Five Year Plan
5th June 2014, 06:37
"I knew immediately," his father said, his eyes bloodshot and glazed over, as if he were looking straight through me to an alternate reality. "As soon as I got the door open, I saw him slumped over. His lips were sort of blue."
The description was something out of my worst nightmare. Those blues lips used to be a beautiful pink. I used to kiss them. They belonged to a friend, a companion, a lover. He shared six years of my life. Now here I was listening to a detailed description of how he died, sitting on his parents couch. Flanked by his tearful mother on my left and his drunken father on my right, I felt as alone at the moment in my life as I had ever felt. I wanted my partner back.
I learned he was gone just two days before. It started off as a typical Saturday morning. Sun peeking through the mini-blinds, and birds chirping outside. 10 AM grogginess. But then a phone call from an unknown number. Then a voicemail. “If you could give me a call whenever you get this,” said the older cousin of my ex, sounding oddly formal. This person would never call me, I thought. Something was up, and deep down inside I suspected the worst. The suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said, crying. I don’t remember her exact words. But I will always remember how I reacted. I was silent for a few seconds, disbelieving and processing what had been told to me. “What happened?” I asked. She explained that she didn’t know exactly, but said that it had happened overnight. I thanked her for telling me, then hung up.
I was in a daze for the next couple of days, and tried every trick I knew to try to make myself feel better. But I couldn’t stop crying. For hours. It almost seemed as though I wanted to torture myself, to become my own Grand Inquisitor pointing out all the things I had ever done wrong in the relationship, all the mistakes I had made in handling how he split up with me just a couple of months before.
Then there was the fact that I never had the chance to say goodbye to him. In the weeks before he passed away, I tried to make it a point to distance myself from him. Even after I received a 3AM phone call just a couple of weeks before, in which he explained that he was “addicted to drugs,” and “in love” with the person who was selling them to him, I chose to keep my distance, not to tell his parents or his family members, not to involve myself. Certainly I called a couple of days later to ask how he was doing and to see if he had made any decisions to stop using. But I knew I had to draw boundaries. We were no longer a couple, after all.
They were difficult boundaries to keep. Those last weeks of his life he would call my cell at seemingly random times—in the afternoon, in the evening, in the morning. “You taught me so many things, but what did I ever do for you?” he asked in one call. I remember asking him after picking up one of his calls, “Why are you calling me right now?” His answer? A cryptic confession: “I’ve made so many mistakes.”
Finally things came to a head in the week before he died. He told me in a call that he wanted to get back together with me, only to be rebuffed. “You have a lot of issues you need to work through before anybody can be in a relationship with you,” I said, believing I was standing my ground. “But if you can get through them, I’d be happy to have a relationship with you again.” He sounded relieved. “Good,” he responded, “This gives me something to work toward, at least.”
The week before he died, I texted him a picture of a baby rabbit I saw hopping around in my neighborhood. He always loved animals. He didn’t respond. Concerned, I tried to call him. No answer. Then I tried calling him again. Still no answer. The next afternoon I finally reached him. “Why didn’t you pick up?” I asked. “I was in the hospital,” he explained. “I overdosed on insulin.” I paused, reflecting back on how much his late diagnosis as a type-1 diabetic affected him in the years that he and I were together. “Was it an accident?” I asked. A pause followed. “Not really,” he said, adding that he had left a suicide note.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the conversation, only that it ended with him telling me that he loved me, and me deliberately not responding by telling him that I loved him. I hung up rather abruptly, and it was the last time I ever spoke to him.
Sitting through the funeral was surreal. It took place in a church, in the midst of a hoard of old white people who – I thought – probably attended that same church every Sunday. I felt so out of place, and I couldn’t help but chuckle sardonically to myself as I imagined the comments about this crowd my ex and I would have bandied about, if only he had he been present at his own funeral. I remember sitting uncomfortably as his cousin, the woman who called me, delivered the eulogy. She tried not to tear up as she recalled the moment of his birth, and how she so badly wanted him to be a girl. “But who needs a girl” she asked, “when you could have him instead?”
