Chapter Thirteen: The Third Time the Universe Spoke

The Week I Almost Became Brooks | This one was not easy.

I drove back to Florida the day after the visitation.

Not in a dramatic way. Not like people leave in the movies with speeches or ceremonies. I simply left. The dogs in the car. A few things thrown together. Memphis in the rearview mirror and the Gulf air slowly returning as the miles passed.

I had no plan.

The lease on the Memphis apartment would run until the end of the month, but that didn’t matter to me. I knew I would return eventually and collect whatever remained. But in that moment I was finished with that chapter of the world. Finished with hospital rooms, funeral homes, and the strange way people look at you when they know your life has been split in half.

When I pulled into the driveway on Wood Beach Drive in Sugarwood, the house looked exactly the same as when we had left it.

That is the strange thing about death.

The world does not rearrange itself to acknowledge it. The furniture stays where it was. The dishes remain in the cabinets. Sunlight still comes through the same windows at the same angle it always did.

A house can hold a thousand memories and still feel completely indifferent to the one that just ended.

I walked inside with the dogs and set my bag down.

And then I remembered the moss.

Even in the fog of those final days Brenda had managed to leave that breadcrumb behind. The word came slowly while she lay in the hospital bed: “moss.” Then “moss drawer.” A nod toward Johnna that explained more than either of them could say out loud.

So I found the drawer.

And sure enough, there it was. A small stash tucked away like a quiet little secret. Not exactly the sort of thing you expect to be part of a deathbed conversation, but Brenda had always understood something many people don’t: relief sometimes arrives in unconventional ways.

I wasn’t a prude then and I’m not a prude now.

So that first night I fashioned a crude little pipe from aluminum foil and sat outside on the back patio. The Gulf air was thick and warm, the way it always is along 30A at night.

I took a few pulls and let the smoke drift out into the dark.

For the first time in months my shoulders relaxed.

And then there were the drugs.

Not the kind of prescriptions most people ever encounter. These were the medications of serious illness — the ones prescribed when doctors are no longer trying to cure something but simply trying to keep someone comfortable while time runs out.

Fentanyl meant to dissolve under the tongue. Morphine in strengths most pharmacists rarely dispense. Methadone prescribed not for addiction but for relentless cancer pain.

Brenda had them all.

Doctors had been generous toward the end because the goal was simple: comfort.

Which meant that in that quiet house in Seagrove Beach sat enough medication to make a small pharmacy blush.

The first night I had a little moss and one of the pills.

And I slept.

Deeply. Quietly. Without dreams.

When I woke the next morning the silence of the house felt a little easier to tolerate.

So the next night I did the same thing.

A little moss.
A pill.
Sleep.

The days between those nights had almost no shape to them. I walked the dogs. Sat on the porch. Looked out at the Gulf. Occasionally thought about Brenda but mostly existed in that strange suspended place where grief hasn’t yet decided what it plans to do with you.

By the third or fourth night the doses crept up slightly.

Not recklessly. Just a little more. Enough to feel that soft blanket settle over the mind as sleep approached.

It was — if I’m being completely honest — welcome relief.

After months of hospitals and decisions and watching someone you love slowly leave the world, the quiet numbness of drifting off each night felt like mercy.

And nobody was watching.

No doctors.
No nurses.
No friends checking in.

Just me and the dogs and a house that suddenly belonged to one person instead of two.

A week passed that way.

Each night the same rhythm.

A little moss.
A little more medicine than the night before.
Drifting off.

And waking up the next day with absolutely nothing in front of me.

Eventually one afternoon a thought occurred as I sat in the living room staring at nothing in particular.

Why wait until night?

If the goal was relief, why schedule it?

It seemed perfectly reasonable in the moment.

So one afternoon I decided to take a nap.

A little moss.
A pill. Maybe two.

I laid down and drifted into that heavy slow sleep the drugs made possible.

And then it happened.

Not a dream.

Not a thought.

A voice.

Clear as if someone had walked into the room and stood beside the bed.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

It was sharp. Loud. Almost angry.

And it startled me so violently that I came fully awake in an instant.

Then it came again.

“This is not who you are.”

I sat up in the bed, heart pounding.

And I knew exactly who it was.

Not in some mystical sense meant for storytelling.

I simply knew.

“This is not who you were.”

That was enough.

I sat there for a long time in the quiet house with those words hanging in the air.

The spell was broken.

The next morning I gathered everything.

Every bottle.
Every tablet.
Every patch and vial and blister pack left behind from months of treatment.

I put them all in a box and drove to Publix.

There is something almost comical about the moment if you think about it long enough. A man who had spent years evaluating companies and navigating complicated business processes now standing quietly at a grocery store pharmacy counter holding a cardboard box full of narcotics worth more on the street than many people I knew could make in a year.

“I need to dispose of these,” I told the pharmacist.

They took them without much ceremony.

Just like that, they were gone.

And with them went the week where I had almost disappeared.

For a short time I had been Brooks.

Now it was time to decide whether I would become Red.

That meant something very simple. You get up. You go to work. You create the illusion of normal life until normal life slowly returns.

I had no job bagging groceries.

I didn’t need the money. But I needed a place to stand in the world again. So I tried.

A routine. A clock to punch. My “few hours” each day where life moved forward whether I felt ready for it or not. I tried to return to my employment.

It was my grocery store version of Shawshank.

Brooks couldn’t live outside the walls. Red could.

That little grocery store job (Consulting Services in Carve out Private Equity) was my ticket counter. Or at least I thought. But at least I had something to do. I prepared to travel again some. The grind. They had known what I was dealing with for 4 years and they were patient allowing me the least of all paths, but now were summoning me to points in Asia and Europe. Best I do it....and engage in life.

And somewhere far off in the distance, though I could not yet see it clearly, was my own version of Zihuatanejo coming soon.

Hope had not returned yet. But for the first time since Brenda died, it had begun to move in my direction.

The journey back to life had begun, the Third time, in Brenda’s voice, The Universe Spoke to Me.