Dignified Identity

This is a short story dealing with a few issues. Read at your own risk. 

DIGNIFIED IDENTITY

A Story Of Death And Rebirth. A Story Of Loss And Love.

In the summer of 2012 my best-friend and the love of my life tied two cement blocks to her ankles and drowned herself in the ocean. That warm cloudy day, she died and I was reborn.

Cameron Everly was barely a day over sixteen when she decided that she wanted to die under her own terms.

“I want you to take my identity,” she said to me three days after she turned sixteen.

“What?” I asked. I stopped mid-bite, the spoonful of pudding slid off and splattered on the floor.

Cameron had been bedridden for almost two months now and the cream colored hospital room had become our sanctuary since she couldn’t escape up to my attic room anymore.

I sat with her every afternoon after school with the lights off watching the sun go down through the open blinds. Our conversations were usually light hearted except when she pressed me to discuss my feelings about my family. I always felt terrible griping about my silly problems when she was lying there with cancer ridden lungs. But she insisted, she said they made her focus less on her own problems.

“I want you to take my identity,” she said again. She turned towards me, her face catching the shadows of leaves from the setting sun.

I mournfully stared down at my lost pudding but my head was trying to make sense of what Cameron was saying. All I could think of was a stupid conversation we had months ago right before she’d gotten diagnosed with The Cancer. She had said that we could run away and assume each other’s identities and no one would be the wiser. I had been upset that day, I’d gotten into a nasty fight with my parents about something that I couldn’t even remember anymore. And Cameron, ever the adventurous one, had outlined a million ways we could run away to Canada or Alaska and live like the Inuit. I don’t know why she always suggested cold places to run away to. I preferred our well heated Florida.   

“Are we going to run away to the North Pole this time?” I asked with a grin. She smiled softly but in a way that I knew she wasn’t teasing. She was very serious.

“Help me up,” she said. I hopped off the chair and helped so she was sitting upright in the bed.

“I don’t think I’m cool enough to have your name,” I said. I scooted my chair closer to her bedside but I stared at her hand instead of her face.

She laughed. “What are you talking about? You’re cooler than I am.”

“Bah,” I said, and took her hand off the sheet. It had gotten so cold and frail. She squeezed my hand and rested her other hand on my head. I felt the tears welling up behind my eyes again.

She removed her hands and I felt her place something on my head. I opened my eyes. Her perfectly shaped head caught the light of the dying sun through the blinds making her look like a zebra.

I touched the hat she put on my head.        

She had a collection of brightly colored hats that her family had bought her but most of them went unworn. I had learned to knit while I was sitting here with her everyday watching her fall into a depression as her beautiful blonde hair fell away with every chemo treatment. She held off shaving it all until the last minute. I had made her a hat that looked like a Viking helmet. It was her favorite. She cried when she saw herself in the mirror with it on the first time. She claimed it was because she was so happy.

“See, with that hat, you could conquer Disney World.”

“I dunno, I’m more partial to Dairy Queen,” I said and handed the hat back to her.

She pulled the hat over her ears and smiled at me.

“What do you say, do you want to be me for the rest of your life?”

“What are you talking about, Cam? How could I be you?”

“Have you ever heard of Jack Kevorkian?”

“Dr. Death?” I asked. I remembered his name from documentary my social studies teacher had us watch. “Didn’t he die last year?”

“Yeah, but he was an activist for a patient’s right to die if they were terminally ill.”

I didn’t like where this was headed. “What does that have to do with me being you?”

“Winnie, I want to die,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Yesterday, they told me that I have a couple months left. The cancer is uncontrollable now, the chemo’s not working anymore and it’s only a matter of time before I start to degrade to the point of--” She stopped and stared down at her hands.

I opened and closed my mouth a couple times, at a loss for words. 

 “Here’s what I want to do. We’re going to take my dad’s boat out on to the ocean and I’m going to jump in, and sink like the Titanic. You know I like the theatrics.” She laughed.

