Dead.
[1.]
Dead.
Dead!
Dead-face.
It doesn’t mean much when you finally hear it.
It was an empty phrase when I was standing at his bedside, watching the flatline, the high-pitched whining sound drilling itself through the bone of my skull, embedding itself in my brain until I realized that I would probably hear it forever. The nurse was staring at the indents and scuff marks marring the tranquil off-white of the flecked linoleum tiles like she was waiting for an outburst from me, and I was staring numbly at the heart monitor and that fucking line, imagining that my own heartbeat had done the same thing. It was a few minutes later, when I still hadn’t moved or screamed or maybe even taken a breath, that she coughed slightly to get my attention and quietly murmured “Mr. Way is dead.”
It surprised me later, when I bothered to analyze the situation to pieces, that she had used the word ‘dead,’ not ‘gone’ or ‘passed’ or some other fucking euphemism, and I had to respect her for the courage to tell me what had really happened: he wasn’t moving away, he hadn’t left the room, no, Gerard Way was fucking stone cold dead right there on the pressurized mattress in front of me, the one they’d imported from a neighboring hospital when the bed sores on his hips had started eating through to the bone. He wasn’t coming back this time with a ragged gasp and some whitish vomit spilling over his cracked lips.
Dead only has one meaning.
Forever.
The nurse had to touch my arm before I even blinked; nervously, like she was waiting for me to explode into a thousand neon broken hearts right there in the hospital room, all the little razor-sharp pieces of Frank Iero shimmering in the air and floating down to coat the cold floor, white walls, waxy corpse on the bed like so much candy-colored confetti.
I turned my head like a mannequin and nodded to show her that I understood, I just needed a few minutes to figure out how I felt about it.
At least an explosion would have proved that I’d cared.
But it was hard to ignore that death, however permanent and dark and frightening and forever it was, also meant an end to everything that I had seen him go through for the past fucking lifetime… all the needles, wires, plugs, pumps, scalpels, tubes, bags… I lost track of everything they did by the end. There was a time when Gerard Way was afraid of needles– I remember telling this to an old man in the hospital cafeteria one day after a grueling six-hour stay at his sterilized, death-scented bedside, a man who reminded me of my father for reasons that I couldn’t place– there was a time when he was afraid of those fucking things, and I wasn’t, and then, slowly, I started having goddamn nightmares about needles; all those tattoos and suddenly I was screaming about them in my sleep, but Gerard just lay there on that fucking bed of dead skin and didn’t even flinch as they slid hundreds of silver syringes in and out, in and out, over and over and over and he never made a sound. There wasn’t even fear in his hazel eyes.
I was through with yelling at the doctors, through with even a hoarse whisper asking why there wasn’t more that they could do, because I had finally realized, sitting behind a fake plant in the downstairs visiting area, watching a parade of wraithlike patients blur by, that the doctors weren’t any better than I was; they felt fucking hopeless too, because they were tired and they had seen too much, and terminal cancer wasn’t anything new. I knew they had tried, and I knew that when they said they were sorry, they meant it, and that was going to have to be good enough, even when my heart was bleeding in a tempera crimson puddle on the disinfected linoleum.
Everything causes cancer, this woman told me once in the hallway, her voice forceful even though her shoulderblades above the unflattering neckline of her hospital gown were millimeters from breaking skin and her eyes were dull with pain beneath the brim of the baseball cap she refused to take off. Everything causes cancer. If you’ve got a god, ask him why everything on his fucking earth causes cancer. Her laugh was as sharp and unforgiving as the IV needle in her arm.
When Gerard and I heard that she was dead, I remember hoping that she’d found something better; that she’d gotten an answer, but I was beginning to doubt more every day that God had any more fucking idea than we did, or that he even cared.
“I don’t want to go without you,” Gerard had whispered breathlessly, one hand tangled tightly in my hair, when we saw her boyfriend just crumple instantly in the hallway outside, curling in the fetal position on the sticky tile, his whole body convulsing with painful sobs that sounded like each one was tearing a hole through the wall of his throat.
None of the nurses could even find the right textbook words to remind him that his behavior was inappropriate in a public building; they just let him cry his bloodshot eyes out onto the floor until late into the evening, when he finally staggered to his feet, silent and hollow as a ghost now, and left, very quietly. I don’t know what happened to him, but I couldn’t force myself to shake the image of his lips wrapped around the barrel of a gun.
I think I was just seeing myself.
“Promise me you’ll stay strong,” Gerard had whispered too, some other dimly remembered day of wires and monitors and intravenous fluids and the click click click of the machine that dispensed the sticky mixture of sugar and chemicals they were tube-feeding him, now that he couldn’t really eat. “Come on, Frankie, promise.”
I didn’t promise.
I’m not sure if my silence brought him to tired tears that time or not, but it doesn’t matter. There were other times, and his sobs sounded like twisted hiccups because there wasn’t enough room for them past the decay in his chest.
