“That’s not a thing!” Julie says. She’s talking about a coworker who had a miscarriage—a fellow cashier at Trader Joe’s—and how another coworker, trying to console her, said, “Everything happens for a reason. This one just wasn’t meant to be.”
“‘Everything happens for a reason’ is not a thing!” Julie repeats. “There’s no divine plan if you miscarry or have cancer or your child is murdered by a lunatic!” I know what she means. People make misguided comments about all kinds of misfortune, and Julie has been toying with the idea of writing a book she plans to call What Not to Say to a Dying Person: A Guide for the Well-Meaning but Clueless.
According to Julie, here are a few things not to say: Are you sure you’re dying? Have you gotten a second opinion? Be strong. What are your odds? You need to be less stressed. It’s all about attitude. You can beat this! I know somebody who took vitamin K and was cured. I read about this new therapy that shrinks tumors—in mice, but still. You really have no family history of this? (If Julie did, the person asking would feel safer; it could be explained by genetics.) The other day, someone told Julie, “I knew a woman who had the same kind of cancer as you.” “Knew?” Julie said. “Um, yes,” the person replied sheepishly. “She, uh, died.”
As Julie goes through her list of things not to say, I think about other patients who’ve complained about comments people make at various difficult times: You can still have another child. At least he lived a long life. She’s in a better place now. When you’re ready, you can always get another dog. It’s been a year; maybe it’s time to move on.
To be sure, these comments are meant to comfort, but they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up. Platitudes like these make a terrible circumstance more palatable for the person saying the words but leave the person experiencing the adversity feeling angry and alone.
“People think that if they talk about me dying, it’ll become a reality when it already is a reality,” Julie says, shaking her head. I’ve seen this to be true too, and not just about death. Not speaking about something doesn’t make it less real. It makes it scarier. For Julie, the worst thing is the silence, people who avoid her so that they don’t have to get into a conversation and say those awkward things in the first place. She’d choose awkward over ignored.
“What do you wish people would say?” I ask.
Julie thinks about this. “They can say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ They can say, ‘How can I be helpful?’ Or ‘I feel so helpless but I care about you.’”
She shifts on the couch, her thinner frame not quite filling out her clothes. “They can be honest,” she continues. “One person blurted out, ‘I have no idea how to say the right thing here,’ and I was so relieved! I told her that before I got sick, I wouldn’t have known what to say either. At work when my grad students first heard, they all said, ‘What will we do without you?’ and that felt good, because it was an expression of how they feel about me. People have said, ‘Noooooo!’ and ‘I’m always a phone call away if you want to talk or just go do something fun.’ They remember that I’m still me—that I’m still their friend and not just a cancer patient, and they can talk to me about their relationships and work and the latest episode of Game of Thrones.”
One thing that has surprised Julie about going through the process of watching herself die is how vivid her world has become. Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again. Tastes—the sweetness of a strawberry, its juice dripping onto her chin; a buttery pastry melting in her mouth. Smells—flowers on a front lawn, a colleague’s perfume, seaweed washed up on the shore, Matt’s sweaty body in bed at night. Sounds—the strings on a cello, the screech of a car, her nephew’s laughter. Experiences—dancing at a birthday party, people-watching at Starbucks, buying a cute dress, opening the mail. All of this, no matter how mundane, delights her to no end. She’s become hyper-present. When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she’s noticed, they get lazy.
She hadn’t expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she’s dying, she’s realized, life goes on—even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, Why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, Why wouldn’t I? I like Twitter! She also tries not to dwell on what she’s losing. “I can breathe fine now,” Julie says, “but it’ll get harder, and I’ll grieve for that. Until then, I breathe.”
Julie gives more examples of what helps when she tells people she’s dying. “A hug is great,” she says. “So is ‘I love you.’ My absolute favorite is just a plain ‘I love you.’”
“Did anyone say that?” I ask. Matt did, she says. When they found out she had cancer, his first words weren’t “We’ll beat this!” or “Oh, fuck!” but “Jules, I love you so much.” That was all she needed to know.
“Love wins,” I say, referencing a story Julie once told me about the time her parents went through a rough patch and separated for five days when Julie was twelve. By the weekend, they were back together, and when she and her sister asked why, her father looked at her mother with such affection and said, “Because at the end of the day, love wins. Always remember that, girls.”
Julie nods. Love wins.
“If I write this book,” she says, “maybe I’ll say that the best responses I’ve gotten have been from people who were genuine and didn’t edit themselves.” She looks at me. “Like you.”
I try to remember what I’d said when Julie told me she was dying. I remember feeling uncomfortable the first time, devastated the second. I ask Julie what she remembers me saying.
She smiles. “Both times you said the same thing, and I’ll never forget it, because I wasn’t expecting that from a therapist.”
I shake my head. Expecting what?
“You spontaneously said, in this quiet, sad voice, ‘Oh, Julie’—which was the perfect response, but it’s what you didn’t say that meant the most. You teared up, but I figured that you didn’t want me to see it, so I didn’t say anything.”
The memory takes shape in my mind. “I’m glad that you saw my tears, and you could have said something. I hope from now on, you will.”
“Well, now I would. I mean, now that we’ve done my obituary together, I think I’m pretty much an open book.”
A few weeks ago, Julie finished writing her obituary. We were in the midst of some important conversations at the time, talking about how she wanted to die. Who did she want with her? Where did she want to be? What would she want for comfort? What was she afraid of? What kind of memorial service or funeral did she want? What did she want people to know and when?
Even as she’d discovered hidden parts of herself since the cancer diagnosis—more spontaneity, more flexibility—she was still, at heart, a planner, and if she was going to have to contend with her early death sentence, she would do as much of it as she could the way she wanted.
In considering her obituary, we talked about what meant the most to her. There was her professional success and her passion for her research and her students. There was her Saturday-morning “home” at Trader Joe’s and the sense of freedom she found there. There was Emma, who, with Julie’s help in the financial-aid application process, was able to cut down her hours at Trader Joe’s so that she could attend college. There were the friends she had run marathons with and the ones she did book club with. At the top of the list was her husband (“The best person in the world to go through life with,” she said, “but also the best to go through death with”), her sister, and her nephew and newborn niece (Julie was their godmother). There were her parents and four grandparents—all of whom couldn’t understand how in a family with such longevity, Julie was dying so young.
“It’s like we’ve done therapy on steroids,” Julie said of everything that had happened since we met. “Like the way Matt and I say that we’re doing our marriage on steroids. We have to cram it all in as quickly as possible.” Julie realized, when she talked about cramming it all in, that if she was pissed off about having such a short life, it was only because it had been such a good one.
Which is why, in the end, after several drafts and revisions, Julie decided to keep her obituary simple: “For every single day of her thirty-five years,” she wanted it to read, “Julie Callahan Blue was loved.”
Love wins.