Beyond the Veil

During COVID, my friend, an ICU nurse, stacked bodies in a freezer truck. There were too many for the morgue. Each body, in a tagged black bag, was placed one on top of another until there was no room. One day, she was asked to bring her mother-in-law down to the refrigerator. Her mother-in-law had died in the ICU where she sat at bedside. Not as a nurse but as family. She couldn’t stack the shell. It was beyond her ability to separate love and life with job. And so, she moved to the basement to other routine tasks that would silence the stacking trauma.

Over decades, I have closed lives, in a way. Burying the hearts of families as their loved ones took their final breath. Now, there are two more bodies preparing to be stacked. Maybe in months, years or decades. Mine and his with the dreaded “C”. Yesterday, I was getting ready for my husband’s meditation retreat. I noticed the line under my armpit. My breast cancer scar had turned light brown with perfect range of motion. I looked at it with silent beauty and acceptance. I realized I had forgiven my fate. I was healing from grief. The quiet loneliness of pain was now in recovery.

As I sat at the retreat, my eyes were heavy during his dharma talk. I listened with half-consciousness until I heard him mention his lungs. The place where the cancer has traveled. A deep sadness overcame me with tears in my eyes. The grief I had thought was overcome, was now just a little deeper. A layer that I had yet to touch. The steam of three years – cancer, COVID and cancer, had burned away the flesh to open-up the wound a little more. This time, it was softer.

My husband asked me once what I thought heaven looked like. I said I didn’t know. He sees loved ones with a string threaded to him. I see darkness with eternal silence and rest. Maybe souls will connect again to live another life. But right now, it feels like body after body stacks unkindly. Teddi died this week wearing red lipstick instead of a clunky oxygen mask. Tom died with end-of-life medications before he could no longer swallow.

Death is around the corner for us, and it sits with me like my dream of a buried new shoe. Something I dig to find but just stack over stack find ones that aren’t mine. Similar, but old. I search for what is white and new but in darkness, I see nothing. Just kernels of sand waiting to be unburied, waiting for me to hear a message that I don’t want to taste.

So many have peace about what is next. Appreciate the now and stop ruminating about the future. To them, I say “Fuck You”, and I laugh and laugh until I cry. The emptiness of my guts. The emptiness of you. And I live another day, hoping that we will all live another too