Memento Mori

on illness, mortality, and grace

Author’s Note: A version of this was originally published in Catapult, which is a now-defunct online publication. I consider this a “throwback post” in that I’m sharing something that I wrote a while back, but I consider useful to now as well, and has been rewritten to reflect things that have occurred since I first published this piece.

In 2016, I was fighting to hold despair at arm’s length. In pulling Tarot and oracle cards as a part of my morning ritual, I revealed the Queen of Swords and Memento Mori. The Queen of Swords is intelligent, clear-headed. She indicates a need for using one’s intellect. Memento Mori simply means: Remember that you have to die.

I was diagnosed with Lyme disease in early 2015. My test results came back while I was at a writers’ residency in Nebraska, where the temperature was often below zero and I was attempting to revise my novel while coping with what I then thought was fibromyalgia. In my studio I sat at the desk provided, staring at the fax in my email, and tried to make sense of the symbols littering my screen. Here was an explanation for my symptoms after years of half-hearted and vague guesses, and yet medical explanations are in my experience rarely useful; they point at possible solutions, but to be alive and sick is a far more complex endeavor than we like to admit. The diagnosis of Lyme disease was not as simple as to say “cure” or “no cure”; I have heard stories of people getting better and leaving the sickness behind, but I have also heard stories of people living with it forever.

A typical day at that time: my husband is at work. I am home alone with our dog, a sink filling with dishes, and a bed strewn with books and papers that I pray will be useful to me. The past few weeks have been physically difficult, but not to an extreme. I’ve found it harder than usual to sit up in bed, or to sustain a telephone conversation; I went to the emergency room two days ago and came home with a bottle of narcotics that I’m willing myself not to take. In times like this, when my body dwindles, despair creeps alongside me to offer its version of bedside manner: Remember that you have to die.

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I now own Grandma F’s camel coat, which hangs at the end of a free-standing rack. A camel coat is the kind of wardrobe staple I’ve always wanted, yet never bought for myself: a good one is expensive, and though I’m in my early- to mid-thirties, I still look too much like a high-schooler to make the look truly work. Camel coats are the stuff of J.D. Salinger stories; they appear in the MaxMara catalogue, perennially hanging off the shoulders of slim white women. For years I’d wanted a camel coat the way I yearned for a caviar Chanel purse or a pair of Ferragamos, which is to say that I wanted to wear something that reeked of a confidence I have yet to possess.

Before this camel coat hung in our bedroom, in San Francisco, it hung inside a garment bag in my in-laws’ laundry room, in a suburb of New Orleans, waiting to be brought to the assisted living facility. It hadn’t quite fit Grandma F when my in-laws first bought it, and so it was tailored to Dominique, my sister-in-law, who is an otter keeper at the Audubon Zoo and the same petite size as her father’s mother. I noticed the coat when C and I arrived for Christmas last year, dragging our suitcases behind us into the house as we do every winter.

My mother-in-law told us, in private, that Grandma F was being moved to hospice care. We weren’t to tell Dominique. Nor were we to believe, my mother-in-law said, that this meant Grandma F was at death’s door. It simply meant that Grandma F was going to receive more specialized care on an individual basis, at the same assisted care facility where she was already staying. We hadn’t visited her yet, but we planned to, and when we were given this news, there was no urgency in it.