People Health Ritual
How My Fear of Loss Became a Fear of Fire
On some level, we all know: Everyone who is etched into our being will one day vanish.
In early March 2017, I am having visions of my house catching fire. When I’m not home, I think , Did I blow out the candle? Did I turn off my stove? Did I leave something burning? Ten years ago, I observed a fire in a building across from my living room window. Someone had left incense burning, I later learned. Unwittingly, I filed this scene away: absurd reasons to panic in the future.
I’m sitting in a movie theater next to TC and Wah-Ming, dear friends. We’re about to watch Personal Shopper, directed by Olivier Assayas. Two years earlier, on the day that we learned Wah-Ming’s close friend Drina had died of cancer, the three of us had sat rapt throughout The Clouds of Sils Maria, also by Assayas, at TC’s home, the melancholy lifted slightly by the comfort of friendship and a mesmerizing film. “How soon can we watch this again?” one of us said as the credits rolled.
As we settle into our seats, I am not as excited as I should be. My heart is with Karen, my first cousin, who is five and a half months older than me. She’s my touchstone.
Once, after meeting her, my friend Jen said: “You didn’t tell me she’s hilarious!” It wouldn’t have occurred to me to state the obvious; “Karen” and “side-splittingly funny” are synonymous.
This quality has only increased since she was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer a year and a half ago. Two weeks after her diagnosis, a dad from her daughter’s school accidentally backed his car into her while she stood on a crosswalk. She went around telling and retelling that story like it was the best thing that ever happened to her.
Cancer. Now this. “Hey, Suz, did I tell you I got hit by a car?” she’d say, delight coloring every word.
She discovered she had cancer one week after her fortieth birthday. When my own birthday came months later, she quipped, “My advice about turning forty? Don’t go to the doctor.”
I have always been the sort of person who can amuse herself (a trait I apparently inherited from my grandfather, who was known for cracking up at his own jokes); it’s not unusual for me to make myself laugh while, say, riding the subway, walking down the street, or writing. But ever since Karen got sick in 2015, I laugh more in her presence than I do when I am alone.
The week she was diagnosed, my bathroom ceiling caved in, an uncanny representation of my response to her diagnosis. My mother joked, “You should wear a helmet when you go to the bathroom,” but I couldn’t laugh. My sense of safety was decimated.
*
Two days before I went to see Personal Shopper , Karen texted and asked if I wanted to meet up on a hotel rooftop in midtown. Though her invitation was accompanied by a yellow smiley face emoji with eye-hearts and an exclamation point— It’s so nice out!— I read between the lines: Her anxiety had tapped that message out.
Karen, who famously had B plans in case her A plans fell through, rarely sent spontaneous invites. My anxiety tapped back: Yes!
Cancer had been floated as one possibility a couple days before the official diagnosis, while she was hospitalized with pain in her side. In her hospital room, the second I heard “cancer,” I had a vision—her hospital bed suddenly empty because she was no longer on earth. Thoughts spooled quickly: She is going to leave us. One day, this will become part of our accepted narrative; Karen died young. For a split second, this intuition was indisputable fact—even eerily peaceful—this newsflash striking me as so obvious that I wanted to smack my forehead. How did I not see this before? Later, I would wonder if that vision had been a product of the nonverbal language we shared, a product of knowing each other our whole lives. Maybe she knew then.
Karen’s subsequent chemotherapy treatments fast became a true production. She invited family and friends—many of whom were, like her, Broadway actors—to help her stage elaborate photo shoots, often inspired by pop culture, in the infusion room. In one, she and a few friends are wearing bathing suits, playing paddleball, laughing—just your average day at the beach, save that visible port in her chest. Scrawled across the bottom, in a font evocative of a vintage postcard, is “Wish You Were Here.”
*
By the time I met Karen on the rooftop, she had staged thirty-three photo shoots. I found her sitting at a table, a huge scarf wrapped around her neck, contemplating a piña colada and crème brûlée. Despite her excitement about alcohol and dessert, her face was tight with tension.
