—

BRIAN CATCHES UP to me as I turn the corner of Harvard Square where a long escalator leads underground to the T, like a passage to hell. He catches my arm, spinning me around. We are suspended in time at the point of JFK Street and Brattle, in front of the Curious George store, where I used to take Meret when she was little. I stubbornly refuse to look at Brian, staring instead at an enlarged cartoon image of the little monkey and the man in the yellow hat. “What was his name?” I say.

This throws Brian off. “What? Whose name?”

“The man in the yellow hat. Who writes an entire children’s series and never names the main character?”

He shakes his head, as if that can clear the space between us. “Why did you come to my lecture?”

I force myself to meet his eyes. “You ought to be asking why I left.”

The tips of his ears pinken. “Dawn. She was there because it’s her job. She’s a postdoc, working under me.”

“That seems to be exactly what she’s hoping for,” I say. To my surprise, I feel tears sliding down my cheeks. “She talks to you like you’re the only two people here who speak the same language.”

Brian seems nonplussed. “She told me I was about to be late for an appointment. That’s not a state secret.”

“It’s not what she said. It’s how she said it.” Like the verbal equivalent of straightening his tie before he took the stage, or wiping a crumb away from his lips. Like she had the right to lay claim to him.

He lets go of me, as if he has only just realized that we are standing in the middle of a crowded public place. “Can I ask you something?” Brian says. “If I had slept with Gita…would you be treating me even worse than this?”

When I was an undergrad at U Chicago, I’d gone out once with a guy to a movie. Afterward, we went to a bar, and then he invited me back to his dorm room. We lay on his twin XL bed, kissing, his hand sliding under my shirt. When it started to move lower, I sat up and said I was heading home.

He was at the door before I could open it, holding it closed and trapping me against it. He smiled, as charming as he had been the whole night. You don’t really mean that, do you?

I don’t know what it was that made my amygdala kick into high gear, seeing this as a threat, instead of a lazy invitation. But I was painfully aware of how much bigger than me he was, how much stronger, how I was caged by the brace of his arms.

I kicked him in the balls and I ran and I never spoke to him again.

I have not thought about this incident in over twenty years, but even now, I could tell you the color of the sweater he was wearing, what I had for dinner that night, his name. I could not tell you the movie we saw, or the name of his dorm building, but that fuzzing of the edges of the memory does not make the incident any less real. And yet, when it happened, I stayed silent. My friends didn’t know. I didn’t go to the administration or tell my mother. I was one of the lucky ones, after all. It could have been so much worse.

I gaslit myself.

Now, it is all I can do to force the words through my jaw. “You act like nothing happened,” I say to Brian. “But something did. You made a choice to hire her. You made a choice to go to her apartment. You could have been with us that night. You should have been. I can’t unthink that.”

I leave him in front of a mural of Curious George holding the hand of the Man in the Yellow Hat. Stockholm syndrome, I think. How else could you be stolen from your natural home, and still call a kidnapper your best friend?

* * *

—

THERE WAS A three-week period where my mother faded away more and more each day, until there were times when I swore I could only see her outline against the sheets of her bed. It was during that three-week period, too, that the hospice social worker helped me to sort through my mother’s financial statements.

During those three weeks, the spring semester started again at Yale. I received official word that I could take a medical leave of absence for the term. And I learned that we were in debt.

It wasn’t just my education—although that was a large part of it. It was the mortgage on our house and credit card bills and the car we’d had since I was in high school.

I also learned that my parents, who certainly acted like they were married, never actually were. I had no idea why not, and my mother at that point was too unresponsive to tell me. What it meant, though, was that any military benefits we might have received after my father died while serving did not go to us.

I was almost twenty-five years old, I was $150,000 in debt, I was about to become the guardian of a thirteen-year-old, and I couldn’t afford a funeral for my mother.

When someone is about to die, they spend more time elsewhere than in the sickroom—lost in memory, processing the tapestry of their lives, or unconscious and dreaming. I spent as many hours as I could sitting next to my mother. I told myself that even if she wasn’t conscious, she knew I was there. What I really meant, though, was that when I looked back on those last few weeks, I would know that I had been there.

Egypt, at that point, seemed so foreign and far away I could barely envision it. There was here and there was now and even those moments were a senseless blur.

I did not see Brian very often. He never intruded on my privacy. But when I came out of my mother’s room to get a cup of coffee, he was in the kitchen with a snack for me because I had forgotten to eat. When I needed to cry, he was there to hold me. When I left to go home to Kieran, he walked me to the car.

My mother died on a Tuesday. One moment, the world was a place where I had a parent, and the next, it wasn’t. I remember feeling like something elemental was wrong, like I’d woken up and found the sky green and the grass blue, and was expected to pretend this was normal. She was cremated, and Kieran and I took a boat out to the Isles of Shoals. We scattered her ashes on the sea, and I like to think the tide swam her back to Ireland.

I began to settle my new life around me like a costume. I put the house on the market and circled rentals that would allow Kieran to stay in the same school district. I baked oatmeal cookies and took them to the staff at the hospice as a thank-you. When the director floated the idea of having me work there, I burst into tears in her office.

Then I asked her about Brian’s grandmother, how she was. How he was. “She died two weeks before your mom,” the director said, surprised. “I thought you knew.”

I shook my head, thinking of all the times that I had run into Brian in the kitchen, in the halls; the way I had slipped out of my mother’s room craving a moment with him, where I could breathe again. How every time I needed someone, he was there. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He’s been at the hospice this whole time.”

The director raised her brows. “For you,” she said.

* * *

—

IT IS VIRTUALLY impossible to put a price on a good death. Right now, death doulas are for people who can afford them, because Medicare doesn’t have the good sense to cover our services the way they cover hospice care. That means I set my own rates—and they vary. It’s hard to figure out whether to charge a flat fee or an hourly rate. If I charge a flat fee for an Alzheimer’s patient who is ninety-four and whose sleeping and breathing habits have been changing, she may live for another two weeks…or she may live for another two years. If I charge $1800 and spend two years with her, it’s not cost effective for me as a business model. But if she dies in two weeks, it’s a reasonable income. I try to base my fee on the illness, the prognosis, and some gut sense of how much the client will need me at the end of life—but the truth is, I win some and I lose some.

I know it feels crass to talk about death in such mercenary terms, but that’s the very problem with death in the first place. We don’t know how to talk about it. We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there. We treat it like a mystery, when in fact, it’s the one experience all of us are guaranteed to share.

I’m also painfully aware that having someone with you when you die should not be a privilege but a right. This is heart-centered work, and you don’t go into it to become rich. I would do this work for free. I have done this work for free. I’ve bartered services. I took care of a nail stylist’s mother and received manicures for a year. I got a side of beef from a farmer whose wife died of ALS. I have the luxury of doing this work because in spite of the fact that I run a business, I still have Brian’s professor’s salary to support us.