#50 — Is It Okay to Have Made Peace With Dying When They Need You to Stay?
Content note: This conversation includes discussion around a terminal diagnosis and a period of chronic suicidality. If you aren't in the right space for this today, that's ok.
A former colleague once opened a tense workplace meeting with three words: I believe everybody. Our caller has carried that line for years, and it shapes how they think about death now, including their partner's hope that some part of them will linger after they're gone. Our caller describes their own experience of dying as something like watching everyone they love from a distance they can't quite close. Earlier this year, at a tribute performance for the late poet Andrea Gibson, they watched Andrea's wife speak about still feeling Andrea near, and found themselves believing her completely.
They were in their twenties when the seizures and fainting started. It took a blood specialist to land on the real answer: a rare, idiopathic bone marrow disorder, diagnosed in 2018 with an initial timeline of three to five years. As a teenager, they spent years certain they'd never live past 40, a belief tied to a period of chronic suicidality they've since moved through. Getting an actual terminal diagnosis as an adult, after growing to love the life they'd built, turned that old certainty into something they never wanted to be right about.
They've done multiple rounds of grueling experimental treatment since, mostly for other people's sake rather than their own. When they first got the diagnosis, they packed up their dog and drove across the country to tell their mother in person. She still, to this day, doesn't accept it.
By the end of the call, our caller returns to a phrase they keep coming back to: the work being done. Not resignation, but the sense of having lived in pursuit of something real for the people they love, so that whatever comes next, it comes with nothing left unresolved.
Topics covered
11:03 — A former colleague's three words: "I believe everybody"
21:16 — The years-long path to an idiopathic bone marrow diagnosis
23:25 — A teenage belief about mortality that turned out true
25:59 — Choosing experimental treatment for other people, and a mother's denial
49:00 — What it means to feel like the work is done
Related episodes
Anonymous #29 — Can Having Parkinson's Teach You How to Live?
Anonymous #35 — How Do You Keep Loving People When You're the One They're Going to Lose?
Book recommendations: They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib and Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley — see the full list of Anonymous Book Recommendations here.
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