As soon as we ordered, she confessed that she had a bad feeling; the cancer was spreading. Her hunch was not based on scan results, but fresh pain in her bones. “I don’t know, Suz,” she said.
My usual answer to the fire of uncertainty—redirecting my anxiety toward fearing an actual fire, however irrational—was absent, and in its place instead was abject, visceral horror, with images of Karen hurting from cancer cells invading her spine. She talked about her upcoming doctor’s appointment, the stress. Then she changed the subject.
“So, at my memorial service, I’d like Sam to choreograph and have Grace sing the ‘White Light’ song. You know that one, right?”
I didn’t.
“Where is the White Light?,” Karen told me, was about a healer who helps people die. She started belting the song out—her delivery exaggerated and high-pitched: “Wheeeeere the fuck is the white light?”
I laughed. It was hard not to. But I heard her, too: Just preparing you—it’s going to get worse. Before I could absorb her message— Wait, we’re planning your funeral ? —she got even louder. “Wheeeeere is the white light? Wheeeeere are my spirit guides?”
I cracked up. I teared up and thought, So this is how it’s going to be .
*
Waiting with TC and Wah-Ming for Personal Shopper to start, my mind drifts to that conversation with Karen, and jumps to a thought that’s been rising with frequency lately: returning home later, walking down my quiet street, past the house that plays soothing Tibetan music, past the guy who smokes on his stoop, and finding fire trucks in front of my building. It would all be my fault.
Over the last couple of weeks leading up to this movie date, I can no longer walk out of my apartment without first compulsively checking and double checking candles, burners, any wisp of an ember.
This routine is particularly nonsensical. If an incense stick has been lit, I will put it in the bathtub and run water over it before racing off to join the world and pretend like I don’t have sudden onset OCD. I know there’s a truth I can see with my eyes—these wet remnants will not in any way factor into my house burning down.
I laughed. It was hard not to. But I heard her, too: Just preparing you—it’s going to get worse. Yet I’d rather fuss than admit what I know—that Karen, whose existence I rely on more than I can bring myself to admit, is terminal.
My compulsion is such that I rarely believe what my eyes definitely see. My memory of pouring water onto burning embers, for example. (Sometimes I even catch myself saying, It’s science , Suzie .) And if I can’t believe that of which I have full cognizance, I’m not sure I can believe anything. There’s so much I don’t want to believe.
*
In Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, an American personal shopper who is living in Paris and grieving her twin brother’s death.
Maureen is also a medium. Obsessed with the other side, she’s decided to wait in Paris, apart from her boyfriend, who lives abroad, until she gets a sign from her deceased brother. Then a mystery person texts Maureen, number unknown. Eerily, he knows things about her schedule, like where she’s going and when. Hellbent on finding peace, Maureen engages, thinking, hoping the texter might be her brother. Maybe this is the otherworldly missive she’s been waiting for. But the messages grow increasingly menacing. When she stumbles into a murder scene—her boss, Kyra, lying bloody on the bathroom floor— Personal Shopper becomes a full-blown horror movie, apropos for a story about grief. When we learn that the mystery texter murdered Kyra and wants to meet Maureen at a hotel, the film becomes downright petrifying.
Sitting in the safety of the theater, I feel my chest get tight. I start seeing images, unbidden. My twelve-year-old wrist, just after I’ve accidentally gouged it with a sharp tool intended for linoleum carving in art class. Flash. Blood. Flash. The vulnerable place from which the blood flows, less than a half-centimeter from my veins. I am dying.
It hurts like hell until I pass out. When I wake up, I am in the nurse’s office and see a wad of bloody paper towels. Dizzy, I have no idea that my first kiss is weeks away.
Even though the scar is permanently etched into my wrist, I haven’t thought of that in years. Why now? Why the urgency? This memory is invasive.
On her way to meet the murderer, Maureen might lose her life. What is life without her brother? What is left for those who remain?
On some level, we all know: Everyone who is etched into our being will one day vanish.
