly because it was unseasonably warm. By early afternoon I was sitting out on my front porch, watching Leta and Marlo zip by on their scooters, up and down the small street that we’d moved to not three weeks before. This was the first time in their entire lives that we lived in a house on a flat side street, a street where they could finally live out the fullness of their childhoods and ride bikes and scooters in the street without battling a hill or worrying about getting plowed down by a minivan. We’d always lived on busy, hilly streets. One was so steep that a tractor snowblower once got away from my ex-husband and raced down the sidewalk into our neighbor’s fence. We’d never met that neighbor, and so we pretended that nothing had happened.

  Two months prior to the move, my therapist made me set two specific goals that she knew would help improve my mental health. One, I needed to move out of my ridiculously enormous house into the small and cozy home up for rent across town. Two, I needed to quit my job at the nonprofit. Both of these decisions terrified me. They paralyzed me. How could I possibly organize a move when I did not want to be alive? Does she not know that I have raised two packrats, one who will eat Hi-Chews and stash the wrappers in her closet just in case she ever needs them? And quitting the job? Was she insane? Yes, I hated the work, and seeing my boss’s name gave me instant panic attacks, but at least it provided stability? I use a question mark because even though I collected a monthly paycheck, that job had thrown me into a hole so deep that even a good day would rank as unstable. These decisions involved talking to two people: my landlord and my boss. I was going to put a little bit of a dent into their normal routines. Did I mention that I hate conflict? Like, I do not like being a burden. My therapist had to force me to ask for help with my laundry, for God’s sake. When I sense potential conflict, I’m like a turtle retreating into its shell. You can pick me up and shake me and my head will not ever poke out except to say, “Oh, did you just do something to hurt me? I’m so sorry! Here, take my wallet. Here are the keys to my house! Can I fix you a cup of coffee? Or would you prefer a back rub? We good? Good. Glad that’s all cleared up!”

  I made that call to my landlord. Then I wished I could get back all those hours I’d wasted worrying that it was going to be the most awful phone call of my life. I detected a sense of relief on the other end of the line when I told her that I was giving her thirty days’ notice. I was renting a 5,800-square-foot house for a total steal yet drowning underneath the weight of the price of gas and electricity and snow removal and the ridiculousness of 5,800 square feet. In fact, to offset rent and utilities, I sublet two rooms in the basement. One was to an adorably odd lady in her sixties who often cooked eggs and salmon in my microwave. The house would reek with the stench of it, and often the girls would come home from school and start crying because Susan just had to have her fish. I’d had to tell Susan, too, that we were vacating the house. That was a terribly hard conversation to have until we reminisced about the night the basement flooded and we both had to pretend in front of my landlord that Walter, the older man renting the other room, was my fiancé.

  A month after that phone call, my entire family and several of their Mormon comrades showed up to my house to move 5,800 square feet of stuff, including a mountain of Hi-Chew wrappers into a 1,300-square-foot space. Except it snowed over 18 inches during the night and we couldn’t get the moving truck up the giant hill to the house. Which is one of the reasons that particular Saturday morning stuck out so vividly for me. The snow had melted and I’d hung pictures in the new living room. The move was over, many thanks to the Mormon Battalion, and I was . . . I felt . . . I was sitting on the porch with sunlight pouring down on my toes over the awning and I did not want to be dead.

  Had I really wanted to be dead? Had I really felt that way? Because I didn’t want to be dead anymore. Not at all. The sun was out and my beautiful kids were being kids. I was watching them live out their childhood in the street just beyond the lawn, zipping back and forth, their heads thrown back in laughter. My beautiful, tender girls. My flesh and blood. My life.

  My phone was sitting in my lap, and suddenly as Marlo passed by on her scooter—she had oven mitts over her elbows and knees affixed with rubber bands because we hadn’t bought proper safety gear yet—I remembered that Dr. Mickey had given me his card with his phone number on it. He’d handed it to me during our initial interview and told me to call him with any concerns, big or little. So I ran inside the house, found the card inside my wallet, and then ran back outside to enjoy the porch a little longer.

