One Saturday in December 2018, I was driving from Riverside to Long Beach to visit my sister Jeanne and her girlfriend Carolyn. I was “taking a break,” as caregivers are supposed to do.
I knew I needed some time to myself, but when I look back on those “breaks” now I feel sick with regret and remorse. There was so little time left…
Sheila had driven down from Santa Maria for the weekend (as she usually did before she moved down permanently), this time to their mom’s place in Riverside instead of Tom’s casita in Desert Hot Springs, where we’d lived until early December.
So while Sheila and Mike hung out and watched Marty — the brilliant 1955 film starring Ernest Borgnine that Mike loved — huddled around her laptop, I drove west on the 91, following the signs to “Beach Cities.”
Wrestling with feelings of guilt for leaving him, I also felt a sort of euphoria at being “free” — driving Mike’s Ford Focus away from the hot, cramped apartment in the gated senior complex, windows down and music cranked. But at the same time I knew I was experiencing freedom that he couldn’t experience and never would again. I was disoriented, no idea how to feel.
I drank coffee alone in a hipster café on Long Beach Boulevard, because I could. I made plans to meet up with Jeanne and Carolyn for dinner. I “took a break.”
As I drove south on 4th Street, “Radiate” by the Chemical Brothers came on — a random pick by the Apple Music A.I. bot — over the speakers in Mike’s Focus. The car he hadn’t been able to drive for seven months. Out of nowhere I started to sob.
CWD, crying while driving, was already a known hazard, but most of the time when I was behind the wheel it was with Mike beside me, so I was always trying to keep my emotions in check. It wasn’t all that common (yet) for me to be blinded by hiccuppy tears while trying to negotiate gnarly Southern California traffic.
For me this sudden breakdown was a sort of foreshock. Of course, I knew the earthquake was coming. ALS means certain death, and it was clearly bearing down hard. I watched it take something from him every day. I just didn’t know when exactly the Big One would hit, or what it would look like. I only knew that I was going to lose him. I knew I had a lot of CWD breakdowns ahead.
“Radiate” feels other-worldly, like a disembodied Someone calling from outer space, or the Other Side: “What is this? / I can’t sleep / Just radiate / Your love / To me.”
In the car, I was transported to the not-distant future, Mike gone. I felt the loss like it had already happened, like a punch to the sternum. I saw myself alone, disoriented. I felt the black hole.
This was what they call “anticipatory grief.”
There’s something about this song. He loved it, I know that. It was his favorite song on the Chemical Brothers’ Born in the Echoes album. It was the kind of song that moved him so much he almost couldn’t bear to listen to it, especially after he became ill.
I understood this because I’m the same way. There are songs that are too beautiful they hurt, so much that I can’t face them. I get it.
I already knew that this song would bring bittersweet pain for the rest of my life.
This was long before Mike put together his My Fun Playlist — the list he created for his funeral in the spring of 2019, when he knew death was hurtling toward him like an asteroid through space. Originally he’d put “Radiate” in the playlist, and I wasn’t at all surprised. But later, while he could still hold his phone, he removed the song without comment. I knew why.
I wanted to add it back for the funeral, but there didn’t seem to be time or space. I figured it was meant to be this way, for some reason. But I wanted everyone to hear it, to hear him in it.
As I knew would happen way back in December 2018, whenever I hear this song now I break down, every time. I see him, in the sky, in the stars. I hear him.