*
Maureen solves the mystery of Kyra’s murder and accepts that her brother is no longer on earth. Far from Paris, she is in a cab, veering around a mountain bend, en route to her boyfriend who is living in Oman. The frame stuns—a cheerleader of an open blue sky, the wonder of a natural world transcendent of human suffering. It is freedom from acute grief.
But Maureen moving on means her brother is really dead.
It hurts just thinking about this freedom, and so I cry, hard, continuing to sob even after the lights go up. My friends don’t say or do anything, but I feel their comfort. They are the best. Every strand of loss is woven together. My only consolation, and it is not small, is that my ache is real.
The director comes out for a Q&A. I’m still mourning the wide-open space, that bright blue sky. Assayas intended for that wide-open frame signal release, I believe. But how am I the only one who appears to find that release so wrenching?
In what feels like seconds, the director runs out of time. He says so, remorsefully.
Oh, I think, we are all running out of time .
Later, approaching home, I find my building intact. My relief at the absence of fire trucks is palpable.
Karen has a doctor’s appointment on Monday, at which he confirms her hunch about the cancer’s growth. Two days after this appointment, Karen will be admitted to the hospital. Her nearly three-week stay will signal the beginning of the end. Almost as soon as she is admitted, I will stop worrying about fire. In an instant, I will not have time, space, or need for fantasies. Reality will be all-consuming, and much of that reality will become my most precious memories.
Every strand of loss is woven together. My only consolation, and it is not small, is that my ache is real. She will die almost three months after Personal Shopper, around two o’clock in the morning, following a days-long vigil with family by her bedside, a steady stream of friends coming through to say goodbye. As she is leaving earth, I will be home, wired, on the phone with my friend Diana, who lives in Mexico. Diana will say, “I feel like you’re speaking to me from some far-off planet.”
That night, I’ll be in a cab, leaving the apartment Karen no longer lives in. The driver will ask how I’m doing.
“Hanging in there.”
“That’s the old New York story. Everyone’s just hanging in.”
Whatever. I’m not even in New York , I think.
I’m still with Karen, wherever she is. Being half-there, half-here will define grief for a while.
“My sister just died.”
In the rearview, I’ll see his eyebrows lift. “Really? That’s funny.”
Hilarious. Karen, are you loving this absurdity?
“I work in life insurance. Do you know if she had any?”
*
Five and a half months after the rooftop, Grace will sing “Where is the White Light?” at Karen’s memorial celebration, the one Karen had envisioned on the rooftop. The memorial will be held at a theater on Forty-Second Street, one she had performed in many times.
“Where is the White Light?” will be an exorcism, of sorts. If any part of me will want to imagine that Karen is still alive, I will not be able to do that while listening to Grace animating Karen’s wish to have this song at her funeral. Grace will be dropping f-bombs and close to tears herself. I will, in this moment, feel at peace that Karen’s death, like her life, was like no other. Through tears, I will hear a voice saying, Comprehend this, Suzie. She is gone. She is really gone. My tears will feel razor-like, falling down my face to my neck and onto my neck and even my stomach, cutting me wide open. The voice will then say, This is what you needed.
*
After Personal Shopper and my safe passage home, I’m in bed, my apartment flame-free. (Checked twice.) Later, this night will look to me like an initiation: Life as you know it is over. My eyes heavy, I envision the corner Maureen turns in the cab.
I am going somewhere, too, though I don’t know where, how, and especially not why. But instead of despair, I feel momentary peace, awash in the subtle light of what lies beyond the horizon. That sky was blue there for a reason.
As I drift off to sleep, I have no idea that in the last month of her life, Karen will be moved by a wide-open horizon, too. We will be walking down a dimly lit hospital hallway toward the gift shop, when she will catch a glimpse of blue sky out the window. She will insist we make a jailbreak to breathe in sunshine, even though she is not allowed outside, and as we try to convince the security guard it’s fine, I will see Karen smiling politely, acting like this security guard’s permission matters, when in fact, we both already know: Karen has made up her mind.
