Hailey and I had met nine years ago when she and my son started dating. I am embarrassed to reveal the ferocity of my first reaction. I was walking behind her up the stairs and I actually thought the words he’s mine, not yours. I’m usually a welcoming person, so I was shocked at myself and told myself I better get over that, like, pronto, which, I’m happy to say, I did. Her beauty was overwhelming. It pulled focus and distracted from getting to know her, yet by the time they broke up the first time, I knew her well enough—how hard she worked, her courage, her profound enjoyment in the little things in life—to be heartbroken at losing her too. She and I had tried to keep our connection, but too many threads led back to my son, which made it painful for her and awkward for me. My first loyalty, obviously, had to be with him.
They dated off and on, mostly on, for nine years. Two strong-willed, stubborn people who loved each other passionately and were intertwined like tree roots. But OCD meets ADHD. She was into order, checklists, giving it her all, fun, and adventure, and he was a funny, anxious, contrary chaos machine. They moved in together during the pandemic and had a lot of joy and pleasure in nesting before things became unworkable. Their breakup was painful. There had been no contact for a year and a half.
Then Henry totalled his car avoiding a deer. He smashed all four sides and narrowly avoided going over a cliff. People who saw the wreck assumed the driver was dead. He walked away without injury, but when he had time to think about the fact that he could have died forever, he realized she was one of the first people he wanted to call.
Little did he know she had been diagnosed with leukemia five weeks earlier, and when she found out that the second type of chemo hadn’t worked, he too was one of the first people she wanted to call. She’d been told to write a will. Two months had been mentioned. He called me after he talked to her. I went out into the rainy night and sobbed to the heavens. The next day I passed a baby clothes store and broke down again. She had wanted a family so badly.
Courtesy of Claudia Casper.
All the love they had for each other was totally intact and separate from issues associated with living together. Henry moved in with her and her mother, Michele, who’d taken the first plane out of Kitchener, Ontario, to take care of her only child. I provided backup support for all three of them when needed. Michele and I became close friends, but that’s another story.
You could see the love in their young faces. Pure delight in being with each other. The shorthand of knowing each other so deeply. He made her laugh again. He made her feel like a woman again. For her 31st birthday, her friends took her to Cirque du Soleil because it was in an outdoor tent. Back at the apartment afterwards, Henry performed an interpretive dance with a balloon in his boxers. As Hailey’s mother put it so aptly, “They are cuckoo-pants for each other.”
The lunch Hailey and I were having now, eight months later, was her thank you to me. She had gone into remission long enough to get a stem cell transplant, and there’d been a window of hope that she could make it through, but the cancer had come back. A couple of days ago, she’d been told she might only have two weeks left to live.
It was May—a sunny, clear Vancouver day. I had chosen a restaurant by the sea. The hostess led us to the heated patio. Hailey chose a table beside the plastic wind barrier near a heat lamp. She took her puffer coat off and sat in her sweater and toque. A cool breeze infiltrated. I kept my coat on. I asked Hailey if she was warm enough. She was so thin. She said she was, in that definite, boundary-setting way she had. “I like the cold.”
We looked at the menu. The drinks menu first because Hailey was parched all the time these days. Our server arrived and enumerated, with ever-broadening smiles, how great everything was going to be. We ordered a drink with mint and strawberry syrup and a bottle of sparkling water on the side to cut the sweetness. Then we ordered sea bass with extra sauce to add moisture because Hailey could only eat wet food. Prednisone was giving her false energy and a reprieve from some of her symptoms. She hadn’t eaten really for a few weeks. She’d kept trying, but it was painful, and food either wouldn’t go down or wouldn’t stay down. It was one of the things that caused her the most anxiety, because she knew she had to eat to stay alive.
When the server left, we talked about Hailey’s family, each person and how they were doing. She told me that her half-brother—who had taken special meds to boost his stem cells that made him feel horrible and had taken a week off work to be her donor for a bone marrow transplant at Christmas—felt guilty that it hadn’t worked. This was particularly heartbreaking because, where the doctors were hoping for two million stem cells, he had produced six million. He was a superproducer. I’d seen the precious bag just before they attached it to the IV and dripped them into Hailey. They were orange, with a tint of red. The doctors and nurses called it her new birthday.
That had been a big moment. That bag held hope. Hope for a future. That bag gave her seven more precious months, though one of those was hell on wheels, literally, because at one point she’d had 18 bags on two IV trees. She was near death several times from the chemo and infection. They’d put a port near her heart so the drugs could reach her body as fast as possible. So much suffering and work had brought Hailey to this moment with me in this restaurant.
