Liz Levine - Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End: A Memoir

FOREWORD

When my best friend and first love, Judson, got sick it looked like a disease. He was quiet and listless, he lost weight, his skin looked grey, and his eyes lost their spark. His sickness and, ultimately, his death broke my heart, but it made sense to my brain. I saw the illness take him. I saw him fight it, and I saw him lose his battle. I knew I didnt have a cure for cancer and despite my best efforts, I knew I could not save him.

It wasnt like that with my sister, Tamara.

She stayed aliveand sickfor decades. But he died.

No one could validate her illness for menot parents or doctors. When I first started to identify my sister as crazy, l was told not to be mean. More to the point, I was told I was wrong. I was told to open myself more to her, to be more vulnerable and more accessible. That is good advice optically. But I was missing vital information: No one was actually aware that she was sick. Or that her deep, cutting cruelty came from illness.

So l opened up, and I got hurt, over and over again. And the more hurt I got, the less it became about getting to know my sister, and the more it became about trying to find the truth. Trying to fix her.

Fixing is a job for the smart and the strong. Its also the perfect escape for a sensitive soul, so thats who l pretended to beand that stuck. So now Im smart and strong and have survived my sisters suicide, and everyone wants to share their issues around mental healthlike I might have some answers or like l might be able to fix someone. But l cant.

I wish there was an Al-Anon or PFLAG for this. Maybe then I could give some advice. But there isnt. And I cant give that advice. l did this wrong, I didnt love her right, and l cant take that back. The best I can do is try to figure out where I went wrong, to become a detective in death. For now, that means working in reverse. That makes sense to me because the only place I have to work with is the end.

And in this reverse engineering (in the words and the details and the act of being vulnerable with all of the information at hand) I might finally be learning what to do with all the feelings I have. Something that is productive or that might touch someone.

Six weeks after my sister died, I got a tattoo on my wrist. It says make ________.

Eight weeks after, I wrote the first story for this book.

And Im starting where all of us do. With the alphabet.

ALPHABET

I read a book called The Lovers Dictionary by David Levithan. And hes right: every word in the dictionary is a synonym for love.

Every word also works for loss.

ACTION

This whole book is a verb for me.

ASHES

My uncle Brian passed away in June of 2004. He requested that his body be cremated and spread across his property.

We spread the ashes. We hugged. And then we went for dinner.

It wasnt until we hit the door of the restaurant that my father noted to someone, Youve got a little Brian on your back.

ADDICTED

People always comment on how I never cry. Thats not completely true. Im rarely if never angry, but I am sensitive and easily hurt, and so I cry in that spaceas in, I tear up a little. I dont cry when Im sad, or at least I didnt for years. Somewhere along the line, that got logged in my brain as a weakness. Im sure it started when I was five and my mother gave birth to quadruplets and one of them, my infant sister, died.

Im sure my mother cried a lot around that time. And then the surviving triplets came home from the hospital, and they cried a lot too. Just at the time when the triplets stopped crying, my mother lost both her parents. Less than three years later, my parents got divorced. So I grew up in a sea of tears. I never wanted to contribute to the flow, for fear that all of us would drown.

It is snowing when I wake up on the morning of April 3, 2005. Judson has been dead for four days, and I have not shed a tear. I remind myself that I have survived this long through numerous losses, heartbreak, failed exams, and family drama without those tears. I seem to be fine. I lie in bed and wonder if my suit will be warm enough. Serious enough. Protective enough to wrap me in the illusion of professionalism for the bulk of the day. I am focused on practicalities.

1. Shower.
2. Dress.
3. Practice the eulogy while you dry your hair.
4. Put on an empathetic smile.
5. Keep it on all day.

Its my turn to give the eulogy. I feel like Ive waited hours in this synagogue for this moment, yet I feel panicked that its happening so soon. I adjust the microphone and look at Judsons familyright at them. I want them to look back at me, I want to feel their pain.

I want to feel anything.

But I dont. I dont cry. My voice doesnt waver even a little bit, and I wear these truths like medals as we pile back into the car.

The cemetery is surreal: slate-grey tombstones, big fat flakes of snow. I can see Judsons father, Saul, already there: tall, in a long navy coat and hat with the snow swirling around him, standing at the foot of his sons grave.

For all the details I have already forgotten about that day and those few months, and for all those details that I never digested in the first place, what stands alone is this image.

I am too cheerful at the cemetery. Greeting people, giving hugs, staying warm by moving around, staying distracted. Im 29, and my mom still gives me the eyeit says, Settle down, look around you, is this behaviour appropriate?

What is appropriate at this moment? Every time I move, my boots make a deafening crunch in the snow. I know I should stand still, pay attention, pay respects, but if I do Ill start to feel .

In retrospect, I can sense the tension between how much I needed to feel and how much I didnt want to. And now I know that it took Judson dying for me to even realize that I had feelings. And it wasnt the death itself, or the funeral obviously, it was the years that came after that were the most revealing. Its about the moment I realized, I cant avoid feeling any longer .

I dont know when the breaking point was, or if there was an aha moment at all. I just started crying sometimes. Always by myself. And then I started laughing a little harder too. I began to realize that I can feel and that the act of feeling, feeling anything at all, is amazing.

Ive become addicted to feeling, addicted to the sensation of awe. I seek it out. Mushroom trips, magical adventures, dangerous relationships, and deep, heady conversations. And it turns out, I am good at feeling thingslike, really good.

I only wish Id known about feeling from the start. I wish someone had told me that vulnerability is like a superpower, if handled with care.

But life taught me the opposite.

BEGINNING

The point in time or space at which something starts.

The first part of something.

The part that comes after the end.

BRIEF (HISTORY OF DEATH)