The act of dying

Another phone call for Sandy, this time from the Puget Sound Blood Center. "I'm sorry, she died in July," I say into the phone. (Sometimes my throat catches and I sob as I say it; sometimes I say it irritably. This time, I just stated a fact.) The young woman is shaken by this news, though I doubt she personally knew Sandy. She's just making routine calls asking for blood donations, or possibly financial donations. I don't know. We didn't get that far in the call.

We were allegedly taking a vacation from cancer when
we traveled in May, but we talked a lot on that trip
about the future, about cancer treatment, about how willing
she was to keep fighting. I was reassured because she
very much wanted to live, wanted to do whatever
it took to come out on the other side of cancer someday.
She didn't die; she was killed.

 

And I'm struck by the words, "she died," which are echoing in my head. It's an active verb, as if she got up one morning and put "die" on her to-do list. Some people do, of course. And Sandy had certainly considered suicide many times in her life. But this was not one of those times. She didn't die intentionally. She didn't do it. It was done to her. She was killed.

Once it was clear that she would die, she was more intentional about the process. She was vocal about her goals, who she wanted to see, documents she wanted to have in order. She was especially adamant that she wanted to be in control, wanted the "death with dignity" pills Washington voters granted her the right to have. The cancer spread too quickly; the safeguards in the process took too long. She never got those pills. And so she didn't choose when to die.

Rather, her body surrendered to the cancer that ravaged it, and eventually, her spirit surrendered, too, and departed — amazingly intact, from the evidence I've seen.

I know this is just one more arbitrary thing to get stuck on, but language is my playground, and it was Sandy's too. This was exactly the kind of thing we'd puzzle over together, and then reference repeatedly as we found other verbs that worked the same way or that disproved our theories. That playground is pretty empty now. I'm left pushing a swing that has no body in it.