The busboy brought our drinks, and they were just the ticket. Refreshing, unique, delicious.
We talked about Hailey’s mother. It had just been the two of them since Hailey was little, and Hailey’s biggest worry was for her mother after she died. She was glad Michele would have Hailey’s dog Snuggles to look after. Snuggles carries part of Hailey. Everyone knows it.
We talked about how before, when she was living with my son, we couldn’t really be close, because there was a lot going on between them which was intimate, some of it difficult, and couldn’t be shared. And now that there was no future, she and I were free to talk about everything.
We talked about the love between us, which is unusual and has no social role. It’s not potential mother-in-law or actual mother-in-law, though it is that also. It’s something we see in each other, our strength and our vulnerability. Two women in a big world, where you need courage, where things are hard, where there are so many people and moments to love, where you need to keep adjusting your compass to aim for what is genuine, what is real, what is loyal, and assess what is disappointing or harmful, where you want to live as fully as you can, where you want the right to be yourself, flawed and ridiculous and striving and strong. I don’t know if women often get full respect from each other, but Hailey and I had that.
Our connection also has to do with both being goofy and loving things that aren’t serious, that are fluffy and fun, and somehow, because we’ve glimpsed each other’s pain, that frivolous pleasure is more acute, and we know that about each other. I think Hailey had that with a lot of her close people.
The sea bass arrived with extra sauce, and lo and behold, she could eat. And it stayed down. A normal moment.
Hailey talked about how much she had loved her bachelor apartment, before her mom arrived and they’d had to switch to a two-bedroom. It was an apartment I never saw, the apartment after the breakup. She listed what she’d loved most about it. Her bed on the floor, with the sheets and covers. That she’d reduced and reduced until she had almost nothing in it. She loved how then, when she brought one thing in, it popped because there was nothing to compete with it. A flower. A bowl. A candle. She said, “Things are important,” and I understood what she meant. If you make things important, then you don’t simply consume them. You don’t lay them aside. You don’t forget them.
I urgently wanted to deliver fully for her in this moment and, at the same time, fully leave space for her. My job was to listen, to create the emotional space for her to talk about whatever she wanted, but, at the same time if she didn’t have the energy, to give her good conversation—”good,” whatever that was, something fun, something light, something acknowledging. I was aware of every moment, every glance, every expression, and then there were all my emotions that I needed to turn the volume way down on, because this lunch was about her and this moment in time together. How do you receive and give at the same time, how do you be present and stuff down all your grief and empathy? How do you port between normal and eternal? She was leading the way.
We talked about Bridesmaids, a movie we both loved. We talked about when I’d taken her to a hospital appointment a couple of days earlier because the new implanted IV port in her arm was really hurting, and how she had PTSD about hospital beds now. The plastic. The hardness.
Eventually she’d lain down in her puffy coat and warm toque, and I got her a flannel sheet from the warmer, and she had a sip of the ice water in her bottle. She’d snuggled under the blankets, lying on her side, her face peeking out, adorable.
I noticed her cheeks were pink.
“Did you get some sun yesterday?”
“Yeah, I did. It’s nice.”
“Yeah, it looks great.”
“I looked in the mirror and I thought, temporary.”
She talked about how she couldn’t really wrap her mind around the fact that she was here now and in two weeks she probably wouldn’t be. “None of us can,” I said. “We’ve tried. I think it’s just not possible.” We laughed about how shitty the art on the wall was. A photograph of some rocks. A photograph of cherry tree bark.
She said she’d been looking up the seven stages of grief. And she thought she’d already gone through most of them the first time, when it looked like there wasn’t any hope. Then when there was, she was thinking, well, let’s see. And now that there wasn’t anymore, now that she knew what was going to happen, she didn’t have to use up her energy in trying to survive and wondering if she would. Now she could focus on the present more, in an odd way.
I blathered on about how we all live in these made-up narrative structures we build around our lives and how she was free of that now, and what she was seeing was what was really there anyway. I talked about how Buddhist monks spend their whole lives trying to get to where she was now, to acceptance of death and nonattachment and the bliss that accompanied it. “I wouldn’t say I’m feeling bliss per se,” she said and laughed, gently teasing me, “but I am feeling the intensity of the beauty of the present.” I’d been trying to walk beside her in my thoughts, but reading this now, I feel like face-palming myself.
