When I Die
When I die, I want it to be in the middle of something. Facedown in my mashed potatoes. Shitting on the downstairs toilet. One leg in my pants. You’ll find me, collapsed in the middle of a moment you’ve already lived past, and somewhere, simultaneously, a parallel universe will cave in on itself. The one we could have lived in together. Gone, just like that.
I imagine you grabbing something to steady yourself. A chair maybe. A bedpost. That big trashcan my mom insisted we get, even though it doesn’t fit under the sink. You feel it then. A skipped beat of the heart. The icy feeling that crawls up your back when something that can’t unhappen happens. You try to breathe, and it catches like an unchewed chip in your throat. You swallow and swallow, but it sits there and over time it rots.
You stagger over. You reach to touch me, my face, and your fingers curl when they meet the cold, bloodless flesh. You turn to vomit and the pile of puke rests on the carpet, warmer and softer and closer to life than I am. You fall into a faint, one hand in the upchuck, the other across my chest.
When you wake, you are on our couch. Our cat bites your hair, kneads your chest, licks your face—a moving mass of claws, orange fur, blue eyes. Here, between sleep and consciousness, it is as if I am still alive. The room smells like I do, or at least like what I did. One of my socks is on the floor. You have the urge to pick it up and vacuum, spray Febreze. There is a glass of water on the coffee table, perspiring from the last of the melting ice. I have forgotten to use a coaster, and you stand up to grab it, to save the unfinished wood before the ring can grow, pale, on its surface.
Then you hear the crying. You turn and my sister is holding me, my head clutched to her chest. Her husband’s arms are around her as she shakes, sobbing into the shirt I died in. The glass of water falls from your hand. You don’t feel it shatter over your feet, but when you look down there is blood. Someone rushes to clean it.
There are so many people in our house. When they speak, their voices fall like the sound of rain through our thick, glass-paned windows. Musical, but without form. Fuzzy. Hushed. My favorite song plays in your mind, repeating even after they’ve all left, and you go through the motions of your life with it as your soundtrack. Sometimes you hum along: Oh I’m on my way, I know I am…
It plays loudest at my funeral. You sit in the back, despite my mother’s pleading. You wear roses in your hair. A white dress. Everyone stares. Only you know how I loved your mane braided with flowers: my sweet sunshine girl. They throw handfuls of dirt, clods of worm poop, old grass, rock, and when they’re convinced they’ve done enough they leave to get drunk and pretend. They tell stories of us, but you aren’t there to listen. You stay. You walk slowly down the row of headstones, down the aisle, like a bride. You pull the roses from your hair, push them into the ground, their stems deep, so they look like they are growing. You lie on the freshly turned earth—soil that has been patted down by the sexton’s son, with the back of a shovel—arms eagle-spread, willing every cell in you to die, die, die. The sky goes gold, pink, dark blue then black, and when the priest finds you the next morning your eyes are still open. You are cold, like I was when you found me. You shiver, goose-bumped, your blonde hairs tall on the lawn of your arms. The back of your white dress is brown.
My mother invites you for dinner. You go. You don’t know what else to do. She serves oven-baked salmon, garlic-chunked and soft, accompanied by roasted asparagus, mashed sweet potatoes, tiny, round rolls of bread you turn over in your hands. The house is quiet. The air is thick. When my father speaks, the effort of pushing his words out, into the air, is too much for him. He wipes his mouth with a napkin before trying again. My mother’s eyes are swollen, red-rimmed below her thick eyeliner. You realize then you have not cried. When she brings out the chocolate cake, iced with buttercream, topped with strawberries—my favorite—something twists inside you. You excuse yourself to the bathroom and leave out the kitchen door without getting your shoes, without saying goodbye.
You take three months off work. The same amount of time you would have if we had a baby. We weren’t trying for one, but I said I’d be happy if you got pregnant, and I meant it, because I know you would’ve been overjoyed. You brought it up on our first date, if you can call it that, a date, with how drunk you got at the bar we went to.
