Life and Other Near-Death Experiences Read online

  ALSO BY CAMILLE PAGáN

  The Art of Forgetting

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Camille Pagán

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503946002 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503946002 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503945623 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503945626 (paperback)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Laurel

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  It was all supposed to be very Eat, Pray, Die, but I promise I’m not spoiling anything when I say it didn’t quite work out that way. Take my diagnosis, for example; Dr. Sanders couldn’t even bring himself to say the word.

  “I’m afraid it’s malignant,” he said from behind his desk.

  “Malignant?” I asked blankly. It had been a long day and I’d had trouble convincing my boss to let me out of work early, even though the nurse who called said it was absolutely necessary that I see Dr. Sanders today.

  “Cancerous,” he said, his thin lips all but disappearing into his mouth.

  “You’re not saying I have cancer, are you?” I asked, attempting to help him clarify—as surely this was not what he meant. After all, just before he cut the golf ball–size lump out of my stomach, he said he was certain it was a fatty tumor. The surgery was just a precaution.

  “Um. I’m afraid so.” He peered cautiously at the paper in his hand, as though he didn’t deliver bad news for a living.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, reaching forward to take my hand—which I quickly jerked back, as I’m not big into people invading my personal space, not to mention he had more or less just told me via body language that I was a goner. “You have subcutaneous panniculitis-like T-cell lymphoma. This type of cancer is extremely rare, but when it does come up, we see it most often in individuals in their thirties, such as yourself. I’m afraid it tends to be aggressive. You’ll have to—”

  This was around the point at which I stopped listening and started going through a rapid-fire version of the Kübler-Ross model of grief. Denial: No one calls me Elizabeth; my name is Libby. Dr. Sanders is obviously talking about someone else. Anger: He said he was sure the lump was nothing! I’m going to give him a reason to be grateful he’s been paying through the nose for malpractice insurance. Bargaining: If I run a marathon to raise money for cancer orphans, not only will I live, I’ll become such a raging success that Oprah herself will promote my memoir. I’ll start a movement, complete with races for the cure and rubber awareness-raising wristbands in turquoise, which will become the national color of—what the heck was my cancer called again? Depression: I can’t race for a cure because I don’t run. I don’t even exercise, which is probably why my body is riddled with overproducing disease spores. I’m going to bite it before I see forty. Acceptance—

  Unfortunately, acceptance was essentially identical to depression.

  I was going to die. Just like my mother.

  Dr. Sanders kept yammering, oblivious to the fact that I was looking right through him. “So, chemo. I’d like you to—”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean, no? Elizabeth, your best chance for survival is to try to zap this thing as fast and hard as possible. I am sure you’ve seen the worst-case scenarios for chemo, but today, particularly for lymphomas, treatment is manageable. And, if I may say so, the difficulty of treatment is preferable to . . . well, not getting treated.”

  “I’m not going to do it,” I said. “I don’t want chemo, or radiation, or any of it. How long will I live without it?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You should be; you just handed me a death sentence. Now, how long will I live without treatment?”

  He looked befuddled. “I’d like to run a CT scan to see if the cancer has spread to other areas, but given the cellular activity in your tumor . . . well, prognosis can range from six months to . . . um, it’s difficult to say. Although certainly there have been some successful cases . . .”

  “Okay then,” I said, grabbing my bag off the back of the chair. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Elizabeth! I’d really like you to meet with a counselor—”

  I left before he had a chance to finish, the taste of cold pennies on my tongue, as though I’d consented to chemo and already started injecting liquid poison into my bloodstream. Oncologists, nurses, radiologists, palliative care specialists: I was all too familiar with the cancer routine, and I wasn’t interested. Not one bit.

  My twin brother, Paul, once told me that there’s healthy denial, and then there’s LibbyLand. His theory is that in order to function, most people have to ignore reality, or at least most of it. Otherwise, all of the horrible things in life—child slavery, acts of war, the pesticides jam-packed into every other bite of food you put in your mouth, knowing that you’re a day closer to dying when you open your eyes each morning—would be so overwhelming that no one would ever get out of bed. “But for you, Libby,” said Paul, “the whole world is filled with kittens and rainbows and happy endings. It’s very cute and probably helps you sleep at night. I just worry about you sometimes.”

  I would be insulted if it weren’t Paul, who knew me better than anyone else—better than Tom, my husband, probably better than I knew myself. And I knew Paul better than anyone, too, including the fact that he didn’t particularly enjoy his proclivity for catastrophizing, even if it did make him a highly functioning type triple-A human being with an unsettling ability to forecast market meltdowns and other disasters. He and I were a good combo that way.

