Guest Post: "Will You Trash My Vibrator?" and Other Secret Pre-Mortem Pacts With Friends

OK folks, I have left the planet. For the next few days you will be treated to a parade of creative talent from some of my dear, patient, talented readers. The Grand Marshall of this parade is Red Dirt Kelly and this beautiful, brave piece. Thanks so much Kelly for all you do!

 The last time I visited my comrade Cathy’s dying friend in the hospital, we talked about angels. “Cathy” was also the dying friend’s name which made for some confusing conversations in the ICU unit.

The dying Cathy looked very much like Susan Sarandon. She rested her head on the hospital pillow and toyed with the IV entry area on her arm while she whispered that she believed an angel had visited her on an Indian Reservation in New Mexico to deliver the message that she was ill. Her arm was hard to look at, having turned approximately half purple by that point.

In my mind, the warm sunlight streaming through the window lighting up her auburn hair was the Light, and the disease turning her arm…and the rest of her body purple…was the Dark. But the Light won when she breathed her last breath because the dying Cathy finally smiled and the tension left her face. She could rest now.

But my friend Cathy was a different story. That night she got drunk and I sat in her living room listening to her repeat stories about their friendship over and over. At one point, I found some rollers in her bathroom, brought them into the living room and begin putting them in my hair as a painfully weak way to cause laughter and break the sadness.

Needing to walk around at some point, we picked up a second bottle of wine and crossed the street, knocking on the door of a female Methodist minister who had a labyrinth in her back yard. We all three laughed when she answered the door with rollers in her hair. The three of us, rollers dangling at all angles from our hair and clothed in our bathrobes and slippers, began to walk through the labyrinth in her back yard, singing drinking songs. The minister and I watched our grieving Cathy as her sadness gushed forth well into the morning hours.

I thought about that night and my undone friend for three days. I was riveted by her ability to announce her utter unraveling in front of the two of us.

Had I ever openly wailed and shown my soft underbelly and pain so plainly to another human being? Even before I finished articulating that question to myself in my head, I knew the answer was: I have not.

The answer was still rolling around in the soul-space of my brain like an echo around canyon walls when my phone rang. It was my grieving friend and she needed help clearing out the house of the deceased.

So I helped her in this task, all the while observing her lingering hesitation over every object with some degree of meaning attached. I was in the middle of observing her decide which of the fifty potted plants to keep when she said, “Can we go get dinner? I need an emotional break.”

Once again, she had exposed her humanity by telling me she was at the limit of her “feeling” capacity, brought on by the process of sorting her dead friend’s belongings. And for the record, vulnerability does indeed breed vulnerability. Each time my friend opened her soul to me, I felt more like I could open mine to her.

So there we were, see, sitting across from each other at a restaurant table spread with heavy cream and butter pasta, grappling with the pieces of our lives which were floating in the air around us. Somewhere around my head “my own thoughts about death” drifted by, close to my speech center. It was being levitated by my growing trust toward my dinner mate.

So I blurted, “If my husband and I die simultaneously, will you PLEASE trash my vibrator? Cathy, I can’t let anyone find our vibrator when they’re cleaning out our ‘death things.’”

Her expression was a classic double take followed by a grandiose belly laugh.

“Oh my stars, yes!!” she replied.

“Okay, you HAVE to remember this…it’s in the bottom center drawer in his dresser, behind the socks. Will you please remember??” I was intensely ensuring that the entire pact would indeed be managed.

“Yes…” she started. “Got it. Bottom center drawer, behind the socks…” Her face was cracked with a full-blown smile and her eyes danced mischievously. “And will you PLEASE come into the funeral home when they’re preparing my body and pluck ALL the fuckwit hairs growing from my chin? I hate my chin hairs and would be SO mortified if they were sticking out of my face when people viewed my body!!”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “I. Am. IN. I will pluck your chin hairs. Happy to do it.” I felt better because I now also had a post-mortem task to contribute to the dignity of my own friend’s future death.

The conversation took a hairpin curve and by the time we walked out of the restaurant, we had talked about how body fat could be disguised in caskets, how to manage crazy family members in the funeral audience and what to make sure our children knew should they falter from time to time after we died.

In other words, we managed all of our personal anxieties about dignity and death over pasta, wine and the essence of our dead friend’s memory floating about in the restaurant air.

The bits and pieces of emotional processing still remaining around our table – buoyed by our own insecurities, were slowly descending to the floor when we left. They did not follow us. Rather, they were swept up with the bread crumbs by the wait staff after closing that night. We were finished with them. For now.

That particular dinner conversation happened three years ago. I still update her on any geographical change in “the location” of the vibrator. And, she’s sent me no less than two pair of excellent quality tweezers… “in case I’m without a pair should she kick the bucket.”

Our promises are intact, as is now our posthumous dignity.

Or, at least the pieces that about which we are most concerned.