This Is the Worst of All Milestones
Aging is both a gift and a curse.
Anyone with kids knows all the little milestones that matter.
The first time your child walks. The first time your child talks. The first time your child eats solids. The last time your child breastfeeds. The first day of school. The first time they spend the night without a diaper. The list is endless.
As we get older, the milestones slow down. It becomes proms and graduations. Then, first sips of alcohol and weekends with friends.
Once you get your first job, the milestones are few and far between.
Everyone gets married. It’s bridal shower season.
Everyone has babies. It’s baby shower season.
From here, it’s all downhill.
Parents die. If not your parents, then you’ll see status updates from friends posting about their parents’ deaths.
Some of us get divorced and begin the race from scratch again.
Kids grow up and move out.
The last stages are about first grey hairs and buying a pill organizer. You’re struggling to keep your body from biodegrading. You’re trying to stop yourself from dying.
Except…people die. Not the older generation. Your generation. The generation that seemed too young to have life-threatening illnesses. I’m forty-five and it seems at least one friend each year is diagnosed with cancer or some obscure illness that we were blissfully unaware even existed.
A very close friend of mine is hanging on in the last dredges of cancer. Did you know that when cancer spreads to the liver, it’s game over? That’s because the liver can’t break down the chemo meds. I didn’t know that. I didn’t ever want to know that. I liked being ignorant because I never needed to know.
When a close friend has cancer, it’s not a phone call and everyone rallies around a hospital bed. It’s years (if you’re lucky) and your friend still has to work, tolerate horrible in-laws, and endless medication. It’s like the elephant in the room; you can sometimes pretend life is normal but you still know it’s there.
Today, Nikki posted her final goodbye on social media. I’m on a text chain with her and a few friends that kept up-to-date on regular events. I wasn’t prepared for the final wave to the masses.
I stupidly still had faith. Worst case, she’d be stuck on endless cycles of chemo and treatment. But Nikki would still be alive. And now she won’t.
She sent a text mentioning in passing that she visited the morgue with her husband.
The. Morgue.
I can’t wrap my head around this sorcery. How can someone be here and the next minute disappear? Science explains everything. Matter converts from one thing to another. Formulas determine the original weight of elements before they burned into a pile of dust. Everything has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.
But life has nowhere to go. If you believe in the afterlife then you can accept that someone’s soul has moved onto another realm or multiverse invisible to the living.
At best, I’m agnostic. I can’t bring myself to call myself an “atheist” because my extreme religious upbringing is still too scared to say it out loud.
In my non-religious view, death to me is like a flip of a switch. One moment a device is running. The switch is flipped and now it’s not. That’s it. It simply ceases to run.
It scares me.
On my text thread, we send the occasional photo from two decades ago featuring all of us. I struggle with these pictures. I want to scream at the Early 2000s version of us and warn them about the perils ahead. I want to tell Nikki to test for the BRCA gene and I want to yell at myself that I unknowingly have a chromosome disorder that I’ll pass to my son.
I want to yell at us for being naïve and stupid. What did it matter if we wore a cute top or got chunky, ugly-but-trendy highlights? Nikki went through a phase where she went on Weight Watchers. In the end, did it matter?
Says the girl who has spent a lifetime panicking about her weight and her worth. I’m upset the scale read 99lbs this morning because I still equate my value to the number on the scale and society validates it every time I wear a tight dress.
As I look at photos of the 2005 White Trash Party or 2007 Vegas Trip, a revelation dawns on me. Our escapades and memory-making events were wonderful because we had no idea what the future held. Our brains were filled with silly things like the time a tree fell on Nikki’s car or the US Citizenship barbecue she held in my honor.
We could never have enjoyed even the small, benign events if we knew or worried about our fates. It’s that innocence and naiveté that makes these memories so special. While we struggled with finances, relationships, and motherhood woes, those problems had solutions or hurdles to overcome.
There is no solution to fix death. It’s the one thing you can’t bounce back from or overcome. It’s final.
This is my least-favorite milestone of all.