“Cameron, you can’t--”

 “I deserve to die with dignity, Winnie. I… I hate this feeling of losing control. If I have to go I want to go under my own terms. If I have to suffer through any more of this… I just can’t.”

“But why that?” I said finally. “Why drowning?

“I dunno, Jack Dawson did it.”

“Jack Dawson isn’t real, Cam. Plus he froze to death. Meat popsicle”

“Beside the point, Winnie. It’s my favorite movie and I get to choose how I die.”

 “But I don’t…”

“Do you love me?”

“I…” I stuttered. “Of course I do.”

“Didn’t you say when we were ten years old that you were going to marry me?”

“Yes.” I blushed. I couldn’t believe she remembered that.

“Well, I want to marry you too!”

“I don’t think Florida is that progressive yet.”

“It’s full of old Republicans, that’s why we get married in international waters and no one has to know.”

“And then you’ll kill yourself? I can’t--”

“But, Winnie, I can feel it. I can feel my body letting go. And I don’t think I have much time left.”

“But maybe…”

“There’s no maybe, there’s no but,” she said firmly. “Do this for me. It’s my dying wish.”

We ended the conversation there. I had to leave and I focused on my guilt about not cleaning up the chocolate pudding on her floor instead of her Titanic style death. I didn’t want to leave her, but my family would be wanting to have dinner and if I didn’t show my face they were likely to think I was hanging out with crack addicts or something.

My disagreements with my family had been trivial up to a certain point, typical teenage bullshit that probably would have passed with a bit more maturity. But I didn’t have a chance to let those trivialities go away.

It started with a casual conversation at the breakfast table. My older brother was talking loudly about his newest girlfriend. He treated girls like trophies and the more he got the higher he was on some invisible totem pole.

I hadn’t really been paying attention when my brother asked me, “so Winnie, when are you getting yourself a boyfriend?”

I laughed, and said sarcastically, “how about never.”

Eric laughed back. “Why? You’re not that ugly.”  

It wasn’t supposed to come out like this but I was feeling happy and secure and I wasn’t thinking about all the signs that should have red flagged me away from saying a damn thing. “I like girls, not boys,” I said.

My mother dropped her cup and it shattered with all her coffee on the floor. “No you don’t,” she said. She said it like her firm statement could change the very weather.

I felt a cold shock run down my spine. Oh crap.

“Never say that again, Winnie, you’re not like that!” she said. She got out of her chair and threw paper towels on the spilled coffee.  

“I…” I didn’t know what to say.

My dad started to laugh, but it wasn’t a kind of laugh that was playful. It was mocking. “Just a phase, Margie!”

I knew my parents were a bit dismissive of gay people. But a couple of my parent’s coworkers and friends were gay so I didn’t think they would be disapproving of it. It was only later I learned that they were okay with it as long as it wasn’t in their own house.

From that point on my parents scrutinized everything I did, where I went, and what I wore. My mother went on a rampage through my room and threw away any article of clothing that was remotely boyish. “No daughter of mine will be a dyke!” She said angrily as all my band shirts and jeans ended up in a trash bag. I managed to rescue the bag and left it at Cameron’s place for safekeeping. Whenever I was home my mom insisted I wear skirts and pretty blouses, but all it did was make me hate the color pink.

A couple nights after Cameron had declared that she wanted to die I came down from my room one night to get dinner and overheard my parents talking.

“Do you think we ought to send her to one of those rehabilitation summer camps?”

My resolve to leave with Cameron had been shaky, but those words struck me like a cold icicle to the heart. They thought they could fix me. But I wasn’t even broken.

I left without even trying to get dinner and headed back to the hospital. Visiting hours be dammed I was going to visit my only friend. I loved my parents, as flawed as their thinking was, but I didn’t want to be in that toxic environment any more than they wanted a lesbian daughter.  

When I finally got to Cameron’s room, she was asleep. She had a ventilator hooked up to help her breathe at night so the machines were loudly breathing with her. I crawled up into her bed and lay by her like a child woken by a nightmare.  

