Before I Die

Still in the hospital, Tessa wakes up to the sight of flowers everywhere in her room. Her father is by her bedside, and she sends him to buy her more presents. He is happy to have this tangible small task to perform.

Tessa’s latest doctor, James Wilson, is humane and straightforward with her. After she presses him, he tells her that she does not have very much longer to live. Her that disease is now in her “peripheral blood” (259), which means that she will be lucky if she lives for eight more weeks—when Zoey’s baby is due.

Adam visits. Tessa tells him to be honest with her rather than polite and standoffish. He responds by getting in bed with her. She makes him promise to have sex with her one last time before she dies. 

Tessa is impatient to get out of the hospital, having “even missed Easter” (263). Both the nurses and Doctor Wilson, however, tell her that she is too ill to go home. Doctor Wilson tells her that the blood transfusions that she has been receiving last for less and less time.

Tessa decides to escape from the hospital on her own. She sneaks out of her hospital room, goes out on to the street and hails a cab. She loves the ordinary sights and sounds of the city around her: “I like it—the stall and shove of traffic, the deep thrum of a bus engine, an urgent siren in the distance” (266). 

She directs the cab to Adam’s house, where she surprises Adam’s mother Sally. Sally expresses shock that Tessa is out of the hospital, and tells Tessa that Adam is not home. He has gone to Northampton for an interview at a university. He has made a sudden decision to start college in September. 

Angry with Adam and frustrated with her condition, Tessa destroys everything that she can find in her bedroom, ripping up dresses and books. She throws the remnants out of the window, even including a television set.

Tessa’s father comes home to discover the mess in the yard. He is furious with her at first, but his anger soon turns to sadness. He and Tessa have a wishful conversation, during which Tessa describes an imaginary alternate future in which he dies before she does. Cal then comes home from school, and helps their father to clean up the yard, while Tessa watches them through the window.  

Adam comes over to Tessa’s house, and the two reconcile. He is only going to college because he cannot bear the thought of staying home once she has died. Tessa jokingly suggests that the two of them commit suicide together, and they both laugh at the idea. They then have sex for one last time.  

Philippa, Tessa’s home nurse, gives her some final instructions for her last days. They hug goodbye, and Tessa reflects that she has grown to appreciate Philippa’s difficult job.

Tessa’s father asks what he can fetch for her. She would like a pen and paper. While he is downstairs making her tea, she writes him and the rest of her family a detailed list of instructions for her funeral and death. Among other things, she does not want cremation or to be stored in a freezer. She would like a “bio-degradable willow coffin and a woodland burial” (284). She provides a list of songs that she would like played at the funeral and instructs her family to spend the remaining 260 pounds in her savings account on a lavish lunch afterwards, instructing them all to eat dessert.  

Cal visits Tessa in her room. Their exchange is stilted at first. He shows her a few magic tricks, and they make some awkward jokes. When she asks him whether he can saw her in half, he suddenly breaks down sobbing. She does her best to comfort him, telling him that she loves him.

Adam comes by and climbs into bed with Tessa, telling her that he will soon be sleeping in a cot on her floor—he assumes that she will not feel well enough to be touched. She sees in his eyes that he is “terrified” (288), so she accepts this plan. 

Though Tessa is increasingly frail, she spends a sunny afternoon on her lawn with Adam and Zoey. She fades in and out of consciousness, dreaming that Zoey’s baby has already been born and that her full name is Lauren Tessa Walker.

Tessa imagines her exchanges with her friends and family as “keep-death-away spells” (293). All of these interactions are loving and attentive, holding people close to her, literally and otherwise. 

This chapter consists of short, fragmented paragraphs, indicating Tessa’s increasingly fragmented consciousness. Occasional sentences are unpunctuated as well, and there are italicized segments, indicating Tessa’s “instructions” for her family members after her death (299). It is unclear whether she has actually written these instructions or whether she is merely thinking them. She also has a reverie about a “mad psycho” choosing her out of millions of people as the person who is doomed to die young (298).

Tessa has brief, mundane exchanges with her brother and her father. She hears her brother having a tantrum downstairs in the living room, for which he later apologizes. Later, her father takes her hand at her bedside: “His fingers look raw, as if they’ve been through a grater” (299). 

This chapter is a single paragraph long. Tessa wakes up in the middle of the night to find Adam gone, and in a panic rings for him with her bedside bell. She is convinced that she is about to die. He comes back to her room, having gone downstairs to make a cup of tea, as Tessa complains: “I don’t care about his cup of tea. He can drink tepid water from my jug if he’s desperate” (301).

Tessa wakes up and sees Adam in the cot at her feet. He has slept there because she was in pain the night before. He asks her whether she would like anything for breakfast, and she reflects that although she has had “a lot of love” from him, she hasn’t “been loved this way for long enough” (302-303).

Tessa’s mother shows Tessa old photographs and tells her stories about her childhood, which occasionally confuses Tessa. In her weakening state, Tessa sees the words coming out of her mother’s mouth as colors and imagines stories that never happened to her: “I weep for a dog, hit by a car and buried. We never had a dog. This is not my memory” (305).

Tessa imagines herself as her mother in her youth, when she and her father were courting: “I’m Mum on a pony trotting across town to visit Dad” (305). She also relives her mother leaving the family when Tessa was 12 years old. 

Tessa is now too weak to talk, and her conversations with her family are mostly in her head. She tells her father how much she appreciates his patience and selflessness and gives Cal advice about his love life. She instructs her mother not to abandon Carl once she has died, and to be nice to her father. Her mother tells Tessa that she loves her, which she has never, in Tessa’s memory, done before. 

Tessa wakes up with Adam beside her. She hears Adam and her father discussing whether she needs more morphine. She experiences her own fading as “turning off the lights one by one” (315), and has a reverie about a drowning sandcastle that she once built with Cal. Although her hearing is “fractured” and delayed (316), she hears occasional snatches of the conversation between Adam and her father. Her father thanks Adam for his devoted caretaking; Adam tells her father that he loves her.  

Tessa spends a final moment with Adam, Zoey, and her family. They talk around her, despite insisting that she is alive and can hear them perfectly well. Cal says a reluctant tearful goodbye after their parents prods him; Adam strokes Tessa’s face and kisses her.

As she lies in bed, Tessa remembers scenes from her recent past, such as her name written on buildings and the dead rook on her lawn. She also has large thoughts about the creation of the universe and morbid speculative thoughts about the end of the world: “The human race dies out and cockroaches rule the world. Anything could happen next” (322). Her final awareness is of the random, quiet world outside of her window: “The sound of a bird flying low across the garden. Then nothing. Nothing. A cloud passes […] Light falls through the window, falls onto me, into me” (327).