Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

by Camille Pagán

  Was I really going to spend the last few months of my life making phone calls for other people and coordinating charity events I wasn’t even invited to? It was like playing Cinderella right up until her fairy godmother showed up.

  “Go on,” Jackie said, waving her hand like I was a stray dog she was shooing from her yard.

  “Oh, I’m going.”

  She’d already turned her attention to her computer screen, and she didn’t stop typing as she responded. “Every word you speak is a second you could be doing your job.”

  “And every word you speak is a second of my life that you are completely wasting,” I volleyed back.

  The frenzied clacking of her keyboard abruptly stopped. She swiveled in her Aeron chair and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. “What has gotten into you, you overfed milkmaid?”

  If she was insulting my appearance, she was actually concerned. Fine. Let her be worried. She and Tom could sit together at my funeral and pretend that they’d shared something special with me.

  “Cheap shot. Perhaps menopause is making you lose your touch?” I smiled at her. “By the way, I quit.”

  “Nice try,” she scoffed. “It’s a recession. Human resources isn’t going to fork over more cash this time.”

  “I don’t want money. I want you to treat me the way you expect other people to treat you. But I can’t wait around to see if that will ever happen.”

  She glared at me as I started for the door.

  “Liiibbby!” she yelled. “Libby?”

  Outside Jackie’s office, I stopped briefly at my desk. A framed photo of Tom and me sat next to my computer monitor, and a small placard noting that I was employee of the month last June hung on the cubicle partition. In the drawer there were some tampons, spare change, and business cards I never used. There was not a single thing worth grabbing.

  “It’s been fun!” I called over my shoulder. I felt slightly elated as I tore toward the exit sign at the end of the hall, but only slightly. Because however gratifying it was to unleash all that anger bottled inside me, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe—just maybe—I was killing off a little bit of what was good in me in the process.

  FOUR

  Paul texted me while I was on the L.

  PAUL: Libby, are you okay STOP Getting distinct impression that there is more to story I must hear immediately STOP Coming to get you and drag you to NYC STOP

  ME: Paul, STOP! I am fine. As fine as someone newly unemployed with no references can be.

  PAUL: Sassy Sissy! You finally told that old bag to jump in the lake, didn’t you?

  ME: Affirmative.

  PAUL: Good. I was beginning to wonder if you’d die in that G-D office. More soon. x’s!

  I turned off my phone and sighed. If only he knew.

  When I got home, Tom was at the stove; the smell of freshly baked brownies hung in the air.

  For the briefest moment I was thrilled to see him, and not just because he’d made my favorite dessert—I could tell him all about how I had overthrown Jackie, the evil asinine dictator! Then I spotted his bandaged hand and it all came crashing back. “I don’t want you to be here, Tom. And that,” I said, pointing to his hand, “is overkill, don’t you think?”

  “Libby, I love you,” he said.

  I tilted my head and examined him for a moment, considering the best way to lob some of my emotional pain at him, as though it were a quantifiable entity that could be distributed between us. Then I smiled at him rather insanely. “Tom, that’s very sweet, and I’m sure you think it’s true. But, in fact, you love the dong. The wang. The cock-a-doodle-do. Because if you truly loved me, why didn’t you tell me the truth years ago? I mean, ten, seven, even five years ago, I would have been ripe for the picking. Now? I’m almost thirty-five, Tom. I’m set in my ways. I have gray hair and cellulite.” And cancer, I thought, although I chose to omit this morsel of information. Maybe it was selfish, but I didn’t want Tom to be allowed to grieve with me. I was too hurt to share any part of myself—even the diseased bits—with him.

  “That’s not fair, Libby,” he said. “We were raised to believe homosexuality is a sin, and I thought it was a choice. And I was attracted to you.”

  I winced. “Past tense.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly.

