By Annie Mattingley
Yes, you did read that right—terminal wellness—that’s my situation. Diagnosed at birth eighty-one years ago, the terminal part is still biding its time, but the wellness part is hard at it to get less well. Some of this is my fault. It seems I’m not great at acting my age.
After the first isolated and scary year of the COVID-19 pandemic came the second and, for me, it was worse than the first. Despite my long history of negative reactions to nearly every allopathic drug I’ve ever taken, I screwed up my courage and went for the vaccine—anything to get out of the house and to help the world get out of the pandemic mess. No problem, a little malaise, a slow day or two, nothing much. Twenty-nine days later I returned to the clinic for vaccine shot number two and the downward slide began. Pain. Inflammation. Low blood sugar. Brain fuzz. I could go on. You name it. I had it. After nearly a year of this, I finally found a functional medicine doctor who put me on an anti-inflammation program and my symptoms melted away and my energy soared and I was ecstatic.
For years I’ve been bouncing up and down on a rebounder for ten minutes a couple of times a week to activate my tending-toward-sluggish lymph system. Now, since I felt so fabulous, I figured I’d nudge my lymph system to really kick that inflammation in its butt by upping the ten minutes to twenty, the times per week to five. I take pride (You know—that thing that comes before a fall?) in being efficient. I’d always worked on my arthritic fingers while I rebounded, along with the shoulder rolls I’d learned in a jazz dance class fifty years ago. (I hoped maybe I’d be invited to join an octogenarian dance troupe someday.) Now, with even more rebounding time to fill, I added in acupressure on the kidney points in the small of my back. Uh-oh.
Long story short, my new regimen lasted exactly four days. I did fine aerobically (Can you hear my pride perking up again?), but my left arm got pissed off about being twisted behind my back while simultaneously being bounced up and down. Official name? Biceps tendonitis. My spine, which had already been described with that unpleasant adjective degenerating, decided this was the perfect time to compact which, since I barely ever topped five feet at my tallest, I could not afford to do. This compaction annoyed a slew of muscles in my back. Enough. You get the not-pretty picture.
During the first pandemic year I was to turn eighty. Family was coming to New Mexico from coast to coast and halfway in between for my birthday bash. I made it abundantly clear I wanted no presents—”Only your presence, please”—I told them all. “Eighty’s a time to downsize, not to acquire.” A couple of times I joked I might be willing to accept certain gifts like, say, a trip to Paris. House of cards style, the celebration collapsed. COVID numbers were rising again, and one by one, each
household peeled away. Travel made them anxious for their own health and they worried COVID would be the unwanted gift they’d bring me and my eighty-two-year-old husband.
By my birthday, the event had been downsized to takeout in the back yard with three of us, me and my older daughter Rowena and my husband, Spencer. After we had devoured the giant dosas from my favorite South Indian restaurant, he handed me an equally giant, ribbon-wrapped scroll of handmade paper that looked an awful lot like a present to me, though he claimed it was only an exceptionally big card. I untied the ribbon and unrolled the paper and began to read his birthday tome.
“I’m super-sillyous—whoops, I mean super serious…” He went on and on. (Silly is part of why he’s been my beloved for thirty-five years now.) Halfway down I came to the shocker. “I’m getting you to Paris.”
Paris? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re getting me to Paris?
I adore travel. I’ve been lots of places, though Paris is among the many I’ve missed. It had just popped into my head for a laugh in the midst of this travel-frozen pandemic, right? Right? As the scroll and its message unrolled, and water slid quietly down my cheeks, I came to two realizations. First, that Paris was probably my longest-standing unfulfilled dream, the one I’d hatched at age ten when for the first time I’d thrilled to the music of spoken French on a family vacation to Canada. Secondly, I got it that Spencer was a dream already come true, a soothsaying shaman who could pierce straight through my joke and into my heart and its hidden yearnings.
Paris is still pending. First France, which had been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, with three lockdowns and stringent regulations, would not let me in, because I wasn’t boosted. Five doctors have told me I shouldn’t be yet, so we put off the adventure. Of course, now I’m kept busy with my hour-and-a-half daily back and spine regimen and getting my left arm so it’s capable of wheeling a carry-on through the airport. This delay’s not all bad. I’m studying French, the other piece of that old, unfulfilled dream. Finally, on August 1, 2022, France lifted its COVID restrictions on travel. We’re checking flights and dates and Parisian weather and we’re on the cusp of making reservations.
Long before masking and isolation, though, I had come to be known in certain circles as The Death Lady. I’d show up at an IONS meeting or a Unity Church service in late October around Day of the Dead to give a talk about how the veil between the living and the dead seems to thin at that time of year. I gave workshops for people in grief. I spoke at SOS groups for those who’d had someone they love take their own life. SOS stands for Survivors of Suicide, a name that always makes me think of bridge jumpers being rescued from the roiling waters below, though in reality these are support groups for those of us who survive a beloved’s suicide. It is suicide that
earned me that moniker, The Death Lady, for suicide is how my younger daughter died, and it was indeed a struggle for me to survive. I was rescued from the roiling waters by what happened not long after the terrible day of her death. Early one morning as I tried not to wake up, because doing so felt like reentering the nightmare life had become, my deceased and thus allegedly unavailable daughter flooded my body with a river of sweet energy that I felt could only be hers.
My mind deemed the question ridiculous, but still I asked aloud, “Randi, is that you?” and searched the dawn-lit room for evidence. “If it’s you, give me a sign, move something, do something, so I know.” Nothing moved except that river of sweet energy that steadily flowed and flowed up from my feet to my head. After a long and breathless moment, she replied, “Your body knows.” She said. My daughter said. I had once carried her within my body for nine months. I had nursed her and nourished her. I had loved her through the forty-seven years of her truncated life. No matter what my mind thought, she was right, my body did know this was my daughter Randi. Thus began, at age sixty-nine, the surprising next stage of my life. Since that morning, Randi and I have had an untold number of contacts. Though now her presence is more subtle, initially these were conversations. Somehow death had transformed her depression into wisdom and kindness and generosity.
Early on I was cautious about sharing this; I’m not fond of being viewed as a nutcase, but when I told friends, that isn’t what happened. One after another they each revealed the closely guarded tale of a dead parent or spouse or sibling who had visited them through dreams or visions, even touch, and that every one of their dead beloveds had made it clear they were okay.
This revelation inspired me to gather and to write down stories, to expose what I came to call our best-kept secret. I put out the word. I heard experiences from strangers and friends of friends and cousins of friends of friends and as I put up a flyer on the post office bulletin board, I heard one from a new widower. “I am okay,” is the most common message the eighty-some people I formally interviewed shared with me. Traveling through my own grief and theirs and our awakening to another view of death has been the great journey of my life.
As I move inexorably closer to the terminal aspect of my terminal wellness, though I am neither eager nor ready, I find myself without fear. Of course, this could be illusion or false pride; perhaps in the face of terminal illness, I’ll fall screaming into the abyss. Yet I have a knowledge of death’s mystery settled deep in my bones. I am beloved on this side and on the other. And, as if that were not enough, my soothsaying beloved is about to whisk me off to Paris.