Like Baptism. Like Breath

It happens on a pre-planned weekday in early October, after he has been given the news he will not live much longer. Two weeks prior, his oncologist gathered us all together so we would all hear the same thing. My brother had only one clarifying question: “You mean I’m not going to be able to go back to work?” 

​

The air left the room, and his doctor’s face softened. “Jeff,” he’d said. “I’m telling you your timeline is weeks, not months. So no. No more work.” 

​

Now my brother spends his days on a bed in his living room that faces a bay window where he can see the giant oak in his front yard. Some days when I visit, I can see him propped up so he can watch the leaves change. I imagine sometimes he counts out loud as they fall to the ground. 

​

My parents spend most of their day at his bedside, holding his hand and giving his wife a break so she can tend to their five-year-old daughter. Today, however, my parents have left early, and when I pull up to the house, my brother is not propped up looking out the window. 

​

I have worked a full day teaching seventh grade. I call my husband to make sure the kids have a proper snack ready for them when they get home from school, and head toward their front door, notebook in hand.

​

The air has already started to change, getting crisp as sunlight wanes to the west. Autumn has always been my favorite time of year; there is such beauty in October sunsets, even as we acknowledge they are the harbingers of winter.   

​

He is seated in a chair, wrapped in a blanket. He is painfully thin, having left the hospital with a bag that diverts food away from his intestines. (“Think of the cancer as a film. Jeff,” his doctor had said. “By now, it’s covering most of your organs. That’s why you can’t eat.”) 

He is melancholy today, I can tell. HIs wife sits in the corner of the living room pretending to watch some shitty syndicated show. When I enter, she does not join me next to my brother; she stays put and begins to knead her mouth with her fingers, her clear blue eyes on me as I pull up a seat next to him. 

​

Suddenly, I am under water. 

​

“No Mike tonight?” My brother’s voice is wispy. 

​

I shake my head, feel my throat tighten. “No. He’s with the kids. Tonight it’s just me. Listen,” I lean forward and take his hand in mine. “I have to ask you some hard questions. Is that okay?” 

​

He looks toward the tree in his front yard, where the tops of the trees have begun to go dark, and when he opens his mouth, his voice is barely above a whisper. “Sure. You want to get weird? Let’s get weird.” 

​

I take a long deep breath. It’s the closest to prayer I’ve been in a while. 

​

“Babe, I need to know what you want to happen after you die.” 

 

“After you die” is a really final phrase to say to someone who’s forty-three. Gone is better; immediate but still softer somehow. However, this has never been the nature of our relationship. When it is just the two of us, we speak freely, honestly. 

 

Even when it hurts. 

 

He gazes out the window so long I open my mouth to repeat the request, thinking perhaps he hadn’t fully heard. But then he speaks. 

 

“I want a party,” he says. “Not a funeral. Nothing denominational. Do it at the country club. No sermon or anything. ‘How Great Thou Art’ at some point.” 

​

I nod, writing notes in my journal as though I am copying instructions for a recipe.

 

Eventually I look up at him again. “And your body?” I ask. “What do you want to happen to it?”

 

He nods. “I’ve been thinking about this. I want to be resomated.”

​

A moment of uncertainty.

 

I turn toward his wife for clarification, but his voice draws me back. 

​

“It’s like cremation, but with water instead of fire,” he says. “Like baptism.” 

 

His wife pipes up then. “Jeff, we’ve talked about this. Resomation is not legal in Indiana. I’d have to ship you to Illinois to get it done.” 

​

Jeff is shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I won’t be cremated. And I don’t want to be buried.” He looks at me. “Make sure it happens, okay? Resomation.”    

​

As I write it down, his wife sighs. “You won’t even know,” she says finally. “You won’t be here.” 

​

**

 

He dies at Methodist Hospital a few weeks later, having become too combative in his last days to keep at home anymore. I offer to go and watch their daughter so his wife can see him once more, but she says no. No more suffering. 

​

When we see him, he is unhooked from all the tubing and bare-chested. His mouth is open. (“He’s too fresh for me to be able to set his jaw,” the nurse explains. “I can put a pillow under his chin if you want me to.”) 

​

When the time comes to celebrate his life, we bend as close to his wishes as we can. We gather in the community room of his country club and read from The Little Prince, his favorite childhood book. We play “How Great Thou Art,” although I make sure it’s the Willie Nelson version. We drink cheap beer and listen to the Pixies and swap epic Jeff stories. The only thing missing is him; his body has been shipped to Chicago so he can avoid fire and instead be baptized one last time.

​

**

 

We place some of his ashes in a rock under a willow tree with room for both my parents to be interred alongside him. His wife gives each of us a small tupperware container with the rest of his remains. 

​

But what do you do with the dead? Reverence on the living room mantle is way too sentimental. 

​

I had plans to take him with me everywhere I travel, to put little bits of him on every trail and in every dirt bar bathroom I could find. Unfortunately, resomated ashes look remarkably close to cocaine, which made air travel tricky. Other than a road trip here or there, the pieces of him that belong to me remain shut tightly in tupperware with a purple lid. I keep him in my office desk, next to my one-hitter. 

​

The summer after his death, those of us who remain go to the beach where we’d vacationed my entire life. It seems important we do it. After all, he’d been sick for nine years and we’d persevered. Why not continue in his absence?

​

We spend the week going to the same restaurants we’d gone to since we were in our teens, and make the same spaghetti dinners on our nights in. We drink and swim and share epic Jeff stories, knowing he is with us. Literally with us.

​

The last day we are there, his wife pulls out a small piece of tupperware and holds it up in the living room. 

​

“We should each take some tonight to the pier tonight,” she says. “Send him into the ocean.” 

It is a pilgrimage, walking to the edge of the pier, each of us clutching a handful of ash in our hands. One by one, we dump him into the rough waves of the Atlantic. There are no stories that night. We sit together, silent on our balcony, and watch the ocean move. 

 

Later, when the sky is still dark, my immediate family of four leaves my parents, sister-in-law, and niece to make the trip back to Indiana. The air is cool, traffic non-existent. The kids are in the backseat, tangled in sleep, their skin still faintly emanating the smell of sunscreen. Mike and I keep the windows cracked, our summer playlist on the speakers. It is a drive we’ve made many times, but somehow I know this will be the last of our whole-family vacations. It will be too hard to write new stories. 

​

We are out of the beach roads and onto the highway when the tears start. They slip down my face, easy as breath.  There had been moments during the past ten years when I’d cried and sworn with such rage I would sweat for an hour later. But tonight, there is no anger, not even any grief. Mike’s fingers brush my arm– he knows– but he does not speak.

​

A few days later I dream I am back at the ocean. I wear a black dress, and both of my hands, right and left, glisten with white ash. I wander until I am waist-deep, and then I plunge both hands into the brown water. It doesn’t even ripple.  

​

“Jeff,” I say. 

​

“I’m trying to hold onto you. I’m trying to let you go.”