  A wave of nausea hit me. No, he probably didn’t mean it like that. In fact, there may have never been a time in which Tom had not been imagining a physique markedly more masculine than my own while we were having sex. “So did you—?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to respond. Instead, I left him in the kitchen and wandered into our bedroom. Funny, it was the one room in our apartment that we had never finished decorating: the walls were as white as when we moved in, and our comforter was the same one I’d used in college, even though it was too small for our queen-size bed. On the wall, Tom had nailed a photo of us in front of the church on our wedding day. Beside it, I had hung a picture of him and me at junior prom; we’d started dating earlier that year. On the dresser, there was a photo of me, pink-cheeked and spilling out of my bikini on the beach in Acapulco, which Tom snapped on our honeymoon. I was relieved to be done with the wedding and to begin our lives as husband and wife. I’d married my best friend. We had a great apartment and friends we loved. Tom was on his way to having the career as an urban planner that he’d dreamed of, and it wouldn’t be long before the two of us would welcome a baby into our lives, or so I thought.

  I’d never felt more hopeful than I did then.

  Mexico.

  The thought was an electrical current through my body. At once, I realized I needed to get moving—and fast. I went to the hall closet, located a suitcase, then returned to the bedroom.

  “Libby?” Tom called from the dining room.

  “Not now, Tom!” I yelled, and began opening dresser drawers and tossing his clothes into the suitcase. After it was stuffed, I went to the master bathroom and threw in Tom’s cologne and various other personal grooming products. I wheeled the suitcase to the spare bedroom, which we used as an office, and finished stuffing it with papers of Tom’s that looked like they might be important.

  By this point, he was standing in the doorway watching me. “Libby, please stop.”

  “Not an option. You need to leave. As in yesterday.”

  The year before, Tom and I had gone skiing in northern Michigan. We were halfway down a bumpy blue run when I almost skied into a man who was splayed out in the snow. Even beneath his thick snow pants, it was clear that the lower half of his leg, which was bent at an unnatural angle, was snapped like a twig. I expected him to be moaning in pain, but as I pulled up beside him, he looked up at me with clear eyes and a neutral expression. “I just broke my leg and need to get down the mountain right away,” he said, as though he was commenting on the temperature. “Would you mind flagging down the ski patrol for me?”

  At the time, I was amazed at the man’s reaction. Now I knew how he was feeling. I was aware that the bit of pain I was feeling was going to start hurting like hell in very short order, but for the time being, my brain and body were in self-preservation mode, and I could focus only on what had to be done next.

  “But this is our apartment,” Tom said.

  “That may technically be true, but who paid for it?” I asked, so coldly that I surprised myself. Until that moment, I’d never once held money over his head, even though I’d used the sum I received from my mother’s life insurance policy when I turned eighteen to make the down payment on our home, and covered more than four years of mortgage payments on my own before Tom began drawing a paltry salary as a newbie urban planner. He now paid a mere third of our monthly bill, and I continued to cover his student loans.

  “Libby, please. I told you, I really want to
work this out.”

  “Tom,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, “that is not possible. No matter what you say or do, what you told me will always be with me. Always, Tom. It can never be undone. You must have known that, deep down, when you admitted it.” I’d intended to mock what he said the day before, but mostly I sounded sad. “I don’t have the time or energy to work it out with you. This may not make sense now, but one day it will. If you have additional questions, I suggest you discuss them with your therapist or a divorce lawyer,” I said, and handed him the suitcase.

  “Oh, Libby,” he said. He was starting to cry.

  It had been a long time since I’d seen Tom shed tears, and he looked so sorrowful that my instinct was to fling open my arms and cradle him to my chest. The scene quickly unfolded in my mind: I would say soothing things to him, and he would look at me appreciatively, then longingly as I dried his tears. We would make sweet, tender love on the bed, or maybe on the floor, and I wouldn’t even mind that it was over before I was ready. Afterward, he would joke that he should really cry more often, and we would laugh together, and then I would kiss my lovely, emotional husband and tell him I loved him like a mouth loves pizza, which never failed to make him smile.

