They didn’t tell me in school that death smells like shit.

I wonder if that would have made a difference.  Would you have stayed away from heroin if you had known that your life was going to end with you detoxing in a coma, your bodily excretions pouring into a bag that hangs from your hospital bed, and that your family would have to sit in an Intensive Care room that smells like your shit because they don’t want to leave you alone to die?

Let me be more specific.  Your urge to control your bodily functions is so imprinted on your being that it’s one of the last things to go.  A person will hold their bowels even after they have suffered brain damage so profound that their body will not breathe on its own.  You can be unable to regulate your body temperature, your blood pressure and pulse, your very respiration, and you will still remember not to eliminate on yourself.

Even when your family is called to the hospital, and a neurosurgeon tells your father that you are clinically unresponsive to stimuli.  Even if you won’t wake up when he knuckles your sternum, when he pinches your nipple, and when he touches your cornea.  Even if you don’t notice when he pinches the quick of your fingernail, and you don’t gag when he pushes a breathing tube down your throat until it stops.  You will still hold it, even when the doctor stands next to your bed and tells your father that even miracles don’t save people in your condition.

At some point, a very kind man from the organ donor organization will sit down with your family and explain that you enrolled to donate your organs when you renewed your drivers’ license, and your mother will be proud of your selflessness for the last time.  He’ll offer advice for your final arrangements, and offer to make a few phone calls on your behalf to get things started.  Visitors will come and go, and your vital signs will start to become unstable, but even then you will remain continent.

The process includes your brother sitting across a table from a woman nurse and telling all your secrets, to see if your organs are safe to donate.  They’ll ask him questions that will make him blush, that would humiliate you if you knew, but you won’t.  And he does it for you because if he doesn’t, your father will have to do it.  They’ll ask questions about who you’ve slept with, and when, and what drugs they did, and they will run blood tests for awful things that come on needles and from sex partners who use them.  Your big brother will learn the results of those tests, and he will keep your secrets one last time, take them to the grave.  Even then you will not defecate improperly.

Even when people start posting to your Facebook wall, wishing you to rest in peace, even though you’re not yet dead, you’ll hold it.  Word gets out, and those junkies who were selling you drugs over the weekend will send your brother friend requests, wanting very much to cry over your not-yet-dead body as if they didn’t sell you the dope that killed you, knowing you wanted to get clean.  But you won’t know his rage, won’t see him flexing his hands in anger as he denies those requests.  You won’t hear him when he answers the phone in your hospital room, telling them to stay away, that they’re not welcome because they didn’t love you, not really.  You won’t know it when your family decides not to have a funeral for you because the people who really loved you cannot endure the phony displays of grief and tacky airbrushed t-shirts from the junkies who used you until your last unassisted breath.  And you still will not take that final dump.  Not yet.

Eventually you will forget.  It’s not until your parents’ pastor arrives that you will take that fateful shit.  And you will.  Everywhere.  The foulest liquid shit you’ve ever taken.  It will get all over you, and all over your bed, and the incredibly kind medical staff who have taken care of you in your coma will protect your dignity anyway.  They will remove everybody from the room and they will clean it up, and they will clean you up.  They’ll change your sheets, and you may not know this, but you can be catheterized from the other side as well.  They will do this for you, to protect your dignity for the rest of your life, which will be lived out in this room.  You’ll be clean from here on out, but this is not over.  You will shit into this bag for the rest of your life.

You will continue to shit while your family cries at your bedside.  They’ve cleaned it up, but the smell won’t go away.  The funny thing is, they don’t go away either.  They endure the stink, and the sorrow, and they will express eternal gratitude to the kindest people in your world – the people who are keeping track of the dozen or so monitors attached to your body, the five or six IV drips, keeping you alive until the brain death test can be legally performed.  They all stay because they love you.  They don’t even talk about it, even as the smell is almost smothering.

Would you still have walked away from everybody who tried to help you?

What about the teenage girlfriend who never stopped loving you?  What if you knew she would stand beside your bed, holding your hand and calling your name as if you were down a long hallway, and merely needed to return?  When she sobs, and says “Who am I going to marry now?” your brothers will both fall apart.  She pretends she can’t smell it, doesn’t say a word about it.  She’d never say anything to hurt your ego.  She’s always loved you, even all this time that you didn’t love yourself.

What about your niece?  She’s sixteen now, but she still remembers when she spent summer vacations at grandma’s house and you’d come home from work and bring her a 20 oz. Mountain Dew all to herself, even though she was only eight years old.  Do you remember when you swore you were clean, and picked her up to go swimming, and you pulled over in a parking lot and passed out because you did dope?  It was the most scared she’s ever been, but she forgave you a long time ago.  She’s here now, and she’s holding your hand.  She loves you for all the Mountain Dews and the time you spent at her house when she was little, but really she loves you because you loved her for who she was, even when the rest of the family struggled with accepting her sexuality.  You were the first extended family to accept her without hesitation, and that’s so special to her.  She might not have even noticed the smell.

This is how it’s going to go down.  This is how your story ends.

Your nurse has to change that bag before he turns you over to the next nurse.  And he does it, without hesitation, without complaint, because your dignity is more important to him than his comfort.  He’s been good to your family, and he’s held it together all day, but your brother will run into him in the elevator lobby, and he’ll break down a little when he thanks this man for all he did today.  The nurse will bring him in for a hug, and maybe shed a tear himself.  It’s hard for him to watch families go through this, and he does – day after day.  He’s numb to the smell.

Your aunt isn’t numb to the smell.  She never had kids of her own, and she helped raise you and your brothers.  But she comes and stands next to your bed and cries, and says her goodbye, because you weren’t ever this guy to her.  She let you live with her, fed you, cared for you.  She changed your diapers, so the smell of your shit isn’t new to her.

Your room will still smell like shit in the morning, when your brother loses it and your father can’t even speak, when the organ donor people want to keep you alive for another day so they can use your body parts to help keep others alive.  And they will all feel like shit when your big brother has to tell a doctor to let you die in peace.  All of them.  Your family, the doctor, the medical staff and the nurses, the organ donor people, your only real girlfriend.  But they will hold your hands and kneel by your bedside when the respiratory therapist gently, respectfully removes your breathing tube, and your nurse turns off the machines to let them pray in silence.

And when your big brother, who held you when you came into the world, who picked you up when you were hurt in the yard and on the field and in the woods, or stranded in Memphis or Tallahassee or at the Walmart up the street, who always believed you’d heal someday, holds your hand and feels your strong, kind heart stop as your pulse ends under his fingertips, your room will smell like shit.

That’s what heroin smells like.  That’s what death smells like.  That’s what addiction smells like.

Shit.