This one hits home for me because I also lost my fiance in my 20s following a period of watching his mental and physical decline, aggressively vocal suicidal ideation, and then he was gone under uncertain circumstances that may have been accidental or due to his complex medical circumstances that were sadly hereditary or secondary to his history of severe sepsis and multisystem organ failure. His best friend, who later blocked me unceremoniously for being a wicked terf, was quite dismissive of the possibility that he did the thing he kept saying he would do, insisting he would have left a note. Looking back, I think she was also being possessive of his equilibriating meat in her own way, not wanting to admit that he perhaps had a different relationship with me than she.
He was 26. I do not have an urn for us to share. His organs are interred in the bodies of several strangers. I have folded starburst wrapper cranes protected by resin somewhere in a cedar box, next to a program from his memorial at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, a place he loved to frequent. I have egg whites he taught me to mix into cocktails for the taste. I have the knowledge of connective tissue disorders and symptomatology that he imparted through years of his genetically foretold misery. I have the compassion he showed me when no one would ackowledge my worsening pain from my rare syndrome, but he was always looking for others like him who did not yet know why they were hurting. I understand that urge to suckle the corpse of the man who left you forever; a stillbirth of a marriage. And I have the rainbow baby of my own life now, which continues forward. I hope this woman who survived this man, can keep finding her way forward.