  It was enough to make tears spring to my own eyes.

  But this was not the time to dwell on things that would never, ever happen again. “Please do that somewhere else,” I said, and pushed a now-weeping Tom toward the front door.

  I expected to cry, too, after Tom left. Instead, I sat on the hallway floor feeling hollowed out and exhausted. If cancer was a gift, I wanted to return it. I didn’t need a fast-acting tumor to remind me about the fleeting nature of life: watching my mother rot in a hospital bed and die in hospice before she had a chance to teach me to choose a bra that wouldn’t make my ample bosom resemble missiles—let alone see me walk down the aisle with the man who would shatter my heart with one stuttering sentence—that was reminder enough.

  After a while, I returned to the kitchen, ate a few brownies, then remembered the ticking of the cosmic time clock I was now observing and the fact that although I didn’t have concrete plans, let alone a job to occupy my day, there was plenty left to accomplish. I sat down at the computer and began.

  FIVE

  Even with Tom out of the apartment, I still felt tethered to him. Unlacing some of our financial ties seemed to be the next best step toward securing my independence, even if said independence would be, quite literally, short-lived.

  The legality of emptying most of our joint savings into a new online account registered to yours truly was questionable, but I decided I had the ethical right of way: I had been the one to stash cash all those years. After transferring the funds, I logged onto my retirement and life insurance accounts and made Toby and Max the new beneficiaries. Though it was tempting, I ultimately opted against canceling Tom’s school-loan payment, which was drawn directly from our checking account. After all, he would end up paying it himself when I ran out of money, after I died, or when we divorced, whatever came first.

  There was the sticky matter of the mortgage, which was in both our names. I didn’t know how I would convince Tom to sell, but somehow, some way, I would. The apartment had been our haven for eight years, and like the tar-stained drywall of a smoker’s home, it reeked of Tom and Libby—a couple who no longer existed. If I couldn’t burn it to the ground, it would have to be sold. A quick e-mail exchange with a friend who was a Chicago real estate shark confirmed that the condo would be an easy sell.

  I was on my way.

  The only problem was, cutting Tom off financially had released some of my anger, and that opened up a space for the loss that had been hovering in the background. As soon as I shut my computer, I found myself hunched over, sobbing so violently that I was worried I might vomit. Eighteen years: it was nearly half my life, and thanks to Dr. Sanders’s medical briefing, I was hyperaware that I would never have the opportunity to spend more time without Tom than with him. Now all of it—my epic high school crush, our long-distance college relationship, the wedding, moving to Chicago together, our anniversary celebrations, the many holidays spent with Tom’s insufferable family, and yes, obviously, the sex—felt like an incredible farce, particularly in light of my new expiration date. It was as though I’d just watched a priceless piece of jewelry wash away in the swell of the ocean’s tide. There was nothing I could do to change what had happened, but I could not stop myself from desperately wishing I could rewind my life and do it all over in a way that was the exact opposite of my past.

  Although I was exhausted—the crying, no doubt, and probably the cancer, too, making my white blood cells run laps around my body—I forced myself to go out for lunch. I wandered down Damen and stopped at my usual coffee-and-pastry place.

  Jeanette, the regular barista, greeted me from behind the espresso machine. “Hey, Libby. Don’t usually see you here during the day.”

  “I’m taking a personal day,” I said.

  With her long dreads and various facial piercings, Jeanette was a relic of Bucktown circa pre-yuppification. “Fun!” she said, thwacking the espresso pod against a bucket filled with old grindings. “How’s Tom?” she added. (He and I went there a lot.)

  “Oh, Tom?” I said, fingering one of the shrink-wrapped cookies on the counter. “He’s dead.”

  Jeanette spun around. “Oh my God!”

  “Not literally,” I said, and reminded myself to lay off the hyperbole. “Just to me.”

