A Pain in the Neck

Years ago, I dated someone whose family ran a funeral home. Long before my cancer, I shared one of my fears about death: That frenemies would show up to my wake or funeral or that people who weren’t nice to me in life would show up and pretend to be sad, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything.

He promised to tie a string to my middle finger and pull on it when someone I disapproved of stopped over my coffin so that I could send one final message to people who I didn’t want at my wake.

I guess I always have to have the last word.

Now that it’s time for me to actually die, I have other things to worry about. And yet… I find myself irritated by a few people who would insincerely pretend to care. The first person that comes to mind is my ex-boyfriend, the one who left me last year. Every now and then, I would receive an email that was a halfhearted attempt to ease his conscience. Sometimes he acknowledged that I didn’t want to hear from him. In his last message, before my Times article, he said, “Know that I am here if you need/want to reach me.” Here. What does that mean? London.

I was tempted to tell him to read the Sunday New York Times to read how I felt. Instead I told it would be helpful to pay me back for my GoFundMe and his student loans on time every month. I don’t know if he’ll be able to muster faux sadness after my article. I think he might feign a sadness that we grew apart for the benefit of others. I’m aware this is a terrible thing to say, but when he tries to be deep, it’s like jumping into a pool and hitting your head on the shallow bottom: painful and embarrassing.

Shortly after we broke up, I found a note that he had written to himself, outlining his version of the story. I think it may have been a draft of a letter to his London lady. It detailed how I was kind of a terrible person before devolving into four lines of unforgettably bad poetry. I will tell you about my broken finger, the money he stole from my savings, the GoFundMe money he tried to take, but I can never share the poetry. It’s too cruel. Even I have a line I won’t cross. (Unless I was intoxicated last summer, when I would occasionally do dramatic recitings aloud.)

One night he fell asleep, after blowing me off to eat pot chocolate, with his phone in his hand. I put the phone on my nightstand. When his alarm went off, a series of flirty texts from London appeared. Furious, I started typing back, but then the phone locked up on me. I went back to where he was still sleeping. “Get out!” I screamed, throwing a pillow at his head. He woke up, confused. “I know about her!” I announced. “I know more than you think.” (At this point, he was unaware I’d heard his lascivious description of their time together in England and his plan to stay with me to “take care of me” while I was sick while pursuing her.)

“I know you’ve been writing her terrible poetry!” I thundered, throwing more pillows.

“No…” he started to protest.

“Are you trying to tell me,” I screamed, “that that poetry wasn’t terrible?!”

He had no response.

I recently watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and when she’s throwing out the jokes at her fleeing husband, it struck a chord. I think sometimes people don’t realize how hurt I am because I either make jokes or come across as angry.

The latter has particularly left me misunderstood, especially when it comes to friends who have stabbed me in the back. Once, mutual friends called me after a “friend” had spent the entire night drunkenly tearing me apart in front of someone I was dating, and asked me why I made her cry. All I’d done is say it wasn’t nice and ask if she was OK, but she turned it into an attack and turned some other “friends” against me. I cried for months. (Small voice: I also may have tried to punch her in the face but I missed.) “You know how she is,” these girls say about me. I “lash out.” I’m so mean and scary. I’m painted as a villain.

It’s better to be the villain than the fool I feel like when my trust is broken. “I’m hurt!” I sometimes exclaim to others, veins bulging from my forehead. “I’ve been wronged. Don’t you see, she’s trying to destroy me?” I sound crazy. It’s so easy to make me look crazy. I worry that I’m crazy. In the mid aughts, I had to go to therapy for years after the friend debacle, because she would goad me and I felt like I was losing my mind. I stopped talking to most of our mutual friends and it ended up being a good decision.

My old frenemies sigh and pout and bat their eyelashes and say that I’m unreasonable in plays for sympathy. Lots of people believe them. This has happened to me at least three times. I never learn with a certain type of insecure girl.

I don’t get the sympathy. Instead I get the laughs. I’m tough; I’ll make it through. I’m not going to be a simpering victim. It’s OK. Sometimes I just feel misunderstood. All my old frenemies will be relieved, I guess.

My uncle has been progressively meaner to me over the course of my life. He is a stealer of joy. He’s also an actual thief, who convinced my mom to give him money even after my grandmother warned me to look out for him. Then he turned us into villains. He recently contacted my mom, no doubt because he heard that I’m dying and he’s eager to weasel his way into inheritance money. He would always appear at the doorstep of the sick and dying.

Why am I so angry? Why am I wasting my precious time worrying over these people? Why do I turn my thoughts over the people I feel hurt by: friends who have turned, people who have said I’m like family then ditched me, people who I’ve felt abandoned by?

I need to let it go. But as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth said of her ex, Thurston Moore, “You can’t really forgive someone if they don’t say they’re sorry.” According to Gordon, the Dalai Lama said you don’t need to forgive if you have empathy for the person.

I don’t understand these people though.

Yet I’ve thrown so much shade, I’m sitting in the cold. I want to be in the sunshine. Is that a selfish reason to want to forgive? Is it any worse than being like them, wanting to appear kind in the eyes of others by pretending to feel something other than contempt for me?

I call them Deathbed Tourists. My illness is a backdrop. It’s so sad that I’m dying, but it’s definitely my fault that our relationships ended. Isn’t it? I broke up with my ex via email. This is true. I broke up with him after he booked a solo trip to Iceland and then said I needed to pay $1,000 of his COBRA insurance coverage. I stopped talking to those girls after being humiliated, after being stabbed in the back. I stopped speaking to my uncle, tired of his verbal abuse every single holiday, when his goal seemed to anger me and make me cry, so much so that my grandmother said something to me and I was absolved from having to be around him anymore.

I’m a photo op. A shame. Something to shake your head at sadly. They tried to be there for me, but I turned them away.

But do I miss any of these people? No. My life is much better now. Why do I dwell here, in this dark place of hurt? I want to really let them go before I go. I don’t know how.