Becky my First Best Friend, Sitting with Death
Becky was my first best friend and older sister, the one who would not let me disappear. We were only a year apart, two brown desert kids sleeping in the same small rooms, sharing hand‑me‑down blankets and secrets, long before I ever had words like “shy” or “introvert” for the way I tried to melt into the wallpaper. She had other words for it. She’d turn the corner in our childhood homes, eyes lighting up with that crooked, mischievous smile, and charge at me—tumbling me to the floor, pinning me, roughhousing, tickling me until I laughed so hard I forgot I was trying to vanish. When I finally managed to gasp, “Why do you always do that?” she looked at me like I was missing something obvious and said, “Because I can, and because I love you, brother.
Becky’s death came to me in fragments,
phone calls, plane tickets, fluorescent hallways, but what remains, even now,
are those three weeks when the world shrank to one hospital room and the
fragile space between my sister’s breaths. The rest of my life, the work
emails, meetings, deadlines, fell away like scenery seen from a moving train.
What stayed was this: a narrow bed, the hiss and sigh of machines, a window
that never quite let in enough light, and my sister, one year older than me,
slowly crossing that invisible border I could not follow.
The first time I walked into her
room, I braced myself the way you do before a punch, old hospice muscles
flexing, the habits I’d learned in AIDS wards and deathbeds lining up like
armor. I thought I knew how to do this. But then Becky turned her head and
found me. Even drugged, even exhausted, her eyes did the thing they’d always
done since we were little, and she’d round a corner in some Chandler home: they
lit up like trouble and sunrise mixed together. “Brother, what are you doing
here?” she whispered, as if I had just wandered in from the backyard instead of
flown across time zones to sit at the edge of her life.
Her bed was a small island in a sea
of beeping electronics and plastic tubing. On the overbed tray, there was a
cluster of ice chips, tissue, papers, and a heart stuffed animal arranged
almost ceremonially, pain, nausea, sleep, anxiety, all present in her face and tiny
altar to modern medicine and its limits. The blinds were half-closed, slanting
the Arizona sun into thin, cautious lines. The air was permanently caught
between too cold and too warm, that institutional temperature set for no one in
particular. It smelled like disinfectant and soup someone had given up eating.
Outside the door, the hallway buzzed with carts and murmured conversations, but
inside the room, the sounds became muffled, slowed, as if time itself had to
check in at the nurses’ station before entering.
I moved closer to her, suddenly shy,
as though I were approaching some mythical creature instead of my sister, the
tomboy who once bloodied her knees for my siblings and me. I kissed her
forehead, surprised at how hot her skin felt. “I came for you,” I said. “I’m
just here for you.” That was the moment the decision settled into my bones. I
would not leave. Not for a meeting, not for a flight, not for a convenient
excuse. I would let my life fall out from under me if that was the price of
holding her steady as hers did the same.
Between the heavy moments, there were
slivers of absurdity, the little crooked jokes that kept us from drowning. We
joked for a few awkward moments. She rolled her eyes and mouthed “whatever”
when her brother gave her a hug. Even
then, even suffering, she would not let me get away with pity disguised as wit.
She had always been the one to pull me out of my own melancholy, to tackle me
when I tried to vanish into books or wallpaper. Now she was pinned to the bed,
and I was the one trying to keep her from disappearing too fast.
Days in that room stretched and
looped. Mornings were a blur of vitals, lab techs, and doctors with tired eyes.
Afternoons sagged in the middle, the light flattening out on the wall, the TV
muttering game shows no one was watching. Nights were the longest when the
laughter and chatter of hospital workers thinned, and the nurses switched to
softer voices. That was when the room filled with the sound of her breathing,
each inhale and exhale gaining weight until they felt like something I needed
to help carry.
At first, we still spoke of treatment
like a bridge to somewhere. Doctors swooped in with their clipboards and their
hopeful statistics, offering surgeries and chemo like doorways that might still
open if she pushed hard enough. They addressed their explanations to me, mostly
because I was the one taking notes, asking questions, and translating their
clinical language into something she could hold. Becky would look from them to
me, eyes searching my face for the truth beneath the script. When they left, we
would sit there in the humming quiet and sift their words. Sometimes we laughed
at their earnestness, their refusal to see the whole picture. “They talk like
I’m a car in the shop,” she’d say. “Just a couple more repairs and I’m good as
new.” She lifted her hand, waving their words away. I am tired, brother. It has
been three years of promises of getting better. She spoke.
