Bahamas

We are leaving the Bahamas today. We are flying in a very small plane, a six-seater Kodiak, pretty blue and white with the shape of the state of Florida on the wing. We are leaving from a tiny airport, one little bitty room, in the little bitty plane that belongs to my dad. We have been staying in their home on the island of Great Harbour Cay in the Berry Islands, which is part of the Bahamas just east off the coast of Miami, north of Nassau. There are 300 residents, one teeny grocery store that gets supplies when the mailboat comes, and two “restaurants” which are just where some locals cook a few nights a week and you can call and put your order in and collect it from Miss Claudette or from the man at the marina who competes w Miss Claudette. You can get a burger or grouper fingers and a Caesar salad or fries. You can get a pina colada, but only the visitors do that.

You can get to Great Harbour by tiny plane, but more people arrive here by boat, and there’s a sleepy, sweet marina with dogs and happy old couples (almost always on their second go at coupling) on sailboats with silly names and little yappy boat dogs with sillier names. On Mondays, the little concrete picnic area hosts potluck night, and on Fridays, there is marina music night, led by my dad on piano and my stepmom on vocals. Everyone has a chance at the mic, and the music is not very good but the whole thing is so charming and earnest that I can’t even make fun of it. Everyone sings Sweet Caroline at the end, even me, even my teenaged children. “Good times never seemed so good! So good! So good!” It’s sweet. Henry plays two songs on the guitar and sings - he’s never done this before and the crowd is precious and supportive. Jane sings with me and charms everyone.

I know that everyone is unhappy in their own way, but these marina people seem really happy. Probably they’re rich and retired, sunshined and cocktailed. They are all retirement age, and I wonder about their hearts and I look at their chests. I wonder how they’re comfortable being old on an island with only the one trauma nurse, Tina, also retired and a little tipsy.

We are leaving today after a week of swimming and visiting and walking the windy March beach. The island out of my window on the tiny plane is Nassau, maybe, and it is crossed w strict, sharp angles in rectangles for smart rows of houses, like someone projected them from above and marker-ed them onto the island w a huge blocky sharpie. Great Harbour is windy dirt roads and a smattering of houses placed to maximize the views.

Off of the island, the water is toothpaste teal and flows through sand looking exactly like veins. I see hearts and veins everywhere, but I think anyone would think of this. Bright blue veins in sandy hearts. There is the occipital marginal. The one that broke.

I wonder what heart valves look like, now that my valves are the problem more than (well, with I guess) my veins. They look like belly buttons, I think, though I don’t know why I think that.

Last night, as we were eating dinner and chatting around the back porch table, Val mentions that they’re glad to get me home where there’s medical care, as there is a nurse on the island and we are an hour’s flight to a hospital. I have thought about this one million times, before I got here, and every second since. I didn’t think about anyone else thinking of this, and it occurs to me that I am a liability.

I carry nitro, which makes your veins open up a little if you have a heart attack. I’m not sure it would really save my life, but lots of heart patients carry it. My nitro is in a little old-people nitro case, a shiny red metal thing that you can buy on Amazon or at hospital gift shops or the CVS, w my pills in it, attached to my huge camp Nalgene water bottle. It jingles in my face when I take a sip of water. Theres a little metal tag on it - “Medical Alert: Medicine Inside”.

When I was in 8th grade and got my first pointe shoes, I would let them hang out of the top of my school bag just a little on ballet practice days, so people could see that I was a cool ballerina. Kind of feels the same, but instead I am a cool, almost dying person, who can’t always catch my breath. On the plane, I use the oxygen the whole time and Val passes me a monitor to put on my finger, so we can keep my heart from working harder than it is able to work. I feel one thousand years old.

Over the deeper water in the little plane, the veins are much larger. Light aqua arteries in deep navy. Little boats leave white trails behind them. I think of what would happen if the sandy sides collapsed.

How different my fear is these days. I used to get really nervous in the tiny plane, my dad, piloting, playing word games on his phone. Val, copiloting, has a beach read on her lap. I am not nervous about the plane. I am not afraid because I know how I will die and it will be the heart and not the plane.

I have been up close to death two times.

The first time, I was away at college, studying for my masters in theology, which I had just figured out that I did not want. It was April, and I had been home for spring break in March and celebrated my little cousin and godson’s second birthday, and then back to Dallas. There is a picture taken on that visit, on William’s birthday at my moms house, of me holding him in the doorway, me in a Roxy surf crop top and William in a solid blue tee. Back at college, a few weeks later, I got a strange call from the college chaplain who asked me if I was alone. I lied; I was alone. Was I sitting? I sat. “Someone in your family has died. I can’t say who - you need to call home.” Horrible and terrible- I began asking her “is it my mom? My sister?” She won’t answer. I call my mom’s house and her best friend Janie answers the phone. “It’s William,” she says. “Is he ok??” “No, baby, he’s gone.” I hear myself screaming. I am outside of my little apartment, alone and screaming.

The second death is my grandmother’s. My sisters and I travel to Marksville, Louisiana, where she is dying, sick w lung cancer. We sit on her couch, in her living room where hospice has set up her bed. We watch the LSU game and eat food her friends have brought. We paint at her kitchen table. My little sister and I sleep in her unused room. She passes at age 72, which is also too young to be gone, and is carried out in what looks like a sheet to me, while her little sister smokes a cigarette and cries, and my mom and aunt pour coffee and we all cry in the carport. I wonder if there is any good way to die.

At marina music night, a shiny-headed 60-ish man is talking too much to me. His shirt is unbuttoned too far and he has cornered me and is asking about my dad, his boat, how much the boat costs (I have no idea - I would never be so rude as to ask, and this man is ruder), how does my dad tie down the plane here without a hangar (I have no idea - why do you need a hangar?). I deflect and laugh though I do not want to, and he asks how old my parents are, and I answer though this is rude. He says, “be very appreciative. This could be your last trip with them. Health doesn’t always stay around.”

He means my parents’ health, but I take this to heart, bc it means me.

The pressure to be appreciative and in the moment and present when you are not well is intense. I feel it hard. Enjoy this. Soak this up. Remember this - what if it’s the last time? Be present here, now. Have fun. Be light and gracious and grateful because time is not on our side.

This is Ellen Bass, a favorite of mine -

If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?