Before I rearrange my room and change the orientation of my bed so that it’s no longer in the same place it was on your last day here: if I don’t write it down I know I will forget, because I know time dulls everything and the small details might be the first to go. I don’t have faith that I’ll remember. But I remember your last day, how it was February but the temperature was in the 70s and I had the window open and the sun was shining in and you were relaxed and we listened to the birds outside.
And another thing I need to write down is my chair, where it’s placed now. I remember how you finally came in from your spot under the bed in the other room, and sat next to me in my chair while I was sick and suffering with a headache. You didn’t leave my side the entire time I was sick. Will I remember that sweater I left on that chair, because you were sleeping on it and I wanted you to stay in my room? Eventually I will wash that sweater - in fact, I didn’t wash it but I did tumble it dry with a bag of rosemary to get the smoke smell out from when I visited my aunt in her dying days. But I’m worried time will eventually erase that sweater from memory the way washing it will take out the traces of your scent. It still hangs in my closet, and it’s a quality sweater so this won’t happen soon, but one day I’ll let that sweater go and I’m afraid with it, the memory of how you laid on it, when you rallied from your own health crisis to support me in mine. That was when you took to sleeping on my bed next to my pillow - you had never done that before, but I made sure when I made my bed in the mornings to leave that little margin for you, in case you wanted to lay in that spot. I came up here one day and there you were and I snapped a picture, a very good one, one that now sits next to the box that contains your ashes. You’re emaciated, but wise, and I think I chose that one as your “burial photo” because that’s how I’ll remember you - so wise, wise beyond this planet - but also to keep telling myself I did the right thing, calling the mobile vet to come help you leave this place, because look at how done you look there. At least, this picture reminds me how you were in your final days: bone-thin.
But for the sake of future me, the sweater you laid on while I was sick is the one that Mom got for me in Aiken for my birthday, probably in 2014; that was when my friends Z and P came with me to celebrate, and we had a shopping day and a lot of fun. There is evidence of this in the mixed media sketchbook P gifted me; we all drew a picture together and it’s dated 2014. The sweater more of a cardigan, but without buttons. It’s a very cozy sweater, ochre and light green and grey and orange stripes. It came to Argentina with me last year. In fact there’s a picture of me in an elevator with someone I loved, very happy, and I’m wearing it. That sweater has a lot of good memories tied in its threads; I hope it’s a long time before I read this again and wonder what sweater I’m talking about.
I know there’s still words I need to write about the regret I feel for leaving you at home alone while I spent the night at some un-sober man’s house. The regret I feel at letting him spend the night at mine, scaring you into the other room, his ugly mouth-breathing and snoring keeping you from spending the night on my bed. Thanks to the clarity I’ve been granted from everything you’ve taught me, I promise never to stay at an unworthy man’s house, nor to ever allow an unworthy man to stay in mine, and to listen to myself the first time I feel scared of someone.
It’s just that I will have to let go of every single thing. That’s the cost of being alive: losing everything, eventually. Like I think of all these changes I’ve been making as spring progresses: I’ve rearranged my room and vacuumed the carpets; I’ve put away the duvet cover on which Phil spent his last days and moments (you should have seen me in the first month after he died: several times a day smelling the place he was lying on at 15:48 that day when I saw his heartbeat stop). I realized the more I clean, the more traces of him get removed. But that’s how life is, it keeps moving on. And even if in this life I were ever to find someone who after I leave would wear a braided lock of my hair around their wrist, eventually that hair will degrade, the bracelet will be lost or the person wearing it will be burned or buried and then every trace of me will have moved along into some other incarnation. It’s not that nothing gold can say; it’s that NOTHING can stay, and nothing does.
But as that last week with him fades the memories of him healthy come back stronger. Those six weeks of him being ill with kidney failure (and his monster pees, and marathon water drinking), and the last five days of his life, are all a short amount of time compared to the four years of happy memories I have with him. Time and my memory are kind that way: the pain is always made less acute, the unpleasant stuff very often gets forgotten. It all disperses the way my atoms will eventually disperse, the way all the hair Phil left behind gets further dispersed every time I clean.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful and moving words. I’m so sorry for your loss. I believe that no one is truly gone until they’re forgotten, and thanks to you anyone’s reading this can help remember Phil a little bit too. <3