Elizabeth Gilbert on the struggle of watching the person you love die Thank

last summer I was walking down the street in New York City in the East Village and it was a glorious day and the Sun was bright and I had the love of my life on my arm and she was dying really dying she had advanced pancreatic and liver cancer and the tumors had grown and they had spread and she had recently discontinued all chemo and medical treatment because it was hopeless and all she wanted at this point in her life was to try to find small ways to enjoy whatever was remaining to her and what that meant on this day was that she wanted to try to mobilize to get herself out of the house and walk to Tompkins Square Park and get a soft-serve ice cream cone now Tompkins Square Park was four blocks from where we lived but it truly might as well have been Kilimanjaro for the amount of effort that it took her to do it on this day and she was our cane and she's leaning her full weight against me what's left of her full weight because she's gotten so thin and I've got my arm around her and I can feel her little bones through her sweater and my heart is breaking because this day signifies a turning point in her illness that I had known was coming and I had dreaded was coming and now it is here and it is the day where she has now gotten so frail and so weak that we can officially say that this once formidable person is now completely dependent on me and the reason that so particularly heartbreaking would be heartbreaking for anybody but the reason it was so painful in this case it's what you got to know about my girl is that for the 17 years that I knew rheya Elias I never once saw that woman walk into a room that she was not the most powerful person in that space never once didn't matter what she was so tough so strong so hot she was a Syrian born Detroit raised glamour butch lesbian punk rock ex-heroin addict ex-felon rock-and-roll music star artist filmmaker hairdresser writer phenom of the human being and in the circles that we rolled in area was legend not just because she was so tough and so street smart but also because she had this enormous capacious generous heart and she was ferociously protective of anybody who she cared about if you were lucky enough to be one of the people who Raya loved she would just tuck you under her arm and name you as one of her little cubbies like we were all of the little wolf cubs and she was the mama wolf and she would just take you through the world and you were never in danger when Raya was there I have never experienced a feeling like it and that's exactly why I fell in love with her and why I blew up my entire life to be with her was precisely and expressly because of that power but now she's powerless and as we're inching along the sidewalk on Avenue A I'm feeling that for the first time and I'm feeling how the tables have turned because now I've got her tucked under my arm and now it's my job to protect her from a world that she used to dominate effortlessly and I don't know if you've ever taken care of somebody who's sick and dying but when somebody who you love is very fragile one of the things that happens is the entire world starts to feel incredibly perilous you know every crack on the sidewalk is something that could trip her and she could hurt herself every kid on a skateboard every big dog could knock her over so it's my job to keep her safe and I've got her bundled up and I'm navigating her down this world and it's so terrible to watch her decline but the one consoling thought that I'm having in that moment is thank God she has me like thank God or what would we do like who would protect her if I wasn't here and at that moment the super sketchy guy on a bicycle comes terracing up the sidewalk super fast he's like this gross meth head looking crusty bearded nasty guy and he's got a furious face and he's tearing so fast up the sidewalk careening into pedestrians and he's coming right at us and he almost plows us over and I managed just at the last minute to grab Raya and pull her out for safety but he Clips her he hits her on the arm with this miss bike handlebar as he goes by and I'm like oh my god my baby at which point red turns on her heels and says get the off the sidewalk and the guy the guy screeches to a halt drops his bike crabs his crotch you go suck my dick and Ray goes if you had a dick you be driving a car I look like a and I'm like [Music] kids I'm from Connecticut gonna need everybody to just take it down but I'm also looking at her and I'm thinking what are you literally backing this up with like she weighs 87 and a half pounds at this point and I'm thinking what do you gonna do ray if this guy comes at you and then I see it and he's not gonna come at her because she's locked eyes with him and she has communicated to him very clearly that she is the Alpha and he is the mutt and everybody can see it him most of all he drops his eyes grabs his bait its cuddles off and Raya keeps on inching down the sidewalk with her cane gets her soft-serve finds herself a nice little sunny spot in the park smiles up at me and says today's a good day babe so yeah this story that I had in my head when ray got sick about how helpless and dependent she was going to become that never actually happened because somehow despite the advances of the disease ray I managed to remain the apex predator in every situation but she came into and every plan that I had made because you know I made plans to take care of her every plan I made based on my perceived idea of her helplessness that all blew up too and my whole planning had been based in this idea that I was powerless to stop her from dying but by god I was going to make sure that she had the gentlest the safest the Moses in the most enlightened the most cushioned death that a human being could possibly have but she didn't want any of that that I was providing as it turned out I didn't want gentle that's not how she rolled so she didn't want to talk to the bereavement counselor that I brought to her house she wanted to watch football afternoon with her nephews and I made all this beautiful organic food to keep her as healthy as we could keep her and she didn't want it she wanted to live on Oreos and cigarettes and did live almost exclusively on Oreos and cigarettes for a solid year past her original expiration date if she called it and of course I got her I got her signed up with hospice because I wanted to make sure that she had the best and safest quality home care and then Raya got kicked out of hospice because she wouldn't let the nurses in when they came to check on her so they come for their weekly checkups and she didn't send him away she did want to deal with him didn't want to look at their faces didn't want to deal so hospice throughout which causes me to beg of you and of the universe who the hell gets kicked out of hospitals like how is that a thing but that's what happened and I went through all this trouble to rent and create this beautiful apartment for her to spend her last month's and with everything that could imagine that she could possibly need a doorman building and an elevator and wide hallways for the inevitable wheelchair that would be coming in an extra room for a caregiver who needed a night nurse toward