The Perfect Goodbye
By Elene Sallinger
Copyright 2012 Elene Sallinger
Published by Tin Woman Press
Contact Elene at
[email protected] This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Other Titles by Elene Sallinger
Flasher
At Long Last
THE PERFECT GOODBYE
My body betrays me. You would think I’d be used to it by now, but I’d forgotten. For eight years, it lulled me into thinking I could relax. Made me think it could be trusted when, in truth, it was simply lying in wait for me to forget, to lower my guard and believe I was finally normal.
Normal. Now, there’s a funny word. I’ve spent my life trying to be normal, pretending when all else failed, but never quite succeeding. It’s hard to be normal when at any second you might find yourself flat on your back, adrift on a churning, synaptic sea.
My first taste of what my life was to become came at age eleven during my great aunt Irene’s funeral. I don’t remember much of the actual funeral service. I’d fallen asleep on the hard, wooden pew as the preacher droned on about a woman who didn’t remind me at all of my aunt. My mother smacked my leg to wake me up as apparently I’d begun to snore. The service was breaking up and the pastor was directing people to the gravesite. I remember standing beside the coffin. It was pearly gray and so shiny you could see the clouds overhead reflected in its surface.
I stood there, trying to be patient in my navy blue jumper and black Mary Janes. They were new and pinched the backs of my heels. My bones ached and it felt as if each and every cell in my body had tripled in size and weight. So much so, that it became hard to balance and I wobbled against my mother who gripped my shoulders tight squeezing hard in silent reproach to behave myself. By that time, I was kicking myself hard for not staying home with the younger children, but I prided myself on being so grown in those days and I remembered Irene as being very nice to me. Attending her funeral had felt like the mature thing to do. I wouldn’t be so quick to jump at maturity next time.
The air was damp and heavy with promised rain. The scent of recently mowed grass tickled my nose while the preacher droned on extolling my great aunt’s virtues, his heavy jowls wiggled lazily as he spoke putting me in mind of McGruff the crime dog and I sucked back a chuckle. As his words blurred into the air around me, my stomach curled into a knot and goosebumps rose on my arms. The ground under me shifted. My legs melted and I swayed slightly on my feet. Another crushing pinch from my mother had me upright again. Finally, the preacher finished up what had morphed into a rant on death and why we should all be happy for my great aunt and released everyone to supper back at the church.
On spaghetti noodle legs, I trudged up the hill to my father’s pea green Bonneville sedan. Around me, my relatives murmured the usual things people say to fill time when someone has died. My legs grew heavier and heavier as I walked. Instead of seeming closer, the car kept floating away from me. My feet grew more and more leaden with each step until finally the effort to lift them was just too much.
“Dawn! Walk properly,” Mother hated for me to shuffle my feet, something I often did just to anger her.
“I’m tired,” I whined, but she didn’t hear me. My voice was barely audible even to my own ears.
“Dawn! Don’t make me tell you twice, little girl,” she hissed. Her scarlet red lips drew into a slash and her perfectly made up face hardened into marble.
I had been watching my feet which seemed to be weaving themselves into the grass. Looking up to assess the distance between the car and myself, the crowd around me receded and I was alone in the graveyard. I whirled around in a panic as the headstones transformed themselves into gargantuan chess pieces. Directly in front of me, where just seconds before had been a gray marble headstone, stood a tall, white horse. A knight. Its unblinking, obsidian eye slowly shifted and stared sightlessly at me.
I opened my mouth to scream, but stopped as everything went black. It was nothing more than a bad dream. My body felt weightless and tingly. A feeling of utter peace flowed through me and I wanted to stay in that place suspended forever in careless dreaming. My peace was shattered by an acrid odor flooding my nostrils. I opened my eyes to see my relatives crowded around me. Mother knelt to my left and my cousin Katy, a nurse and the bearer of smelling salts, the source of that awful smell, knelt to my right. Their mouths moved reminding me of beached fish struggling for oxygen, but no words penetrated the fog clouding my brain. I tried to sit up, but my limbs were leaden and pinned to the ground. As I lay staring at the darkening sky above me, stretched out on a stranger’s grave, I began to cry.
In my disorientation, I thought the name on the headstone, McDonald, so similar to my own Donaldson, was mine. I thought I’d died. Large, wet tears ran down my face soaking the doll baby collar of my blouse. I couldn’t hear or feel the tears, I was only aware of a sense of coldness tracking down my cheeks and neck. Later, as I came more fully into my senses, I would endure the burn and scratch of the teary aftermath, but in that moment I remember feeling cheated. That death hadn’t brought me to paradise; it had landed me in a dank graveyard surrounded by strangers.
Seizures are like a little death in many ways. You lose time, sensation, and memory. Those moments are stolen and must be given back to you by witnesses only to wish you’d never resurrected them in the shame of indignity. It’s like a lurid fascination, hearing about my seizures. I always ask even though I can now predict the pattern. My former boyfriend would visibly pale and shudder whenever I asked.
“What happened this time?” I leaned in and searched his face as he stared at his hands. They were large and scarred from the carpentry work that was his passion.
“Your eyes are open and you stare,” he looked off into the distance refusing to meet my eyes. His own chocolate colored eyes glazing in grim tribute to his words.
“Go on,” I prompt squeezing his knee as if I could physically extrude the words as much as to reassure him.
“Well, you get really stiff. I can’t move or bend you.”
“You mean I don’t shake or twitch like you see on TV?” he shakes his head before I even finish the question. His face going haunted.
“No. You just get really stiff and you hum.”
I jerked back from him and scowled as I tried to imagine what he described, “I hum. You mean like a song?”
“No,” he threw an exasperated glance at me. “This isn’t funny you know,” he moved his knee away from my stroking hand and moved across the living room to the bay window before continuing. “You make this humming noise. Like nnnnnngh, nnnnnngh.”
“Why are you getting so pissy? I’m—”
“I’m not pissy. You’re trying to turn this into a joke.”
I crossed over to him, wrapping my arms around his brawny bulk trying to comfort him even though I’m the one whose brain short-circuited.
“Shhh,” I stroked his back and waited until he relaxed and returned the hug. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” is what he said into my hair where he buried his face. I squeezed him hard glad he can’t see my expression.
I try to be understanding, but here’s the thing about being an epileptic—you don’t actually experience the seizure, you only experience the aftermath or, as my illustrious neurologist likes to call it, the postictal period. Ick is right. It sucks the big one.
You go from living, breathing, and experiencing your life to exhaustion so complete that your
body folds in on itself. Everything is too much, just simply “too.” Breathing, eating, moving, even opening your eyes all become optional. You no longer interact with the world around you. Instead, you simply take up space as your brain works to re-charge itself and blaze new trails to compensate for the ones that were just burned out forever.
The recovery period is what a seizure means to me, but that is a misnomer. You never actually recover from a seizure because you never regain those moments of oblivion. I remain incomplete and questioning, reliant on whoever is around to fill in the gap. But, the reality is that all they can give me is their pain and fear. They can’t actually give me back the memory which is what I desire. So, I am incomplete. On the surface, I appear the picture of a healthy, thirty-something woman without a care in the world, but no one sees the holes, the grey gaps in my outline that blur my shape and alter my essence. And, that is just from the seizures that I’ve