But the turning point was not
dramatic in the way television would have it. It was a day of small failures,
stitches that wouldn’t hold, a procedure that left her bleeding and frightened.
I watched as they wheeled her down the corridor, watched the way the sheet
trembled over her as if the cold air itself was nervous. When they brought her
back, her skin was pale, and her eyes held a wild, hunted look. She waited
until the room was ours again—no doctor, no nurse, just the two of us—and then
she said, “I don’t want to do this anymore, brother.” Her voice cracked on the
last word, as if it had hit some hidden reef of pain.
I could feel something in me split
right then: the part that wanted her to fight, to stay, to cling with her nails
to every remaining heartbeat, and the part that loved her enough to help her
let go. We talked for a long time, side by side, like two kids at a sleepover
confiding in the dark. She told me she didn’t want her children to watch her
dissolve one procedure at a time. She didn’t want their last memories to be of
machines and tubes. She wanted some dignity back, some control. “If I’m going,”
she said, “I want to go like Becky, not like a chart with a barcode.”
So, we called in the social workers,
the paperwork brigade, and the people whose job it is to make final decisions
official. There were forms for the DNR, for advance directives, and for power
of attorney. It was surreal, signing documents about my sister’s death while
she lay two feet away, breathing shallow but still here. I kept thinking of all
the permission slips our mother had signed when we were kids—for field trips,
immunizations, the occasional detention. Now here I was approving her exit from
the human world, initialing tiny boxes that said we understood she might die
and, in fact, that was the point.
When the oncologist came in,
bristling with professional insistence, he wanted to hear it “from her.” At
this point, she was intubated, bruised, and exhausted. He talked about
statistics, about patients who’d been “worse off” and lived another year in a
care facility. Becky answered him with her eyebrows, her hands, with a look so
pure and profane it might as well have been a prayer. Enough. She gestured
toward her wrist. Put the bracelet on. Put the words around me that say no
more. I stood between them, translator and brother, and said, “This is what she
is saying. This is what she wants. Part of me wanted to punch him for his
arrogance, for having her beg for dignity. He finally snapped the band around her wrist,
the thin plastic circle that said we would not call her back if her body
decided to leave.
After that, the room became both
gentler and more devastating. We knew, without saying it, that we had shifted
from fighting for her life to tending her death. The nurses changed how they
moved around her, their hands softer, their eyes more direct. They started
calling her “sweetheart,” “honey,” not as a script but as something that rose
naturally from their throats. Becky found a new way to call me when she needed
me. She would tap her fingernails against the metal side of the bed, a delicate
clack-clack that sliced through the muted sounds of the ward. I came to
recognize it the way another person might recognize a ringtone. Sometimes it
was for water or a pillow adjustment. Sometimes it was simply for presence.
Just be here, her fingers said. Just don’t leave.
Then there was that night around
three in the morning, the hour when hospitals feel most haunted and honest. I
jolted awake to that light tapping, my body now trained like an animal to
respond. The hallway lights were dimmed, the TV flickering silently in the
corner. Her face was a map of shadows and soft green machine-glow. I lowered
the rail and leaned in, whispering the usual litany—“Are you thirsty? Do you
need pain medicine? Are you hurting?” She shook her head no, the tube in her
throat making her swallowing look effortful. She held my gaze for a long
moment, and in that look I saw everything she could not say: I’m tired. I’m
scared. I’m ready.
Then she lifted her arms. Not
dramatically, not like in a movie, but like a child who has finally admitted
they can’t walk any farther. I hesitated for half a second—she felt so fragile,
so breakable—and then instinct took over. I slid my arms under her shoulders
and knees and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing, a strange betrayal of
memory; this was the girl who used to tackle me, who once swung a bat like a
weapon, who carried children and groceries and whole apartments on her back.
Now she fit against my chest like a small bundle of laundry.
