23
I was eleven years old when my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and got left by my father on the same day. I came home from soccer practice one blazingly hot Wednesday evening and walked into the bathroom to find her slouching in a pool of water on the dirty tile floor, staring blankly at the sink in front of her. I have flashbacks to that day a lot, especially when I’m depressed. I knew Summer only thought I could love her because I was used to dealing with health issues due to my mom’s condition, but that wasn’t exactly true: this awful day had set my fate into motion more than anything. After I fell to my mother’s side and asked her what she needed – if she wanted me to call the cops or walk her to the doctor or whatever else – all she did was reach over and grab me by the arm.
“I just want you to do one thing,” she said, suddenly serious. “Find the best person in the world and marry them. I am serious, Cooper. Treat your heart as carefully as dynamite, because when placed with the wrong person, it can explode your life. Don’t settle for anything less than someone with an absolute heart of gold. When you meet someone who is kindhearted, sweet, honest, and levelheaded, I want you to marry them and never look back. It is the most important thing you will ever do. Don’t end up like me, ruined by love. Do you understand me? Can you do that for me, Coop?”
I nodded.
“No – promise me,” she said.
“Okay. I promise.”
This is what I’d thought of when I’d forced Summer from my home that night in the garage and then gone looking for her, only to hear of her collapse soon after. This is what I’d thought of before walking into her hospital room a few days later to tell her I’d forgiven her, and that I wasn’t leaving. And this is what I thought of as my life fell apart in front of me, as the future I’d envisioned for myself eroded into dust and then tumbled to the pits of the Earth before me, as Summer’s father vacantly collected his ex-wife off the floor and started leading her down a hallway to say goodbye to their only daughter together. As it all melted away and I sank into an ocean of panic, for some reason all I could think of was my late grandmother’s sparkling wedding ring sitting in my mother’s safe back home – the ring I’d promised to give to the best-hearted person on the planet. To Summer. I’d known she’d wanted marriage, of course, but just like any twenty-five-year-old who was terrified of the future, I’d dodged the subject every chance I’d gotten, hoping to delay the matter – but now it was too late. I’d looked long and hard for the best girl in the world, and now that I’d found her, I’d let her slip through my fingers before making her mine forever. I had failed the woman I loved, and the thing I’d been running from my whole life, avoiding with the help of pills and booze and all the rest, had happened.
I had become my father.
Things were happening too quickly for me to fully understand, but I tried. After Shelly had been peeled from the floor, they led us up a flight of stairs to a quiet room on the second floor where Summer had been taken for the goodbye. Oh God oh God oh God. As I climbed, a primal black fury whipped up within me, dizzying me, threatening to overwhelm me at any moment, but I tried to stay with it. Some age-old voice from somewhere deep down told me to be calm, to be the rock that everyone needed, and that if I kept it all together, everything would somehow be okay and everyone would end up fine. I was simultaneously hyperaware and yet completely removed from my body, watching the scene with a zoomed-in precision and a zoomed-out detachment all at once. Outside, the world was raging – a summer thunderstorm had descended upon this place and was bending the pines outside the staircase window nearly in half. The universe was angry at what was happening to Summer – I could just feel it, in the strangest way.
As I walked down that sterile second floor hallway, every door I passed made me even more panicked and confused. Summer’s gathering family was just sort of falling all over each other outside the entrance to her room, wailing like animals, as the nurses stood off to the side, some crying silently, others checking their phones and trying not to act like they were witnessing a death. For some reason it instantly infuriated me that the world wasn’t stopping for her, but then I remembered that these nurses probably saw people die all the time and therefore this wasn’t anything special to them, and that just infuriated me more. Oh, God – die. Death. The word made a new panic rise up in me again. A death. I couldn’t face a death.
But I had to. And I would. For her.
“Come in,” a nurse said with an oddly stiff formality, and I turned the corner and entered the room.
I couldn’t process the next few minutes. I just couldn’t. It didn’t make sense that the same human body that had been alive in front of me that morning was not alive anymore; that Summer wasn’t Summer anymore. They’d cleaned her body to let us say our goodbyes, and all I knew was that there was lots of sobbing and touching and kissing and feeling the last warmth we would ever feel on her skin. For all the world, it looked like she had gone to sleep. She looked like herself, but not like herself, and it was simply not making sense that this was happening and that there was nothing I could do about it. Soon my body started to shut down, my brain getting fuzzy around the edges, but I held on. A random hospital priest showed up and started praying by the bed, but I shoved him away and told him that it was our time with her. He very politely said, “Well, I’m sure she was a wonderful girl,” and then left, and that word slammed into me and broke me:
Was.
My girlfriend was now past tense.
Actually the worst part was when I noticed a clear plastic bag against the wall containing her personal effects, some toothpaste and hair ties and a hairbrush that she would never get to use. For some reason this little bag jumped out at me with the fury of ten thousand typhoons. Oh my God the love of my life will never get to use that stupid toothbrush oh my God oh my God oh my God what the fuck is happening oh my God. But no, that wasn’t the worst part. Soon Summer’s mouth started to droop open, and because it really upset Shelly, the nurses had to come and close it, and that was the worst part.
Actually, no: the very worst worst part was the nurses finally came and asked us to leave so they could send her to the morgue for an autopsy. Morgue! Autopsy! Morguemorguemorguemorgue. Just thinking of the word made some primitive moan-scream escape from my mouth. I was collapsing and I was losing my mind. The thought of my girlfriend lying cold and unfeeling in some dark little refrigerated drawer while her family congregated twenty miles away made my heart fall into my stomach and my head fill with a blaring, shimmering panic. And that’s when I fully disassociated.
Some strange, funny, cackling voice in my head said Nope, this isn’t happening. She didn’t die, she’s still here, this isn’t possible, young people don’t just die out of nowhere for nothing, and I wanted with everything in me to believe the voice. So I put my hand on her arm and said in a soft, pleading tone, “Come on, Summer. Wake up. Get up for me. It’s beautiful outside and we’ve gotta go to the beach. Wake up, it’s still summertime, get up. This isn’t over yet. This can’t be how it ends.”
I pushed back the sleeve of her gown to touch her skin and gasped. It was already ice cold.
That’s when the nurses asked me to leave again and told me it would be better to just let her go see Jesus, but I didn’t want to, and finally they got together and grabbed me and started pulling me away, but I turned around and it occurred to me that I would never again see her like this, with blood in her veins and some color in her cheeks. I was angry and broken and confused and overwhelmed and I was drowning. I shouted that I needed to go find the surgeon because I was going to rip his heart out of him while it was still beating, and a flurry of activity at the nurses’ station resulted in a pinprick-y feeling blooming in my left shoulder. Then Summer’s mom wailed something like “…but I wanted to live to see my daughter have daughters,” and that just decimated me and took all my fight away, and that’s when everything within me faded and then fell in on itself, and I slumped against the wall.
But still, I did get to see one last glimpse of her before it all went black. And she was so beautiful.
My God, Summer was so beautiful.