Page 49 of All the Way to the River

R ayya had said that a “gathering” was happening on the other side of the veil, as her departed ancestors came forward to receive her.

But there was a gathering happening on our side of the veil as well—in Michigan, at Stacey’s house, which had now become the epicenter of Rayya’s diminishing world.

Here, the living were gathering from all over this world, to say goodbye to someone whom none of us were ready to lose.

Distant cousins came to pay their respects to Rayya in the short time she had left.

Rayya’s siblings and their adult children circled around her, eager to create as many memories as they could, while they could.

Old Detroit friends from back in the day came to be with her, to reminisce and to fill the hours with laughter about antics from years ago.

A Syrian priest, a refugee, came to deliver final prayers and sacraments.

Prayers of conclusion; prayers of absolution; prayers of safe deliverance.

I still find it poignant that Rayya returned to Michigan to die, rather than staying in New York City.

When she was a teenager, all she’d ever wanted was to get away from this place, where nothing about her fit.

But getting away hadn’t been easy. She’d been the first person in her family to leave the family, and there had been huge pushback from her relatives about it, especially the men.

But Rayya had been happy to live in a total dive on the Lower East Side if it meant she could be free—if it meant she could be queer, if it meant that she could be an artist, if it meant that she could get high with her tattooed and mohawked friends and perform all night long at CBGB and the Pyramid Club (where she and her fellow band members used to make fun of Madonna, another Michigan exile, for being “a little fucking brat”).

New York City was the place where a person could be all the things she ever dreamed of being, and where everyone got second, third, and tenth chances to reinvent themselves, every time they burned themselves out.

But still, Michigan was home . It was where Rayya’s siblings lived, where her original community lived.

She still loved these people and longed for their care and acceptance.

Michigan was where her oldest friend, Anita, lived—who had seen her, since adolescence, through every wild incarnation of her existence.

It was where Stacey lived—who could talk her off the ledge better than anyone.

Michigan was where her sister cooked the same astonishing, fragrant, multicourse Syrian meals that her mother had once cooked.

It was where Rayya could swing by the Arab-émigré neighborhood of Dearborn on her way from the airport to pick up pistachio-rosewater ice cream, jars of Aleppo cherries, and roasted chicken wrapped in pita bread that you ate over the kitchen counter as soon as you walked in the door (not even bothering to take off your coat before you dug into that perfect, tender, falling-off-the-bone meat).

Michigan was where she could laugh and swear and smoke with her family, speaking in the French-Arabic-English patois that only they understood, telling stories about people whom only they knew.

And now all these people were gathering around Rayya as she prepared to leave us behind forever.

There were some really big personalities in the room, and I would love to say that we were all supportive and gracious with each other as we faced our own suffering and each other’s, but I can only report that sometimes we were supportive and gracious, and sometimes we were not.

Sometimes grief can look like rage, as it turns out.

Sometimes grief can look like territorialism, jealousy, and blame.

In the years since Rayya died, I have been asked many times to speak about death and dying, as if I might be some sort of enlightened expert on the matter—as if I could offer guidance as to how to face the death of a loved one with unperturbed peace and dignity.

Honestly, I wouldn’t know. People also talk a lot these days about the practice of “conscious dying,” to which I can only say: Must be nice .

I was, at best, only semiconscious in the last weeks of Rayya’s life.

Like the rest of us in her fading orbit, I fluctuated between courage and generosity one moment and hopeless meltdowns the next.

Sometimes I was a straight-up asshole, flexing the power of my intimacy with Rayya as I tussled with her family members—more than I had ever tussled with anyone before and more than I have tussled with anyone since.

We disagreed about everything, it seemed, from how the original medical treatment should have gone, to who got to be at Rayya’s side for various important events and procedures, to what should happen to her remains, to what kind of funeral service should be held and who should pay for it.

There was even a deep philosophical and cultural divide about whether death was a topic that should be openly discussed or stoically ignored.

These fights seemed terribly important at the time, but in the end, none of it mattered.

It didn’t matter because Rayya died anyhow.

She died exactly how she decided to die—and along the way, she pissed off pretty much everyone she loved, at one point or another.

And we were all doomed to be gutted when she was gone, no matter how strong or prepared or right we thought we were, and no matter how hard we tried to hold on to control.

But there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that any of us could’ve done to change the shape of that journey.

I understand all this now, but I didn’t understand it then.

