Flowers for Everyone

9/2/23

Charlie,

I wanted to start by thanking you for everything you’ve done for me. Besides the treatment and therapy, you know by now that you’ve been the closest thing to a friend to me for the past few months. Sometimes I wish we’d met under different circumstances, and we could have just been friends but I think the reason we have such stimulating conversations where I have none otherwise is because it’s your job. That’s just the unfortunate nature of therapy, I expect. I doubt I’m even the loneliest person you’re worked with. Regardless, you’ve done excellent work above and beyond what anyone could have hoped for, even including myself, and I appreciate it greatly. Specifically, I wanted to write you this letter because I think my thoughts here belong in your file and because I respect that you will understand them best. A small part of me does also consider you a friend.

Since the end of the program, I’ve continued ahead with my reading and now it’s my main hobby. I still play video-games sometimes, but I haven’t spoken to my friends in a long while, and I still get the headaches. I loved your recommendations, I even bought myself copies after I finished. Besides that, I’ve kept up with the existentialists and I just finished Psalms which marks the halfway point for the Bible. I also read The Miracle of Mindfulness which I quite liked, I recommended it to my mother. Things at home have relaxed a little; since I read so much I can just lay in bed next to Holly, and as usual she’s happy if I’m in the room and sad when I’m not in the room. But I don’t feel trapped by her anymore.

I try to think of it as pure acceptance- letting go and freeing myself from desire. Some days it feels like infinite resignation, like I can’t shake a sadness that still speaks to me and asks why I deserve any of this. It doesn’t seem to matter who I read, or how profound and deeply I am touched by the writings of other people who have felt like this. A primal part of me feels like it’s being punished, and I’m always sorry all the time. I wonder if I’ve always felt like this, but never noticed it before we met? The story of Job is at least two-thousand years old and describes exactly what I feel. I think it’s something inside everyone, but most people can’t hear it under the noise.

Now, it’s all I think about. I wake up and I can still remember my dreams, and in my dreams I am meditating trying to calm myself before I die. I have dreams about holding Holly after an accident and trying to comfort her, and all the time I can’t help but wonder what she expected. Did she think she would be ready? Now I go about my day, I’ll run errands and all I see are people milling about unaware of what’s happening to them. I cut off a Kia in the lot by mistake and the driver flipped me off, and all I could see was how scared and alone they would be when they died. I feel like I’ve come unglued from everything. When I talk about any of this, I can feel the other person backing away from me. I know they feel like there’s something wrong.

All I ever wanted was to find a purpose for myself, and I have long-since accepted that there really isn’t a purpose to anything. God’s infinitely complex machinations come off a lot like there’s nobody there, but that’s the secret- if any of it made any sense then faith would be useless. Thankfully our God who looks like he’s not there strongly values a virtue based on seeing things that probably aren’t there. For mine is a drunken-boxing God. So here my purpose seems to be to simply be what I am: an abandoned thing like the rest of us, except that I get to be aware of it in every waking moment, and surrounded by people who can’t see it, or don’t care, or won’t listen.

I can feel all the places where my skin is attached to my bones and skull. I can feel the Earth spinning underneath me, and when I look up at night I can feel those depths that I could fall into. Before I got better, I was no less forsaken. I was just like everybody else- I only suspected that I was doing all of this for nothing. I might have had an inkling that one day I was going to die, and that no one would come to save me. But I didn’t think about it and I didn’t care, and I had friends who didn’t care either. Now I am forsaken, and I am alone. All I want is to reach out to people with this knowledge and tell them that it’s still going to be alright, and now I know what’s happening and I’m here for everyone but nobody wants to listen. All we have left is to be there for each-other as we fade away, but nobody wants comfort because they don’t know that anything is wrong.

I wonder if therapists have to take whatever medical ethics course it is where doctors learn to tell patients that they are dying. I would be interested to hear about that if you’ve had to learn it. It strikes me as the most ethical to inform the patient as soon as possible, but I wonder if there are special considerations? If it’s someone who can’t really understand what’s happening? Like a young child, or how I was before the treatment. I’ve always assumed that even if it was a very young child- and they had a terminal illness- that you were required to tell them that they were dying. I’ve seen interviews with young cancer patients who knew and could express that they were dying, but maybe that’s per the parent’s discretion. Maybe some of them die without knowing anything was wrong. I think there’s a certain kind of person who prefers dying in pain and confusion to living in pain, and dying anyway. At a certain point, pain and confusion is all we get.

So that’s the crux of it. More than anything I wanted to get all of my thoughts out for you- I woke up at 6 this morning with all of this in my head. I’ve only gotten worse since our time together, it seems. I try to breathe and relax, and remove my expectations or desires from the world and everyone. But I’m trapped at the funeral of everyone I see, and it’s as much a celebration of life as it is a promise to myself. In every eulogy, I wish I had known them better. I’m sorry they had to be here. I’m glad they were here with me.

Sartre suggests that experiences in your life end up only as memories, and that memories are possessions just like collectible cards or Tupperware. In the same way that we collect things to give ourselves an identity, we might try to collect experiences to tell us who we are. Of course, we all know that you don’t get to take your possessions with you when you die- but for some reason we make an exception for memories. It is as though, because we store them in brain-matter, those don’t count and we will have them in the end. I wonder at the reactions they all have to Saint Peter’s mallet, when he clarifies that we mean all of your possessions. So it is, then:

No one on Earth knows me. No one in heaven remembers me. And Jehovah stumbles like a slobbering drunk.

But just you wait.

-Sam