It didn’t even look like lung cancer any more. To me, it looked like fucking AIDS. His whole body was just shutting down; everything except for his skeleton was just collapsing, caving in on itself, betraying him with the sickening parade of tubes and wires meant to replace all of the functions that his body would no longer complete. It wasn’t what I thought of when I thought of cancer; this dry, dusty shell of the man that I had loved lying motionless on the bed between shuddering ventilator breaths without a single faint echo of everything that we’d shared; the tender kisses chasing away my fear of the future, the torrid, erotic nights when his body would move in perfect rhythm with mine, the laughter and hugs and big dreams for a whole fucking life together. I had always pictured cancer as the pale, wide-eyed kids from the hospital billboards, small bodies wasted by chemotherapy but faces still forcing their smiles, still holding on to the hope of another day, another week, another birthday.
Why him? Why me? was all I could think. No matter how many crying relatives and withered patients walked by outside his hospital room, I always felt like we were the only ones. And I couldn’t understand, even throughout all of the hundreds of explanations offered by the people I knew or perfect hospital strangers, why it had to be him.
I knew who fucking deserved it; I could have made God a list twenty fucking pages long, full of blackened names and faces which it wouldn’t bother me to see sinking in and wasting away. Like the fat bastard with the dark sweat stains on his beige shirt and the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, yelling faggot at me out the window of his car on my long, miserable walk home from the hospital... I wanted to see him choke on that fucking cancer stick. God, I wished he would get fucking cancer; I was dying in that moment to see him lying with a tube down his carcinogen-coated throat on some miserable, over-sterilized hospital bed somewhere, gasping out the last excruciating breaths from his black tar lungs, nicotine-stained fingers wound into the scratchy fiber of the sheets with pain.
It sounded sick, but it was what I wanted to witness. And kicking trash along the cracked city concrete, throat still raw and choked with unshed tears that had just barely begun to dissipate after I’d left my fucking boyfriend alone in his prison of a hospital bed, coughing up old ash and death and bloody denial onto the bed sheets, there was no doubt in my mind that this disgusting, self-righteous asshole deserved it.
But not Gerard- not ever Gerard. He was too young, too reckless, to beautiful to be turned into that empty fucking shell of a human being, choking out my name like a hopeless amen when I couldn’t even hear him over the frantic beeping of the monitors spitting shrill warnings at me, making sure I knew that I’d better admit the sinner I was before God gave up and ripped away the one thing that I truly cared about.
Dead!
Dead-face.
It doesn’t mean much when you finally hear it.
It was an empty phrase when I was standing at his bedside, watching the flatline, the high-pitched whining sound drilling itself through the bone of my skull, embedding itself in my brain until I realized that I would probably hear it forever. The nurse was staring at the indents and scuff marks marring the tranquil off-white of the flecked linoleum tiles like she was waiting for an outburst from me, and I was staring numbly at the heart monitor and that fucking line, imagining that my own heartbeat had done the same thing. It was a few minutes later, when I still hadn’t moved or screamed or maybe even taken a breath, that she coughed slightly to get my attention and quietly murmured “Mr. Way is dead.”
It surprised me later, when I bothered to analyze the situation to pieces, that she had used the word ‘dead,’ not ‘gone’ or ‘passed’ or some other fucking euphemism, and I had to respect her for the courage to tell me what had really happened: he wasn’t moving away, he hadn’t left the room, no, Gerard Way was fucking stone cold dead right there on the pressurized mattress in front of me, the one they’d imported from a neighboring hospital when the bed sores on his hips had started eating through to the bone. He wasn’t coming back this time with a ragged gasp and some whitish vomit spilling over his cracked lips.
Dead only has one meaning.
Forever.
The nurse had to touch my arm before I even blinked; nervously, like she was waiting for me to explode into a thousand neon broken hearts right there in the hospital room, all the little razor-sharp pieces of Frank Iero shimmering in the air and floating down to coat the cold floor, white walls, waxy corpse on the bed like so much candy-colored confetti.
I turned my head like a mannequin and nodded to show her that I understood, I just needed a few minutes to figure out how I felt about it.
At least an explosion would have proved that I’d cared.
But it was hard to ignore that death, however permanent and dark and frightening and forever it was, also meant an end to everything that I had seen him go through for the past fucking lifetime… all the needles, wires, plugs, pumps, scalpels, tubes, bags… I lost track of everything they did by the end. There was a time when Gerard Way was afraid of needles– I remember telling this to an old man in the hospital cafeteria one day after a grueling six-hour stay at his sterilized, death-scented bedside, a man who reminded me of my father for reasons that I couldn’t place– there was a time when he was afraid of those fucking things, and I wasn’t, and then, slowly, I started having goddamn nightmares about needles; all those tattoos and suddenly I was screaming about them in my sleep, but Gerard just lay there on that fucking bed of dead skin and didn’t even flinch as they slid hundreds of silver syringes in and out, in and out, over and over and over and he never made a sound. There wasn’t even fear in his hazel eyes.
