2 Passing

Lily

In the end, dying was both a massive pain in the ass and a relief.

As the symptoms progressed, she’d tried to explain to her friends and family that, while the physical pain was omnipresent and did indeed royally suck, the knowledge that the pain would eventually end was comforting. Only a few of them were able to get it.

For most, like her parents and brothers, the situation was still too raw for them to be able to take that observation in, and they’d told her not to think so negatively. Part of her had wanted to scream.

She was losing everything. Wasting away, bit by bit, she ached down to her bones with a chronic pain that over-the-counter medications couldn’t hope to touch. She sat with the knowledge that all of her dreams, her goals, and her hopes had died long before her body would. If she took comfort in the end, it didn’t mean that she loved them any less, that she didn’t hate knowing the pain her death would cause them.

Didn’t they know that? Didn’t they know she would stay if she could?

The utter unfairness of it made it hard to bite her tongue, but she tried. If she could get through the conversations that immediately followed her diagnosis—some of the most painful of her life—she could do this too. She knew that it was her pain and fear that had her quietly resenting every mournful or overly positive comment and every long look they gave her. All she had to do was die, and with death would come the end of the pain, but they would have to live with the memory of it. Of her. So, she’d swallowed the bitterness and rage down—mostly—and tried to give them as many good days and things to remember her by as she could.

She’d written letters for them, especially for her brothers, sat and talked with her mom for hours, marathoned all the old Godzilla movies with her dad. She’d cleared her apartment and didn’t tell anyone how she’d drifted through the rooms, numbly wondering what to sell, who to leave certain things to, what she would need or want to the end, before she’d laughed and sobbed over the memories and hopes attached to different items. She tried not to burden them when she had the choice, painfully aware of how she’d had to move back in with her parents to prepare for the inevitable and rapidly approaching decline to the end.

She tried to be cheerful for them.

Her genial attitude had its limits, however, and those limits made themselves rather abruptly known every time one of her religious relatives or her parents’ well-meaning church friends pushed the idea of faith healing on her or urged her to reconvert before her death. In a particularly ballsy move, a former college roommate named Kaitlyn had emerged from the depths of social media and taken the opportunity to tout the healing abilities of her essential oils. She’d been more than happy to offer to sell Lily a bottle or twelve and stated that it worked best when combined with prayer. Lily’s temper had definitely slipped the leash then, and she’d spent the rest of that week trying to be as pleasant as possible to everyone around her to make up for it.

It crept up on her though, until she wasn’t strong enough to hide it anymore. The pain. The fatigue. The way breathing had grown more and more difficult. Her utter lack of appetite and frequent bouts of nausea had made her body weak and skeletal, any movement sapping what little strength she had. She didn’t want to go, but she didn’t want to linger in the prison of her failing body either.

A deep, primal part of her felt it coming one evening. Her heart had beat a little bit harder in defiance of the inevitable but had stayed steady until the end. She’d hugged her parents a little tighter that night.

When death came for her, it was bittersweet.

But nothing hurt any more.