sick

by Kristen Field

Catherine O’Hara died four days before I went in for a partial colectomy to remove a malignant tumor that had cropped up in less than two years and already spread to my lymph nodes. Made itself at home at the juncture of my sigmoid colon and rectum. I remember the shock – reflected online – despite the dramatic weight loss she’d gone through over the past couple of years. Scarily gaunt on her last few red carpets. Everyone wanted to know what had happened – what was wrong with her. TMZ and People acknowledged in the same breath that there was no known cause of death, but if you’re curious, looking for answers, her organs were reversed. A condition she was born with. I worried – why, when she’d already passed? – that it might have been something mental, anorexia, but maybe that’s just because I’m finding myself living with a more and more fraught relationship to food and surrounded by people in the same state, who don’t eat but say nothing about it, or who talk with an unsettling fervor about the weight they’ve lost – that it’s not muscle or bone, and they’re just not hungry, and I might not even recognize them the next time I see them. I go into hospital and burst into tears when they try and fail to get the IV in my arm the first time. I have bad veins. And it feels like an imposition on everyone around me. Catherine is still in every other reel that appears on my Instagram feed, above claims that she was everyone’s mother. That she was brilliant. That she is missed. The clips are mostly from the shows and movies she was in, which makes sense – that’s how she existed, who she was to most of the world. When the posts stop, and they will, I wonder what her family will feel. Relief? Or loss – anger at the impermanence of grief that’s felt at a distance, for a person who will never really be gone, because you only knew them through a screen, and that footage isn’t disappearing. I don’t find out until I’m back in the hospital with a post-op infection that Catherine had rectal cancer – feel the most recent photos of her skeletal form, with couture dresses and pantsuits hanging off her frame, hit with a new, sour taste. I’m on nothing by mouth, desperate for a glass of cranberry juice that nurses can’t bring me. It was a pulmonary embolism that got her in the end – sent her to the hospital when there was probably nothing more they could do for her. Do to her. Was she sick of needles being shoved into her hands and arms, looking down at green-grey bruises and hating the ugliness more than the pain? Did she struggle to suck in any air, cough up blood or bloody mucus? Was it panic or resignation that set in, while she was still conscious? And what did she want, beyond a week or two of viral memes? I think about how she kept her diagnosis from the public until it was out of her hands, and I get it. Feel an irrational wave of jealousy that she was able to avoid the aftermath of news breaking, opinions and pity and “the kindness of strangers” – because no one wants to rely on that. It’s accompanied, always, by buckets of shame, and I can only lift ten pounds at a time.

BIO: Kristen Field is a queer, non-binary writer who hails from Melbourne, Australia. She is a graduate of Northwestern's dramatic writing program, and her work can be found in Hayden's Ferry Review's The Dock, Qu Lit Mag, The Citron Review, and Feels Blind Literary, among other presses. She is currently teaching and pursuing a PhD at Western Michigan University and working as the Drama Editor at Third Coast Magazine.