Just in Case

Max and I are watching a new show, “Godfather of Harlem.” We like it a lot, and I especially like the song that plays at the beginning over the credits sequence, Just in Case by Swiss Beatz, Rick Ross, and DMX. The chorus makes me cry a bit sometimes. It goes:

Open up my window again (yeah)
Open up my window again (yeah)
I can hear death calling my name (it’s calling)
I can hear death calling my name (it’s calling)

At the end of the chorus the singer says “Just in case…” and Max likes to joke “Well, I guess his name must be Justin Case” which always steals a laugh out of me and makes me not so maudlin.

I feel like death has been chasing me or I’ve been chasing death for quite a while now. Not that I’m suicidal, which I’m not, but with the deaths of Sarah and my mother. And the knowledge and fear that children with severe disabilities sometimes die suddenly and die young. Max would try to reassure me, telling me that Sarah was going to live a long, long life, and that I didn’t need to be so anxious, but it seemed like I was always in some state of hypervigilance.

Ebay notified me the other day about a sale it thought I might be interested in. This this time last year I ordered a couple of old high school yearbooks from the site. I went to Ninth Grade in Austin, Texas, where my father was teaching at the University of Texas, and then we moved back to Washington, D.C., where I finished high school. I had been thinking about old classmates in Austin, and Googling some. I had a sort of “frenemy,” let’s call her Lisa, who was often not very nice to me. My websurfing found an obituary that revealed she had died in her early twenties from a genetically-inherited medical condition. I don’t think she knew she had the disorder when I was in school with her but I remember that she was very petite and underdeveloped in Ninth Grade, which is apparently one of the possible hallmarks of this genetic disorder, just as it was for my daughter’s disorder. She also had some learning disabilities, again like Sarah.

I ended up ordering a couple of Austin High yearbooks because I wanted to see what Lisa looked like as a junior and senior in high school, whether she had ever really blossomed into adolescence, and what had become of her. I guess there was something I wanted to learn from this experience of a girl with a genetic disorder dying young and going through high school. I got the yearbooks and they showed that Lisa had been very pretty, petite but feminine and womanly (this is starting to sound weird), and she seemed to be involved in all sorts of school activities during her years at Austin High.

I pretty much forgot about my brief obsession with my former classmate until Ebay asked if I wanted another set of yearbooks, and it took me a minute to figure out why the site was asking. Then the moments spent looking up Lisa’s diagnosis and flipping through yearbooks came back to me, and I saw the yearbooks on the bookshelf in my study. I checked Ebay to see when I ordered them, and the site just says “more than a year ago.” It must have been last spring or winter when Sarah was in her first year of high school.

I have a compulsion to prepare myself, to make lists, to be super-organized and on time and ahead of the game and never late and check off my goals. But I just couldn’t prepare myself for Sarah’s death. It’s just not possible. And that’s so hard.