Dear Body,

89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.^[1]

Your favorite cousin called you “dark child.” You smiled when she said it. It meant she loved you, expressing love in the way children learn how to say big things like “I love you.” They play with the thing that makes you special. You are dark and your name is Darcel. You are the only Darcel you have ever known from childhood to this. She knows you are special. You know, too.

You are a tall body, but not as tall as your cousin. You envied her extra two inches. She was magnificent in her svelte athletic stance. You were tall and soft, a slight pillow of a belly, thighs rub, bulbous breasts. Your hands though. No one except your father had more exquisite hands, fingers that your cello teacher agrees are made for piano, hands your manicurist takes pleasure in massaging, deliberately tending your long, slender nailbeds. Once in high school you wore sandals. Your friend said, “Look at your toes. They’re as long as your fingers.” You were mortified that someone critiqued your body, your toes, that someone looked at you. You did not wear sandals again for over 40 years and when you do, you still never show the full length of your toes. Only your pedicurist sees your hammer toes, corns, bunions, the damage from youth’s ill fitted fashion.

You are 67 years old now. Your soft belly evaporated into folds of skin, your thighs gap, your young and handsome Sikh specialist in hATTR-CM, Dr. P, squeezed your ankles and said, “Very good. Nice and skinny.” You laughed and later sent him an email saying, “Just so you know, black American women of a certain age don’t want skinny legs.” You called your 85 year old Aunt. The two of you giggled.

You went through periods of identity crisis. I suspect most women’s bodies do. You were fat before you were malnourished and then you were athletic before you were mentally sick and Depakote grew you fat once again. You adhered to a diabetic’s diet, not being diabetic, and became slim again until you became an alcoholic and grew once more. Then you got sick, really sick, heart sick, deadly sick, and you concocted a heart healthy diet down to skinny legs and protruding clavicle, and bony wrists and ribs that sometimes become visible when you forget to eat.

You forget to eat on the days when melancholia drags, when the apartment has gotten dirty and the bed hasn’t been made in days, when coffee is the only food with flavor. You tell yourself coffee is food and you drink more. No sugar, no cream, just bold almost bitter black. You forget to eat the same way you forget to read, listen to music, forget to cut your hair, shower, change your underwear. You forget to eat when being sick is too laden, when it takes two hours to swallow 14 pills each night, when you skip seven more pills at noon because more pills is more than you can swallow. You forget to eat and ignore the cut flowers a week dead in their porcelain vase. You forget to eat when your brain says you are tired.

Sometimes I don’t know how to tend to you. Sometimes I don’t want to. You drain me, your endless greed, the exactness of your demands: monthly examinations, echocardiograms, cardioversions, heart surgeries, specialty drugs, clinical trial. In four years, you have been treated by three cardiologists, three surgeons, three primary care physicians, one nephrologist, and one clinical trial researcher. You have been hospitalized twice on a cardiac care unit providing such abominable care for a critically compromised heart patient that you are certain your complaints resulted in the termination of two nurses. I have had to fight for you.

You have felt gentleness. At your worst, when expressions of fear and rage and hurt could not be contained, mercy met you. Your cardiologist bestowed his mother’s wisdom from her Buddhist faith. Your clinical trial researcher translated poetry from Arabic and fed you chocolate. Your surgeon teased you about your Sting obsession. Your primary care physician delighted in you, her favorite fashionista. You felt tenderness in those medical rooms. Afterwards you ate. You walked to Tatte Bakery for salmon and rice with winter squash and kale, a pastry, latte, and lime soda. You sat for hours at the enormous windows absorbing the gifts of the sun, glowing as if the Universe knew you needed Her blaze to bear the difficulty of terminal disease. You felt tended to by your caretakers, by your God. You promised to tend to yourself.

What was it that you wanted after you understood that heart failure would never be reversed, after your relief that your disease had an acronym that you could remember because you could not pronounce its name, after you learned that you were terminal, after you were told that terminal meant two and a half to four years of grace, after you walked away from relationships that did not nourish you, after your twin godsons were born, after three major depressive episodes, after retirement, after mourning the life you had and the life you did not get, after the clinical trial proved successful, after you got a disabled second chance. What is it that you want?

I do not know you. I tend to you, I bathe and groom you, I feed you, I read you poetry and you write for me, but we are not one. Not yet. Tomorrow I see Dr. G. We will discuss again the chasm that I describe between me the narrator and you the story. He will remind me that I am all of our experiences, all of our emotions, all of the barricaded horrors, that we are not two crafted personae, but one human being clinging to a new life strand, a successful clinical trial moving the dial from two and a half to four years of life to a point when there is no longer a viable prognosis, or as Dr. P said as he patted your shoulder on the way out of the examination room, “You’re going to be with us for a while.”

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^[1] Bluets, Maggie Smith, Wave Books (2009)