A body shutting down is horrifying. Looking back, I don’t know why I took on the task for as long as I did. It was short, but horrible time. The home hospice would kit out the house with all the supplies and the meds and a visit from kind people who would answer your call. I had a shoebox full of an opiate dependent’s dream, with a few benzos and heavy sedatives on top of it. Everything within me objected to the premise of comfort for dying - do not go gentle into that good night.

There was a large bottle of liquid Haldol, for the delirium. Looking back, Jon was fighting to stay present and conscious long after his body had started to shut down. His determination to have a sense of control of just basics, while trapped in the bed. Wanting just help. Just help.

The body doesn’t all shut down at the same time, and I don’t think the conscious mind understands that. He didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want him to leave, so when his care became suddenly too much, he went to inpatient hospice, where they could grant the wish he told me weeks prior, with his mind and faculties still there — let me drift off.

I can’t continue to relive it right now, but I will tell you that the day he died I played for him on my iPhone ‘American Beauty’ and ‘Working Man’s Dead’ by the Grateful Dead. Curiously, he wasn’t a Deadhead but when it came to moments of life and death there was something about those albums that resonated with him. He bought both during his last few months.

Hospice makes me angry. They told us that most people wished they had started hospice earlier and I don’t. What would I have done? Maybe I could have accepted the outcome earlier, but I couldn’t accept that there were people that had survived a decade or more on what was Jon’s original treatment and that after 6 years, that was just it. How can a person have a miracle of nearly five years of as normal a Pandemic life can be, and then just be stricken.

How does someone with no statistical likelihood get diagnosed with lung cancer in their 40s and die before their 50^th birthday? How do we just accept this, and why the fuck are we built to grieve? I think about my stuffed elephant, Henry, and the elephants I have admired along the way. The traumatized, rampaging, memory-holding, grieving elephants. I wonder what it would feel like to have their trunk wrapped around me in a hug.

The ‘The Year of Whatever’ started on a date in a non-alcoholic bar in the East Village on a work trip to NYC last December. I had ducked out of mandatory fun to do it, possessed by a carnal hunger and absurdity. I initially called it ‘The Year of WTF,’ but whatever was more appropriate. It was declared, and so it would be, and so it has been, and as such, is not over yet.

No doubt one of my previous installments has covered part of this, but there was an absolute isolation that ate at me after Jon’s death. There was help and there were people, and there were friends and family, and to this day I am grateful for those who step up and continue to extend their friendship to me and my kids.

There is no guide for the first few months. I was stunned to find out that the support groups don’t really start until three months post-death, and similar with the hospice-provided therapist. You are given packets and referrals, and well-meaning people will share what worked for them, but I couldn’t find a guide for a queer, weird, atheist parent with a penchant for Existentialism and psychedelia.

Just like Dr. Gitomer, one of my Religious Studies professors at DePaul would talk about in his classes, death is taboo in America, denial of it being woven into the fabric and the religious veneer of what it means to be a ‘Real American.’ We divorce ourselves from Thanatos, shove it to live cozily with Freud’s other pet, Eros. Our bodies and any frailties or unsanctioned joys shall be regarded as trash, do not stare at the parts that have not been sanitized for your consumption.

So death is a commodity, we cannot deny it, there’s industries surrounding it, and nothing about how to cope with it other than adopt some sort of understanding that this is the order of things. Accept it like an unwelcome suitor, like a marriage of convenience, like a 20 year old virgin staring at the ceiling just wanting to get it over with so they can graduate college and at least have that box checked off.

Death will fuck you. And what are you to do, make it have meaning? Make it matter? How? That’s the thing, it’s ‘Cold Pizza’ - “it is what it is what it is what it is.” There’s no meaning to be found there, and the shitty thing is that I can choose to make my meaning out of it, or find my meaning somewhere else.

I don’t have an answer to that yet, but I’m working on it.