Death feels to me like an invitation, one that we reject at our peril. We can overthink it, worry it. Not now, we might say to death. Later would be better, or never. As adults we develop an opinion about it. I tell my ex-partners I will help them with their goals of care—detailed end-of-life instructions for their caregivers, possibly our kids. I want the kids to be spared any unnecessary heavy lifting, decisions for which they’re unprepared. I’m not going to die, each of the exes says. Yes, I say, that’s excellent. Let’s call that Plan A. Now, let’s talk about Plan B. I know that at least one of them wants nothing to do with Western medicine. This is the time to say so.

Death tells us what form it wants to take. Sometimes it comes with a bit of wiggle room. I’ve been told I have three months to three years to live. It’s a Goldilocks-style plan: not too hot, not too cold, not too soft, not too hard. People invariably pooh-pooh it when I tell them about it. Three months to three years? What’s the use of giving someone such a wide range? You could drive a truck through a prognosis like that, a hearse. But it’s all I’ve got, and at the very least it tells me that death is imminent. I’ve been given notice. This is a first for my family of origin. Those family members who predeceased me all died more suddenly. We’re all going to die, but I have the luxury of knowing more or less when it will happen.

“When it comes down to it, I don’t see the point of fighting death to the death. I’ll go toe-to-toe with it a bit, wring what I can of goodness from what remains.”

Obviously, I’ve never had to die before—not the big and final death. But I’ve had enough losses to have a sense of what’s to come. 

I grew up with death. I was a Littlefair child, part of a collection of brothers and sisters that happened to dissolve at an alarming rate—births alternating with deaths, birthdays with funerals, and death anniversaries always operating in our background. Four of my siblings were dead by the time I was twelve. Memories dragged the past into the present. How many times did my mother see her daughter slip beneath the ice, grabbing unsuccessfully at solid ground? How many times did my mother drown along with her?

Frequency and proximity did not make me like death. It was always just there, like the scent of bleach and cooked cabbage was always in the air at my friend’s house, or like old cigarette smoke always sat like mustard gas in another friend’s rec room where on Saturday afternoons we watched horror movies and smoked old butts. I did not warm to death, but death gave me the opportunity to be with it and to develop an acceptance of it.

For someone who writes about life, there is much to be said for death. It is irrefutable. An objective fact. Left to my own devices, writing my own version of Littlefair history, I might unwittingly or wittingly falsify memory. I might be an unreliable narrator, but having a smattering of dead siblings in my past gives me at least that much of a solid start with which to work. Their deaths could never be a product of my imagination or a matter of speculation. Four of my siblings died; that part of my history is clear.

I was a nervous child. Perhaps it was all that corporeal coming and going. I was shy, mute, hid in my mother’s skirt at silver-service Saturday afternoon teas at the YWCA. I tried to wrap her around me. Cocoon. Five years old. Six. At five I had hand-me-down items from all my siblings living and dead—a panther lamp, a stuffed tiger with a secret-zipper belly, 4-H prize ribbons, photos. Items from an abruptly interrupted past intruded on my present.

It’s not as if I knew death well or distinctly enough to see it and pick it out of my food like it was a hair, and no one else seemed to see it and want to pick it out for me. We just carried on. As a family, we kept ourselves in the dark. Being the youngest, I have no way of knowing what really went on, and the memory of my one remaining sister is nonexistent. But one thing was for sure: We were once a good-sized family, six kids. But in the end, we grew small, and it is as if we were always small. That did not sit well with me. I felt cheated.

A few years ago, I was given the chance to reconstitute my family. It was a therapeutic exercise. I was invited to use seven workshop participants to represent my siblings and parents. It was like being given free tokens at a video arcade—I was delighted. For my parents, I chose and arranged two people whose positioning was meant to express both love and weariness. For my brother Thomas and sister Sharon, I chose people at random to stand in for them. Both had died before I was born, so I never knew them. My choice for Greg was informed by my love of him. And Jeff, he was tricky because I’d always hated him. Whenever I think of the person I chose for Jeff, I want to apologize again. It gave me so much satisfaction to all but yell and spit in his face. The real Jeff had molested me. But seeing the rest of my family as it might have been brought me extreme joy. We were a force.

When I was growing up, death lived in the most unsuspecting of places. In my case it was at the end of the first-floor hall where the phone hung on the wall. Black. In my fifth and twelfth years the phone became an instrument of torture and stayed that way. It was by phone that one of my brothers last attempted to contact my mother in hopes of finding acceptance and instead got my father and his wrath. It was also by phone that another brother’s fate revealed itself courtesy of a nurse calling on a Sunday night to ask to speak to one of my parents. It’s for you, I said to my father, the receiver in my hand becoming a starting pistol for a race he did not yet know he’d need to run. One more time.

Death was intrusive and uninvited and while we didn’t deal with it with anything approaching awareness or curiosity, we nonetheless accommodated it. One of my siblings once found a box of discarded sweaters outside the local Sears and brought it home—freebies! But every item had come in contact with fibreglass, and we couldn’t get away from the glass slivers. Death was like that.

This is the past I bring to the present and to my own death and dying. Acceptance is a given. I am now embarking on my three-month-three-year plan. I’m trying to prolong my life, though this is just a way to be with it. I like the idea of giving family and friends and myself time. 

I see dead as easy. I see it as easy to die and to be dead. It’s those who remain behind that I worry about. My heart goes out to them. I’ve been there; I’ve been them. I experienced my parents’ deaths, a close friend’s. I was sure I wouldn’t survive.

Questionable though it may seem, I have the advantage of thinking I know what comes next, the part where I die. It even comes with a set of directions: From the lower parking lot at Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, head due south along Sailor’s Memorial Way to the place where the Northwest Arm, a narrow ocean inlet, meets the rest of the harbor. Look left, out to sea.

It’s really just open water, but to me it’s become a deep vertical expanse of welcoming, the air shimmering with its presence. It feels to me like emptiness itself, and it grounds me. Welcomes me. It reorients me whether I see it in person or recall it in memory from the dry, upholstered comfort of my home, and it’s where I think I’ll be in spirit, first stop, when I die.

I don’t think I’m the first one to see the spot this way. At least one other person has seen it before me: Audrey Parker. As coincidence would have it, I knew her. There’s a bench there on the shore with her name on it, and it looks seaward. East. It’s as if she was inviting people to see what she saw as she approached her own death. Look, look, she said. Urging. The bench is at the very place you’d put such a thing if you had something important to communicate, in this case the exact location of a good disembarking point from life. Point Pleasant. Indeed. 

When it comes down to it, I don’t see the point of fighting death to the death. I’ll go toe-to-toe with it a bit, wring what I can of goodness from what remains, but ultimately, I accept that death has business with me, and I won’t stand in its way. It would be silly to attach myself to opposing it too vigorously. Cancer has as much right to me as the rest of the cells in there, the Team Life cells—the two having spent decades in near-flawless lockstep, one always slightly ahead of the other. 

I’ve seen too many siblings come and go to make a big deal of death. Feeling that good health has no greater claim on these physical parts than illness makes it okay to go with the flow. I’m not opposed to the flow.

Cindy Littlefair

Cindy Littlefair has been on staff at Lion’s Roar for sixteen years. She has her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College.