  “Ohhh,” she said. I saw her mental wheels turning: Libby’s clearly traumatized. So sad—they were cute, reading the Sunday paper over lattes and strudel. Although he was better-looking than her, and that never works. “I’m sorry.”

  “Eh,” I said with a wave of my hand, “don’t be. My two-year-old nephews have bigger penises than Tom.” This, too, was hyperbole, and I was aware that it was odd to say such a terrible thing to a woman who, aside from my preference for whole milk in my coffee, knew next to nothing about me. I had always held my tongue and tried to think the best about people, but something strange had happened. I would soon be nothing but a memory to others, and for reasons I couldn’t quite understand myself, I didn’t want anyone—not my brother, not my ex-boss, not this barista—to remember me as lie-down-and-take-it Libby.

  Jeanette laughed. “Good for you, then! Life’s too short.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said, and slipped a ten in her tip jar.

  On the way back to my apartment, I fell into step behind two women speaking to each other in Spanish. For all I knew, they were discussing industrial waste, but the florid words fell off their tongues in a way that made me envious. I’d studied German in school, and although it had been billed as a practical business language, I had yet to find myself in a situation in which there was an opportunity to sprechen Deutsch. Meanwhile, I’d traveled to three Spanish-speaking countries and had fallen more in love with the language on each trip. Obviously there wasn’t time to master it, but I had an idea about how to capture a pinch of Latin magic before I died.

  First, though, I wanted to verify that this wasn’t all an overreaction on my part. I went home and called Dr. Sanders’s office. “Hi, this is Libby, er, Elizabeth Miller. I was in yesterday and Dr. Sanders said I had cancer. I’m just calling to find out what type of cancer, exactly, I have. I know it was lymphoma, but I can’t remember the rest. Can you check my chart?”

  “I see,” said the receptionist. “Hang on one second.” I heard some rustling, and then she asked me to hold again. A few minutes later, Dr. Sanders got on the line.

  “Elizabeth—”

  “Not that you’ll need it for future reference, but I go by Libby.”

  He sounded upset. “Libby, I understand this is very unfortunate—”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “Now can you please tell me the name of my cancer again?”

  “Subcutaneous panniculitis-like
T-cell lymphoma.”

  “Uh . . . can you spell that?”

  He did. I thanked him, then pressed the End button on my phone.

  A second opinion from Dr. Google confirmed that my diagnosis was, indeed, the worst sort of news. The aggressive form—as mine was—spread rapidly and was generally resistant to chemo. On top of it all, this particular form of cancer was rare enough that agreeing to treatment was essentially volunteering to be a guinea pig whose claim to fame would be a postmortem appearance in medical literature. Thanks, but no.

  I removed my shirt and stared in the mirror. How long would it take before the worst happened to me? The skin around my bandage was starting to look not unlike the center of an undercooked pork loin. I got back on the computer and poked around some more, ultimately determining that if anything, Dr. Sanders had sugarcoated my prognosis. If I was lucky, I was looking at three to six decent months of life, followed by six to twelve wretched ones, then a swift kick to the old bucket.

  I had a rough idea of how to proceed, but for inspiration, I popped Y tu mamá también in the DVD player and splayed out on the sofa. My sophomore year of college, I shared a room with an international student named Isidora, and she introduced me to the tragic beauty of Spanish-language cinema. Most of my favorite films—Lucia y el sexo, Los amantes del círculo polar, Piedras—were set in Spain, but I had a particular weakness for the Mexican Y tu mamá también.

  In it, the thirty-something Luisa meets two teen boys at a wedding, and they boast about a secret beach called Heaven’s Mouth, telling her she should come with them to find it. After learning that her husband has cheated on her, Luisa does just that. The three of them dance and drink and have lots of sex. There’s more to the story, but—sorry if I’m ruining it—Luisa stays on at the beach and dies of cancer soon after, which she never told the boys about.