I was through with yelling at the doctors, through with even a hoarse whisper asking why there wasn’t more that they could do, because I had finally realized, sitting behind a fake plant in the downstairs visiting area, watching a parade of wraithlike patients blur by, that the doctors weren’t any better than I was; they felt fucking hopeless too, because they were tired and they had seen too much, and terminal cancer wasn’t anything new. I knew they had tried, and I knew that when they said they were sorry, they meant it, and that was going to have to be good enough, even when my heart was bleeding in a tempera crimson puddle on the disinfected linoleum.
Everything causes cancer, this woman told me once in the hallway, her voice forceful even though her shoulderblades above the unflattering neckline of her hospital gown were millimeters from breaking skin and her eyes were dull with pain beneath the brim of the baseball cap she refused to take off. Everything causes cancer. If you’ve got a god, ask him why everything on his fucking earth causes cancer. Her laugh was as sharp and unforgiving as the IV needle in her arm.
When Gerard and I heard that she was dead, I remember hoping that she’d found something better; that she’d gotten an answer, but I was beginning to doubt more every day that God had any more fucking idea than we did, or that he even cared.
“I don’t want to go without you,” Gerard had whispered breathlessly, one hand tangled tightly in my hair, when we saw her boyfriend just crumple instantly in the hallway outside, curling in the fetal position on the sticky tile, his whole body convulsing with painful sobs that sounded like each one was tearing a hole through the wall of his throat.
None of the nurses could even find the right textbook words to remind him that his behavior was inappropriate in a public building; they just let him cry his bloodshot eyes out onto the floor until late into the evening, when he finally staggered to his feet, silent and hollow as a ghost now, and left, very quietly. I don’t know what happened to him, but I couldn’t force myself to shake the image of his lips wrapped around the barrel of a gun.
I think I was just seeing myself.
“Promise me you’ll stay strong,” Gerard had whispered too, some other dimly remembered day of wires and monitors and intravenous fluids and the click click click of the machine that dispensed the sticky mixture of sugar and chemicals they were tube-feeding him, now that he couldn’t really eat. “Come on, Frankie, promise.”
I didn’t promise.
I’m not sure if my silence brought him to tired tears that time or not, but it doesn’t matter. There were other times, and his sobs sounded like twisted hiccups because there wasn’t enough room for them past the decay in his chest.
It didn’t even look like lung cancer any more. To me, it looked like fucking AIDS. His whole body was just shutting down; everything except for his skeleton was just collapsing, caving in on itself, betraying him with the sickening parade of tubes and wires meant to replace all of the functions that his body would no longer complete. It wasn’t what I thought of when I thought of cancer; this dry, dusty shell of the man that I had loved lying motionless on the bed between shuddering ventilator breaths without a single faint echo of everything that we’d shared; the tender kisses chasing away my fear of the future, the torrid, erotic nights when his body would move in perfect rhythm with mine, the laughter and hugs and big dreams for a whole fucking life together. I had always pictured cancer as the pale, wide-eyed kids from the hospital billboards, small bodies wasted by chemotherapy but faces still forcing their smiles, still holding on to the hope of another day, another week, another birthday.
Why him? Why me? was all I could think. No matter how many crying relatives and withered patients walked by outside his hospital room, I always felt like we were the only ones. And I couldn’t understand, even throughout all of the hundreds of explanations offered by the people I knew or perfect hospital strangers, why it had to be him.
I knew who fucking deserved it; I could have made God a list twenty fucking pages long, full of blackened names and faces which it wouldn’t bother me to see sinking in and wasting away. Like the fat bastard with the dark sweat stains on his beige shirt and the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, yelling faggot at me out the window of his car on my long, miserable walk home from the hospital... I wanted to see him choke on that fucking cancer stick. God, I wished he would get fucking cancer; I was dying in that moment to see him lying with a tube down his carcinogen-coated throat on some miserable, over-sterilized hospital bed somewhere, gasping out the last excruciating breaths from his black tar lungs, nicotine-stained fingers wound into the scratchy fiber of the sheets with pain.
It sounded sick, but it was what I wanted to witness. And kicking trash along the cracked city concrete, throat still raw and choked with unshed tears that had just barely begun to dissipate after I’d left my fucking boyfriend alone in his prison of a hospital bed, coughing up old ash and death and bloody denial onto the bed sheets, there was no doubt in my mind that this disgusting, self-righteous asshole deserved it.
But not Gerard- not ever Gerard. He was too young, too reckless, to beautiful to be turned into that empty fucking shell of a human being, choking out my name like a hopeless amen when I couldn’t even hear him over the frantic beeping of the monitors spitting shrill warnings at me, making sure I knew that I’d better admit the sinner I was before God gave up and ripped away the one thing that I truly cared about.