LAUREN BRAZEAL GARZA

At Least, My Dear 

At least, my dear, you did not have to live to see me die 
–Edna St.Vincent Millay 

---

Julia, 

I began speaking to it the day I was diagnosed—when I learned the source of my discomfort and constant tiredness was a parasite made of my own cells. It had only one need: the replication and replication of a single parent cell. Its only voice was pain; communicating a dull throb in my lower abdomen, I am here, I am here, when I bent over, ran too quickly down stairs, or rolled over in my sleep. I’d whisper to it then, I know, shhh. Its September appearance came during a time when life begins shutting down and light adopts the stringy tenor of a thing needing rest. I grew it like a child within me. After all, it had made a home in the walls of my uterus: an organ whose only purpose is to carry life. It lived and I bewilderingly fed and nurtured it, knowing from the start that the only way to destroy this overtaking thing was to go to war with my own body. Doctors would need to open me and carve out an entire constellation of organs. They aimed to fill me with poison that killed indiscriminately. We just lost Sara to cancer only a few years ago, and I still carry searing visions of her unable to hold down water, her brittle nails splintering at the cuticle bed, her body eventually becoming too radioactive to even touch her baby daughter before complications related to the cure overwhelmed her. It just was. And so I hoped my cancer and I might learn to live together in the way two creatures who can’t easily rid themselves of the other sometimes do. 

//

But several weeks after the diagnosis and many nights of being woken by its cries, I sought the help of a spirit-talker in the neighborhood—a woman named Flamora. She’ll never tell you that’s her work: to mend broken things. “I only interpret and translate forms of information,” she’d say, and shrug her shoulders. In old times she would have lived away from civilization in a forest hut, or maybe a lonely cliff-side shack. The path to her would have been arduous. She would have brewed tea from flowers and green roots, reading fortunes from the bones of fallen creatures around her. But this is Dallas in 2022. She lives five blocks North of me, and my journey to her apartment began at my own untended city street, lush with potholes, along a crumbling grass-pocked sidewalk, terminating at the top of four shaky flights of stairs. Each step brought the growth’s cantering song: listen up, listen up, listen up. 

I’m doing this. Be quiet, I hissed at it before knocking. When Flamora opened the door, she smiled at both of us. 

// 

Julia, I know a letter isn’t the best way to confess all this. I’m hoping I’ll be forgiven for my cowardice—hiding this secret from you until now. Especially for everything I’ve done and am about to do. I know you won’t approve. The tea Flamora brewed contained no medicine, it was Walmart-brand Chamomile. Her home was no hut. Its shelves patterned themselves with books and various trinkets of her profession: tarot cards, statues of Our Lady of Holy Death: Santa Muerte, candles, assortments of colorful crystals. It smelled vaguely herbal. A lonely porcelain bird perched on a windowsill. Dozens of old cardboard file boxes filled with manilla file folders crowded her living room, “all my recordings—I transcribe them,” she said, nodding in their direction. She offered to listen and talk with a tape recorder cataloging our conversation, saying the answers would come from between the words we exchanged.

She called me the next day with her own diagnosis: the tumor did indeed have a spirit and voice but wasn’t in the mood to bargain or compromise. It demanded its own equal right to life, and wouldn’t be swayed. “It was so full of rage,” she confessed, “I don’t know where all this anger is coming from. I don’t think it can be reasoned with.” Her words hit my ear through the phone in bruising blows. I felt a constriction travel across my chest and throat as I began to cry, but pulsing within my feelings of hopelessness, a blood-hot flame flickered into existence. Julia, all of a sudden I saw a possible path through my illness that didn’t result in my end. I needed to gain Death’s favor—to bargain with her to only take the life of the growth, instead of us both. Flamora responded sharply when I told her my plan, the way a mother does to a child about to touch fire. “Death can only ever take. She never gives.” She argued. I stood firm, and we continued back and forth. Flamora ended the call with a final caution “You want Death to kill something that’s killing you: so, you’re asking her to give you life. I can’t advise more strongly against this. Do not call on her: it will only bring her to you.” She said the last part slowly, pausing a little after each word. But of course I wanted death to come: how else could I propose my bargain? 

// 

Over the following days, I assembled a summoning shrine and made nightly offerings to Death. Roses, cigarettes, tequila: luring items. I rang my small, oil-blessed bell while burning orange candles, the color of healing and hope. I whispered to her, throwing black salt to purify the flames. On the third night, I woke up covered in sweat to see Death, tall and slender, standing at the foot of my bed, gazing at me. She put a bony finger to her lips when I tried to speak Shhhhhh a voice radiated from the walls and ceiling. The room began to spin and she pointed to Sara’s picture on my dresser, dematerializing as I fumbled for the lamp beside my bed. I found a thermometer and took my temperature to discover I was running a fever of 102. The cancer was winning. More orange candles, more black salt. I ripped the petals from roses I kept in the fridge and scattered them on the flames in desperation. The next morning, when the fever had subsided, the resolution finally presented itself. Death had spoken. 

// 

Julia, my dear, smart, wonderful sister: the only way out is through. I’ve resolved to offer my body to Death and let her decide what to give and take. I know losing Sara was so hard on us both—a triad of sisters reduced to a duo, and now you may be left alone. But I’m reaching out to you now, on the night before my surgery. I begin follow-up radiation next week, and felt it was important to write all this down for you while I was still in my best mind so maybe you could understand my decision— though this letter won’t reach you unless I don’t survive the treatment. I know this is hard to accept, and hope you forgive me for not telling you sooner. I just didn’t want you to worry about something so out of your control. Would it have been better to ruin your life with fear and worry? At least this way you don’t have to think there was something you could have done. And you didn’t have to see me die, if that’s how it ends. As I write, I’m hoping these words never reach you, and are just tucked in a drawer somewhere: an artifact of a near-brush with Lady Death. Let’s hope for that, or hope that we will meet again if the bargain didn’t work in my favor. 

With eternal love, 
Your Carolina

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