ACROSS A CONTINENT and other chasms, Hannah and I have a new hobby: we read books about dying.

Hannah and I met in college. Back then, we were both thin and young and pretty, and already full of sadness. I grew up with parents who raised me, in a neighbor’s words, “like a cat” – they put out food and that was about it. Hannah’s parents drank, a lot, every day, both of them. So, she had grown up on her own, too.

In college, Hannah and I sometimes went to parties, danced, drank a little, but we didn’t “get wasted” — an expression I disliked for the truth of it. We were aware of the privilege of an elite education. We enjoyed our serious conversations: philology, biotechnology, art history. We talked a lot about the idea of love as a verb, her gaze drifting off to the side while she was deep in thought. We were at the beginning of finally being free.

There is something hot in the middle of Hannah’s chest, something like an ember. I could see it back then, kind of glowing up and through her cheeks like a flashlight behind fingers. Her warm, brown, Bambi eyes emit earnest, cartoon-big expressions of delight or concern. I don’t think I ever had an ember but sometimes I got caught in spells of gratitude that would come over me big and sudden. The first time I was 14 and I sunk to my knees in the field after hockey practice, saying a prayer of thanks to a blue and empty sky. After that, gratitude was liable to come over me any time – just walking down a green side street or in the Papasan chair at that house party with Joe’s friends, Lauryn Hill’s voice reverberating through my chest and head and soothing me like honey.

So I think we both had some kind of sadness, and some kind of light that helped us keep surviving it. 

After college, Hannah sent me emails from her microenterprise job in Liberia. She wrote to me about falling in love and carrying well water by the pail and finding Jesus. I wrote back to her from my basement studio apartment in Boston, where snow would melt into the heating vents and turn the single room into a wet sauna. I told her about my lab work and Zen meditation and my lovers, the women and the men. So you see, our lives were always on different paths, and had just bisected for a few years before they strayed out again.

Hannah got married and had a daughter and son with her big, beaming eyes. She needed the salary, so she got a corporate job and threw herself into it the way her parents threw themselves down the neck of a bottle. Hannah spends her days in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Slack, Zoom, Asana. Her children are growing behind her back, in the dark, like mushrooms. She says she knows she won’t get this time back.

I fell in love three or four times, drowning and then bobbing back up to the surface alone while my friends cinched their lives in tight around their marriages. I finished my PhD and left academia feeling like I’d escaped a cult, ill with relief and burnout. I got a job working a cool 35 hours a week. I traded meditation for yoga; alone in my living room, I sink into the muscle burn, making my breath sound like a car engine. I go on dates now and then but usually our words slip over each other without making impact, slick, quiet, and forgettable. You could say our lives have gone wrong in opposite directions. 

But Hannah and I both wake up and go to sleep thinking about death: mine, hers, her daughter who needed oxygen tubes for the first year of her life, my stepfather warehoused in a Medicare facility for the last year of his, the Zoom funerals, the eventual deaths of our mothers. The friends who died young, by suicide or something like it. I think about my pet cat, who will die before me if all goes right, the goldfinch she brought in punctured and gasping, the meat in her bowl or on my table. Death has always been like this for us: that low sky of swords, ringing like windchimes.



WHEN THE CHRONIC PAIN started in my late twenties, it broke my gratitude. Hannah’s ember sparks, still; she told me it’s like a firecracker going off in her chest when her daughters laugh. But when she rests, the sadness comes back on. So she works, though her hair has started falling out, and shadows cross her field of vision at odd moments, and her arms and legs intermittently go numb, like Christmas tree bulbs flashing on and off. Her doctor says it’s anemia but I google the bad words, words like multiple sclerosis and chronic Lyme.

On our regularly scheduled call, Hannah asks me what I’ve read lately about dying. I tell her about Cory Taylor’s book, which I like because it’s not about struggling for meaning or hope in the face of death. It’s about kind of shrugging and making sure you’ve got enough morphine on hand for when the time comes.

I read lying on my couch, feet up, sun streaming in the south-facing windows of my apartment on afternoons when I’ve finished work early. Hannah listens to audiobooks while she folds laundry at 11 PM or makes lunches at midnight. Hannah envies my quiet, and the time I have to sleep, to read, to think. To her, my empty spaces look like open spaces; they shimmer like Montana. I envy her the press of bodies, the way their heat keeps her warm. The way the demands of child, child, husband, job, yard, house are lines of boning around her, like a corset, keeping her from going formless.

I call her again the next evening. It’s rare to catch her off-schedule but I get lucky: she’s on a pee break.

“Why do you read about dying?” I ask.

“Death makes you think about what’s most important.” She pauses and I can feel her face going thoughtful through the phone, her gaze drifting. “It brings your priorities into focus. What about you?”

“When I die, I want to be prepared.”

I don’t say it, but I’m thinking of my grandmother. Instead of nail polish, she buffed her fingernails with a fine emery board and then shined cream into them.

“I’m not ready to die,” she told me once, flipping through shirts on a Nordstrom’s rack. “There are so many places I want to travel to.”

She lived another nine years but she didn’t travel. Maybe her life didn’t let her. Her nails were pink and shining until the morning they went cornflower blue.

“I need to get ready for tomorrow,” Hannah says and we hang up. I get ready, too: opening my mail with a paring knife, recycling the envelopes, filing the bills, everything in its place. I open the windows and the breeze blows nothing off my table.

Hope Henderson is a scientist and writer living in Berkeley, California. Her writing has been published in venues including phoebe, The Rumpus, and Hobart Pulp. You can learn more about her and see her full list of publications at hoperhenderson.com.