For me those words had a different meaning than the one she had intended. I continued listening on as I realized that my six years with him had been written out of his family’s remembrance.
The description was something out of my worst nightmare. Those blues lips used to be a beautiful pink. I used to kiss them. They belonged to a friend, a companion, a lover. He shared six years of my life. Now here I was listening to a detailed description of how he died, sitting on his parents couch. Flanked by his tearful mother on my left and his drunken father on my right, I felt as alone at the moment in my life as I had ever felt. I wanted my partner back.
I learned he was gone just two days before. It started off as a typical Saturday morning. Sun peeking through the mini-blinds, and birds chirping outside. 10 AM grogginess. But then a phone call from an unknown number. Then a voicemail. “If you could give me a call whenever you get this,” said the older cousin of my ex, sounding oddly formal. This person would never call me, I thought. Something was up, and deep down inside I suspected the worst. The suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said, crying. I don’t remember her exact words. But I will always remember how I reacted. I was silent for a few seconds, disbelieving and processing what had been told to me. “What happened?” I asked. She explained that she didn’t know exactly, but said that it had happened overnight. I thanked her for telling me, then hung up.
I was in a daze for the next couple of days, and tried every trick I knew to try to make myself feel better. But I couldn’t stop crying. For hours. It almost seemed as though I wanted to torture myself, to become my own Grand Inquisitor pointing out all the things I had ever done wrong in the relationship, all the mistakes I had made in handling how he split up with me just a couple of months before.
Then there was the fact that I never had the chance to say goodbye to him. In the weeks before he passed away, I tried to make it a point to distance myself from him. Even after I received a 3AM phone call just a couple of weeks before, in which he explained that he was “addicted to drugs,” and “in love” with the person who was selling them to him, I chose to keep my distance, not to tell his parents or his family members, not to involve myself. Certainly I called a couple of days later to ask how he was doing and to see if he had made any decisions to stop using. But I knew I had to draw boundaries. We were no longer a couple, after all.
They were difficult boundaries to keep. Those last weeks of his life he would call my cell at seemingly random times—in the afternoon, in the evening, in the morning. “You taught me so many things, but what did I ever do for you?” he asked in one call. I remember asking him after picking up one of his calls, “Why are you calling me right now?” His answer? A cryptic confession: “I’ve made so many mistakes.”
Finally things came to a head in the week before he died. He told me in a call that he wanted to get back together with me, only to be rebuffed. “You have a lot of issues you need to work through before anybody can be in a relationship with you,” I said, believing I was standing my ground. “But if you can get through them, I’d be happy to have a relationship with you again.” He sounded relieved. “Good,” he responded, “This gives me something to work toward, at least.”
The week before he died, I texted him a picture of a baby rabbit I saw hopping around in my neighborhood. He always loved animals. He didn’t respond. Concerned, I tried to call him. No answer. Then I tried calling him again. Still no answer. The next afternoon I finally reached him. “Why didn’t you pick up?” I asked. “I was in the hospital,” he explained. “I overdosed on insulin.” I paused, reflecting back on how much his late diagnosis as a type-1 diabetic affected him in the years that he and I were together. “Was it an accident?” I asked. A pause followed. “Not really,” he said, adding that he had left a suicide note.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the conversation, only that it ended with him telling me that he loved me, and me deliberately not responding by telling him that I loved him. I hung up rather abruptly, and it was the last time I ever spoke to him.
Sitting through the funeral was surreal. It took place in a church, in the midst of a hoard of old white people who – I thought – probably attended that same church every Sunday. I felt so out of place, and I couldn’t help but chuckle sardonically to myself as I imagined the comments about this crowd my ex and I would have bandied about, if only he had he been present at his own funeral. I remember sitting uncomfortably as his cousin, the woman who called me, delivered the eulogy. She tried not to tear up as she recalled the moment of his birth, and how she so badly wanted him to be a girl. “But who needs a girl” she asked, “when you could have him instead?”
For me those words had a different meaning than the one she had intended. I continued listening on as I realized that my six years with him had been written out of his family’s remembrance.