Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  “You shouldn’t be giving men money just because you are breaking up with them, whether they got fired or not. You’re not forcing them to sleep with you, are you?”

  “No, Dan. I’m not raping men.”

  “So, why are you paying them?”

  “Because, I’m just not thinking about their circumstances and that they could lose their jobs. So, if that happens, and it has happened, I try to ameliorate the situation—with money.”

  “Do you understand that that behavior—paying someone to break up with them—is completely unnecessary?”

  “Yup.”

  I needed to switch gears. I told Dan that I also go for very long periods of time without any male interest or sex, and I’d prefer to be having more sex.

  “You don’t get hit on by men?”

  “No. Not typically. Not in America. I think I’m just one big boner killer. Older men like me, because they’ve seen it all and they probably find it refreshing, but men my own age are definitely not interested.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because I’m loud. It’s obnoxious. People are scared of me.”

  “You say that often.”

  “I hear it often.”

  “People tell you they’re scared of you?”

  “Dan, I’m loud and brash. Certain people find that off-putting. Most straight men find that off-putting. This isn’t hard for me to understand. Why is it hard for you to understand?”

  “It sounds like you’ve worked your entire life to make sure that you wouldn’t get hurt again.”

  “But, I have gotten hurt. I’ve had my heart broken.”

  “And what did that feel like?”

  “It was awful. I was completely out of control—like a madwoman. I get distracted with love, and I’ve let it take over before. I’ve done unreasonable things, like checking a guy’s phone, or acting out of fear and jealousy—all the qualities I’m not interested in having ascribed to me. It’s just so much safer to be single. I just get more done when I’m single. So, yeah, let’s talk about that.”

  “That’s your doing, not your being.” I pretended I didn’t hear that.

  “So, is that Chet too?” I asked Dan. “He’s certainly getting a lot of airtime for a dead guy.”

  “I don’t think you’ll allow it. I don’t think your subconscious thinks it can take another letdown. You are most likely actively making sure that you are preserving the only reliable thing in your life.”

  “Which is?”

  “You.”

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “Do you think you’re capable of being in a loving, caring relationship with a man, knowing that if something terrible happens, and he dies, that you will be okay?”

  “No. No. No. No one can die.” Dan stared at me. My body reacted as if I had been Tasered. The tears filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. Once that sentence left my mouth, I was able to hear myself. Not what I said, but the tone with which I said it and the age of that voice. The nine-year-old.

  “I can die, but no one else can die. It’s enough already with death,” I said, snapping back to my present-day self.

  “Did you feel what happened to your body when I suggested that someone could die?” Dan asked, with his bottom lip curled inward.

  “Yeah. I’d rather be alone. I can’t take another death.”

  “I want you to think about what you just said.”

  No matter how many times our conversations would lead us away from Chet, we’d always end up back there.

  Dan was making sure we paused every time Chet came up—he wanted to make sure I didn’t minimize my feelings, and he was constantly relitigating my pain back to me—each time further convincing me of the notion that I had a right to be in pain. Not to feel like my pain wasn’t valid because I wasn’t raped or assaulted or molested or beaten or worse. Just because I grew up with all the things I needed and never had any real perceivable struggle, that didn’t preclude me from having the right to unearth my pain. To not power through it and assume it was in my past simply because I’d identified it. He wanted me to live those moments slowly and repeatedly, to make sure the pain didn’t get stuck again—to wring it out.

  That is not my comfort zone. Hashing, then rehashing, something. I don’t like repetition. I like newness. I had to remind myself constantly that this was a reasonable course of action. I was learning from Dan not to object to something without hearing it out or giving it a whirl. I was giving sitting in pain a whirl—and it felt yucky.

  Dan explained that in very traumatic times, you freeze.

  “You do the only thing you can do to survive the pain, which is to shut off and retreat to your own world, because if you were to absorb the pain from all the people around you or acknowledge your own pain, you wouldn’t be able to cope. So, you coped, just like everyone else in your family coped—each in different ways. Your coping mechanism was motion. Do something—anything other than sitting around with your feelings.”

  “But if everything has been a deflection thus far, and I’ve been pretending to be someone for this long, at some point didn’t I eventually just become that person I’ve been pretending to be?”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “People are generally consistent at being themselves,” I reminded Dan.

  “Not when you’re working so hard to change that consistency.”

  “Okay, well, then I’m going to take a step for you, because you’ve been working so hard on me. I’m going to say something I never thought would come out of my mouth. I think I’d like to be in an adult relationship.” And then I wrinkled my nose as if one of us had just farted.

  “You don’t have to commit to being in a relationship. You don’t have to want to be in a relationship. I’m asking you what you want. Any answer is fine.”

  “Quite honestly, I’ve never given it much thought. I’m more worried that liking being alone makes me selfish—selfishness is around the corner from narcissism, and anything is better than being a straight-up narcissist.”

  “You’re not a narcissist,” he told me.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. I deal with narcissists all the time. You are consumed with grief that you have been trying to hide for years. Narcissists are defensive, and you haven’t been defensive about identifying your shortcomings. Narcissists have trouble being self-critical.”

  “Oh, thank God.” I exhaled. “I feel about narcissism the same way I feel about HIV. I’ve always suspected I might have it but was too worried to take the test and have it come back positive.”

  We sat in silence and let this all sink in.

  “I’m a storm chaser,” I declared to Dan.

  “Well…you’re the storm,” he corrected me.

  “Yikes. That’s a double whoopsie.”

  Dan nodded, and we stared.

  “More like a hurricane,” I added.

  “Spinning and spinning, and never landing anywhere,” he said.

  This was another metanoia.

  To know I’m going through something and not try to keep circling around it hoping to avoid going through it. Sitting, and experiencing, and feeling, and not running. To understand that things take time, and to be okay sitting with my pain. To understand the only way through something is through it. Not to rush through life hopscotching over or around it. No one is fully cooked. No person is complete.

  “You had some unfinished business,” Dan told me. “You are healing now. You are learning how to grow and become a fuller person. This is good.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A few weeks later Dan returned from a trip to Jackson Hole and told me that he had spoken to one of the park rangers who remembered my brother’s death. My jaw clenched, my eyes flooded. I was learning to recognize what happened