I cried into her pillow and apologized over and over when she woke up. She didn’t say a word and cradled my head to her chest, humming a song she liked until I fell asleep.  She was the only person who really understood me.
          I hated that she was in here, in this sterile place that had generic pictures on the walls instead of her movie posters. She must have been so unhappy to be trapped here.

We began to plan. I wasn’t happy with the planning to take Cameron to her watery grave but her mood got better every day. She had more life and light in her posture those last few days than she had in almost two years. The darkness that had entered our lives when she had been diagnosed with lung cancer at fourteen was dashed away and I felt like we had been transported back to when we were children playing without a care.

I avoided my parents even more. I was more confident about leaving with every passing day but part of me was distraught to leave everything behind. My distancing seemed to freak my parents out and one day they even took me to their pastor to see if there was any way they could pray the gay away. I wanted to puke when they all sat there with their heads bowed and called out to some merciful god to fix me.

Any misgivings I had about leaving dripped away with every snide comment from my father and passive aggressive look from my mother. My brother didn’t seem to know how to deal with me so he didn’t.

The last time I had dinner with them I smiled all through dinner and tried to chat them up. “Everything will be okay, you’ll see,” I said to my gloomy faced parents. I finally felt like Cameron looked. I felt like freedom was just a breath away.

That night after everyone had gone to bed I lifted the keys to my brother’s car and headed to the hospital.

Somehow, filled with some kind of second wind Cameron had managed to get out of bed and down the elevator without any of the nurses seeing her. I don’t know how in her weakened state she was able to even stand but there she was in her rumpled shirt and jeans that were too big for her standing at the edge of the hospital lot.  

She jumped in the passenger seat and giggled like she was going an illicit party instead of catching a boat to end her life. I quickly drove out of the parking lot and Cameron kicked up the radio and sang loudly with after midnight pop songs. I tried to laugh and sing along with her but with every mile my heart grew heavier.

+++

We got to the docks on the coast and parked my brother’s car as close to The Selfish Shellfish as we could. I will never cease to be amazed at Cameron’s ingenuity. Somehow she had managed to get copies of her dad’s boat keys.  She had clearly been planning a lot longer than I had been in on it.

She showed me how to control the boat and we maneuvered out of the docks just as the sun was rising on the horizon. Her father kept the boat fueled so we went out as far as half a tank would take us and then stopped to watch the sun continue to rise in the sky.

Cameron sat me down and handed me a small packet.

“Here’s my folder. It has my social security card, birth certificate, passport, and driver’s permit. It’s everything you’ll need to establish a new identity.”

I held it like it was going to explode. This was really happening.

“But first, I want you to marry me.” Cameron said with a huge smile. She pulled out two little plastic rings that looked like they came from one of those little vending machines in restaurants.

She took my hands and we stood in the middle of the boat staring into eachother’s eyes. She looked so silly with her knitted Viking hat on but all I saw was the pattern of her blue eyes. I dared no to forget what they looked like. My heart ached from the love I felt for her and the loss I was about to experience.

“I, Cameron Everly take Winnie Tyson to be my wife, till death do us part.” She said with such strength I wanted to believe that we were going to be together forever, that we were going to grow old and adopt a bunch of babies and die in bed together with wrinkles on our faces. She took one of the little rings and pushed it onto my pinky. It wouldn’t fit on the others.

“I, Winnie Tyson take Cameron Everyly to be my wife, till death--” my voice cracked, but I pushed through, “til death do us part.” She kissed me then and smiled. I put the little ring on her pinky finger and raised her hand to my cheek. Don’t forget the feel of her skin.

“Let’s eat,” she said.

We had a picnic in the sun and she started to tell a story. In the next two hours she told a story about the future we were never going to have. “We get married out here on the ocean and our boat runs out of fuel. We’re stranded and we have a long conversation about where we’re going to move to after the honeymoon.” She went on on and on talking about intricate details like the kind of carpet we will have in our first apartment to the kinds of coworkers we’re going to have at the jobs we get after college. “Then one day we retire, you from music producing and me from movie directing and move to--”

“Canada,” I interjected with a laugh.

