Wide row.
Narrow row.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
The smell of sage wafted through Katlyn’s Pike Street apartment. We’d spent the afternoon wandering from Two Bridges through the Lower East Side, stopping for cold brews every few laps, as we killed time until my flight home. After a half pack of skinny cigs we’d returned home so she could continue her daily Pilates routine. The bundle smoldered in a bowl next to me as I wondered if the other passengers on my flight would be annoyed with the scent currently soaking into my pants.
Katlyn continued without so much as a drop of sweat or a panting breath, unraveling the week’s events with me while the instructor on her laptop repeated with urgency:
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
I reclined on her blue velvet couch and let the waves of emotion wash over me for the third or fourth time this week. I was in New York to oversee a project, and it had cracked me so wide open I’d almost forgotten that Egg was dying.
When I left Vancouver, it seemed like he had more than a few months left. Eating and playing like a healthy cat. That’s what I told myself to deflect the guilt I felt about leaving him. Even still, we knew it was only a matter of time before the cancer took him apart piece by piece. As we continued down Ludlow, Amy called to tell me he’d just taken a dramatic turn, and we decided to put him to sleep as soon as I got home the next morning.
I have been losing my litter of four gentle boys over the last ten years, one by one. First it was Dagney, the gentlest of them all. He collected all of my agony from a breakup that left me catatonic, on the floor, curled up, out of gas, eyes frozen for days. No food. No water. I withered away. He sat with me. Jet-black face, snow-white body. He barely left to eat, collecting my pain and sadness, my self-pity and self-hatred, and channeling it into a pea-sized tumor silently growing on his jaw.
He suffered through squamous cell carcinoma far too long, for no one’s benefit but my own. I couldn’t bear to let him go, and in my selfishness I felt him beg for an end but was too weak to bring it. I spent fifteen months tattooing his likeness around the top of my left arm as thanks for the years of kindness I couldn’t return to him. It’s become as much an homage to him as a reminder of my own selfishness. Amy and I resolved not to let Egg suffer like that.
As his brother, Dutch reached the ripe age of nineteen; his kidneys started to fail. The alpha of the four, the ringleader, he charged his way through it until it was clear there was no life left for him. He passed with grace a few years ago and left a hole that his little brothers, Steak and Egg, stepped up to fill. Steak never left my side from then on, until his kidneys eventually failed him as well. This time we called a vet to the house. He died in my arms, on the floor of our bedroom, which was a trauma I was not prepared for. When the heart stops, the body gets heavy, and the head falls limp. One moment, he was staring into my eyes. Scared. Tired. The next, a lifeless mass of bone and muscles draped over my lap. My heart keeps beating.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Plank.
One minute.
Two minutes.
“What are you going to do?” Katlyn asked, without missing a breath.
I didn’t respond.
Three minutes.
She kicked one leg up and then the other. Now in a headstand: “What do you think?”
Her long hair draped over her sinewy forearms as she clasped her fingers tightly, her neon green claws extending far past the sun-bleached mane.
“You look strong,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
Katlyn is not Kaitlyn nor Caitlyn. She is Katlyn, owing to a nurse who had misspelled her name on her birth certificate, setting into motion a life that most other women would not have survived. In the years since we’d become friends, she’d come to represent to me what my sister might have become if she had made it too.
Jesse’s story ended abruptly a few weeks before her twenty-second birthday. With a revolver perched against her temple and an alcoholic boyfriend in sight, Morgan, the boat captain who unironically called himself Captain Morgan. She pulled the trigger.
After Jesse took her life, Morgan swore off alcohol forever and would call my parents and me on the anniversary of her death every year to tell us he was still sober. I came to resent his metronomic repentance as much as the gravelly sound of his voice, shaking with fear and shame.
It took only a few years before the calls stopped coming. He blamed himself, but deep down he knew what we all knew: She was not meant for this world from the day she was born.
This was the first of many lessons about loss that my parents attempted to spare me by not letting me see her body, but instead left the gruesome scene to my imagination.
