Not Dead Yet

My mommy is a practical gift giver. A balm for mosquito bites. An overnight bag that folds to fit into my pocket. Aromatic balls intended to stop my shoes from smelling. Thanks, mom. 

Her gift giving is a token of who she is, practical. She wears transition lenses, her glasses growing dark in organic light. "Transportable shade!" she marvels. Her uniform is one of straight leg jeans and a button down, usually flannel. Sneakers with space for her orthotics. Her practicality is our engine. Our steady hum. 

Her latest gift is one for my mama. A royal blue t-shirt cut with waist and hip space. Across the front in white block lettering the shirt reads: “Not Dead Yet.”

The “Not Dead Yet” t-shirt comes after a dinner of take-out ramen and shrimp buns. The food is disappointing, we all agree. Pork grease forms in a thin layer above the broth and leaves our lips coated in oil. 

Our dinner conversation feels greasy too, like we’re slipping off of it. I’m reminded of swinging across the monkey bars as a kid. Wiping my palms on the fabric of my pants to stop the sweat and strengthen my grip.

“Mama is going to die this summer,” I say and swallow. My brain slips into greasy, sweaty, oily dissociation behind my words. I wipe my palms on the fabric of my gray sweatpants. My sister, sitting across from me and next to my mama, has plans to move to D.C. this summer for a journalism internship on Capitol Hill. We are eating bad ramen wrestling our way through the concept of “plans” in the face of death.  

“Mama will die while you’re there,” we all agree. But we keep slipping off of what to do about this fact. 

Recently, my mama decided to stop treatment for her stage four ovarian cancer. With this decision her death has become a blunt certainty. With this decision comes sentences like “Mama is going to die this summer.” Her death is not new, it has loomed around us for the five and a half years since her diagnosis. Bloated with potential. Now its potential gives way to fact. It sits at the dinner table, present and sure. 

My mama wears a blue terrycloth bathrobe and leans against a pillow in the kitchen nook where we slurp our oil slick noodles. Her big teeth, blue eyes, newly white hair, all of her insistent three dimensionality, clash with the proximity of death at our dinner table. We talk of palliative care and assisted suicide and hospice and long term care insurance and my mama’s face is hers and her body is real. Everything is slippery and slick in the place where these concurrent truths meet. 

We toss out takeout containers and pour leftover pork broth down the kitchen sink and when the “Not Dead Yet” t-shirt makes its debut we laugh and the laughter is something we can hold onto. It has weight and width. A dry grip on the monkey bars. My mommy, ever practical, gifts us humor. Our family’s safest, driest ground. 

Really, we’re all trying to hold two clashing truths at once. My mama is both not dead and dying. She is in the land of “Not Dead Yet,” and none of us are sure how to orient, navigate, survive, exist here. My mommy, ever practical, gifts us direction. The royal blue t-shirt serves as our first road sign, a reminder. 

 My uncle, in what I believe is an attempt to find footing in this new landscape, posts a tribute to my mama on Facebook. He announces her decision to end treatment, makes public the certainty of her death. I understand the instinct. His need for an outward indicator that our pain, grief, slippery dissociation are real. It is another road sign. Not dead yet, but dying. 

After dinner the four of us climb the three flights of stairs to my moms’ bedroom. I try not to think about how, this summer, this walk will no longer be possible for my mama. I try not to think about the hospital bed we’ll install, likely in the living room. “First floor,”, my mommy’s told me, “It’s more practical.” She wants to die at home, I know. 

I call the spot in my moms’ queen size bed between their two sides “my spot.” I fold between their bodies and pretend I am little, rushing from my bed to theirs after a nightmare. Recently, I’ve had a lot of nightmares. 

Lying in my spot, I try not to think about how, this summer, there won’t be two moms for me to lie between. I try not to think about the eternal erasure of the comfort that comes from pressing my body between theirs. The cocooned sensation. My safest place. I try not to think of the nightmares that will ensue. 

I’m in my spot and we’re watching a Ranger’s game. My mama shouts at the TV. My sister speaks a hockey vernacular I’ve only half learned. The two of them are avid ice hockey fans. I used to play superstitious games with myself while they watched their beloved Rangers. “If the Rangers win, my mama won’t die,” I’d bargain. During a power play, the old habit sprouts up. I push it away. 

The game is tied one one when my mama shouts at her lap instead of the TV. She passes me her phone with the Facebook app open.

A name I don’t recognize has tagged my mama in a post. “May her memory be a blessing,” it reads, accompanied by a black and white photo of my mama as a kid, big teeth and blonde hair turned almost white by faded ink. 

I read the post twice, before I realize, with slippery dissociation threatening my vision, that this woman, this stranger, thinks my mama has already died. “May her memory be a blessing.” 

“Who the fuck are you?” I think back. 

Outwardly, we laugh. It’s absurdist in a way that makes life feel like a movie. Serendipitous like a screenplay. A period at the end of our slippery night. “I went to middle school with this woman,” my mama tells me. “And I’m not dead yet!” She holds up her royal blue t-shirt as proof. The practicality of the gift exponentiates. 

We laugh and upon my mama’s request I message this woman, this middle school acquaintance who is a friend only in Facebook terms, “Hi! I saw your post and while the sentiment is very kind I think you may have misunderstood as I am still alive and kicking!” The exclamation points are jagged. The Rangers lose in overtime. 

The next day my mama wears her “Not Dead Yet” t-shirt and we play mini golf. She wins by three strokes. She is playing mini golf and dying. She is beating us all at mini golf and dying. She is competitive, laughing, swinging, three dimensional, vital, whole and dying. She is not dead yet. 

I have a tattoo on my inner right elbow of a light switch. It was poked into my arm with a needle and black ink ordered on Amazon three Novembers ago. Black ink on pale skin, it is intended as a reminder not to live in the black and white. Not to operate as an on off switch as is so often my inclination. I find safety in absolutes. But the land of not dead yet is gray. Slippery. A convoluted implosion of contradictions on a mini golf course. 

How do I tell you then that the day is beautiful? Rich and sparkly. Clear and marked by the quality that lets you know you’ll remember it. My mama poses next to a plastic life-size gorilla on hole 15 and grins. I take her photo. Her royal blue shirt, her big teeth, bigger smile. Later, we sit in a leather booth and eat thin crust pizza topped with meatballs and mushrooms and lemon zest. It is greasy and delicious. 

I awake the next day with a headache that builds in my temples and my blurs my vision. It is a headache so severe that I recognize it as the result of fierce contradiction and slippery gray space. It is a headache born from a weekend spent in “my spot,” in bed between my two moms, confronting the finite quality of my spot’s existence. It is a headache born from a weekend spent discussing “this summer” when my mama will die and we’ll have a hospital bed in the living room and my sister may or may not be in DC. It is a headache born from messaging a stranger who believes my mama has already died on Facebook. 

It is a headache born from knowing that all of this occurred inside the beauty of my mama still being here. Inside the beauty of the four of us together, of my mama beating us in mini golf. Inside the beauty of not dead yet.  

I call my mommy with tears clogged in the tension of my headache. “I can’t see,” I tell her. “It hurts,” I say. My head and everything. All of it. I can’t see “this summer.” “This summer” hurts. The beauty hurts. The finiteness. The visibility of its end. The dying. All of it. It hurts. 

“Write it down, Jess.” My mommy tells me. This is a practical, gorgeous, gift of advice. I latch onto it like an engine. Breath into its steady hum. It is a dry place to land, a firm grip on the monkey bars. I write.