  At 3:42 p.m. on March 18, 2017, I sent Dr. Brian Mickey the following text:

  “Hey, Dr. Mickey. I hope you don’t mind me texting you on your personal line. I just needed to tell you that I am experiencing a kind of hope and happiness today (and yesterday) that I thought wasn’t possible again. It almost feels strange, like a limb I lost that suddenly reappeared. It feels . . . great.”

  Moments later, he responded:

  “I don’t mind . . . Is this Heather?”

  “Yes. This is Heather.”

  “I thought so. So glad to hear you’re doing well!”

  “Thank you.”

  And that was it.

  I had said it.

  Well, I had texted it, but giving voice to those feelings felt . . . right. And I wanted him to be the first to know.

  The first to know that it was working.

  * * *

  You want to know what else worked? Remember the woman who experienced constipation when administered Zofran? Yeah. She tried poop tea for a second time. Drank a cup of it that Saturday morning and by late afternoon found herself abruptly lying on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, thinking she was going to die. She no longer wanted to be dead—she was now certain of this—but it turns out that when poop tea works, you can’t undo it. She actually texted her mother from that bathroom floor: “UNDO POOP TEA. UNDO.”

  Her mother texted back, “Don’t ever drink that tea if you have plans to be more than ten feet from a toilet.”

  FIFTEEN

  IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, AMEN

  THE DAY AFTER I texted Dr. Mickey was a Sunday. The weather was nothing short of brilliant. The clear blue sky stretched for miles and all the recent snow had melted, so I spent most of the day outside enjoying a two-day break from flatlining. Dr. Bushnell would eventually clarify that they weren’t technically killing me; it was more of a really, really intense induced coma. They were just almost killing me.

  During the early afternoon hours I was playing fetch with my miniature Australian shepherd, Coco. She was either born without a brain or, if she does biologically possess one, it operates in only three modes: cuddle, protect, or attack anything that comes close to her flock. That last mode is trigger-happy, and it has only gotten worse as she’s aged. And as I mentioned previously, she also likes to scream and flip her body in the air when I let her out of her crate to feed her. She’s ten years old and been solely in my care since the divorce. I’m not sure why my ex-husband didn’t show any interest in our (then) two dogs when I asked for the separation over six years ago. He didn’t ever ask to walk them or spend time with them or fight for shared custody. He just sort of exited their lives. Our other dog, Chuck, was a mutt who took that absence a lot more
personally than Coco. Chuck was a lovable Grinch who became famous on my website because I routinely posted pictures of him balancing odd objects on his head: cereal boxes, jars of peanut butter, beer bottles . . . When Jon left, Chuck’s mood and health took a nosedive.

  I really miss that little guy, and it was soon after his death in 2015 that I started training for the Boston Marathon. I just now put that together. I loved that dog so much and miss him terribly. I continue to find stray dominoes in the sequence that led to that gurney.

  Coco doesn’t have moods, she has a job. Moods are distracting and so is any moving object that comes within five hundred yards of her flock. That includes me and the girls, of course, but it expands when we are with family and friends to include all of them. She was put on this earth to protect us and scream deafening yelps of triumph when we walk through the door, because that means she did not lose us. She’d also rather play fetch than eat. This afternoon I was throwing a yellow lacrosse ball in the backyard. After seven years of research I finally determined that this is the only object she cannot destroy. My mother texted me and asked if I could talk. She had something on her mind that she needed to tell me.

  Coco had just brought the ball back to me, and I picked it up and walked over to the steps leading out of the sliding door from Leta’s room onto the back porch. As I sat down I called my mother and motioned for Coco to follow me and lie down.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up? Everything okay?” Usually she just texts and says, “Can you talk?” But this text had said, “Can you talk? I have something important I need to ask you.” I knew this wasn’t going to be a regular checkup call about the girls or our plans for the day.

  “Yeah, everything is fine. I just . . .” She breathed a sigh so heavy that I involuntarily stood up and began to pace slowly around the porch. “I want to ask you something, and I know it’s a sensitive topic. But please hear me out.”