Page 31 of All the Way to the River

H ow high can you fly before you crash?

How long can you stay intoxicated beyond all recognition?

How long can you sustain a buzz, a bender, a peak experience, a magic carpet ride, a hot-burning flame of mania, a trip to Venus on a pink cloud?

How many days can you cut Earth School before you get called to the principal’s office?

These are all very good questions that addicts do not generally like to answer.

When pushed, however, an addict’s short response to all these questions is usually something along the lines of: As long as I can .

We will keep this ride going for as long as we can.

And we will not put it down until there is nothing left to smoke, drink, fuck, eat, spend, hoard, shoot into our veins, disappear into, or lick off the carpet in crumbs.

Rayya and I kept that love-addict high going with each other for a few months after we finally came together as romantic partners, which is a pretty good run. And boy, did we have fun.

“How can I be so happy when I’m also dying?” she kept asking, and I wondered the same thing: How can I be so happy when she is also dying?

We soared on that happiness like it was a hot air balloon.

We managed to shut out the demands of reality for a good chunk of the spring and early summer of 2016—to cocoon ourselves in bed and lose ourselves in each other’s gazes and words and bodies.

We stopped making love only to make music, food, and art.

We were able to completely forget about the past, the future, mortality, life itself.

They were the most iridescent and heightened few months of my life, and—I believe—of hers.

I never wanted it to end.

But then, of course, it ended.

Because every high always ends, no matter how incandescent. Eventually somebody has to get out of bed and open the blinds and notice that there are ninety voice messages on their phone and stacks of mail piling up outside their door.

There was still a world out there, goddamn it—and that world was trying hard to get Rayya’s attention.

I never want there to be a world out there.

But much to the dismay of my love addiction, it turned out I was not the only person in Rayya’s life.

She was rich with friends and family and community.

She was abundant with people who loved and needed her (and whom she needed and loved), and these people were having their own reactions to her cancer diagnosis.

Rayya might have wanted to flame out in a blaze of glory, but a lot of these people wanted her to stay .

They didn’t want to lose their sister, their aunt, their business partner, their beloved friend.

They were experiencing their own anguish and panic and confusion at the prospect of her death, and they called upon her to slow down the process with chemotherapy, or even to look for radical cures.

Everyone had opinions and advice, and everyone was calling her daily to demand an audience.

Everyone, it seemed, had a doctor they wanted her to meet, a radical new cure they’d heard about on TV, a clinic in Switzerland they thought she should check out, a new study they wanted her to read, an uncle who had spontaneously gone into full remission, or some unconventional scientist who was doing research with light waves.

Everyone had some magical diet or guided meditation or prayer or supplement that could keep her alive for many months, if not years!

Much of this was wishful thinking, but some of it was grounded in reality.

As Rayya and I had been told in the early days of her diagnosis, there were indeed some treatments out there that had been shown to extend the lives of patients with Rayya’s exact diagnosis.

Nobody who was legitimate claimed they could cure her, but the miracles of modern medicine, combined with some prudent changes in lifestyle and diet (ha!), might be able to buy her some extra time.

And once Rayya’s loved ones heard about this, they pushed her even harder to get chemo—to go to any lengths to live a little bit longer.

Why wouldn’t she fight for her life? they asked.

If not for herself, why wouldn’t she try to survive for them ?

How could she give up so easily? How could she be so selfish or cowardly or flat-out stupid as to not try to survive?

More than anyone I’ve ever met, Rayya hated being told what to do, and she bridled at all this unsolicited advice.

“It’s my fucking life, it’s my fucking body, it’s my fucking choice,” she kept saying—which was, of course, just a variation of the same song she’d been singing in some form or another since the day I’d first met her back in the year 2000, when she’d expressed outrage at the thought of people telling her that she was spending too much time at the beach.

But I cannot fault anyone for their efforts to sway Rayya.

I understand now that unsolicited advice is always driven by panic on the part of the person bestowing it, and I am frequently guilty of that panic myself.

(I would much rather tell you what to do, in other words, than sit with my sadness or anger or fear about what you are doing.) And the more we love and need someone, typically, the more we try to control them—especially when we are afraid.

I was certainly trying to control Rayya in my own frantic way: I was trying to control her by getting her to love me so ferociously that I would not have to feel the weight of my own life anymore, or face my unbearable grief at the prospect of losing her.

Other people had their own strategies for controlling Rayya—for not wanting to feel whatever her cancer diagnosis was making them feel.

And those strategies included pressuring her not to die .

In the end, she caved to her family’s wishes that she fight the cancer, but only in a “sort of, kind of” way.

She agreed to try chemo for three months—but not for a moment longer.

“I’ll do it just to make everyone happy,” she said, “but I know I’m gonna hate it, and it’s not gonna work. So after three months, I’m gonna quit and do whatever the fuck I want again.”

I will never know Rayya’s true motives for agreeing to get the cancer treatment that she had so adamantly insisted she did not want.

Maybe it was, indeed, to “make everyone happy.”

Or maybe it was because she didn’t have the fortitude, after all, to defend her true wishes against the opinions of people whose love and approval she had always craved.

Or maybe she had a secret hope that chemo just might work—that she might be miraculously spared.

Or maybe death—in whose face she had been brazenly laughing for months—is really terrifying, once you get close to it.

Terrifying, humbling, powerful, inescapable.

Maybe death is something we cannot help trying to run from—even the mightiest among us.

And Rayya had at last been starting to experience physical suffering from the cancer, which was showing up as excruciating abdominal pain.

She couldn’t bend over, she couldn’t hold her guitar close to her body, she couldn’t hold me close to her body.

If she twisted around to reach for something behind her, she would cry out in sharp pain and shock.

The tumors were growing, and they were taking over.

Death’s reality could no longer be ignored.

Never having been that close to my own death, I cannot begin to imagine what Rayya might have been feeling that summer—the summer that she truly believed would be her last on earth.

All I know for certain is this: She finally decided that we needed to get out of bed and go to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and let them give her some chemo.

But she made that decision in tears—the true source of which I will never know.