((e:Paul)) posted recently of his psychic aunt, which was interesting because I recently had my own psychic visit on Saturday and it was bittersweet. About 3 years ago I made an appointment with this woman Robyn, who numerous people have given wildly enthusiastic descriptions of. They've glowed over the perfect detail with which she described their lives, their dead loved ones, their future. blah blah. I never really believed them. I made myself an appointment with Robyn the spirit medium about three years ago. She is allegedly clairsentient and can also talk to animals. There were things to consider, things that might be worth thinking about later, but they were things anyone could've said. I left somewhat unimpressed, but found the performance to be interesting nonetheless. Last Saturday I returned, which you may find perplexing, so I will outline my motivations in an excessively long, cathartic two post explosion.

My best friend and sister wife, Chopstix heard all about my little psychic experiment and we laughed about it together and she thought she might give it a try at some point. Chopstix and I both retain our mystical Aquarius inner workings and even hardcore cynicism can't completely chase it out of us. When people visit my house, they always ask who the person is that I have so many pictures of, it's Chopstix. We did everything together, looked out for one another, were each others' family in a place where we lived alone. In August 2012, without any warning or previous symptom, Chopstix died. It was a tuesday and I remember that I was eating chicken wings after work when I got a frantic call from our friend John that he had taken Chops to the hospital and I needed to get there immediately. It was so strange, that string of words and that concept, I moved slowly because I didn't process what it meant. The night before the three of us had gone to see the Marina Abramovic documentary at the theater, which was notable because Chopstix would never go to a movie theater. She couldn't stand sitting for 2 hours without smoking or crafting. Her shaky hands were always busy, always making or sewing or felting or spinning. Having been a very well known figure in Rochester as a bartender, she quit that life and became a full time artist making beautiful African wax print clothing and dying wool and spinning and creating her own work that is still well known all over the world. We spent so many hours crocheting or laying in the lawn on blankets talking shit and drinking vodka, bitching about our love lives, talking about art process, dreaming up designs. John, Chops and I spent the whole summer of 2012 taking turns sleeping over at each others' houses, drinking scotch, listening to records, and laughing hysterically. I'm glad we had a nice night out to the movie all together the night before, making plans for the weekend.

The hospital always sends the mind into an alternate universe because it's unlike any other place one frequents, the air is different, the lights are foreign, the sounds are from another place. Much the way casinos are designed to confuse and overpower you, I feel that hospitals disorient, maybe mercifully so. When there is a crisis situation, I immediately turn into Survival Mamasumi and shut off all emotional response, so I found John in the emergency department and started grilling nurses and looking for Chops. Then I saw that the whole floor was running toward one bed, people ringing the tiny body and shouting. I didn't get to see her conscious, barely catching a glimpse as they worked and rushed around.

I took John to a waiting area and we sat there staring into space. I was murmuring comforting things and making jokes and feeling that there was no possible way that a young, strong person who was so magical and alive would TRULY be in serious trouble. John was stunned and traumatized because only a couple of years before he had sat in the exact same room hearing that his wife was dead, so he kept saying "not again. this can't happen again". The nurses were worried, they kept checking on us and I was busy trying to comfort THEM, thanking them and trying not be any trouble. Finally, a nurse and doctor came into say that they had tried everything but she was gone. Dead. 30 years old and gone in few hours with no warning. I could not process that information correctly. All I could think of was practical matters, we have to tell everyone, we have to figure everything out, what is the next step. The most fucked up phone call you can ever make is to tell a parent that their child is dead and I was sitting there preparing to dial the number, being alarmingly calm. Her parents live 3 hours away in Pennsylvania, so I told them she was in serious condition in the hospital, it was not looking good. I kept thinking of them driving and didn't want them to have an accident. Her sister, I told the truth, she lost it on the phone and the reality started creeping in. During the hours that John and I waited in the hospital, I called all of our friends and finally started crying and crying. When her mom arrived, she was completely losing her mind. She was talking crazy shit and making all of these plans and promises and trying to organize things but all in an illogical way. I suppose she was in a mode similar to mine, to cope with the wave of emotion.

When John got the call from Chopstix, she had been in bed, unable to catch her breath or move. He found her sweating and pale, weakened and barely conscious. He picked up her tiny body and carried her to the car and drove wildly to the hospital. She kept saying that she couldn't breathe and the when they arrived at the hospital they had the audacity to make her fill out paperwork and grill her about insurance instead of taking her to ER immediately. Being young and without insurance, thin, looking someone who would never be sick, they probably didn't take her seriously enough. John said he screamed that she was having a heart attack and they finally snapped to, but we always wondered if those minutes would have made a difference for her. By the time they got her in and realized what was happening, it was too late to operate, do an MRI or anything. She had a rare aortic aneurysm, an archway surrounding her heart burst suddenly and her inability to breathe was probably blood filling her lungs. It makes me cry now thinking of her feeling scared and unable to get a breath and not knowing what the hell was going on. Most people who have these types of aneurysms don't survive, but it just seemed like maybe she would have been one of them, you can never know.

The worst part of the night, the one that is simultaneously surreal and the crashingly TOO real, was when they finally escorted us down the hall to say goodbye. In a room not much bigger than a closet, they had a gurney with Chopstix tucked into sheets as though she was sleeping and some chairs. we all crowded in and her mom kept talking and patting her and trying to make us feel better, but my heart was breaking for her and for Chopstix and for all of us at once. I hate that moment, that time when I saw her and her face was not her own, swollen from fluid changes and from the violence of the doctors trying to save her, trying to operate and then not operate, her body rebelling against her and killing her from the inside out. Chopstix was always a trendsetter and a rebel and a free spirit, so it seemed apropos that no external entity took her out, that she burst forth from within. I sat alone with her and it was awful to see her for the last time and it had to be like that. I still have to distract my mind when I get flashes of her face in that moment because that isn't how I want to remember her and I wish her mother never had to see her like that. I touched her hand and it was real how she was gone because her hands always shook, sometimes a light tremor and sometimes intensely. I tucked a small handful of yarn into her fingers because there was always yarn in her hands. I said goodbye and then my world changed forever

Prior to Chopstix, my relationship with death was by acquaintance and peripheral at best. I remember my grandmother dying in the hospital and reaching to swab her lips with the moistened sponge on a stick that was all they would let her drink. She grasped at it longingly and it occurred to me that I was nursing my grandmother and a cycle was completing itself. That sort of death was familiar, followed the narrative of life that I was prepared for. The same for my granfather a few years later. Someone close, someone in my daily life, who really knew me, who I knew so well, who I saw naked, who I was drunk with, who I held crying and forced hangover food on, who I counselled, this was the first time I ever experienced this sort of loss. Before Chops, I was somewhat hardhearted when people were grieving over a death, not really feeling true empathy for them, not really understanding how it incapacitated some people and damaged others years after the fact. I didn't understand funeral traditions or mourning practices, eulogies and memorials. It all came funneling into me that night. I changed. I cry now when I hear a news report of a truck driver dying in a crash in Montana because I know what his family feels like and I hate that they have to go through it and through the months and years after. I unfocus my eyes when I see scenes in TV shows of people identifying their murdered child in the morgue. There are people like me who haven't known the sensations and they think the way I did before and sigh at all of the "overly emotional people" crying over things like these. But I know why people try to find their mother's spirt in an old dress or go to the medium to try to talk to her, I understand that wistful longing for one more chance to say something. But all we ever get to say is goodbye.