When Grief Feels like Sci-Fi

Last weekend, I watched “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” and it made me laugh and cry, and hit on so much of what death and grief do to you—rip your world apart and make you fight to stay alive and believe you are still alive now that your person has been sucked into the void. I know both my mom and Daryl would have loved it for different reasons. It’s imaginative and wild, and it’s also a mother-daughter love story and gets at the many lives we all could live and then amps it up throughout universes. But it also takes place in this world, a world of mundane tasks and squabbles, and laundromats and nowhere places and taxes.

It’s the first movie I have seen that I wish Daryl could have seen, too. Like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” put into a blender with “The Matrix” and a twist of Pixar. I miss not being able to hear his interpretation. I wonder about them now, where their energy went, where their thoughts went. They were both so smart, so verbal, where do those voices go? When someone dies, you realize—usually at the funeral or when some total stranger shares a memory about your person—that they were someone to other people as well. And that someone could have been someone very different to who they were to you.

The Tardis in a Multiverse All at Once

I was never as big a fan of sci-fi or speculative fiction as Daryl, but after having both him and my mom die, I now want nothing more than to believe in a multiverse. I often feel like I am in a Dr. Who episode, or any number of Marvel films, and that space and time just no longer make sense in the same way. There was a door I went through and I can never go back. Sometimes it truly feels like more than a metaphor, that my life has been split along with my memories. 

When I ask Google “What are the rules of sci-fi?” I’m told:

The classic elements of a science fiction novel include:

·       Time travel.

·       Teleportation.

·       Mind control, telepathy, and telekinesis.

·       Aliens, extraterrestrial lifeforms, and mutants.

·       Space travel and exploration.

·       Interplanetary warfare.

·       Parallel universes.

·       Fictional worlds.

Aside from aliens, interplanetary warfare and fictional worlds, I’ve acutely felt all the other elements the last few years. Occasionally, I worry that I might be having a mental breakdown, but then I turn on HBO and any number of shows remind me that, no, I’m just a writer.

A recent writing prompt for the Isolation Journals asked this question: Write about a threshold you crossed—what you expected it to be like, how that differed from reality, and what it took to make it through.

The Threshold

My threshold appeared in January 2019 in St. Petersburg, Florida. I was attending a writing conference and Daryl came along for the trip. One night, Daryl was complaining about his stomach hurting, so we went to urgent care. They pressed on his stomach, said he seemed constipated and told him to take something to get things moving. Except, nothing moved. Back in the hotel room, he was retching, in terrible, terrible pain. So, off to the ER we went (not before he called our insurance to make sure this would not bankrupt us. Always practical, even in pain). I remember the hospital was so quiet, no one was in the waiting room, except for a man who was pretending to fly an airplane over his head. He was too old for that, a little disheveled, wild-eyed, they called him a cab.

Everything moved so quickly. They put Daryl in a room, decided to do a CT-scan. Waiting for the results of his CT-scan, I sat there reading the novel manuscript excerpts we would be critiquing the next day in the writers’ workshop. The ER doctor who looked a bit like an actor I could not place, came back into the hospital room and before he even crossed the threshold of the door, we knew. His face, the breath he took before entering, and finally these words: blockage in the colon, cancer that has spread to the liver.

Daryl was on morphine, exhausted and only just comprehending the dragon that had entered our lives. I put down my notebook, the manuscripts from the workshop shoved inside on the floor. The hospital chair that I was finding uncomfortable moments before was now the only thing holding me up. I stared at Daryl’s feet under the white sheet of the hospital bed. Two thoughts zoomed in and out:

1.     We should have had kids

2.     We will need to move to England to afford his healthcare

The door opened again, this time the nurse, who we had met before the news, before the doctor, the nurse who had told me of her brother who also lived in Virginia, handed me a cup of coffee and quietly said she was sorry, knew we had received bad news. The first human to reach out to me with kindness felt like a first breath of air, I gripped that cup so tightly as I would every other kindness that would come to us that year.

Hospital spaces are ones in which we hope to not dwell for too long, and yet, for so many of us they will be the threshold spaces where we will have our most intense and emotional experiences. Birth, death, diagnosis, good news, bad news, survival all of it.

My Origin Story. The Threshold Between Life and Death.

I used to think of thresholds as more metaphor than reality, but crossing an actual threshold in your life feels like you both and that you have entered another dimension. That salmon-toned hospital, St. Anthony’s is where my origin story begins, the threshold between life and death that I crossed while never moving from my chair. It was bigger than anything I had ever experienced and yet I had not moved an inch. I often think of that me frozen in that space, a Styrofoam coffee cup in her hand, watching her husband sleep, knowing that everything that would happen once we left that room would make cancer real, this reality something we would have to live through.