“Canada! Oh, Canada!” She giggled. “And then we buy a house in the woods and grow some flowers that only grow in Canada. And we pay for our grandkids to come up every summer to play at the lake we’ll have.”

“And we’ll spoil them stupid!” I said.

“Fill them with sugar and send them back to their parents!” She laughed herself into a coughing fit. I patted her back until it passed.

“And then…” I started to say.

“And then,” she repeated, “we’re going to grow so old and wrinkly that you look like a prune and I look like a raisin.”

“Why am I a prune?” I asked.

“You’re taller, of course.”

“By like an inch!”

“And then!” she said again, “we’re going to crawl into bed one night, say goodnight and I love you to each other, and a shooting star will pass across a crescent moon and it will be the last thing we both see before we fall asleep for the last time.”

We grew quiet after that. Half-eaten sandwiches between us, I felt like a gap was widening. Her time was growing close. But the smile on her face was bigger than ever.

And for the last time that day I sobbed like a baby. It’s stupid that in the end it was her comforting me, but she was content with her decisions.

+++

At 1:35 Sunday afternoon, Cameron tied the two cinderblocks to her ankles, held the blocks in her hands and stood at the bow of the boat. “I’m king of the world!” she shouted.

Then with my help she sat at the edge of the boat and released the blocks into the water. She sat there for a few seconds and then looked back at me. She smiled and nodded her head. She leaned over and kissed my cheek one last time. Then she took her Viking hat off and put it on my head. “Remember me fondly.”

“I love you, Cameron,” I said.

“And I love you… Cameron.” She grinned and with sigh of relief she leaped off the edge. I trembled with shock as I watched her sink quickly. Bubbles trailed up behind her. The smile never left her face and her eyes never left mine until the darkness of the water swallowed her up.

She was gone.

I sat watching the point where she disappeared some part of me expecting her to rise up and come back to me. But realistically I knew she had used all her strength to come here. Even if she had wanted to come back she wouldn’t have had the energy.

I didn’t move for hours, suddenly lost. All the plans to run away had been so solid up till now. Because strong Cameron had led the way for weak Winnie.

But Cameron had given her name to me, I was supposed to be strong now. Everything that she embodied I had to honor. Her strength had to be my strength. I pushed myself up on shaky feet and took the controls of the boat once more.

 I drove along the coast until the boat ran out of fuel. Then I wrapped up the folder with Cameron’s identity in it and the Viking hat in a plastic bag stuffed it into a backpack and swam back to shore. I came out somewhere near Ponte Vedra Beach and walked up onto the beach. If it was strange to see a fully clothed girl emerge from the water none of the Sunday beachgoers said anything. I took a seat on a sandbank and watched the sky grow dark. It was hot out so my soaked clothes felt good on my skin.

I wanted to cry but I promised Cameron that my tears would only be from happiness after this point.

I opened the folder just so I could see Cameron’s name again or see her face on her driver’s permit. Along with the ID I found a smaller envelope and in it was a letter with some numbers written on it.

Winnie—or should I say Cameron?

Here is the account number and pin for my bank account. No one knew I had this so don’t worry about being tracked. It contains all my birthday, Christmas, and babysitting money from the past two years. I also managed to get ahold of my parent’s savings account information and transferred a portion of my college savings into it as well. I left the rest for my sisters and my parents for any expenses that might come up. Enclosed you will also find a $100 bill. Go get your hair cut, dyed and styled differently. From here on out you are Cameron Everly, unrelated to the missing cancer patient from Orlando.

Be safe, and I love you. Go be the best music producer you can be.

~CE

“I won’t let you down. I promise.” I clutched the letter and allowed one last tear to escape. I didn’t move for the whole night feeling my body go through another shock.

When the new dawn came I opened my eyes and saw the world with new eyes. I wasn’t limited to small minds and small lives. With Cameron’s blessing I could be everything I couldn’t before. She had left this world behind and given me the opportunity to better myself. I would never forget her and with the strength she has passed on to me I will make the world a better place.

 FIN