The Receptionist

I found out her name was Jody the same day I found out she had cancer and then she was something like a goddess to me because since she got the news she had remained the same smiling receptionist that I saw every day and night and her laugh never changed and her morning wave never changed and I knew I was in the presence of someone very strong and very special.

I found out she was 24 and I imagined that she would lie in bed at night and stare straight up or do strange sums in her head on how things had to work out the way they did and she probably asked if she was really in control of anything anymore or if all of life was decided by some other fate at some other time and no virtue could be found in the tiny pleas of the living.

She was a goddess to me because she never wallowed even though at 24, she had to ask the big questions about who she really was and about hard things like souls, and what was over the edge -  in the blackness and if there was any way to prepare for that blackness -  and not in a way that art house philosophers do but in a fucking real way that meant she might have to say goodbye to her parents and older brother and separate from them for ever and she had to even think that she may not actually exist anymore if she died.

I have asked those questions when full of melancholy or full of wine or pot. Asked them in temples or pondered them lying on a beach, but you ask them with a different truth when you're 24 years old and your spine is full of tumours and they say go home and get comfortable, there is nothing we can do.

A week after I found out her name I asked her to lunch and introduced myself because I was so in awe of her and I told her that and she smiled like only a goddess can and she told me that she had nothing to fear but time itself and that meant that only waiting for little signs and omens and test results and sunrises and the photocopier to be free, only waiting on things could hurt her. A tortuous clock of thoughts.

In the end she had to surrender, like an ugly resilient surrender of sorts.

It’s not because she died that my heart stirs for her. All Gods die. It's that she led me to shed my fraudulent skin and recalibrate my own questions. Because I had witnessed someone who had to really ask them. Ask them with fear and with anger, ask them with ferociousness and with a beating heart of passion.

Ask the big questions in a way that only the dying really can.