  That’s why it was going to be such a bummer to tell him that while I’d been watching my kittens defecate all over the rainbow, I’d taken a wrong turn at happy and run smack-dab into a dead end.

  As I speed walked through Dr. Sanders’s office and out to the elevator, I found myself thinking about funerals, as one will do when on
e learns one is not long for this world. I’d gone to a single funeral in my life, but afterward, I swore I would never attend another.

  Because that funeral had been my mother’s.

  At ten years old, Paul and I were too embarrassed to hold hands in front of other people, so we huddled together in a corner of the funeral home: he clasping the back of my dress, me grabbing at the corner of his suit. We watched our father greet this person, and reminisce with that one. Occasionally someone would approach the two of us to offer pat condolences, then quickly move on, all parties relieved that what needed doing was done. The chemical-scented air was suffocating. An eternity passed, then another. Finally someone gently pushed us to the front of the room where our mother’s body lay.

  The funeral home was decorated like a small chapel, and we were instructed to sit in the front pew beside our father, entirely too close to the casket. I remember thinking that I could not feel my feet, and my hands and face were tingling as well, though my ears burned from the knowledge that everyone seated behind us was trying, and failing, not to stare at the remains of our family.

  Our pastor took his place at the podium and began to pray, asking God to welcome “Phillip’s wife, and Paul and Elizabeth’s mother” to her heavenly home. I had a different request for the head of the Holy Trinity: I prayed that the tingling was a sign I was seriously unwell and would join my mother in very short order. I begged God to take me to her—the pre-cancer her, with a smile free of pain, reaching for my hand—because the only place I would ever want to be again was wherever she was.

  My father said some words. A few other people spoke as well; I don’t remember who they were or what they said. And then the room was empty, and Paul was pulling at my dress, harder now, telling me it was time.

  The casket was only partially open, as though the half of my mother’s body that ultimately killed her was not suitable for viewing. I told myself that if I didn’t look directly at her, none of it would be real, that this terrible experience was actually happening to someone else.

  But I had to, because it was the last time in the world that I would ever see her face.

  Even in death, skin coated in pancake makeup, cheeks over-rouged and now sunken when they’d been swollen and stretched in hospice just days before, she was the woman who had wiped my tears when I needed comforting, and cut my sandwiches into small squares just as I liked, and told me she would love me forever and ever and still even longer than that.

  She was lovely. And I knew as I reached down to touch her softly, one more time, that anything that happened next in life simply could not be as unbearable as this good-bye.

  I expected my father to scold me for touching her, but for the first time that day, he had let himself go and was weeping on his knees, oblivious to his children.

  Paul was crying beside me. Now he took my hand and held it so tight that it hurt. I didn’t tell him to stop. We were just beginning to realize we were motherless children, and that we were all we had left.

  By the time my father, Paul, and I got in the car to drive across the state for the burial, I had decided I’d had enough of funerals for one lifetime. It was a vow I almost kept: when distant relatives passed away, or a friend’s parent, or a colleague, I sent large bouquets and vague apologies for my absence.

  But as the elevator doors outside Dr. Sanders’s office opened and I stepped into the plummeting metal box that would deposit me in the hospital lobby, it occurred to me that I could not keep the promise I had made to myself twenty-four years ago.

  I would attend more than one funeral, after all. It just so happened that the second would be my own.

  TWO

  Then this happened:

  “Tom? Tom?” I was crying so hard that my contacts had fallen out, and I couldn’t really tell if the blob hovering around the kitchen island was my husband.

  The torrent of tears started the minute I left Dr. Sanders’s office; it was a miracle that I managed to make it from the maze-like medical building on Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue and flag down a cab without being flattened by a bus. At nearly five o’clock on a Monday evening, it took half an hour to make it to our condo in Bucktown, and as every quarter mile passed, I became more distraught. When I thought of my life—as in the big-picture, full-screen version—this was not how the story ended. I still needed to learn Spanish and quit my job and see the world and maybe adopt a child or two (I couldn’t seem to get pregnant, for reasons my ob-gyn had yet to identify). The ashy particulates in the urn that would rest on our fireplace, which was soon to become just Tom’s fireplace (sob!), were supposed to be at least seventy years old, not thirty-four.