Every day, you wake up, feed the cat, and walk out the backdoor, through the yard, and into the mountains. There’s no trail, so you let your feet carry you across the riverbed, up the staircase of roots to the top of the ridge. Sometimes, you forget to look up until the stars are bright and high in the sky. Your feet are bloody for the first few weeks, but soon thick skin grows on your heels, beneath your toes, and you remember how I used to cut callouses from the palms of my hands with our kitchen knife, and how you screamed at me when I did it. You never remember showering, but your towel is damp every morning, your hair curled with moisture, your pillow wet.
When the casseroles and frozen food run out, you go to the grocery store, the expensive organic one on the corner I liked to shop at. You move like a ghost through the aisles, buying all my favorite things: dark chocolate covered honeycombs, elderflower cider, those peanuts they have that are crystallized in toffee. Your cart overflows. One of the employees helps you and you stare at him, blank, as he walks you through the self-checkout. The beep of each item crossing the scanner is a heartbeat. You close your eyes and my face swims behind your lids. I am saying your name, over and over. Someone is saying your name. Loudly. You open your eyes to fluorescent lights. A man in a black apron tells you the price of the groceries, some ridiculous number three times the amount it should be. You hand over a card, the one under my name, and it’s declined. You sent the papers in to cancel it last week. The death papers. You pay with the wad of cash in your purse, the one I used to insist you carry with you back in college; enough for a cab ride from anywhere, I’d say. You don’t know why you still carry the cash, but it is rubber banded and stuffed in the side of your purse. The man in the apron offers to walk you to the car. You say no. You don’t feel the cloth bags cut into you, but when you get home there are red stripes across your arms, barely broken skin that stings later in the shower, as the hot water hits.
After the three months have passed, you begin to work from home. Your boss doesn’t complain because you’re getting twice as much done. He gives you a raise and you use it to buy two tickets to Norway, where I said we’d go backpacking. You pack bags the night before the flight, stuffing my old boots, my thick pants into a duffel bag. Some leggings of yours into a roller. You don’t set an alarm. You miss it. You don’t return the calls of the airlines, of the hotels, of the car rentals when they ask if you want a reimbursement. When they send checks, you throw them away.
My sister calls you every three days. You don’t answer. You don’t listen to the messages. The only person you talk to is your mother, who cries whenever you mention my name. The voicemail fills up. One day, my sister shows up at your door. You let her in. She smiles, and you try to smile back, but the muscles in your mouth won’t cooperate; your lips feel like they’ll split when you make them stretch that way. She tells you you’ve lost weight. She asks what you’ve been doing with your skin; you’re so tan; your complexion is great. When you tell her you only eat when you remember to, that you only leave the house to grocery shop, to wander through the mountains at the end of the day, she is horrified. She throws out the crusty tupperware in your sink. She pulls you out of the house and to the café we used to go to every Saturday. The barista remembers our order. He gives you two drinks. You drink mine and throw yours away. My sister doesn’t mention it. She shows up once a week and drives you to a bar for drinks, inviting friends of ours you haven’t seen since the service. They drink cold cocktails, and you drink whiskey, neat, room temperature without anything to mix or chase, not even a lemon. With each sip, you remember kissing me, drunkenly, rich and smooth, a fiery feeling you chase with each drink.
On the day you wake up and the bed doesn’t smell like me, you hyperventilate. You squint your eyes at the lump of pillows beside you and do not see the shape of my body. You close your eyes to hear the echo of my voice, but there is silence. Instead you hear my sister’s laughter, replayed from the bar. You go to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and a woman you do not know stares back at you: bony, rings of darkness under her eyes. Her hair grows matted down to her waist. You scream. You cry. It has been six months, and you cannot remember what you looked like before I passed away.
You spend the rest of the day picking up my things from the floor. You pack them up and put them in the back of the storage closet. You decide to go back to work. When you do, your desk is there, waiting for you, the fern I bought you still alive in the corner. One of your coworkers watered it while you were away. Someone has organized your top drawer, where you used to shove lollipop wrappers. I bought Dum Dums for you every week. You find one, still sticky, at the back corner behind the paper clips. You leave it there and reach back to touch it when you feel the tears budding behind your eyes, which happens often over the next few weeks.
You remember to eat one meal a day. Then two. Soon you are eating three, sometimes with ice cream before bed, a luxury you forgot you enjoyed, sweet like ambrosia. You give my clothes away and keep one jacket. You take the pictures of me from the walls and put them in the trunk at the foot of our bed. You do not open it. Not for years.
