Death, Already

I have some notes about what I’m going to talk about the next few times I post. Sex, death, society, doctors, a few other things. Death was actually low on the priority list, what with it being a downer, but it popped back up this week (and it’s been in my life a lot in the last six months), urging me to address it.

A woman I have known and been friends with since ninth grade died yesterday. M. was a passionate person, an artist, musician, writer and filmmaker. She had been working on a film of her most recent screenplay, as well as pursuing other endeavors. Then, on Sunday, she experienced an adverse reaction while taking cough syrup with prescribed Adderol. The cough syrup may or may not have been recreational, but the boyfriend who was with her apparently didn’t call paramedics in a timely manner, and by the time they got there, her pulse, brain activity and breathing had stopped. The paramedics managed to get her heart started again, though she needed a breathing tube and other life support measures to survive for the two days that she hung on. An experimental treatment didn’t work, and she died yesterday morning.

She was three months older than I, born in June to my October. We lost touch here and there, but I always knew what she was up to through other friends, even when I had run away from home and only spoke to a couple of people here on a regular basis. The miracle of Myspace and Facebook brought us back together on a direct basis, and a few years ago I visited her at the restaurant where she worked, rekindling our friendship. M. was a vivacious, unique personality who was well-known around our small city, and so the reach of her influence was wide. On Monday, it was Facebook that made it possible for me to find out what was happening to her.

Part of me always assumes it’ll be me before it’s any of the rest of my friends from our high school class. D. smokes, and has a bleeding disorder, and is having surgery next month, and that scares the shit out of me. T. has, through no fault of her own, come close to the ultimate disaster a couple of times, getting a very high degree of disaster out of it, but she lives a pretty clean and healthy life. A. is settled in with a husband and two kids, and is pretty insulated. B. is a physician herself now and that seems to insulate her, too, somehow. M. was never a heavy drug user; she was a vegetarian who didn’t drink, and whose open heart often resulted in less-than-stellar taste in men, including a randomly violent one, and the one who didn’t call 911 in time, presumably because he himself was high and/or feared getting into trouble.

But diabetes isn’t the only disaster out in the world; in fact, as tragedy goes, it tends to be a very slow burn. Overdose, suicide, accident, violence, and the like are so much splashier, and several terminal or potentially terminal diseases even yank the spotlight away from chronic diseases and their sufferers. I said last time that there are no diseases left for which there are romantic notions, but on second thought I think cancer may have some cachet with a certain type of drama queen (never the people who actually have cancer or those who love them most and see what they really go through, though). The four horsemen I listed first (suicide, violence, accident, overdose) all have that element, though. There’s a reason we call it staring at a car crash. All those times I ever have or ever will bitch about not being seen for who I am and the parts of me that my disease has formed, I’ll know somewhere in the back of my mind that what’s worse, at least for the survivors, is the death that comes so much faster, so much more suddenly, and draws such scrutiny from the vultures.