As Rayya’s sister Maha so graciously put it when I visited her in Michigan recently, to make amends for some of the jackass ways I’d behaved around the time of Rayya’s death: “It’s okay, habibi . We were all drowning. None of us knew what to do.”

As for Rayya in those final weeks of her life, she was at times noble and brave, at other times self-centered and manipulative—just like the rest of us.

Sometimes she talked about her impending death with clear-eyed courage, but other times she was out of her mind with denial—like when she called a friend back in New York City just a week before she died, saying, “I’m just gonna stay out here in Detroit for another month with the fam, and then I’ll be back in town and we can make some music together.

Then Liz and I are going to California for the summer—you should come with us, man! ”

That same week, she asked me to make an appointment for her to get Botox back in New York in the spring. I humored her and pretended to secure the appointment, because why argue? What did it matter at this point?

She also announced that she wanted an Apple Watch, because her phone “didn’t work anymore”—when it was, in fact, her fingers and eyes and brain that weren’t working anymore.

I got her the watch, but then she complained that it didn’t work, either.

(At that point, she was so nearly blind with end-of-life confusion that her mind could make no sense of the device’s tiny, complex features.) She asked to be taken back to the Apple store in person to trade in the “defective” watch for another brand-new watch.

So Stacey and I agreed to take her to the mall for this futile endeavor.

Why did we do this?

Because the alternative was to sit at home all day waiting for Rayya to die, and none of us wanted to do that.

Rayya insisted on being the one to drive us to the mall, and heaven forgive us, we allowed her to do it—with me and Stacey both grabbing at the wheel from either the passenger seat or the back seat, telling her when to brake, and shouting at her to veer out of the way of oncoming trucks.

It was so stupid and risky of us to have allowed this, but we had to: It would be the last day she ever drove a car—she who had always loved to drive!

It was around this time that I began to understand at a much deeper level what it means to die—how you really do lose everything .

I began to feel in my own heart all the things Rayya would never do again.

She would never drive a car again. She would never go to a restaurant again, or cook a meal for herself again, or be able to bathe or shower alone.

She would never see another summer’s day.

She would never play the piano again. She would never get on an airplane again and head off into a new adventure.

She would never make love again. She would never walk outside by herself again.

She would never swim in an ocean again. She would never write another song.

I was losing her, yes, but she was losing everything, everything, everything .

What I remember most about our visit to the mall that day was the sweet, fey, green-haired young man who worked at the Apple store, who had eyelashes like a baby giraffe, and who asked if he could help us.

Rayya had demanded to do the talking (“Let me do the talking,” she had said to me and Stacey—conspiratorially, as though she were running a heist), and so we stood back and watched as she shakily and semi-articulately tried to explain to the young man why her perfectly good, brand-new, one-day-old watch was completely defective.

It would have been obvious to anyone at this point that this woman wasn’t well, that she might have even been a little crazy—but the boy (and really, he was just a boy) was infinitely patient with her, despite how swamped the store was with holiday customers.

Melting into his kindness, Rayya told him that she had cancer, and that she had only a few more days left, probably, before she died.

Then she told him all about her life. Her birth in Syria, her move to Detroit as a child.

Her years in New York, in the scene. The music and the films she had made.

All those years she had done hair, and the cool people she had met.

The jails and institutions she had been in.

Her time on the streets. Her relapses and recoveries.

As the boy bestowed upon her the gift of his unwavering attention, she kept talking.

She told him that she had written a memoir about surviving drug addiction, and that she had died more times than she’d been born.

She pointed to me and Stacey and explained that we were two of her best friends (“the greatest crew in the world!”) and that we were helping her die.

She told him that she had no regrets about anything she had ever done, that nobody should ever regret what they have done—that life is worth every bit of suffering and craziness it entails, just to be here for the ride.

“Everything is so beautiful,” she told him. “You’re beautiful, too. I fucking love your hair, dude! I wish I could style you!”

By the end of this monologue—the last time Rayya would ever tell her story to anyone—she and the boy were hugging, and he was openly weeping. He told her she had inspired him deeply, and that he hoped she had a beautiful Christmas.

“And may God bless you,” he said.

“God bless you, too, baby,” she said.

Then Stacey and I let Rayya drive home—totally white-knuckling it while she somehow managed not to kill us or anyone else.

After that, we hid the car keys from her forever.