A nightstand. A pile of cocaine and a bag of pills strewn across the bedroom of their Oakland Park bungalow. The pool of blood and brain matter soaked through their carpeted bedroom floor. Morgan was the only one blessed to live with the real image. As she lay in his arms, alive for minutes after the initial shot, he reported to us that he could see in her eyes that she regretted it. As her grip loosened, she experienced the first few moments of her life when it seemed she actually wanted to live.
I’ll never know how long Morgan lived with that image.
An entire song had lapsed, and Katlyn was still in the headstand.
“Paul, you only have one life. Seek joy.”
“You cannot wait for things. You have to be happy now. I’m still here. I made it. Keep going, right?”
“Keep going, Katlyn,” I parroted back.
We’ve been saying it to each other for years.
“Just keep going.”
My dad passed shortly after Jesse. He didn’t try to fight the cancer. From the moment she left, he wanted to go with her.
Even as her brother, I can’t know the pain of losing a child that way. I didn’t spend hours and days and years trying to find her the right help, to name the disease that took her, until it was just a little too late. Borderline personality disorder. I delivered both of their eulogies.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Wide row.
“Narrow Row,” the instructor repeated.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, my darlings. Remember to always seek joy. You are strong. You are unstoppable.” As the instructor signed off, Katlyn put in a few extra reps.
“Did I get that last one? I think I skipped a set. Do you mind if I do one more?” she asked.
“You do you.”
Working on this project had opened up some wounds. The second I landed in New York, I was grieving. I’d spent no more than a weekend or two here since I moved to Vancouver during the pandemic, and these nine days had me living something that resembled the life I thought I’d lost, even though most of my friends have moved on. Austin, Miami, Boulder, Los Angeles.
Vishal
Brooke
Kelly
Dolev
Doors left open that needed closing. Doors closed that needed reopening. Memories of old love and what could have been. Memories of tragedy and trauma inflicted on me, and that I, in turn, inflicted on others. It came over and over through the week, only capped by Amy’s call.
Egg’s passing will be the last of a long string of tragedies for now. There’s nothing left to take. Decades of trauma have left my mother and me further apart than ever, each of us gathering just enough strength to continue for ourselves, and plenty to share advice with strangers, but not nearly enough to face each other.
“A week too early is better than a day too late,” I remember the vet saying when we asked her how long we should wait before sending Egg off to the great Churru in the sky. I made the mistake again. Another day too late.
I’ll never learn to close doors quickly. I leave them open, hoping that something I miss walks back through. Closing them feels like life narrowing, a dull knife pruning away the past, leaving holes for missing puzzle pieces that nothing can fill perfectly.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Cancer.
Kidney failure.
Suicide.
Cancer.
“You have to close doors so there’s room for something new, Paul.”
Wide row.
Narrow row.
Wide row.
Narrow row.
John.
Kalen.
Blaise.
Sunny.
“Keep going, right?”
“Keep going, Katlyn.”
My beautiful boy. I love you from the depths of my heart. What the Universe put into play for us could never be undone. On that fatal day, my life shattered. I would never again be who I was before. I couldn’t breathe. Still today, my breath catches in my throat struggling to release when I remember the intensity of that moment.
I found myself shattered and in the deepest well of despair, more like a Greek tragedy than a life. Your father’s transition made the wall’s of that well, as smooth as glass. Climbing back up took Herculean effort. I was trying desperately to pull myself back together. Oft times resembling Mister Potato Head with limbs in places where the eyes should go, rather than a real person.
You have very accurately described our relationship. Two people who love each other very much, but have difficulty crossing the abyss. The depth of the pain and grief we experienced, still holds space in my heart. I have learned to make friends with it. I wish this for you as well. Grief never leaves, it just changes forms. It is a reminder of how deeply we have loved.
I would never have chosen this journey intentionally, but here we are.
I see you, I love you, I am here.
Paul- I’m sure this was incredibly difficult to put down on “paper”. Thanks for sharing ❤️