Someone new is hired in your office and after a week he asks you to dinner, bashfully, eyes on the scuffed leather toes of his vintage work shoes. You don’t know what to say. You say yes. You told me, once, when we were just friends, that you could never say no to a date. Or anything, really. You like making people happy more than you like being happy yourself. He takes you to an Italian restaurant, one we never went to. I always wanted Japanese food, and you humored me. You wear the green dress I loved, the ruffles loose around your slim neck. He compliments your hazel eyes, says he thought they were brown, something I mentioned when I saw you on that lawn in the sun, in our college days, when the light refracted your irises forest green. There are five courses. You eat every bite. You feel you might explode, your stomach swelling against the starched linen of the dress. It is a new feeling. He is impressed. When he drops you off at our house, he walks you to the door. You don’t let him in, you don’t kiss him, but you watch from the peephole as he drives away.
The next time you eat sushi at a place we used to go to. You haven’t eaten there, or eaten sushi, since the last time with me. He doesn’t know how to use chopsticks. The first bite of slippery raw fish makes you think of me, makes you sick, so you order hot sake and you drink it all and soon you are surprising yourself by teasing him. I knew how to use chopsticks perfectly. He asks for the training chopsticks, the childproof ones, and the waitress’ mouth tightens, but she comes back with a plastic pair. He washes every bite down with water. When he goes to the bathroom you order him chicken teriyaki and white rice. He is embarrassed when it comes, red creeping up his neck to his cheeks and his ears, but you smile, and he smiles back, and that is how you know it will be alright.
This time when he drives you home, you let him in. Our big, oak door creaks. I was the one who oiled its hinges, and you’ve forgotten since I’ve been gone. Our cat hisses. She has not seen anyone besides you and my sister for a year. When he bends over to pet her, she nips his fingers with her perfect little teeth and stalks into the kitchen, tail twitching. She laps her water up, angrily, and you hear it splash over the rim and onto the tile, but you don’t rush to clean it. You let it sit.
He spends the night. In the morning, you wake up in his arms and smell me. You feel my breath on your cheek, warm and steamy, vinegary from the rice of the night before. You look over and see my hair, my face, the shape of my body in a sea of sheets and blankets and pillows kicked around by our feet. You close your eyes, dig your head deeper into the pillow, fall back to sleep. You wake later to him kissing your cheek. I am gone. The floor is strewn with clothing, not mine but his, mixed with yours, dirty. You keep your breath even. Your heart continues to beat.
You tell him to shower, and when he emerges, my towel around his waist, you are in the kitchen, making eggs, bacon, blueberry pancakes. A cup of coffee balances delicately in one of your hands, its steam swirling. You do not see when he pulls you in from behind. The coffee spills and he swears as it burns him, but you are smiling. It feels natural on your face. He gets ice from the freezer, holds it to his arm, and cleans the coffee from the floor. On his knees, he asks for another towel to wipe up the water our cat splashed. You watch him as the blueberries burst on the griddle, as the bacon pops in the cast iron pan my mother gave us for our wedding.
Six months into dating, he moves into our house. Our cat purrs, tangling herself in his legs, tripping him when he walks like she used to with me. It makes him laugh. You love to see him happy. It makes you want to be happy. You tell him, one day, about me, and he cries, he holds your hands and cups your face and when he kisses you, you taste him and only him and I am just a memory.
He asks you to marry him and you surprise yourself by saying yes. In the whirlwind of wedding planning, you forget to invite my family, but when you walk down the aisle, they are there, smiling. He sent their invitations himself, called my sister to make sure she was coming. There is an altar with a priest and this man who loves you at the end of it, instead of my grave, marked with a headstone, filled with my corpse, and you are so full of joy you can feel yourself expanding with it and you imagine for just a moment what I would think if I saw you. I would be happy. You say, I do. You walk up the aisle with him, and with your free hand you pull the roses from your hair, stopping to hand the bouquet of them to my mother, who sits at the back. She kisses you on both cheeks. My sister hugs you, so hard you feel your ribs contract. You cry. She cries. You cry together, and the warm tears running down your faces mix. This is how you say goodbye.
