My daughter died twelve years ago. She was around for just seventeen days, not really long enough to give me many memories. Yet every day, I remember her, and then I remember that she is not the last person to die. People keep dying, all the time. It’s what we do. And you don’t become an expert at grieving by being an expert at death, as I had fancied myself to be after a childhood spent in my family’s funeral home. Having lost before doesn’t make losing again easy. The feelings are familiar, but you have to find new words. Every time. People keep dying, and people have to keep watching it. And keep living.

A girl I dated, Jaime, died in 2019. Calling her a girlfriend may be a bit of a stretch. She and I had a breezy summer romance in 2005. I had been working in Burundi, in central Africa, for about a year and had been dating men, but I was not ready to settle into a straight life after fighting so hard the previous four years to become more than a theoretical bisexual woman.

A few weeks before a July trip to the US—what people in international development work call “home leave”—I put an ad in Yahoo! Personals, which at the time was the most technologically updated way to find a date. I made it clear I was just passing through Minneapolis briefly and was looking for fun, not love. Even so (lesbian U-Haul jokes be damned), I got a lot of interest, no doubt because I used a photo that was misleadingly flattering, smiling on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with a tipsy smile, sunlight sparkles on the waves and no hippos or crocs in sight. I did not have a lot of time, so after exchanging a few messages with handful of girls, I made a call and decided to focus on Jaime. We arranged to meet the day after I arrived to the US. Her name was pronounced like Jamie, but her mother had decided to spell it how one says “I love” in French. Jaime had fantastic curly hair and clear blue eyes and wore Chacos, and I was her first dip into dating waters after a painful breakup. From our romance, my memory has chosen to retain: going for ice cream at Sonny’s in south Minneapolis, canoeing, listening to her play guitar and sing Indigo Girls songs while sitting on the grass, eating bland tempeh and broccoli that she sweetly prepared for me, and having sex after watching The Goonies at her modest north Minneapolis house while my gay boyfriend Edward slept in the guest room.

When Jaime and I said goodbye, she told me she “liked me.” I got nervous; I was going back to my job and life in Burundi and did not want to deal with someone with feelings in Minnesota. Luckily, a few months after I went back, Jaime met the woman who would become her wife and love of her life, and she and I shifted to an infrequent friendly correspondence.

When Jaime got breast cancer in 2014, she complained about having to do what so many who get cancer do: no, not chemo. Setting up a CaringBridge site. No doubt it was annoying and burdensome for her, but I was grateful for the prompts. Every time she put up an update, I would send her an email and we’d share some stories from our lives over the course of three or four emails, signing off, “rainy Sunday bisous,” “fuck cancer bisous,” or “here’s to a healthy baby bisous.” Because she had a French name, and I had been living in a French-speaking country when we met, we had always used the French word for a friendly kiss to sign off. We were not close, but we had a small connection.

Jaime survived just over five years after her diagnosis. She had just under a year of clean scans before the first mets were discovered, and then about three years of radiation, chemo, and various surgeries to keep her skeleton hinged together despite cancer’s best attempts to break it apart. When she exhausted her chemo options and entered hospice care, I tried to increase my communication. I floundered in my search for words, a miserable dilemma since words were all I could really offer from an ocean away, besides the occasional care package or gift card.

What words are the right ones to support a dying someone with whom you have shared moments of intimacy and vulnerability, experienced separation by circumstance, but are not really close? My first email chose these:

“I wanted that chemo to work for ages. This was way too fucking fast. I feel blindsided—-and if that’s how I feel, a little imagination can lead me to how you feel.”

What those words were trying to say was, I don’t want you to die! And I want you to know that I understand you are probably not ready to die either. I also wanted to avoid saying, I can’t imagine what you are going through, because I firmly believe that most of us can imagine what people are going through—we just choose not to. I had a fierce urge to call death out, and loudly, but did not feel I had the right to use those words with her; they felt too intimate. My and Jaime’s intimacy was a thing of the past. Jaime’s response was positive, focusing on enjoying ridding her body of all the chemicals it had been hosting for so long.

My next email, about a week later, made reference to a recent Caring Bridge post about jaundice and how her liver was ruling the game. I told her that I expected yellow would be a flattering shade on her. It was a feeble attempt to inject some humor into her day (because if you don’t laugh, you’ll die). As I wrote it, though, I couldn’t chase away a chorus of menacing voices in my head, the same ones that had taunted me with their whispers whenever I tried to find humor in the days after my baby died.

She is racing toward death. She is going to die in days.

Jaime stuck with the levity, remarking, “The yellow is not such a great color on me. Not vibrant enough!”

Her last weeks were a flurry of activity, until her strength gave out. She went to a cabin on Lake Superior with her wife and closest friends and ate pie and birdwatched. She flew from Minnesota to Maine to see one of her favorite musical artists in concert. Her wife posted a photo on Caring Bridge of her in a wheelchair, with fantastically wavy one-inch-long silver hair—an effect of the last line of chemo—and a completely yellow face. Her liver was on the brink.

I wanted to know if she had her own chorus of voices who creeped in when she was off doing those fun things in her last weeks. Did they breathe on her neck and tell her, You’re not really happy. You’re doing this precisely because you are dying. You’re only trying to feel happy Jaime ?

I did not ask. If she had been one of my best friends, I probably would have. I knew my questions were a projection from my own experience of grief, when I did all the “right things” after my daughter died—all of the walks and travel, the yoga and spending time with friends—that are supposed to help you heal. But no matter what I did, I was keenly aware that I was doing those things precisely because I was grieving, not simply because they were good or beautiful things. I did not want to be a voyeur in Jaime’s journey, but I could not disconnect my experience of grief with her walk into death.

It hit me that Jaime was my first peer to die. There had been people my age I knew who had died, certainly, but no one I had shared intimacy with. No one who had sung “Closer to Fine” to me while sitting on a patch of Minnesota June grass after eating overpriced trendy ice cream and who looked so surprised when I kissed her goodbye after our first date. No one who had congratulated me so warmly when five years later I confessed that I was bisexual, not lesbian, and that I had fallen in love with an African man.

The realization that I had gotten to my mid-forties without losing a good friend, or a sibling, stunned me. Jaime was deeply loved by a big group of great people, and they surrounded her those last days, and it comforted that she was not lonely. But when I thought about it, I wanted to ask her: Does knowing you are deeply loved make it easier to die? Or harder?

My personal guess it that it’s both, depending on the moment. But I didn’t ask her. Again, I didn’t feel I could. I have never been great with boundaries, but with her, I kept imposing them on myself. Instead, I opted for lightness and started using my six-year-old son as a way to try to connect. He became my literacy device, or maybe my deflection. I told her about how when we were on
maternity leave in Iowa after having my second son, every day on our walk to school, we walked by the Blue Heron knitting shop and greeted the heron in the sign. I told her I thought of her every time I saw the store, blue herons being her favorite bird. She responded, “I would love to talk about birds with Felix. That sounds like a great day!”

As her emails got shorter, I switched to iMessage. I sent a video of my older son telling a joke: “How do you fit six elephants in a VW? Three in the front, three in the back.” She sent back three heart emojis.

My last message to Jaime was a quip about one of my son’s books that interspersed mentions of Albert Einstein’s cool hair among his achievements, in reference to seeing her own cool silver hair in that jaundiced photo. She did not respond to that message. I will never know if she saw it; she died four hours after I sent it.

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