Death: This Is What It Feels Like

From Illinois to New Mexico, from black coffee to fresh heartbreak

Looking at a map of the Pacific, remembering myself naked in a hotel room on the island of Oahu straddling a blindfolded stranger — I don’t recall specific details of that encounter nor the ones to follow. My memory does not focus on the Craigslist ad I wrote to bring that scene and similar ones into reality. Instead, I recall the friendship that spanned decades of my life and served as my confessional. The friendship where I found and took the advice that helped me form the words I typed into that Craigslist ad, the same that led to the naked straddling scenes.

Brita was a woman I met in Chicago in recovery when I was just shy of a year sober in my early twenties. She was newly sober, in her late twenties, living again with her dad. We were both too broke to eat out, so we met at cheap diners -- places with black coffees for 99 cents. We wrote in our journals then read those entries to each other aloud. Our writings were deeply vulnerable, real, full of long-hidden secrets, thoughts we felt sure we could never utter aloud, but did, voicing them to each other.

Eventually, we skipped the journals and simply talked about everything. Brita was witchy and woo woo. She took me to a gathering of women who channeled spirits and facilitated past life regression. I went along for the adventure and because I loved her, but the experiences I had there opened my mind in important ways that lasted and led, eventually, to my pursuit of learning Reiki, to the volunteer work I still do today, visiting people on hospice. After five years, gallons of cheap black coffee later, Brita relapsed, and we lost touch. I moved away from Chicago and so did she.

Years later I reconnected with Brita. She was sober again and had reached out to me. We picked up exactly where we had left off, confessing it all. I told her about my plan. Maybe it was hormones and my early-thirties body telling me it was high time to procreate, or maybe just a shift in the fluidity that is sexual preference, but I found myself suddenly and wildly attracted to men again. In a purely visceral, physical way.

To experiment, I went on a solo vacation to Hawaii where I planned to have casual sex with men, with strangers. Brita suggested that I carefully craft the Craigslist personal ad I planned to post with words to call forth the highest and best in the men who responded. She suggested I use words like gentle and intelligent, even submissive. And, of course, clean, good smelling, and well groomed. Whether I cared to have an actual conversation with them or not, she wisely advised, this would help them to be on their best behavior when they showed up.

And she was right. It did help them to be on their best behavior. In fact, my requirement to have them wear a blindfold, not touch me, not so much as look at me — it was about power. It's this convergence of sexual promiscuity, Craigslist personals, power and control, and friendship that came together at that point in my life, as well as in the book I continue to admire, How to Fuck Like a Girl by Vera Blossom.

Blossom writes, "Because so Many of Us have felt the contours of rock bottom, been left completely disempowered, rendered useless and speechless in the face of giant political machines that want us to die slowly and quietly, en masse, that we really know what it's like to wield power. When we get the spotlight on us, when we have a bit of money, when we have the opportunity to change our reality, we fucking use it, we wield it like a knife."

I related to this. It made sense to me that I designed and directed those casual encounters back then. In the book, Vera Blossom writes fast and witty prose that traverse so many aspects of a young, queer life, including the pivotal role of friendships. The essays cover so many topics, from hookups to witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, divorce, and survival. The humor and the wit are matched only by the melancholy and intelligence, and importantly, what it put me back in touch with from among all the vivid scenes of my own life back then, was how friendships are like family, serving as a foundation for support, understanding, and resilience within the queer community.

My Hawaii hookups being about power and control — it hadn't made sense at the time, and I was OK with that. So was Brita. She didn't try to analyze it for me, nor did she judge it at all. She only looked out for my safety by giving me that advice to call forth the best and most gentle in the men I could with my ad. We lost touch again after that, then connected again and for the last time in my early 40s. We traded video monologues and talked on the phone regularly. We didn’t see each other in person often; only three times, in fact, in the last five years.

Today, driving down the street in Taos, New Mexico where I can feel her so strong, it hit me hard: the cruelty of outliving her. The special brand of pleasure that attends a friendship inside of which you can say anything — anything at all — and know to your marrow that you are loved. That’s rare. That’s the friendship I had with her.

Back in April, she had called me, said she was nearing the end. She couldn't eat or hold any food down. She was on hospice. I flew to Wisconsin, twenty-four hours of travel to be with her for about twelve hours. When I arrived, she stood up from the bed and walked toward me and smiled. I hugged her, stunned. She was skeletal, but much more alive than I'd expected to find her. She said she was getting better, laughed that maybe she would overcome it yet. She had read about people fasting for long periods of time to starve the cancer out of their bodies. Because she hadn’t been able to eat for weeks, what if she had accidentally succeeded in starving it out? I was excited and amazed, and decided that yes, maybe that had happened. “But I came here to hold your hand while you died,” I said. She smiled. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said.

Three months later, she was at the actual end. Her partner called me and asked me if I could help, said Brita wanted to die but couldn’t. I reminded him that the soul decides when it’s ready to leave the body. “She says she’s ready, that’s why she doesn’t understand. Can you help?” I offered to go into meditation and talk to her, soul to soul. He thanked me, and we hung up. But I didn’t do it. Not right then. I went about my day, doing things that needed done, and every so often, I’d get a pull. A literal pull like a child pulling on my sleeve. But still, I tried to put it off, not wanting to face what might come next, hating that I wasn’t there with her this time.

It wasn’t until the next day that I felt the pull turn into a tug, and I finally relented. “Ok, Ok,” I said aloud to the empty room. I lit a candle on my alter and sat to meditate. Right away, I dropped deep into my unconscious. Brita, I’m here. You can let go now, it’s time. This body isn’t a friendly dwelling for you anymore, it’s time to leave it behind and fly free. I felt and heard a snap right around my sacrum, and it hurt a little, then a sensation of pulling free and a dizzying lifting and floating feeling, as though I was helium filled and moving up from my body. It felt lovely, ecstatic, orgasmic, even. I understood. Are you showing me what it feels like?

A few minutes later, only seven minutes to be exact, I was interrupted by my son entering my room to ask me something. After that, I went to dinner with my partner. While there, Brita’s partner called again. “She’s gone,” he said. I asked when. He told me the time, precisely the time that I sat in meditation finally and spoke to her there. I gasped. This is this what it feels like.

The last time I talked with Brita on the phone, I told her about a house in Taos that I wanted to buy. I was afraid to because I would have to take all my money out of retirement to do it. She reminded me that I’m good at taking risks, that they always work out well for me. It was only a couple of weeks after she died that I closed on the house. I was in Taos, reading Vera Blossom’s book, when I was shuttled back in time to Craigslist personal ads, Chicago, promiscuity and power, to the earliest days of an incredible friendship.

I’m still in Taos as I write this. Maybe it’s not inexplicable that I feel her so strongly when I’m here. I have come often since I bought the house, and, after all, it’s only been six months since she left. Another line from Blossom’s book says it perfectly: "I'm in it, now. In that big, open freedom of fresh heartbreak."