It's Steadily Creeping Up On The Family, Exactly How Many Days We Got Lasting, While You Laughing We're Passing, Passing Away

--"The Crossroads", Bone, Thugs, N Harmony

I waited outside her hospital room, utilizing the only power left to me, denial. Figuring if I refused to see how she was doing, if I didn't allow my mind form a mental sketch of the beginning of the end, then maybe the end wouldn't come. I played the game that children play, if I can't see it, then it isn't true. And I so wanted it not to be true. This just couldn't be happening to her. More to the point, it shouldn't be happening to her. Not to her. Not to Jennifer.

I don't know why we do it, focus on the stupid stuff that has no bearing on the situation on hand, so I can't tell you why it became important to me to focus on the fact that I had Jack in the Box that day. Nor can I reveal to you some mystical reason why I was trying to compile the contents of said lunch and trying to remember the exact total of the meal. I should have walked inside already. She'd asked specifically to see me. Yeah, it was about two weeks after other people had found out, but that day, that specific day, she felt okay to show me what she'd been hiding all those months after she'd found out herself. She was broken and she was never going to be fixed again. I guess the whole revolution of my thoughts around Jack in the Box was a distraction mechanism. If I'd found out with everyone else, seen with everyone else, been lumped in with everyone else, perhaps I could have hidden among the flock. My reaction would have been their reaction. My tears would have been their tears. But, no, she had to single me out so that I would have nowhere to hide.

My waiting out on the hallway, trying to bring about the biggest smile I could fake, could have been construed as being nervous. However, nervousness, I think, is reserved for events we hope to see--promotions we hope to get, proposals we hope to be answered positively, times we hope we will remember always. That time was different. It was akin to fear. I was fearful I would see her lying in the hospital bed, worse off than I could have ever imagined, and never being able to forget that image ever. That was my nightmare I was trying to avoid. It's true what they say, when you know it's going to be the last hurrah, you really will go out of your way to avoid having the last image you see of a person be at their worst. Because part of what was racing through my mind, besides burger wrappers, was the notion I could walk away and have my last memories of her be happy ones. Sure, it'd be the cowardly thing to do, but I was trying to convince myself that would have been what she wanted. After all, didn't she try to hide her secret as long as possible? Wasn't she trying to spare everyone's feelings so they wouldn't pity her? I didn't understand why couldn't things just go back to when I, when all of us, were just skipping along in blissful ignorance.

Five minutes had raced by before I knew it and I was still standing like a doofus outside her door.

I could have prevented it. I had been friends with someone who went to become a researcher studying something pretty damn close to what she had. Maybe if I hadn't screwed up that friendship like I did all my friendships, I could have been able to call her and ask for her assistance. All of this was really preventable. All of this really my fault.

I could have saved her.

I don't know what made me walk in finally. Possibly, it could have been standing out in the hallway far too long and the questioning glances I was beginning to receive. Whatever it was, I walked away, prepared for the worst, steeling myself to be the emotional wreck I always knew I was capable of being. She knew me. She knew I tended to block out unpleasantries such as the inconsequential matter of my friends dying. I had to pretend I didn't care to stop myself from caring too much. It'd be like poking a hole in the dam. I wasn't built to just let a trickle through. If I let a small piece of what I wanted to feel through, the whole facade would come down. That's why I thought it better for all involved if I saved my genuine feelings for her for places like this, my writing. I was more comfortable with getting it all down on paper, choosing my words carefully, without having the unfortunate side effect of my face and my eyes betraying the suffering behind every word. No one should have to say out loud that their friend is dying. I didn't want to say that to her. I didn't want to apologize that she was sick. I didn't want to tell her it was unfair, that she didn't deserve it, or that it should have been me. She knew all that. Besides, saying all those things gave the dying power. It granted the sadness and the grief a strength all their own, that silence did not.

Again, if I never had to say it, it wouldn't be true.

So, yeah, I walked in there prepared to lose myself in the tears I thought she deserved. I wanted it implicitly shown that I would miss her horribly. I wanted her to believe that at least one person cared about her enough to absolutely lose it in front of her.

But that never happened. I walked in there and she was smiling broadly. She treated it like I was visiting her at home. And we talked as if the two of us were merely sitting on the couch, catching up on silly Dawson's Creek re-runs. We joked, we laughed, and we didn't discuss the fact all of this was going on in a hospital. Not, at first, at least. We treated my visit, my two-hour visit, as if her being in that bed was where I saw her every week and as if all the wires, tubes, and machinery strewn about her where pieces of furniture she had chosen to decorate her bedroom with. Everything was normal. Everything was exactly the way it always was.

It wasn't until I was about to leave, that she broached the subject.

"So the doctors I might go really soon, Patrick."

"Oh, really?" I asked. I wanted to ask if she meant leaving the hospital, but, the way she said it, I knew it was a stupid question to ask.

"When I go I want you to do a small favor for me."

"Shoot."

"Say something nice about me. Something cheery maybe."

"Cheery. Got it. Anything else before I go?"

"No, that's it. Just promise me when you come back, you'll let me hear what you wrote."

"If I get something good going."

"When you get done, and you will, promise me you'll read it."

I don't know--maybe it was the way she said it, but suddenly I caught her drift. She didn't just want me to write something cheery for someone else to read. She wanted me to read it when she was gone in front of everyone she knew. Not only that, she wanted to hear it before everyone else. Or because she knew she would never get the opportunity to hear it with everyone else.

And that was it. That was the extent of my first visit to her in the hospital. The first of many, but not as many as I would have liked. That was also the only time I've ever written something I was proud of in one shot. It's probably because I wasn't writing it so I would be proud of it, but that she would be proud of it. I finished it within hours of leaving that room and I read it to her the next day.

And we never talked about her leaving again.

She died with a smile on her face a couple of months later and everyone else got to hear what I always knew about her.

Jennifer's Eulogy

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers