Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(10)
“I see,” said the receptionist. “Hang on one second.” I heard some rustling, and then she asked me to hold again. A few minutes later, Dr. Sanders got on the line.
“Elizabeth—”
“Not that you’ll need it for future reference, but I go by Libby.”
He sounded upset. “Libby, I understand this is very unfortunate—”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Now can you please tell me the name of my cancer again?”
“Subcutaneous panniculitis-like T-cell lymphoma.”
“Uh . . . can you spell that?”
He did. I thanked him, then pressed the End button on my phone.
A second opinion from Dr. Google confirmed that my diagnosis was, indeed, the worst sort of news. The aggressive form—as mine was—spread rapidly and was generally resistant to chemo. On top of it all, this particular form of cancer was rare enough that agreeing to treatment was essentially volunteering to be a guinea pig whose claim to fame would be a postmortem appearance in medical literature. Thanks, but no.
I removed my shirt and stared in the mirror. How long would it take before the worst happened to me? The skin around my bandage was starting to look not unlike the center of an undercooked pork loin. I got back on the computer and poked around some more, ultimately determining that if anything, Dr. Sanders had sugarcoated my prognosis. If I was lucky, I was looking at three to six decent months of life, followed by six to twelve wretched ones, then a swift kick to the old bucket.
I had a rough idea of how to proceed, but for inspiration, I popped Y tu mamá también in the DVD player and splayed out on the sofa. My sophomore year of college, I shared a room with an international student named Isidora, and she introduced me to the tragic beauty of Spanish-language cinema. Most of my favorite films—Lucia y el sexo, Los amantes del círculo polar, Piedras—were set in Spain, but I had a particular weakness for the Mexican Y tu mamá también.
In it, the thirty-something Luisa meets two teen boys at a wedding, and they boast about a secret beach called Heaven’s Mouth, telling her she should come with them to find it. After learning that her husband has cheated on her, Luisa does just that. The three of them dance and drink and have lots of sex. There’s more to the story, but—sorry if I’m ruining it—Luisa stays on at the beach and dies of cancer soon after, which she never told the boys about.
Although it was probably the ninth time I’d seen the movie, it felt especially poignant on this particular viewing, and I sat sobbing as I watched Luisa walk into the frothy waves. “Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea,” she said in a voice-over, and I curled up in the fetal position and wailed like a humpback, even though I wasn’t sure what, precisely, she meant.
I was going to find out. I was going to go to Mexico while I still could.
SIX
There was just one teensy problem: my passport had expired. And I hadn’t noticed, because Tom and I hadn’t traveled in . . . gosh, how long had it been? A while. When we were younger, we went everywhere—Crete, Austin, Buenos Aires, Boston. In fact, Tom said he knew he wanted to marry me because we traveled so well together; it was a sign we were truly compatible, he claimed. But we hadn’t been able to make our vacations match up since he started working. Now I wondered if this had less to do with our respective calendars and more to do with Tom’s not wanting to have vacation sex with me. My cheeks burned as I recalled his reaction when I wanted to make love twice in a row during a trip to Paris. “I’m not a machine, Libby,” he said, and even though he immediately apologized, I slouched under the covers on our lumpy hotel bed, mildly aroused, moderately irritated, and severely mortified by my inconsiderate, overactive libido. (I could just hear Paul saying, “You know this has nothing to do with you, right?” Well, I did now.)
The defunct passport was momentarily disheartening—I didn’t have six weeks to wait while the State Department issued a new one—until I discovered that for an extra fee, I could speed the process to just two weeks. Yes, I thought excitedly, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I walked to the drugstore and had a new passport photo snapped, and although the photo made me appear eerily cadaverous, I took the L to the post office and submitted it along with a check and the necessary forms.
When I got home, I ate a microwave burrito while searching for beachfront properties along Mexico’s far eastern coast, which was supposed to be gorgeous in the fall. Thanks to what was apparently a fresh surge of drug-related violence, ticket prices were down and waterfront properties were cheap. I bought a round-trip flight that would have me in Mexico for a month and a half, then put down a deposit for a small cottage on a private beach in Akumal. If I tired of Akumal, I could head to Cozumel or Tulum or any number of places, although the specific location was really beside the point: the only things I needed for spiritual redemption were sand and water, authentic Mexican food, and buckets of margaritas. (I didn’t really drink, but I intended to start.)
After Mexico, I would fly directly to New York, where I would finally tell Paul about the big C. Then he and I would drive to New Hampshire, where our father lived, and together we would deliver the news. The three of us would visit my mother’s grave one last time, and then I would die quietly, surrounded by the people I loved. Admittedly, the specifics of my post-Mexico plans were murky. When the pain became unbearable, I would theoretically put heavy rocks in my pockets and wander into a large body of water, or maybe find a nice warm oven and stick my head in. In reality, I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t go through with that, and so Paul and Dad would end up watching me suffer for at least a short while. This, more than anything, was devastating, so I tried not to give it too much thought.