The server returned and asked if we wanted more of the strawberry-mint drink. Hailey and I noted again with amazement that she was able to eat her lunch and everything was staying down. We ordered a mojito, with alcohol.
She said she had never had a traditional view of life, like marriage, house, family, kids, and when she thinks about it, mostly she would be repeating things she had already done, but she hadn’t travelled, especially to Europe. She wished she could have seen Europe. I said the Italian men would have loved her and would probably have given her a lot of unwanted attention. We smiled. I said that Europe was just a bunch of buildings really. Not super meaningful. She smiled at me with patient irony and said, “Still. I would have liked to have gone.” Face-palm number two.
Hailey had deputized me to write a GoFundMe update to all the people who donated, probably for after she passed, she said. I had already written it, because I didn’t think I’d do as good a job after. I knew Hailey liked to be in control of details, and so I said we could read it if she wanted. When she went to the bathroom, I reread it to myself, and when she returned, I said, “The past tense is a problem. Let’s not.” She agreed.
She said she felt there was something else after. She said, “I just hope time is different. I hope I don’t have to wait alone for too long before everyone joins me.” Because she’s dying so young, she’s only got her grandparents on the other side. And her childhood dog, Hank. Not enough company. No one from her generation to hang out with. We talked about time and how technically the past exists as much as the present in physics, and so I said I thought time would be very different. Every moment would be present. I told her about my friend Anne who had had an egoless oneness experience twice in her life and said that it was the most wonderful thing and so beautiful. Hailey knew about all the people who had died and come back and reported not wanting to come back. She wanted to think that she would still have consciousness as herself in some way.
After lunch, we walked out to the end of the pier and looked at the ocean. She asked me, “What do you like better, air or water?”
I said, “I really like water, but I don’t like the idea of being under it, so air, I guess.” I understood that she was thinking about her ashes.
She agreed about being under the ocean, but she said she liked the idea that the ocean flowed everywhere. And I told her what I had written on my mother and stepfather’s gravestone: Everywhere Now.
She said she was too young to have a place for her ashes. For her it was people, so she was giving her ashes to people. She said her dad told her he was going to put her on the mantelpiece beside Oma and Opa. He thought she’d like it because they had lovely boxes. She laughed. That wasn’t what she had in mind, she said, but she didn’t care, if that was what he wanted.
I told her that I had read about mushroom caskets and seen pictures of them, and they were white and lined with moss and looked really cozy. That was what I wanted. She said she’d read about them and they looked nice and you could have a tree grow from you.
Then she was quiet for a while. I watched myself worry that she was cold, worry that she wanted to leave and was just staying because she thought I wanted to, then I told myself to be quiet and let her have this moment. She would tell me when she wanted to leave. I was not still. I looked at the water and the seaweed and saw how beautiful everything was, but I didn’t care. I was just thinking about her, and in that sense I wasn’t wholly present, and I worried about that too. The beauty of the world could not have mattered less to me. She looked out at the sea. Really taking the beauty in.
Eventually she turned to me. “Time to leave?” I nodded and said something about how cold the air was. She said she didn’t mind. “It’s nice to feel the cold.” She said, “Breathing is good.”
The next day Hailey texted me and asked what word she’d used when she’d looked in the mirror at her freckles from the sun. Was it “temporary”? I confirmed that yes, that was the exact word. A little bit later I texted her:
She texted back:
I texted back:
I wanted to fend off death for her.
I wanted to stand beside her and look where she looked.
I wanted to fill her short time with sweet moments.
I wanted to let her know, over and over, that she mattered.
She was a flower. A lotus flower opening. Her face and golden eyes translucently clear. What light there must have been within to emanate such perfection even as her body broke apart. Her ears with their gold hoops perfect as any sleeping child’s. Her death, our small, personal supernova that shoots out light and pain across the universe.
At one point, we had thought we were going to lose her she was in so much pain, but methadone had done wonders, and today was a good day. She had a new hat on, soft yellow and light beige stripes, and it looked so beautiful on her. She shone. I suggested she take a selfie she looked so beautiful, and she said, no, I could take a picture if I wanted. I understood that she never wanted to take another photograph of herself. She had taken photos before the transplant, when she said she felt pretty for the first time since she’d got sick. Whatever she saw in the mirror now, she had no need to memorialize it for herself. We were memorializing it for ourselves. I took the photo. Here it is.
Courtesy of Claudia Casper.
Hailey Merkt appeared on Season 21 of The Bachelor and was represented by Richardʻs International Model Management. During her multifaceted career, she worked as a clown, a server, and a creative marketing professional.
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