What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Die: Guest Blog by Glenn Rockowitz

What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Die: Guest Blog by Glenn Rockowitz

I don’t cry anymore. And I hate that I don’t. I have always attributed this weird fucking paralysis to the emotional lockdown I developed years ago when I was diagnosed with cancer and given only a few months to live. A survival mechanism I designed to keep my eyes fixated only on reaching the living Me at the other side of the brushfire. And it has served me well. Or so I have told myself.

This morning I cried in a way I haven’t since I was kid. The guttural kind of sobbing that only comes from a body purging a pain too large to fit the human-shaped frame that holds it in place. I know a lot of people experience this kind of sadness breach as a catharsis, a necessary release long overdue. But for me it wasn’t. At all.

It was the overflow of the cumulative ache that comes from trying to live every day waiting for the other shoe to drop. The shoe that is the slow-burning ember everyone who’s ever survived a body in betrayal can’t fully scrape off their windshield. The one that never stops reminding you that you’re always just a slight breeze away from igniting your world.

I talk about this phenomenon a lot. I even wrote a book about it. And like an idiot, I keep believing that I can find the right words to convey this darkness and loneliness to the uninitiated. Even though I know that it can’t be done, I am making peace with the fact that, like childbirth for a man, some things are unknowable when a person has not or cannot experience it firsthand. And I’m okay with that reality on most days because I have learned to carry myself through the brushfire and reset to the only other place I live inside my tiny skull-shaped world: gratitude.

The simple gratitude of even having the luxury to feel pain at all. And because nothing is static, I know that if I am feeling this pain, then I am equally as able to feel love.

I’m writing this now because I am floating in that viscous nowhere space of the dying. And I want to take a rare window and a unique opportunity to connect with a world of humanity who live in this space every day. It is very real in this moment no matter which way the wind blows. I recently received blood tests that indicated I am likely on the precipice of another fight for my life. An unsurvivable cancer. The same a tireless enemy I have dedicated the last 15 years understanding, demystifying and destroying. One that I spend part of every day helping others navigate and battle back into submission. I talk endlessly about this state of mind because it informs the very way I approach every day of my life. And I’ve usually had the luxury of being on the other side of it. But here I am. Smack dab in the middle of the blaze, pushing myself through those flames toward the living Me.

So I have chosen to be uncharacteristically public about this latest battle for one reason:

If you are here with me—statistically tens of thousands of you—I want you to know you are not alone. Whether you are the only soul in an empty house or one of dozens in a crowded hospital room of friends and family members, you likely feel a sense of isolation very few people can understand. As much as they wish they could. It’s the untouchable opaque part of you that you desperately wish felt even the slightest bit translucent. A tangible mark you wish people could see and immediately understand.

While I don’t think anything I could write would accomplish that mammoth feat for you or for myself, I want to at least try to punch out even the slightest pinhole of light for the people we love and who are trying so desperately to understand and love us back.

So this is the beginning. Starting with this, I hope to share with you the handful of things I have learned in my relatively short time on this planet. The things I remind my son way more frequently than he would prefer. He would prefer zero, by the way. All with the hope that those of you fighting right now won’t feel alone and those of you who love those of us who are, will be able to know this feeling without having to actually know it.

So I’m half-jokingly calling this What To Expect When You’re Expecting…To Die. And strangely this isn’t about cancer at all. It’s about the torture of being at perpetual war with an unquiet mind. And I think anyone who lives with a brain that makes it feel like simply being alive and going through the motions of a routine day is like running through motor oil will know exactly what I’ll be describing. I just hope that even if I don’t make it to the other side of that brushfire this time, you can take these fucked up scars and build a new land on the other side that is safe for everyone who will inevitably have to forge their way through that same dark place.

We will do it together.

Because frankly it is that very fucking connectedness that makes every day above ground a good day.

I didn’t expect to meet Paul even though our lives put us in the same rooms on the same nights so many times decades ago in Chicago.

I guess it wasn’t time.

But now that he and I have connected and that I have connected — through him and his beautiful pretzeled soul—to so many of you, I want to reach out and lock arms.

We will do it together.

We will do it together.

 

You can follow Glenn on Twitter @JustARide

 

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