Pyramid Song

I recognized the cry--the desperate cry that hopes beyond hope that everything will be okay even though it won’t be. It switches to agony until it is replaced by lost silent eyes. And then they go home to an empty cold bed where they have to take drugs to sleep otherwise see shadows and faces in the dark window.

The first time you lose the person that means the most to you is the hardest. I’m not saying that you can’t get hurt again. It’s just that you’re better prepared for the next time. You expect everyone to die. And eventually they will. The difference is that you know you will survive. Because you didn’t kill yourself off the first time even though you wanted to. The worst has already happened.

You’re never the same afterward. You think that you’ll never heal. And that whole bullshit line about time heals everything is just a line. By time that amount of time has passed, you’ve already forgotten how much it really hurt that first day, the first week, the first month, the first year. Those first days drag by with a miserable pit in your stomach and nothing means as much or tastes as good. And you’re constantly counting. Time is counted in postmortem minutes of first holidays, anniversaries and birthdays spent without them. You save everything that they ever touched. An empty box of Dots candy—the ones they shouldn’t have been eating because they were diabetic. Their Wal-Mart name tag—even though they cursed that place. Size 12 slip-on shoes. You insist on wearing them even though their 3 sizes too big. You wrap yourself in their favorite blanket until it loses their scent. After a while nobody wants to listen to you talk about your dead girlfriend anymore. They say you’re obsessed.

You relive that worst week of your life everyday for the next 2 years. I spent mine in Chicago waiting for her body to be shipped from Michigan. The funeral was delayed because they got the death certificate wrong. I helped pick out a coffin at a Russian sweat shop. Her aunt talked her into heaven even though she was a pagan. The preacher sent us all to hell, because he was convinced that we were hooked on Ecstasy. I think he got the wrong funeral. They straightened her afro, and painted her face. I didn’t want to remember her that way, so I refused to look. She wanted to be cremated, but she got buried instead. I still don’t know where she’s buried. She died wearing the socks that she bought me for Christmas.

Suddenly it’s 9 years later. And those 2 years that you spent together is a momentary blink-- a few second yawn. And those 3 years you spent trying to find yourself back seem childish. Emery Jade happened before I started writing anything down. Before I realized that if it’s not written down somewhere, the memory will change constantly until you’ve got nothing left. It’s like the yellow blanket that she left behind--threadbare and unable to hold in heat. And you don’t dare wash it because it will fall apart. But eventually you do wash it, and you keep it in some faraway tote in the basement instead of in your bed.



The first time I heard this song Rhiannon was driving us into Chicago for the funeral.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M_Gg1xAHE4

Pyramid Song from Amnesiac



I jumped in the river and what did I see?


Black-eyed angels swam with me


A moon full of stars and astral cards


AND All the figures I used to see


All my lovers were there with me


All my past and futures


And we all went to heaven in a little row boat


There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt


-Radiohead-

The Longest Relationship I Ever Had

10 years and 7 months—something like that. Almost everything I know about nursing, I learned there. My job has probably been the only stable thing in my life. I have moved 8 times, lost 2 partners, almost lost my mom, watched my father-in-law die, started and abandoned the MSN program and finished my MFA. That’s the short version.


Even before the restructuring, I knew the end was drawing near. I could feel it at 6:30 am as I walked down the long corridor. I wondered how many more times I would ride the elevator to my floor. What was next? I kept having dreams about tornadoes and tsunamis. These dreams are often about change and rebirth. I thought maybe I would die in a fiery plane crash on my way to Nebraska. That obviously didn’t happen.


Yesterday I worked the last day at my 1st nursing job. I didn’t know it was going to be my last day until the day before. It was anti-climatic. A regular let’s discharge everybody Friday. No bangles. No buzzers. No banners. Just an e-mail on how I’ll leave a void. Assholes leave voids too.


Packed up my stash of snacks. Emptied the freezer. Shredded my mail file and evaluation portfolio. Picked out the books that were still relevant.


