Josie died yesterday.
I wasn’t there – it was a Wednesday, when I’m in class pondering words written a century ago. Strange words, like Gertrude Stein’s all this and not ordinary….The difference is spreading. We spend evenings deciphering such phrases, and Josie died while we did.
Josie celebrated her 30th birthday in hospice care. I’d met her during the party the nurses and her NA/AA compatriots set up, and we’d bonded over our colored hair – hers blue, mine a faded green – and a mutual love of cream cheese icing. I’d brought her a new kind of cupcake weekly since, even though she’d stopped being able to eat them a few weeks back.
I’d started volunteering with a hospice the year before, almost a year to the day after my dad died in the one where he’d volunteered for more than three decades. I had been presenting my first published paper: “Not unordered in not resembling: Gertrude Stein and the Strange Physics of Expatriation.” The title doesn’t make sense if you’ve never read Tender Buttons or studied a specific cadre of American expatriate writers who took over a riverbank in 1920’s Paris. Thirteen strangers came to hear me speak, and in that hour and a half, my father’s body went septic and gave up. The doctors and nurses and volunteers at that Texas hospice surrounded him, holding his hand and crying until his breath was gone.
His last words were something about going to “the gate,” and my sister told him to go on ahead. And he did.
Josie, in contrast, was surrounded by strangers. “Mom left when I was ten, and who the hell knows who Dad was. So it’s just been me, for a long time.” Strangers had taken her in when she was released from jail, and those same strangers held bake sales and hosted GoFundMe’s to pay for her chemo and radiation once her cancer was discovered. Strangers took her to the ER when the pain she felt low in her belly made her think of a previous miscarriage, but, as she put it, “turns out I was growing tumors instead of babies.” Her emergency hysterectomy came too late to keep them from spreading to her lymph nodes, lungs, and liver, and so here she was.
Josie was sharp as a scalpel and equally cutting. “That night nurse has gotta stop thinking with her feet,” she told me, after the woman kept forgetting things. She told the social worker who said he’d help her reorient to the outside world that his “heart was dripping compassion that my hands can’t hold.” She knew she was dying, and she didn’t shy away from it.
I always visited Josie when I worked my shift so we could read together, since the books I brought were ones she’d never seen before. She was no stranger to words, Josie; she’d taught herself to read on the fourteen boxes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books that had been in her mom’s attic while Mom was out dealing drugs and pussy to strangers, and that brought a unique perspective to the many classics she’d absorbed.
“Cupcake monster,” she’d asked when I told her about my paper, “who the hell spends six months trying to decipher that rot? That book’s a slaughter, and the meaning’s all bled out.” When I asked her why she read so much, she’d only say, “TV needed electricity, and we didn’t have that a lot.” I didn’t pry, and she didn’t offer more.
I wondered what Stein would have thought of Josie’s criticism, if she would have invited her to Paris to smoke cigarettes and drink wine and turn phrases and maybe fuck.
But Josie was done with Stein. I’d brought in my tattered and marked-up copy of Tender Buttons, but Josie said the author had “far more mind than sense. Strange because she can, not because she is.” I thought a lot about that, and about the presentation I was making as Dad died, and I couldn’t tell whether I was offended by her words or my choices.
We tried to sort out what made writing strange-good, not just strange-strange. “There’s strange for the look of it,” Josie told me one day when I’d brought Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood for her. She’d gotten lost in the first three pages and only stopped reading when I cleared my throat. “That other book, that was strange to be strange. This one,” and she tapped the cover, “is strange because she is, and that makes her words mean something.” She hadn’t explained further, partly because she got lost in the pages and partly because she got her pain meds soon after.
A couple of weeks later, I brought a tiny cupcake with crystallized ginger in it (for her stomach) along with my copy of Finnegan’s Wake. By then, Josie had a hard time speaking, and the cupcake went uneaten, but her eyes stayed on me constantly as I read. “Strange-good,” she croaked, so I kept bringing the book back. When we started Episode 4 — deeper into that insanity of a novel than I’d ever made it before — she reached out and grabbed my hand as I read the words the watchful treachers at his wake. “Treasonous teachers,” she said, glassy eyes locked to mine, as if she were revealing a secret. And then, watery eyes spilling over, “I’ve had a life full of them.”
And she did. Her first father figure had powdered Ambien and put it in her Kool-Aid so he could do drugs with Josie’s mom. Her first partner had abandoned her after she’d nearly died from a miscarriage at age16, five months pregnant. She’d done drugs with strangers, hooked up with strangers at bars, and had strangers push her first into cancer treatment and then into hospice when those treatments failed. Treachers, indeed. I couldn’t blame her for thinking of people that way.
“Will you come to my wake?” Josie asked as I got up to leave that last time. I told her I would. “Good,” she’d murmured, settling weakly back into the pillows. “Gonna need directions to that gate.” Then the morphine had her eyes fluttering closed as I wondered if I’d shared that from my father’s last moments.
I heard later that Josie had called out some nonsense words before she took her last breath, and I wondered if they were James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, or maybe ones Josie made up on her own. Like my dad did, chattering along with his best friend in a language they’d made up specifically to keep others out of their affairs. I never got the hang of that tongue, and I’d get so frustrated trying to understand that my dad would laugh and hug me and remind me that I would never understand everything, no matter how hard I tried. I wanted to, though, and I’d write down the words he said so I could decipher them later. Only there never was a later, just a now I missed out on.
Josie left me a note tucked into the book where we’d left off. “Stop reading,” it said, “and just listen.” And so I did what my dad used to do when he was pondering something; I poured a drink, sat down on my patio, and watched the sun set. That man lived through two heart attacks, two cancers, and one hell of a terrifying robbery at gunpoint when he was a teen, so I figured he knew something about living with death. I listened to the leaves, the birds, the wind. I took breaths. I sat with it, without trying to understand it.
When we got Dad’s headstone, I brought Josie’s note with me and placed it in the hole carved out of the ground. “No treachers here,” I promised, tucking it carefully in the earth. All of this and not ordinary, I thought, returning to Tender Buttons. The difference is spreading.