"Death & Life (After Klimt)" by Dorota Quiroz

My great-aunt Alvina died a few years ago. She was in her late seventies, and had three daughters and a son. After she died, her kids discovered that, unbeknownst to them, she was treated for congenital heart disease for years. Though she took heart medication and was seeing a heart specialist, she failed to mention this to her children. My great-uncle, her husband, died several years before her so we aren’t even sure if he knew about it. My grandmother, Aunt Alvina’s best friend and sister-in-law, didn’t know about it either. It was the town’s best kept secret.

I hadn’t seen her in years—hadn’t even thought about her much—but ever since she died, I keep thinking about my childhood, about visiting my great uncles and great aunts, about playing cards in my grandparents’ double-wide trailer in “grape land.” Our name for the place seemed appropriate since vineyards loaded with grapes grew behind their mobile-home park. My childhood memories are pretty romantic. I thought my grandparents would live forever, somehow shielded from death’s grip. Everyone else’s death, however, I imagined over and over again—my brothers, my mom, my best friend. I imagined I would live with my grandparents when my mother died. I had to protect them. When I heard that Aunt Alvina died, I thought about times when I’d sat at her dining room table shelling walnuts, eating pie, and laughing about one thing or another. The tears were always rolling off the sides of her face when we were with her. I used to pour through the stacks on the floor looking for found treasures—a bookmark, unused envelopes, stickers.

Now, I often study people, trying to guess the way they might die. There’s no way to predict my accuracy, of course. I pick out folks I see on the street and think to myself: it’s in her liver, his pancreas, her breasts. Sometimes I feel like cancer is taking over the country.

When my mother called me four years ago to tell me she had breast cancer, I was brought to my knees with the phone still in my hand. My two-year-old kept asking why I was crying. I always associated cancer with a death sentence. I sat on the kitchen floor imagining my mother’s slow death, her funeral, getting together with family afterwards, sorting through family heirlooms, saying goodbye.

But it didn’t happen that way. I flew down a week later to be with her when she had a partial mastectomy; I stayed with her while she recovered, cleaning the drain under her arm where they’d taken a sample of lymph node cells. I went with her to meet the oncologist. I woke her up every four hours to hand out pain medication and other prescribed drugs—one once a day; another two times a day; and a third every four hours.

A year later my mother told me she was cancer free. Breathing a huge sigh of relief, I walked around for days finally feeling that my mother and I were protected. It had never occurred to me that cancer was beatable. Sure, I’d heard of people getting cancer and surviving, but they belonged to someone else’s family. It was easy, almost, to think of their cure as make-believe.

I wonder about my father, about all the treatment he went through, the prayers for miracles, the experimental medication he took thirty years ago in hopes of beating cancer. I consider what he may have felt, what he thought during those days of treatments while throwing up until his whole body ached from the illness. And sometimes I think about what it would have been like for me if he hadn’t died. What might I have become if he lived?

I don’t dwell on that too often anymore because I love the path I’ve walked, the person I’ve become. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss him, that I don’t ache for my father at times. I now am open to the hope and beauty his death has provided me. I am hopeful that when it’s my turn to go, I can leave this place gracefully and full of love. Because without death, would love of any kind be possible? Not the kind of love, at least, that I believe in.