All day I made a list in my head of the things that I won’t miss. All the discharge paper work—not many people are discharged on the night shift. Not having a bright light over the bed. Being on the last floor the doctors come to round. Getting up at 4:30am. The constant ring of the phone. Semi-private rooms. Medications in a million different places. Being Vocera-ed for stupid ass shit—but maybe that will be somebody else’s job.


J.G. asked me if I was a little sad. She asked if I was going to miss them. I said that I was and that I would, but I hesitated a little and laughed at the end. So she didn’t believe me. You’re not really sad, she said. Well, I am, but I don’t want to be. And I most certainly don’t want to be in front of people. It’s hard to be sad when I know I’m only going to be 5 floors down, and in all likelihood will be back as a float staff from my new floor. And it’s hard to be sad when I don’t feel anything yet. Except a sinking, nauseated feeling in my stomach. Besides nobody died. Everybody is still right there where I left them—for now.


I stood in my boss’s office to say good-bye. I think maybe she was holding back tears. Maybe. It was verging on something emotional, and I didn’t like it. I had this compulsion to hug her, but I know she doesn’t like hugs. Instead I said, this feels weird, so I’m out of here.


Truthfully, I’m scared shitless. I’ll be the one orientating, not mentoring someone else. I’ll be the new person. I’ll be the person who doesn’t know stuff. And I’m really going to miss them.

The Bust

Someone asked what the background picture to my blog was. I thought it was obvious. But then I looked at it more closely—from an outsider’s perspective. Seriously, what the hell is it?
I think it was an attempt to resuscitate the dead through the living. Instead, it was a reminder of what I wanted and what I couldn’t have. In the photo, it sits ready to burn in a fire pit. Only it was too windy that day, and there had been no rain. I threw it in the pit anyway. Covered it with some clumps of dirt and gave it a dead bouquet. It was my way of moving on. I had wanted it to be some dramatic, engulfing fire, melting shimmering blue beads. But moving on isn’t dramatic like that. One day you wake up and realize that you don’t need relics of the dead. They are in you.


I remember Rhiannon laying on the carpet in her underwear, gooped up with Vaseline as I placed moistened plaster cloth on her body. That’s what you see in the picture. A plaster cast mold of Rhiannon’s bust, decorated in a celestial theme with blue beads and silver paint. Those were the days when I think we understood each other more; not that we talked, because that really wasn’t Rhiannon’s style. I did the talking. She would half listen, grunting in response as she simultaneously chatted on Yahoo messenger. She was silent and emotionally distant unless you got her drunk, and it took more than a few shots to get her there. I never saw her cry, not even when Emery died.
I had expected Rhiannon to be like Emery. Emery was born first; Rhiannon 6 minutes later with the cord wrapped around her neck. Their mom didn’t know she would be having twins. It was 1978, and the doctors always heard a slight echo when they listened to the heart beat. They blamed it on faulty equipment until Rhiannon came out second. They were together for the next 23 years—inseparable shadows of each other, speaking their own language.


Rhiannon and her three cats moved into Crooked Tree Apartments with me in 2001. That is how I came to know Rhiannon.
“Is that the last box?” I asked Rhay.
“Think so.” She peered into her car window.
A neighbor approached us.
“Hey, you doing alright?” He directed this question toward Rhay.
Neither one of us had ever seen the guy before. He must have noticed the confusion.
“I’m the one who found you on the steps,” he said.
Oh god. He thought she was Emery.
“That was my sister,” she stated evenly. She looked a little grey.
“Oh. I’m so sorry.” An awkward pause. “Is she alright?”
“She didn’t make it.” Rhiannon was trying hard to control her voice. She focused on the cement.
The neighbor guy didn’t look so good.
“Was she diabetic? Was there something more I could have done?”
“There’s nothing you could have done.” I assured him. “Nothing anyone could have done.” I repeated more to myself.
I wondered if he too would relive those moments on the stairs, asking himself what more he could have done or what if he would have gotten there sooner. I never saw him again.