the end everything that you could possibly imagine this beautiful soft sunny space and then two weeks or sorry two months before she died right I decided that she didn't want to be in New York that she wanted to move to Detroit she wanted to go back home to be with her family and to like party with her friends from 30 years ago so she moved my fragile terminal cancer patient moved to another city and what did I do I did what I'd always done Freyja I followed a scamper after her like the little cub that I had always been and blew up my life once again just to try to keep up with the she-wolf so even Rhea not even ran tough as she is of course was tough enough to withstand pancreatic cancer and the disease continued to eat at her and by November of last year the doctor said it's anytime now that's she's on borrowed time already but it could be at any moment and knowing that she was so close to the end rheya called in her ex-wife GJ who she had been married to ten years earlier and asked her to come and help take care of her and she had also already called in her ex-girlfriend Stacy from 20 years ago and she had me so now what Reyes got is a hot blonde from every decade of her life waiting on her hand and foot with devotional love which is rare elias's version of course of hospice and that totally worked for her the Charlie's Angels way of being taking her and we did it we did it because we were crazy about her because she was that mack daddy and she still was she managed to live till Christmas I don't know how that she pulled it off it was important to her and on Christmas Eve and Christmas day she couldn't get off the couch and she was in and out of awareness but she knew that we were there and she knew that we were loving on her and she was happy and midnight on Christmas night we put her to sleep and at 4 o'clock in the morning I had to wake her up to give her her pain medication and I couldn't arouse her and this was the first time that it ever happened so I I just laid with her for an hour and waited for another hour and I tried again I couldn't get any response from her another hour and no response and by the time that the light of dawn was breaking through the snowstorm outside I could hear that her breathing was ragged and her lips and her hands were turning blue and I knew that's it so I went and I got Stacey and Gigi and I said it's now you know come and what happened next was so exquisite it was so beautiful it was like the three of us these three women who had loved her so passionately for her whole life we just knew what to do like it had been scripted or that we were born to it we just came into the bedroom and and she she put on sacred music and Stacey lit a candle and then the three of us as one got on the bed and we wrapped our bodies around her body and we took turns telling her all the last things that she needed to know if she could still hear us that we loved her that she was incredible what a grand and stellar life that she had lived that we would never be the same for having loved her and been loved by her that she had forged our hearts in the furnace of her power that we would always love her that we would never stop telling the world her name and then it was like this silence descended and it was like this portal opened some distant uncharted part of the universe in this river of the infinite entered into that space and we could feel it that it was taking her very gently from us and that's when Riya opened her eyes and said what the are you guys doing and we're like nothing nothing she's like what's going on I'm like definitely not a bet that's her death watch like no that's that like wiping sheets of tears from her eyes she goes babe why are Staci and Gigi in our bed I'm like they're not they're just dropping off some mail you know like kicking them out of bed Gigi's running to turn off the music Braz like why does this look like a candle in here tastes like it does in or just nice shampoo right it's like you guys aren't weird she sits up in bed lights a cigarette looks at me and goes babe what's today's date I said it's December 26 my love she said cool I want to hit that 60 percent off sale today at Lululemon so that's what we did a couple hours later were all at Lululemon there's red in the dressing room surrounded by her attendants trying on athleisure wear for some future that she's still very much intending to have somebody once told me and I wish to God that I had got it sooner there is no such thing as a dying person there are living people and there are dead people and as long as somebody is alive as long as they have any sentence or sense about them you have to expect and allow them to be who they have always been never more important and at the end of somebody's life that they get to be who they are and who they always were and I think that goes a long way toward explaining why Ryan was so resistant why she was so stubbornly oppositional to every story that I had in my mind about what her death might be or should be just wasn't having it from the beginning of diagnosis till the end of her life she was like I'm not your story like you don't get to script this I'm ray of elías my life my death I'm doing it my way you don't write this one I'm doing this one so it was just a handful of days after Christmas when she did die and hers was not a gentle death I'm sure he will be shocked to hear she went down fighting and it was rough and even there at the end I still had stories in my head about what I wanted it to be and how I wanted it to go and I had this very Airy dreamy romantic idea about what Ray's last words would be to me that she would gaze up at me from a soft pillow and say I love you or thank you for everything you did for me you're getting the idea rheya elias's last words to me were no baby no as I was trying to walk her from the bathroom to what would be her deathbed no baby no it was the last steps that she was ever gonna take in her remarkable life no baby no her legs didn't even work anymore no baby no I got this and what I got but I only got it at the very end was that Raya didn't want my help she didn't want my pity she didn't want my planning she certainly didn't want my story the only thing that really wanted from me was that thing which I had always so effortlessly had naturally given her which was my devotion and my awe she just wanted me there in the room in love with her and bearing witness she took that last ride she just wanted me standing back in amazement and horror but mostly amazement what she as she went down as she came out of this earth not gently but like a ship going down in a storm at sea like the force of nature that she was and in the end the only thing that I could do for her in those last harrowing hours was nothing was nothing except to surrender to my powerlessness and to have to let her go and to have to watch her go and she went down swinging and battling to the last awful breath and it was brutal and it was beautiful and she was brave and I howled like a wolf when she was gone and I will never stop telling the world her name you you

Channel: Cheryl Jones Evans

Views: 59,002

Rating: 4.9422932 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: DzH7I4usKeE

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019