Page 35 of All the Way to the River

H ow had Rayya and I reached this point—where we were holed up in our apartment together with thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine, much of which she was shooting into her neck and all of which, unbelievably, I was paying for?

How and when does a relapse this appalling even occur?

How and when does someone’s drug addiction (and someone else’s helpless codependency) move from “dormant” to “active”?

Tonight I am so fucking SAD. Rayya started another round of chemo this morning and now she’s already sick in bed again, after having been so vibrant all last week.

She swallows those poison pills and it’s like some cold spirit comes into our house and immediately—within the hour—steals ? of her from me, from herself.

I watch the dark chemo spirits come and take most of Rayya away, and they leave just a quarter of her behind.

I can’t figure out where they take her. It’s heartbreaking.

It will be like this for the next two weeks, and it makes me so fucking sad.

But God once told me to live my most beautiful possible story, so I will do that.

And Rayya is my most beautiful story. When I get sad, I just remember that our love story is my most beautiful story.

Even when she is passed out on the bed in a chemo daze, even when I am sad, even when I don’t know how to help her, even when I feel scared and lonely, even when it is so horribly scary …

she is still my most beautiful story. Even when Rayya is only ⒈／⒋ of Rayya, there has never been a more beautiful story than Rayya.

Now, I’m not sure it was wise or emotionally sober of me to have decided that somebody outside of myself was “my most beautiful story”—or whether it was even loving of me to reduce an entire human being down to nothing but a “story” that I was living in, beautiful or otherwise.

But that’s what my terrified mind and broken heart kept telling me during the exhausting autumn of 2016: Rayya is my most beautiful story.

Because that’s what I needed to believe in order to get through the experience of her dying.

The truth was, though, I was starting to crack.

I was running out of energy from taking care of my sick partner day and night while also taking care of the logistics of both our lives and trying to keep our romance burning at its original fever pitch.

And Rayya was depleted, too. The shrinkage the chemo had achieved, her doctors said, was evidence that they could continue to hold the cancer at bay for a few more years.

But Rayya was done with it. The cost was too dear for such a small gain.

And Rayya detested hospitals, doctors, nurses, shots, scans, tests.

Having spent so much time in institutions when she was an active drug addict, such places brought back her worst memories.

Even the smell of a hospital and the sight of the flickering fluorescent lights made her want to, as she said, “put a fucking gun in my mouth.” She had given the chemo a try because her family had wanted her to, but now she was finished, and she was willing to go into hospice instead.

“Are you aware,” the doctor asked, “that your cancer will return if you stop treatment? Are you aware that all these gains we have made will be quickly lost?”

“Trust me, I’m aware,” said Rayya. “But I don’t care how short my life is, I just want to be free .”

She took her final dose of chemo on October 2 (almost six months after her initial diagnosis) and then said to her lovely Irish oncologist, “You are a very nice person, and everyone here at Sloan Kettering has been amazing, but honestly? I never want to see any of you people again.”

And then she was free—both of us were free—for an incredible three months after that.

That slight reduction in her tumors continued to bring temporary relief from her cancer pain, and for a while she was my old Rayya again.

She could go for walks again, she could eat again, she could get on flights again, she could make love again with joy and power.

She could drive her car again, as she liked to say, “like the Detroit Arab I am,” and she could also scream fantastic curses at the TV during football games, play the piano, and belt out Led Zeppelin songs with full force on karaoke nights.

We drank vats of wine again, ate amazing meals, and took handfuls of psychedelic mushrooms that let us fly through the universe on rainbow wings together.

We made promises that we would find each other in the afterlife through a “portal” that we were generating together, made of undying love.

She was once more a force of nature, vivid and mighty.

She was once more my most beautiful story.

We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family, and both occasions were precious, boisterous, and sweet.

We spent New Year’s Eve together in New York City.

We got drunk that night, knowing without a doubt that 2017 would be Rayya’s final year on earth.

On New Year’s morning, she woke before the sun came up.

She gave me a tender kiss. Then she got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and dry heaved for the longest time.

I called out and asked if she needed help, but she didn’t want it; she wanted to be alone.

When she came back to bed, I held her tightly.