  “Marriage troubles?” the cabdriver asked at one point, handing me a tissue. This made me cry even harder, because my beloved Tom would soon learn he was about to become a widower. Tom! So loving, so brave. He wouldn’t let me see him cry, but I could just imagine how I would wake in the middle of the night to find him weeping silently in front of his computer (he had insomnia and was often up until two or three in the morning). I felt worse for him than almost anyone, except for my dad and Paul, as they had already lived through my mother’s death. Even now, her absence was as palpable as a newly missing limb; all these years later, the three of us still hadn’t learned to balance or ignore the phantom ache.

  “Libby? Are you okay?” Tom rushed at me, taking me by the shoulders. Thank goodness, he was home. Tom was employed by a small architecture and urban-planning firm that didn’t adhere to strict office hours, so he often left as early as three or four in the afternoon to go wander around the city, then finished the rest of his work in our home office in the evening.

  “Tom!” I wailed. “How could this happen?”

  “Libby . . . ,” he said cautiously, and let me go. This caught me off guard; wasn’t he supposed to be stroking my hair and comforting me? “You know, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know!” My head was spinning. I knew, but how did Tom? Weren’t there laws specifying that you couldn’t share a person’s medical history without her consent? Although I had put his info down on that privacy sheet I filled out before surgery. Maybe Dr. Sanders was alarmed about the way I’d fled his office and had called ahead to warn Tom.

  “Oh boy,” he said. “I didn’t want you to find out this way. Did O’Reilly spill the beans?” he asked, referring to his best friend, who had been known by his surname as long as I could remember.

  How would O’Reilly know I was dying of cancer? I was officially confused. I wiped my eyes on my jacket sleeve, then fumbled around in the drawer under the kitchen island, where I kept an extra pair of glasses. After jabbing myself with a pair of scissors, I located the glasses and put them on. One of the arms was missing, so they were slightly askew on my nose, and the prescription wasn’t quite right anymore, but they were effective enough that I could see Tom’s face was, well, mildly terrified. My heart lurched in my chest: perhaps he would not be quite as brave as I’d originally anticipated. Be strong, Libby, I commanded myself. Tom needs you.

  “It’s just that I’ve been seeing a new therapist . . . ,” he said.

  Was he? Good. I didn’t think Tom was really the type to visit a shrink, but at least it would help him deal with my dying.

  “Libby, did you hear me?” he asked, staring at me intently.

  I blinked. “What? No. What did you say?”

  “I think I might be . . . gay.”

  A dizzy spell came over me, and I felt my backbone smash against the edge of the cold stone counter. “Oh my,” I said, reaching out for Tom’s arm.

  “Libby,” he said, pulling me to him, “I am so terribly sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I’m—I’m fine,” I said, because that was what I always said when someone asked me this question.

  As Tom looked down at me, his eyes were moist with unshed tears. “Thank you,” he said, his voice warbly. “Thank yo
u for saying that. You knew for a long time now, didn’t you? Deep down, at least.”

  Up until that point, everything he’d said had been hitting me without my actually absorbing it. Now it all sank in at once. Was he nucking futs? I knew global warming was killing polar bears, the Chinese population blew past one billion several years ago, and rhythms was the longest word without a vowel in the English language. I did not know, however, that my childhood sweetheart, the man I had loved for nearly twenty years (twenty years!) was sexually attracted to men.

  “No, no—no,” I said, pulling my head back in a way that made my neck disappear, a phenomenon I was aware of only because my boss Jackie was always telling me not to do it after she made yet another outrageous request (“Libby, buy a cream-colored, brown-spotted alpaca throw for me on your nonexistent lunch hour, and please stop doing that thing with your neck because you look like a turtle, okay?”).

  “I’m not saying this is the end of our marriage,” Tom said, hugging me tight. “I love you so much; you know that. It’s just that—well, I’m trying to figure out who I am. This is something I’ve been struggling with for years, and I’m—Libby? Libby, what are you doing?”

  I wasn’t sure I could answer that question, but I had unlatched myself from him and found myself rifling through yet another drawer, this one where we kept our silverware, which still looked as shiny as it did when we selected it for our wedding registry eight years ago. I took a fork out and held it up to admire it. It sparkled in the light of the dining room chandelier—pardon me, light sculpture—that Tom spent a fortune on, even though we were still paying off his graduate school loans.

  “It’s just that—” I said, then brought the fork down on his hand, which he’d placed on the marble island.

  “Gahhh! Why did you do that?” he yelped. The fork had fallen to the floor, so I knew it hadn’t gone in that deep, but Tom was jumping around and pumping his arm up and down like he’d been burned, or, you know, stabbed. “I pour my heart out to you, and you spear me like a piece of meat? What is wrong with you, Libby?”