Humans show up, and they also disappear

I have come to learn that a common experience of someone dying is the inevitable shock of learning who does not show up for you, as well as the folks that DO show up. Those who do not show up are yet another massive loss.

This is a very sad, factual story about a difficult choice made by people we love deeply. Walking away from others during death and dying has unique driving reasons for each human being. This is a story about Mike’s final memory of our dearest friends, who were our chosen family for decades.

I am sure they had mentioned this trip they were taking, but it wasn’t on the front of our minds because we assumed that the plans would change under dire circumstances. We were living those dire circumstances with a life ending disease, which requires adaptation of plans for everyone. We assumed that love focuses on being there and showing up. Hospice and dying eclipses everything else in life because life is a BFD, especially when its expiration date is pending.

13 days before Mike died, our closest friends (“Pink” and “Blue”) left town on a previously scheduled, months long, non-emergent RV trip to sunshine. They felt it was very important to them to go to that place at that time, and they had reserved camp sites for their RV.

Driving away from a beloved, dying friend was an oddly tidy and sanitized response that was absolutely incongruent with the intimacy of our relationship, and Mike’s pending death. “Its easier to leave than be left”, they shared as they reflected on the personal circumstances that created a timely need to hit the refresh button in their lives at that particular time. “You knew we had this trip planned,” they said. The brains of dying and grieving people don’t easily align with retaining the logistical planning of anything but critical tasks.

Love drops it all and comes running. Love says, I will be there for you - How can I help? Love knows what matters. Love shows up. Love shares, this is what I can offer. Love goes the extra mile. However, walking away before Mike died was an intentional choice that they get to fully own. Although I still do not understand it at all, it was right for them at the time.

They asked to come over and say goodbye the night before they left. I did not want to be there, because the idea of it was so incredibly painful, I just didn’t want either of us to go through it. But Mike asked me to be there, so I was. Pink and Blue shared their reflections on the value of our friendship and that they loved us. “We were a matching set,” said Pink, which was winceworthy given the past tense statement with Mike on hospice, sitting right there hearing it all. At the final goodbye, Mike struggled to stand to hug them, unable to lift his head to see them or lift his arms for an embrace. Tubing and cords were arranged for the vent to inflate his lungs on his behalf. Pink was sobbing and Blue calmly put his arm around her and comforted her out the door.

It was torture to witness Mike experience the purely volitional departure of our closest friends only days before he died. They were the first people we told - before the kids, before anyone else. We were breaking from an already brutal load. Love doesn’t walk away at times like these, but avoidance whispers there are solid reasons to do so.

The snapshot immediately after the door closed is forever in my memory.

Mike desperately tried to breathe through tears and thick mucous, his face in a silent scream as they walked out. Without the muscle strength to sob, the ventilator peacefully breathed in and out; his mouth gaped open in uncontainable and completely soundless anguish. It is a tragic, forever snapshot of the last time in our decades long friendship that the four of us were together. They wrote the ending as a tidy amputation of our quadrilateral friendship in an attempt at a Hallmark Channel goodbye scene. They chose to walk away to work in the sun, as we struggled through his last days. Our hearts hemorrhaged and I sat alone in my home once everyone had left after Mike died.

Texts from their sunny location landed as completely out of touch and numb to the reality of watching Mike die. The disconnected, situationally-sanitized correspondence they sent was illogical. Each outreach broadcast their detachment from the impact of their walking away. The few who knew could not understood their choice to walk away in the final chapter of Mike’s life, and the aftermath of our family’s suffering. There is no lipstick to put on that pig to transform it into anything but the abandonment that it was.

I have since learned that the additional loss of family and friends disappearing before, during or after death of a loved one, is a very common story. Hearing this is somehow reassuring, even though it is still unbelievably painful. We gained belonging in the Camp of the Abandoned,

The support we believed we had turned out to be a switch that they could flip to ‘pause’. It shocked us, our family and friends. Its unimaginable that people we considered family could surgically detach from the reality of Mike’s pending, final departure from being a living human being, and my being alone after the kids returned to their lives. To be clear, the kids continuing with their life rhythm was one of Mike’s clear wishes, as well as mine.

I discovered from a real estate agent friend that they were putting their house up for sale a few months after Mike died. I felt like a kicked orphan puppy. The antidote was to block all correspondence and to rebuild my community. With the kids out of town, and Pink and Blue acting in such an unfamiliar way - I needed to build new bridges, and block their outreach for a duration of time. I trusted my instincts in this nightmare territory.

9 months after Mike died, they planned a lunch for my birthday. It was thoughtful, tidy, light and surprisingly enjoyable. Our shared experiences were in the room, at the table and in our hearts, while the abandonment and avoidance was quarantined offsite. I saw that chapter stand shivering outside in the cold, over the fence. I did not invite it in, because that’s not something that Pink and Blue will do. So I fully contributed to the heavily edited story of that day that excluded Mike’s illness and their walking away, and we lived the ease, while ignoring the pain. That is another choice, and I tried it on.

Pink texted a month later that they will be moving to California a month later. There has been no discussion about the impact, only the data. I will not help with the move, and I plan to ignore it as successfully as they ignored Mike’s final days. Not out of spite, but because not watering things helps them die faster, and a faster death perhaps will be less painful.

After much consideration, we invited them for Christmas dinner. The kids are in support of it. Personally, I want the kids to have a final experience of what our family looked like before Mike died. It could be the memorial service for our friendship, or a breathing point to weave a new kind of together, keeping intimacy at a distance.

Sometimes abandonment burns bridges forever. Perhaps it also can be a caulderizing gun burning raw tissue, leaving burnt hair aroma and smoke to dissipate into the air between what was once attached. Sometimes love can quarantine that loss far away, but it is just barely out of site because the scar is there from the wound. Scars never go away.

We all have the opportunity to decide what story we tell ourselves about our scars.