“That didn’t sound like fun, my love,” I whispered.

She curled into my arms like a baby. “But this is fun,” she said.

After she fell back to sleep, I went for a walk all the way to the East River, to make my New Year’s wishes by the water, as I always do.

When I reached the river, I wept. Rayya was getting sick again, I knew it.

I had noticed that her abdominal swelling and episodes of pain and vomiting were increasing.

The cancer was growing again, as promised.

I asked the river for divine guidance but heard nothing in return.

Turning away from the water, I nearly bumped into a tiny old woman, who stopped me and asked me for help.

She was lost, she said. She had tried to go to church that morning to pray to God, she said, but she had gotten turned around.

Now she couldn’t remember where she lived.

She had never seen this river before, she told me— where were we ?

Were we still in New York City? Her daughter would be so angry at her, she feared; she wasn’t supposed to leave the house alone anymore, because she got lost all the time now.

But she had just wanted to talk to God that morning.

“I wanted to talk to God, too,” I told her. “Looks like we both failed.”

It was wickedly cold that day, with that awful, biting New York City January wind blowing hard off the river.

The old woman had no gloves, no hat, no scarf.

She was shaking with cold. She couldn’t remember her name, nor her daughter’s name, nor the street where she lived, nor the name of her church.

All she knew about herself was that she was Ukrainian, that she had tried to go to church so she could talk to God, and that her daughter was going to be furious at her for getting lost. She let me search her pockets for anything that could identify her, but she had nothing—not even house keys.

Knowing where the Ukrainian neighborhood was located in the East Village, I suggested, “Let’s walk there together and see if you recognize anything along the way.”

I gave her my hat, wrapped her up in my scarf, and tucked her blue-veined hands into my gloves.

She was so frail that I wished I could pick her up and carry her on my back, but I was afraid I would break her bones.

She put her thin arm through mine, and we started our excruciatingly slow journey west.

As we walked along, moving not much faster than a shuffle, the old woman kept finding pennies on the sidewalk and stopping to pick them up.

This was amazing to me, because this was a superpower that Rayya possessed, as well—the ability to always spot loose change on the ground.

Pennies, especially. In Rayya’s case, scanning the sidewalks was an old drug-addict habit: One learns on the street, she had told me, to constantly search the ground for money, for loose cigarettes, maybe a dropped vial of crack, some food stamps.

This ancient woman had the same scavenger’s gaze as my beloved, and, astonishingly, she picked up six pennies in the time it took us to walk very, very slowly to East Seventh Street.

I wondered how much of her life she had spent hungry, to have remained such a sharp-eyed forager, even now, when she obviously remembered so little of herself and the world.

As we circled the Ukrainian neighborhood, the woman finally recognized her apartment building.

A neighbor let us in, and I was able to deliver my new friend back to her daughter, who—although grateful to me—was indeed frenetic with anger and fear at her mother for having gone wandering out of the house unsupervised.

“She will never let me out again,” the old woman told me in resignation. “This was my last time outside.”

Then she handed me the six pennies.

I walked away without my hat, scarf, and gloves.

This encounter—finding a lost crone who was searching for God, and exchanging coins and articles of clothing with her in return for the favor of a rescue—felt mythical to me.

It felt like something from a dream or fairy tale.

Sad as it was to meet someone on what might be the final walk of her life, I also had the sense that the old woman was an augury of something.

But of what? Warning or blessing? I couldn’t identify what it meant.

When I finally returned to the apartment that morning, I found Rayya weeping on the floor in pain and fear. She’d been vomiting up blood, and it was all over the carpet.

“You were gone too long,” she sobbed. “I was so afraid. I’m hurting, I’m hurting, I’m hurting. Don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever leave me again.”

I ran to her, full of apologies. “Sweetie, you should have called me.”

“My phone is in the other room,” she cried, “and I’m too sick to stand up and find it.”

I held her until her pain settled, and brought her a hot water bottle for her aching belly.

When at last she quieted, I tried to tell her the story about the old woman and the magical pennies, but she didn’t want to hear it.

Rayya didn’t want to hear any of my stories that day.

She was too sick.

Too sick, too angry, too scared.

And from there—from that day onward—began her long and awful decline.