‘Sorry to disturb you so late’ read the text message that flashed on my cell phone screen at about 2 am, ‘but she has passed away’. I never really knew her, she was a girl named Desiree who worked at the same company where I once briefly worked; the company I hated with every strand of my being, the company that treated its employees worse than the Amistad did its cargo. But the company, despicable a place as it is, didn’t kill Desiree, she died while partying at her house with her three siblings and a few of her friends. It was a night like many the Filipina had during her short life when she danced, drank, chatted and laughed with her beloveds, but the chatty alcoholic merriment that has neglected to kill her in the past did so with cruel leisurely deception that night, five nights ago to be exact. After consuming an exuberant amount of alcohol and boogying about tirelessly, Desiree fell and hit her head hard on the floor causing internal hemorrhaging that lasted throughout the night, draining her life down to its last quivering trickle. Desiree briefly regained consciousness after her fall and with a little help from her brother and sisters she managed to walk to her bed where she laid for the remainder of the night until the vivid colors of her life faded into the placid grayness of death.
Desiree’s brother and two sisters, whom she shared the living space with, were at first completely unalarmed, thinking it was all the effect of overenthusiastic tippling they fell into their own spells of much needed sleep once the party was over and the guests were all gone. As the morning hours rolled and Desiree remained asleep the siblings grew more concerned, not concerned enough, however, to disturb her from what seemed to them a deep peaceful trance. By 2pm the concern reached an unsettling peak, although still they chose to believe that their sister was merely being a sleepyhead who is exhausted from the jubilant bouts of the night before. But that blithe assumption was shattered into little spikes of terror when Desiree’s brother entered her room and saw her body sprawled still on the bed, pinned down motionlessly, a dried up puddle of vomit by her pillow and stiff strips of blood sticking out from her nose. The three siblings wrapped their sister’s body up fast as they could and shuttled her to the hospital in the first taxi they were able to fetch in the scorching afternoon heat, in the flurry of all the horror that was stirring up inside. But by the time they got to the hospital it was too late, the doctor who may as well have been the angel of death told them so. The doctor tried to save Desiree’s life or rather bring it back as the facts had it then, he even kept her under his close personal supervision in an ICU room for nearly two days. A mutual friend of Desiree’s and mine, who was with her almost every step of the way, related these sorrowful events to me and I in turn decided to narrate them to you.
Desiree and I shared an office with three other people back when I was working at the old company, her desk was a couple of steps away from mine, the sound her revolving chair made every time she would frantically get up to answer the manager’s importunate calls suddenly began to waft in my head as I read the text message that declared the news of her death. But it’s not the weighty merit of our friendship or Desiree’s personal worth that kept her image flickering in my head, Desiree and I barely even spoke to one another, there was nothing substantial about her I could recall as I read the text message; no unforgettable moments or precious memories that could have caused my heart to bleed or my eyes to well up with tears, in fact the only potent memory I have of Desiree is of the time when the rest of us in the office ridiculed her and spoke ill of her behind her back on her first few days as our co-worker. The thought that came to my mind when I learned about Desiree’s death was not that of utter inconsolable sadness at the loss of a dear friend whose lovely temperament I was now at great pains to mentally recast, not of her kindness and grace, not of the unbreakable ties that bound us for surely there were none, it was instead a hollow thought divested of all fondness and grief; a naked, raw and unembellished thought about death, the death that couldn’t spare even the vigor of a 24 year old, the death that could, at any unguarded moment, wrench me the way it did Desiree’s youth.
During the days when Desiree was in the intensive care ward fighting for her life, her healthy bereaved friends inundated her’s and each other’s Facebook walls with earnest sorrowful messages of support, they all wished she could miraculously surmount this mortal impasse, one of them even quoted Paulo Coelho, something about ‘the warrior of light’, what the hell is that? What does Coelho’s insipid imagination know about death? But alas, the messages were of ardent hope from people who really wanted Desiree back, because unlike me, they knew her well; the person that she was. They must have seen her cry a time or two before, they must have witnessed her laughter several times and they may have even been there when that laughter pushed her headfirst onto the oncoming traffic of death across the floor. Even I sent a message to her, I posted it on her Facebook wall, it read ‘I am sending a prayer out to Desiree…’ ah what the hell, what difference does it make now, Desiree is no longer a fighter that could be cheered on into battle by prayer, Desiree is dead.
