Living and Dying and the Inadequacies of Polite Friendship

I faced death head on for the first time at age twenty one.

It crept up on me so slowly, through a haze of chronic pain, that when I was suddenly staring down the barrel of my own mortality it felt like no other day. Like I’d been dying since the day I’d been born and my final seconds were ticking down to that peaceful sigh of relief.

It wasn’t until the worst of it was over that I realised my heart had failed me after all. The ECG reading was false - somewhere in the depths of it all I had flatlined. The desperate sputtering of my heart had finally ceased.

As I lay in that bed, the plastic mattress sweating on blistered skin, I wrote the invitations to my own funeral. I imagined them to be simple, elegant, the font cursive but still clear enough that even my Nan would be able to read it. I think the card stock would be white.

Mum and dad would be there of course, my sister, an auntie and uncle and two cousins I hardly see. Three grandparents and maybe, if I’m lucky, a few friends. Maybe they’d be able to splurge a bit on the urn? Since there wouldn’t be enough people to warrant a proper wake.

I’d like to be cremated I decided. I can’t stand the thought of rotting, I’d been slowly decomposing for two decades - better it end in fire.

I didn’t want to die. Not really, I never had. Part of me wonders if it just seems slightly inappropriate. Surely to die you have to have first lived? My meagre existence might not warrant a send off.

There are a few accomplishments in my life that I’m proud of. Awards I’ve won, people I’ve helped, but they seem so far over shadowed by the things my life has done to those I love.

I've cost my family a lot. Money, tears, pain and worry, years of wasted time taking care of somebody who should be able to take care of themselves.

And then there was the looming shadows of all of my regrets, hanging in every corning of my mind. All of the rights of passage I’d skipped right over, thinking my life would be better in my twenties. How wrong I was.

My friends I feel would need a month, maybe two if I’m lucky, before their lives go back to normal. Before the novelty of being friends with the dead girl wears off enough to stop mentioning it in casual conversation.

It’s not like my absence will impact them much. Only one less lunch date a month, where they’d tell me all about what its like to be a real person. In return i’d offer advice learnt from books and movies rather than personal experiences. I'd sit there and squirm, struggling to come up with anything to contribute, and end up giving them little pieces of my soul as compensation. They'd go on with their lives without a second thought, not knowing a tiny fractal of me went with them. It's almost comforting.

Maybe I’d get a few instagram posts? Or a half hearted facebook charity that wouldn’t reach its target? It would look like people cared, and I’m sure that they would. But it's true that for the most part i'll be forgotten, as in life so in death. Forever I will be an anecdote; no longer the friend with a chronic illness, now the girl they knew who died at 21.

Before my heart gave out it was easy to excuse the infrequent messages, the brush off responses to suggestions of hanging out. The lack of invites to group events and pathetic excuses for polite conversation. I’m sick and wouldn’t be up for it anyways, besides everyone has their own stresses to deal with.

But when you stare death in the face and shake his hand, you know him intimately, and still the people you cherish can barely manage and ‘are you okay?’.

When the ‘how are you feeling?’ is only a formality, an obligation before they change the subject to themselves. When they don’t want to know the details. They don’t want to hear that your organs were failing, that you spent six days in intensive care, that you couldn’t walk on your own hell you could barely sit up, or swallow, that your skin turned purple and your blood was literally boiling in your veins and you had a fever so high you risked brain damage and another half an hour more and you wouldn’t of made it.

When all that is true and you're lying there barely breathing in a forty five minute conversation about their job or their degree, or some party they went to, that’s when you realise that maybe you really mean nothing to these people.

You’re not as important to them as they might be to you, you’re someone who can be replaced or forgotten. Someone who only exists for gratification. That secondary character in the movie with the tragic backstory that pops in briefly to give the protagonist perspective or cheesy advice, but whose impact was never important enough to delve below the surface. I’m there to cheer them on, say how proud of them I am, how glad I am that they are doing what I cant.

Maybe I really should have died, it would have given a nice dramatic kick to their character arc. A little bit of drama for them to feed on for fifteen minutes before the happily ever after. Instead I lay there on that sweaty plastic mattress for six weeks. Bleeding from the inside out. It took seven bags of blood to keep me here, all the while I clung to my phone like a lifeline waiting for the message tone to shock a rhythm back into my flatlining heart.

The thing is surviving really felt like dying in many ways. Because it's more of the same, back to empty promises and infrequent contact. Back to the confines of my bedroom staring out of the window like a forgotten exhibit at the zoo. Not exciting enough to to pause at for more than a moment.

But maybe I've let myself grow to comfortable in my confinement, so used to being deprived of the things that create true joy and fulfilment. To scared to try for more. Because how that I’ve stared death in the face I know exactly what I’ve got to loose and what scares me most is that i could almost bare it. To close the curtain here and let the screen fade to black.

But why should I?

Why when i've gone through so much already, fought so hard to pull myself out of the whole that luck had dug for me? So what if I flatlined, why should I let this death be mine? Why not let it be the death of all the worthless promises and weakening bonds. Why not let it be the death of despair and hopelessness. Why should I give up on even the slightest possibility of something new. Something better.

My sunrise might be just minutes away, and I know i'm going to stick around to see it.