Easily my favorite part of Star Trek Voyager, my very favorite Trek series, and easily a description of 2025, which is the least favorite year of my entire lifespan - which is especially interesting because today, on December 30th, I have just finished my 66th trip around the small, little regarded yellow-white star called 'Sol'.
Happy fucking birthday, to me. And Stephen, too, one of my remaining two spouses. We share the same birthday, he is one year younger than I.
Grief is weird for me, why would it not be, considering, well,
me? Fuck Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the usual map doesn't apply to me. I am in uncharted territory. I'm not experiencing five neat phases at all. I am experiencing a surreal numbness interspersed with sharp moments of flashbacks and crying that suddenly end leaving me calmly mopping my face. I am sad, of course, beyond measure, but it is clear that my strange brain is protecting me in some fashion. Likely because, if it did not, my emotions would kill me outright.
Intellectually, I know that my Sandi had a textbook-perfect 'good death'. She was in no pain, she lay calmly on a hospital bed, soothed by morphine and me singing softly to her about how much I loved her. I held her hand, and she died peacefully. I am grateful that I could be there for her - this is a proper thing to do, both for someone you love, but also for anyone, ever. Nobody should have to die alone and in pain. Many, if not most, to varying degrees, do. They claw at the air, they moan, they cry, they writhe, they gasp for their last breath. Most death in the world is that horrible, and always has been. Modern technology both hides that from us, and - when fortunate - solves for the suffering as well. So I would not change how she died, or that I was there for her... as such.
But I wish I could erase from my brain the experience entirely. I regret every second because it has wounded me in some direction I cannot point to.
Eldenath and I have been continuing what the three of us - when Sandi lived - were doing before her decline and death, which is watching the latest season of 'Murdoch Mysteries'. It is a Canadian period detective drama with overt science fictional elements - clever and fun, with memorable characters, it has been running for 19 years. The practical effects are extremely good - not only in representing the late 1800's and early 1900's in which it is set, but in showing dead human bodies in every possible state of morbidity. Up until now, I have been highly impressed by these effects and makeup.
But now I have seen real death, I have seen a human being die, in real time, right in front of me, and it is nothing like what you see on television or the movies. Not a bit of the death shown on Murdoch looks real anymore.
It isn't different in essence; skin does become pale, blood does pool at the bottom surfaces of the body, the eyes remain open, the jaw slack. But it is very different when actually witnessed. The paleness is not makeup, it is the translucency of human meat from which all blood has drained away - and it does so in seconds, as you watch. It just drains away, leaving the lips colorless, the inside of the mouth yellow-white, the light of the room penetrating far deeper into skin and tissue than it should.
A person just shuts down and turns off, like a refrigerator that has had the electrical plug pulled. The wet, mildly gurgling breaths become fewer and fewer, and then, finally, no additional breath is taken. Then the lips and face drain of color. The eyes remain open, no longer seeing anymore. I had to raise my hand to block the view of her face. I couldn't look at that anymore. That is one of two things that I keep having flashbacks of.
The other is from when she was still alive, when she would look up at me with pleading eyes, like a puppy, like a child, full of trust and hope and fear that 'Mommy' will make everything better, only mommy couldn't, I couldn't, and for all the strength and confidence I tried to show to her, to help her, I was utterly useless. Nothing can stop entropy. She had, over three surgeries and surviving sepsis, taken too many hit points. More than her already damaged meat could regenerate or fix. She just kept getting worse and worse until, at one point, she very deliberately used the last of her strength to dramatically tear the oxygen mask from her face and toss it across the room.
'It clearly wasn't fun anymore' - as she had often said - and she was 'done with it'. That was when she began dying in earnest.
But she waited... for me.
Eldenath had spent the entire night with her at the hospital, on deathwatch - she made me go home because she insisted that she could handle this better than I, and she was not wrong. I came in the morning and just a half an hour after she left, Sandi died while I held her hand and sang to her. Sandi often had told me that I was the first real friend she had ever had in her life, and that her life only began with meeting me.
Apparently, her life began, and ended, with me.
And that is all very nice and sweet in a macabre way, but it is an ongoing nightmare of sudden flashes of horror for me. This grieving shit is really, really hard. Especially because I have no concrete sense of time.
All of you - and I include the remaining members of my family in this - have some sense, it seems, of the passing of time. You people talk about it constantly - about how years are long and how long things have been and how long ago something or another happened. I don't have that. I don't feel the weight or shape of time. For me, in my feeling - not my intellect, I
can count using numbers - I met Sandi just last week. Everything happened last week. Or maybe two weeks ago. It's very amorphous. I went through transition in 1981 just two weeks ago. I started Unicorn Jelly just two weeks, or a week ago. I was a child of five getting slapped across the room for stating firmly that I was a girl, just two weeks ago. Everything feels like that for me. I always feel cheated by time and life, because I've never lived anything for very long.
Eldenath tells me that she 'feels old'. That she can feel all those years behind her. I don't feel that. I intellectually know that six decades have passed behind me, but that intellectual statement has no emotional resonance in me. If I remember something, it is as if it just happened. I have to work out when it must have occurred from the details in the memory, or rely on others to tell me. I remember things very clearly and visually, and in great detail, which helps with trying to work out the time period, but the downside is that I remember things
very clearly and visually, and in great detail.
I think I have some kind of additional PTSD to the stuff I already have. Or something like that. And I feel cheated, because I only just started to get to know Sandi and now she is gone. And I only just started to live after my transition, and now I have an old body that hurts in various ways and lacks stamina and strength. It all happened so quickly! I got ripped off, by time.
They tell me that it took almost two months for Sandi to die, from the first moment she had sepsis. It feels like a couple of days. Months make no sense to me, they never have. I could never get the hang of Thursdays, either, but that is another issue altogether. Hitchhiker's Guide reference there, for the young/and/or illiterate.
Anyway, I am all messed up, but today is my birthday, and I am sixty-six years old, and one fourth of my family is dead, and I had to see it, and I am not okay about that.
But, later tonight, there will be tacos, apparently - in true 'Taco Tuesday' style - and there will be presents for Stephen from me and Elde, and presents for me from Elde and Stephen. And then, even later, Elde and I will watch William Murdoch solve another murder mystery in Toronto, in 1908 or so, and if I had lived from then until this day, it would still seem like it had happened only two weeks ago at most. And the death in the show being investigated will look like makeup and appliances, because it always will forever more for me, in any show, for the remainder of my life.
Which, I am afraid to admit, will for me, in the end, feel as though it were only two weeks long.
So, do I have a moral here, a meaning to all of this crap I have just dumped on you? Yes, actually.
Your friends, your family, even if you are mad at one of them, or some of them, or all of them - whoever is willing to interact with you? Pay attention to every second you spend with them. Value it. You, who can feel time, feel it - however it is you seem to do that. Let it be long and heavy and whatever words you people use to describe how you perceive time. Hug them. Cling to them. Study their face, their smile, their frown. Hold their hand, measure the cartography of their skin with your fingers. Savor the color of their living, blood-flushed skin. Commit to memory their smell, their voice, their mannerisms, everything you can.
They will be gone, soon. So very soon. Too soon. It's always too soon. Always.
Even if you can 'feel' time. I am sure of that much, even if I cannot.
I have truly become Phoebe, from my short story, from my life experience. It's my birthday, I know I am old, yet I am still 26, inside.
And it isn't fair.