You have three children. You give the eldest my name. He grows to be tall and strong, and sometimes you swear you can see my spirit in him: the way his mouth twitches when he speaks, how his eyes alight when he’s happy. Your two daughters look like you, but with your husband’s dark hair. Absolute beauties. The children take up all your time. There are breakfasts and lunches and dinners to make. There are sports and tutoring and art classes and parent-teacher conferences to attend. Sometimes, you feel like a shuttle service, a cook and a maid. Your husband helps you through these days. He takes the keys from your hands when you are too tired to drive. Rubs your feet on the nights they are sore from standing. He is strong and supportive and loving through all of it. How I would have wanted to be. There is a new house that you move into. There are birthdays. There are New Years. There are graduations. You think of me only when you pass the trunk full of pictures, at the back of the hallway, in the closet near the laundry room. Your husband knows what’s inside but doesn’t speak of it. It is the only piece of furniture you keep from the house we used to live.
When our old cat dies, you sneak into our backyard, breaking in through the side gate. You bury her in the corner, near the entrance to the trail that leads to the mountains. You sit there, under the stars, and cry until you hear the squeak of our old screen door, someone coming to check on the noise you are making. You climb over the stone wall, your vision starred by tears, and run, the evening drying your face by the time you are at the car. When you get home, you are cold and shaking, and your husband holds you against his warm body until your temperatures are the same.
Your children move to different states. For years, you and your husband live alone in the big house you bought together. You retire. One day, you pass the trunk with our things on the way to the laundry room, the closet door ajar, so you can see the corner of it. You open the trunk. You go through the pictures. Your husband comes looking for you with a question about groceries but stops when he sees you at the end of the hall, our life stacked around you. He sits, and you tell him our stories: the Tiki bar we met at in college, the foggy, hungover drives to the coast we’d take on Sundays, how I proposed to you on a field sprinkled with daisies in the middle of spring, the smell of apple blossoms swirling in the breeze. The next day you tell him you want to move, and he says okay. The trucks load up the furniture. You give most of it away, but you put our trunk in storage with your grandmother’s rocking chair. The house is sold quickly, to a young family who buys with all cash. You move to the same state as your daughters and live in a condo with a security system, a tennis court, heated pools. It has its own dog park. It’s the sort of place you never saw yourself living in, at least not when you were young with me. You spend your days reading books on the balcony, taking care of your potted flowers, baking hundreds of cookies, pies, cakes, watching your children and grandchildren grow up as you grow old, your joints and mind calcifying.
You get sick first. Your husband spends every day, every night at the hospital, holding your hand and listening to the heart monitor count the beats. The doctor orders an ultrasound for your heart. The gel is a translucent and cold. The nurse massages it over your chest in figure eights. You are crying. When the results come back the doctor comes in and tells you, gently, that the walls between your ventricles are softening, that your heart cannot pump enough oxygen to keep your body awake. At least not for much longer. A few nights later your heart stops, flattening. Your husband’s head lies on the bony ribs of your chest, your hand in his thin, white hair. He has fallen asleep in the middle of reading to you, a book on art history. When he is woken by the nurse, who tells him gently what has happened, his spotted hands shake. His cloudy eyes tear. He holds your lifeless body. You are on your way to me….
But now, I am still alive. You sleep beside me. There is a crinkle between your eyes, a strand of hair caught between your lips. I watch you twitch as you dream. I pull the lock gently, brush it behind your ear. It is golden and soft. It curls at its end. Your skin is smooth and warm, the smallest of moles raised into a beauty mark that sits where the memory of your smile creases your left cheek. You stir and move closer to me. You smell of roses and half-fulfilled dreams. If I must die, I would like for it to be in the middle of something. But I would much rather live here with you.
Mariah Rigg is a writer from Honolulu, Hawai`i who likes writing about how things break. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in 7x7, Pidgeonholes, Hawai`i Pacific Review, and Yes Poetry. She was a semifinalist for the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize and a finalist for The Seventh Wave 2020 Editorial Residency, along with being nominated in 2019 for the PEN/Robert J Dau Emerging Writers Award. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA from the University of Oregon and will attend the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference as a Poetry Scholar. You can find her on Twitter @riggstah.