I sat on the side of her hospital bed,
cradling her, and began to slowly rock. There was nothing to say. Words felt
like disrespect, like noise in the presence of something sacred. Her head lay
over my heart, and I could feel her breath hitch and then gradually sync with
mine. Every now and then, a soft sound escaped her, not quite a sob, not quite
a sigh. I thought about all the times she had held me when I was the broken
one—after some boy broke my heart, after some cruelty at school, after I had seen one too
many young men disappear in the AIDS ward. She had always been the one to wrap
an arm around me and say, “Come on, we’ll go dancing, we’ll go for a drive,
we’ll do something.” Now there was nowhere to drive, no dance floor left, no
distraction big enough. There was just the two of us and the slow ticking of a
clock we could not see.
We must have sat like that for hours.
Time lost its edges. The room, that ugly beige box with its scuffed walls and
humming machinery, became a kind of chapel. I could feel the muscles in my arms
screaming, my back stiff, but none of that mattered. All I cared about was that
her body knew—on a level deeper than words—that she was not leaving this world
untouched, that someone was holding on to her as she slipped away. At some
point, her breaths evened out into sleep, that ragged, morphine-heavy sleep that
looks too much like rehearsal. I pressed my cheek to the top of her head,
inhaled the smell of her—soap, sweat, the faint chemical tang of hospital
air—and silently begged the universe, or God, or whoever was on shift to be
gentle with her.
When the nurse came in that morning,
he took one look at the two of us and his face softened even further. Later,
outside the room, he leaned in close and told me, very quietly, that she had a
day, maybe two. There are sentences that rearrange the furniture of your life.
That was one of them. I had suspected, of course. You can feel when the tide
turns. But hearing it stated so plainly snapped the world into a sharper focus.
Becky did not want to die under buzzed fluorescent lights. She had told me that
when she could still speak. “If there’s any way,” she had said, “get me
somewhere with a window, somewhere I can’t see everyone rushing past.” So, I
did what big bureaucracy says you shouldn’t be able to do quickly: I moved her.
The hospice was like stepping into a
parallel dimension. There were still monitors and IV poles, but there were also
curtains that looked as if someone had chosen them on purpose, and furniture
that seemed built for comfort rather than easy sterilization. Outside her
window, there were horses in a paddock, their tails flicking lazily, their
hooves stirring up dust that glittered in the afternoon light. My family filled
the space—my mother, already bent with previous grief; sisters, brothers,
cousins, her children, everyone trying to find a place to put their bodies in a
room that suddenly felt too small for so much love and fear.
By then, Becky’s consciousness had
thinned. Her eyes were mostly closed, moving rapidly beneath their lids, her
mouth parted in that open, vulnerable way the dying have. But when I spoke,
something still shifted in her. So, I stayed near her ear, anchoring her to the
room with words. “Mom is here,” I whispered. “Your babies are here, Ronnie’s
here, Junior’s on his way.” I named each person as they came in, a roll call at
the end of the world. Occasionally, her fingers twitched, or her brow relaxed
when a particular name landed. It felt like I was guiding her through a final
inventory: here is who you loved, here is who loves you, here is what you built
that will outlast you.
And then came Junior. He arrived
breathless, eyes red, shoulders heaving. The air changed when he walked
in—there is a frequency grief gives off that everyone in the room feels. I
leaned close to Becky again, the way I had in the night in that hospital room,
and told her, “Becky, Junior is here. Your boy is here.” I asked him to touch
her, to lean over, and he gave his mother a kiss, his hand on her arm, and then
she died. It was so precise, so immediate, that he jerked his hand back as if
burned. Later, I would dream about that moment, that moment when the soul left
her body, but in that moment, I understood something else: she had been waiting
for him. She had been holding on, with whatever leftover thread of will she
had, until her firstborn was close enough to feel the warmth leave her skin.
Those are the highs and lows I carry,
the ridiculous and the sacred, the laughter that bubbled up in the middle of
despair when we made fun of hospital gowns, the way we joked about her
bossiness even as she ordered me around with a lift of her eyebrow. The music
on the radio when we scattered her ashes. The hawk that appeared at the
Mogollon Rim, sliding into the canyon like a living metaphor. The pink moons
that rise now over the desert when I’m sitting on my porch, coffee cooling in
my hand, feeling her slip into my thoughts as easily as she once slipped her
arm through mine on the way towards a dance floor.
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