Perhaps I had forced a continuation of my dream onto someone who didn’t want it.


One day I was pulling the vegetables out of the crisper, and I looked at Rhiannon’s face. After living with her for so many years, I didn’t really see Rhiannon. I had this image of what she was supposed to be and stopped really looking. Maybe it was the new light in the kitchen or the angle as I stood up from the crisper. I noticed that she didn’t have any dimples. I looked at one cheek and then the other.
“What?” she asked.
“I just thought that you had a dimple.”
“Nope.”
Emery had had a dimple.

My Dead Wives

You’re probably wondering about the title to this blog. Why Postmortem Life and Black Widows? That’s so morbid. Okay, so I’ve never been married. I have never had a wife in a legal sense just girlfriends or partners. Maybe significant other is a better word. There have been four main ones, two of which have died.

Melynda was a redneck with a mullet. I met her at a church outing when I was 16, and she was 20. She grew up with chickens and goats in the house and a schizophrenic father. She was the only child to graduate from high school let alone go to college. They lived in a double-wide off a dirt road and had government cheese in their fridge.

That’s when we spoke in tongues and raised our hands and knocked on strange doors in Cabrini Green and inner city Detroit, because we believed in Jesus and hell and the Republican party. It’s true. I voted for Bob Dole. That’s when I wore Addicted to Jesus t-shirts and didn’t swear for 4 years. And when I hid my Bible from my parents because they didn’t approve. Only they approved even less when they suspected something else.

It started with phone sex only we would never have called it that. We were only privately masturbating simultaneously over the phone. But otherwise we did very Christian sort of things like watch 8 hours of Anne of Green Gables and then have sleep overs in a twin bed. I kissed her first and couldn’t stop.

Melynda told me that she wasn’t in love with me anymore over a Slim Jim at Russ’. She had met someone on the internet--someone older and more exotic. Melynda is still alive and well somewhere in Nebraska.

I met Emery through yahoo personals when they were free. We lasted 2 years and 26 days. Or maybe I should say that she lasted. The doctors told her she was young. Wrap it. It’s just a pulled muscle. Two weeks later, Rhiannon and I stood next to the stretcher that held her lifeless body. She had an endotracheal tube shoved down her throat and a useless IV in her hand. Her gray hoodie and green corduroys were filleted open. A neighbor had found Emery, barely breathing on the apartment steps. That’s where the large clot had dislodged from her calf and entered into her lungs.

Sylvia worked at the group home with Emery. Eight months after Emery died, Sylvia and I started dating. She would leave poetic and sometimes ridiculous messages on the answering machine. “Why are frozen pizzas kept in the freezer section?” She made house calls when I was sick, forcing me to drink cinnamon tea. Soon we were going out a couple times a week to Jupiter Moon, the twenty-four hour coffee shop to play Scrabble and watch the privileged kids act pretentiously sophisticated. I won’t lie. We argued a lot and broke up several times.

We had been separated for about a year. She was headed eastbound on I-96 when she lost control of her vehicle. I imagine a vivid sequence of events. And I see her in her purple Jeep Cherokee, driving too fast down the freeway, skipping to the next track of her Bob Marley CD. Her long dreads decorated with beaded poetry and twisted wire, clinking together as she leaned forward, partially obstructing her view of the road. With a sudden swerve and screeching tires, her short, heavy, body smashed through the glass landing with a dead thud on the pavement.

And then there’s Jacks, my current partner and personal chef. We didn’t want to meet. Manuel set us up at his Halloween Party. I was a bitch and she was nothing special. Until we sat down in the wet grass and talked while everyone else was smashing the adult piñata. Jacks and I were delighted when we discovered that this is the longest relationship either one of us has ever had. I worry a lot that she’ll die. I know it’s inevitable. We all die. I just don’t want it to be too soon.