Like I Said by Jennifer Bannan

       Ed Suominen CC




Like I Said
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The home hospice aide, Brittany, uses “Like I said,” the way people use “Well,” or “See,” or “Uh.” It’s her placeholder phrase while she collects her thoughts, or strings thoughts together. She is here to explain to us (more to me, because you are fading) these final steps, and “Like I said” is her refrain. She probably has said these things earlier in the day, but to other families.  
        “Like I said, you’ll need to use the morphine no more than three drops at a time.
        “Like I said, the mouth swabs are good if they’ve stopped producing saliva.” 
        Every suggestion new to me. 
      As she and I tour the house, you are downstairs in the living room on the couch, talking slowly to your mother and brother about old times, for now using full sentences. Our six year old is on the floor at your feet, snapping together his Legos.
       I watch in our upstairs bedroom as Brittany puts pillows on the bed to simulate the immobilized body we know is inevitable, then works around the pillow-form. “Like I said, you don’t want to hurt your back when you change their sheets, so do it like this.” Tugging, rolling, tugging, rolling back.
        In a few minutes, after the oxygen tank demonstration, we’re downstairs again and Brittany sits with you on the couch to go over your medications. “Like I said, take what you were taking,” she says. Like I said is something you and I would love together in the moment, with a shared grin. But when I catch your eye, only your wide-eyed gaze is there, that frank this-is-really-it look that kills me. You have more important realizations happening. There’s no sign you’ve caught the hilarity.
        That you don’t notice Brittany’s tic is just another sign of the end. You, who once reminded me after a fender bender to describe each moment’s passing without the trappings of a story, but like a phenomenologist. “Don’t say, ‘She hit my door when I opened it,’” you said. “Instead say, ‘I had just opened my car door, I heard and felt a loud crash. I turned and saw my door was mangled. Then I saw her Toyota.’” You were deep in the writing of a paper on Heidegger then, and while I didn’t quite get it, firmly rooted in my narrative camp, I used your technique with State Farm, and it seemed to work. 
        Now you’re asking Brittany about foods you can eat, because it’s getting more difficult. 
        “Like I said, Jello is good for getting some protein.” 
        I can’t wait until your mother and brother have gone to bed and I can share it with you: this sweet quirk of another human being.
At the door, out of earshot of you, I ask her my most pressing question. “Earlier today he was really scaring us,” I tell her. I want some reassurance that home hospice is a state of being with some heft, to last a month or more, like we originally understood it. You took a twenty mile bike ride just a few days ago, so while maybe we can accept that there is no more route forward with chemo, isn’t it true that you can walk the winter sidewalks with me and our kids, throw the ball for the dog, sip tea on the couch? “He wasn’t really connecting, was talking in sentence fragments. But now he’s fine. Is that going to happen a lot?” 
        “Like I said. Like I said,” Brittany murmurs, collecting her thoughts. 



The rest of the night I picture it, how I’ll curl up to you and say How about that health aide and her thing? “Like I said, like I said.” How you’ll laugh and say. Oh yeah, she did do that. 
       But it turns out I won’t get to, because you’ll go into something like a fever dream, tossing and turning and trying to get out of bed, stiffening and standing but having trouble standing, hitting the bed hard when I heave you back to the middle. There isn’t a quiet moment that night for a long time, and by the time it comes I’ve forgotten to mention Like I said. 
         You will not be lucid enough the next day. 



Some of my memories of you now, years later, are from that surreal end: like when you flapped your arms in objection as your mother applied holy oil to your temple. Or the next night when you took those two large pillows meant to keep you from falling over, stacked and held them before your mouth for a big hamburger bite. 
        Other memories are from our seven years together: hiking with the baby strapped to you, on icy paths above plummeting ravines. You with the baby in the rain at the lake, holding him up to the sky in exaltation. You and my two older kids, whose trust you’d gained so quickly, teaching them how to ice- skate – the older with her mincing blades tentatively forward, the younger with his reckless speed, his arms arcing close to the ice. You stumbling into the scrubby Florida woods alone one night at camp, in a swooning communion with the cypress trees, scaring us all, even me, though I told everyone you’d be back, you’d be fine, both being true hours later. Or that time I told you my favorite thing about you was how you always noticed people’s minor characteristics, their subtle oddities. And then how you seemed upset, even surly, like I’d accused you of being a voyeur. I like to think you were embarrassed by it because it pleased you -- to be seen in the act of seeing.
        Like I said, like I said. Even though it’s not a memory we shared, not technically, Like I said is so very you. There is beauty in its effort, in a harsh world, to secure the moment, to reflect and pin down, to say we’ve been here before.
Like I said: over the months, then more than a year, my heart and mind wade through the loss, lugging Like I said alongside. I tell my friends and family about it, never sure what they think. I tell them how, when Brittany used the phrase two times in a row, I could finally reflect, ‘Well, you did say that.” I laugh. Sometimes they do too.
        Does it make them uncomfortable? Do they think I’m fetishizing death? 
       I start dating and find myself describing the story even to new people I meet, explaining how I thought it was funny and painful at the same time, how it was a sweet human detail you and I would have treasured together, if we could have.
        I may never feel finished with it, because I’ve never been able to hear you laugh about it. 
       When people say that my memory of you will keep you alive, I feel nearly angry, knowing I could never store the totality of you in this pitiful mind. More honest to be a Brittany, forgetting the soon-to-be-dead as soon as the next one appears, forgetting that what has been a daily repetition (like I said) is breaking news for those about to die. 
     What’s the point of being preserved in someone’s memory? I wonder.  It seems more impressive to be thrown on the ash heap of everything forgotten. Let the ash heap of human memories grow so large it will become its own planet.  Someday it will be visible to the naked eye, hurtling around its undeserving star.

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Jennifer Bannan’s second short story collection, Tamiami Trail, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in the Fall of 2025. Her first short story collection, Inventing Victor, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2003.  She has had stories in the Autumn House Press anthology, Keeping the Wolves at Bay, and has been published in literary journals including the Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review and more.  Her non-fiction has appeared in The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and others. Her webpage is at Jen Bannan (jenniferbannan.com)

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