If I Stay

I don’t know if once you die you remember things that happened to you when you were alive. It makes a certain logical sense that you wouldn’t. That being dead will feel like before you were born, which is to say, a whole lot of nothingness. Except that for me, at least, my prebirth years aren’t entirely blank. Every now and again, Mom or Dad will be telling a story about something, about Dad catching his first salmon with Gramps, or Mom remembering the amazing Dead Moon concert she saw with Dad on their first date, and I’ll have an overpowering déjà vu. Not just a sense that I’ve heard the story before, but that I’ve lived it. I can picture myself sitting on the riverbank as Dad pulls a hot-pink coho out of the water, even though Dad was all of twelve at the time. Or I can hear the feedback when Dead Moon played “D.O.A.” at the X-Ray, even though I’ve never heard Dead Moon play live, even though the X-Ray Café shut down before I was born. But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.

I never told anyone about these “memories.” Mom probably would’ve said that I was there—as one of the eggs in her ovaries. Dad would’ve joked that he and Mom had tortured me with their stories one too many times and had inadvertently brainwashed me. And Gran would’ve told me that maybe I was there as an angel before I chose to become Mom and Dad’s kid.

But now I wonder. And now I hope. Because when I go, I want to remember Kim. And I want to remember her like this: telling a funny story, fighting with her crazy mom, being cheered on by punkers, rising to the occasion, finding little pockets of strength in herself that she had no idea she possessed.

Adam is a different story. Remembering Adam would be like losing him all over again, and I’m not sure if I can bear that on top of everything else.

Kim’s up to the part of Operation Distraction, when Brooke Vega and a dozen assorted punks descended upon the hospital. She tells me that before they got to the ICU, she was so scared of getting into trouble, but how when she burst inside the ward, she’d felt exhilarated. When the guard had grabbed her, she hadn’t been scared at all. “I kept thinking, what’s the worst that could happen? I go to jail. Mom has a conniption. I get grounded for a year.” She stops for a minute. “But after what’s happened today, that would be nothing. Even going to jail would be easy compared to losing you.”

I know that Kim’s telling me this to try to keep me alive. She probably doesn’t realize that in a weird way, her remark frees me, just like Gramps’s permission did. I know it will be awful for Kim when I die, but I also think about what she said, about not being scared, about jail being easy compared to losing me. And that’s how I know that Kim will be okay. Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won’t feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away. And the rest of her senior year will probably suck, what with her getting all that cloying your-best-friend’s-dead sympathy that will drive her so crazy, and also because really, we are each other’s only close friend at school. But she’ll deal. She’ll move on. She’ll leave Oregon. She’ll go to college. She’ll make new friends. She’ll fall in love. She’ll become a photographer, the kind who never has to go on a helicopter. And I bet she’ll be a stronger person because of what she’s lost today. I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible.

I know that makes me a bit of a hypocrite. If that’s the case, shouldn’t I stay? Soldier through it? Maybe if I’d had some practice, maybe if I’d had more devastation in my life, I would be more prepared to go on. It’s not that my life has been perfect. I’ve had disappointments and I’ve been lonely and frustrated and angry and all the crappy stuff everyone feels. But in terms of heartbreak, I’ve been spared. I’ve never toughened up enough to handle what I’d have to handle if I were to stay.

Kim is now telling me about being rescued from certain incarceration by Willow. As she describes how Willow took charge of the whole hospital, there is such admiration in her voice. I picture Kim and Willow becoming friends, even though there are twenty years between them. It makes me happy to imagine them drinking tea or going to the movies together, still connected to each other by the invisible chain of a family that no longer exists.