Kyle Phoenix Answers: What is one accomplishment you are most proud of?

My mother told me she was dying but didn't want to die in Charlotte, she wanted to die in NYC where she'd been born and buried with her mother and sister. Oh, by then she'd had a leg amputated, several mini-strokes, was 250lbs at 5'2 and going on her 2nd year in a diabetic rehab because the state thought her and her husband couldn't maintains healthy habits at home. They couldn't. I'd been visiting nearly monthly and helping to bolster them financially when finally cousins begged me to come long term.

I cleaned the house, top to bottom, took plastic tarps and nailed blackout curtains down, pine sol, bleach, late at night incense and prayers, visited the rehab and for year tried to supplement, manage and help two insane people. Finally I had to take stepfather to court to get money out of his control and to the rehab she was about to be kicked out for $9k in arrears. Pulled together family meetings to try and reason with him. No avail. Finally talking to my mother I understood her desire to leave. I got an extra job at WalMart of all places because I could have my check directly buy stock that was increasing for holidays then cashed out, had savings and an adult student come down to help pack and drive truck. My mothers part was to regularly have nurses get her up and dressed for my visits and Sunday church services. Because she was a loudmouth I told her one Sunday we'll just go but I need time to get everything set in two states. Two months in, she had a cancer scare but it turned out benign. Somehow she knew stepfather was cheating on her and told me to watch him, to not go back to NYC without her.

He and I are now regularly back and forth in court as he pulled a gun on me demanding money. I stared him down and threw him out of the house. I secretly visit NYC one weekend to get things ready here, to hire a private nurse and talk to mentors to see if I'm really going to try this.

I had week of Xmas in mind because court action would end by then and traveling could be by plane with her in a wheelchair and we could settle up here, have all the power of attorney and DNR done in charlotte, filed for two months and then move.

Tuesday I'm unsure, money/stock is cashed out, I've worked crazy to have two big checks coming, nurse on call, lawyer on call, nee credit cards for student to travel under---my lawyer was like get out of NC you're home free but traveling stepfather could create drama, get NYC and you're both safe.

I'm doubting doing it. It's a lot. A lot a lot. I go to sleep and dream of five people coming to me, realize it's my grandmother, two aunts, closest cousin and uncle. They tell me sometime ms you must break the rules to do the right thing. I wake up and realize that's my fear.

Saturday night, I work double shift at WalMart and finally tell one little old lady in going, another diabetic coworker had helped me put together a supply of meds, taught me how to change adult diapers, move a large person, clean, inject insulin (a nurse at rehab I think sensed the plan or my mother said something and directly would teach me what she was doing), wash a large person, build supply bags, etc..

I'm now near diarrhea nervous but I get to rehab at 10pm (truck packed, student helped tremendously, 1 cousin knew plan, 1 didn't) and as I am about to ask her if she's sure about leaving my mother hysterically begins howling not to leave her, begging, terrified, saying we'll never see each other again if I leave. I had privately considered just moving back to NYC then going back her or moving out of house and waiting madness out.

I don't know if any of you have ever had a person beg you, truly beg you in terror, pain fear. But I was mind blown trying to calm her down as folk are coming in but I hadn't said a word about divergent plan she sensed it. I calmed her down told her to up and dressed for lunch/church by request like other Sundays.

Sunday morning I walked in and by midnight they thought she'd gone home for weekend. Monday morning fax arrived to director of paperwork and release forms. Stepfather freaked out we made local and national news as missing. Lawyer and I negotiated health check on her and I in Pennsylvania (it became a two week road trip....we met Ashley Judd....okay she stared at me as I waved excitedly at her, wanting to talk about her Harvard and UN work...my student later pointed out AJs horrified look probably had to do with the adult diaper I was holding after park employees closed off restroom \U0001f610).

State troopers met us at Super 8 and together and separately they questioned us then left, deactivating "missing persons" he'd falsely put out. We spent two weeks making our way to NYC.
I was in it for at least 6more months to years I thought as we stayed with friends till apartment was ready. I realized in hotels that no one had held her, wrapped their arms around her for years, she hadn't been in a normal bed.

Oh we argued and laughed and as her adult son our relationship deepened especially twice day diaper changes and baths.

So I figured we'd have a good year...she died in my arms one morning getting ready for the doctors. Her last words were I love you,Kyle.

The best thing I've ever done for someone that brought together all my ingenuity, faith, strength and patience, as much as it saddened me, or I miss her, I'm an only child, I learned then how to be a gladiator for someone else...and myself. All the years of her pressing me not to be so introverted, to stand up to her, and my father's chess lessons (and Thomas Perry novels starring Jane Whitefield about how to travel with your own cloak of invisibility) came to a head. 

I feel such peace at her death because I feel like a deep karmic work agreement was between us. I'd always felt she was spiritually my child, maybe a sister, never too much mother.  My godmother told me it would have destroyed me if I'd left because she would've died alone .

That within the past couple of years is the best thing I've ever done for someone.

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Suicide and Sexuality, Part 1 by Kyle Phoenix

Recently brainstorming with my small team of friends and students on book topics we circled back to when I'd done several YouTube videos on depression.  There have been times in my life when I have been depressed, mostly out of frustration for some life situation I was in or at my family or at a failed relationship but never directly at my sexuality.  Insanely enough my sexuality is something I've never felt doubt about or allowed it to be trod upon.  Conversely there have been other areas of my life where I can't say I was always so bold.  

To some degree being very intelligent can be depressing because I'm also brown and this world projects a lot onto that physical state that I really had no say in.  That coupled with sexuality have often times put me out of sync with the greater numbers in my family, with classmates, with friends and even with lovers.  I had to learn how to manage my intelligence and not suppress it and I think I'm closing in within the next handful of years with having a grasp on "using it" properly.  By that I mean I've made some funky choices in friends and lovers and knowing that I was much smarter than the choices or even the friends./lovers has driven me to depression.  And inevitably depression suggests itself to varying modes of suicide.

In my teens there was the high school love affair break up that sent me spiraling in silence---because I wasn't out to anyone and the most melodramatic almost-suicide attempt with multiple credit cards, every sleep medication I could buy, a sojourn through Prospect park in Brooklyn and then as soon as I felt the effects of the pills---I ran to the hospital in Park Slope, delightfully next to my high school.  I wanted to die because I wanted Sean to love me and be a whole lot smarter and surer than he ever was capable of being as a teenager.  I wanted peace and rest from my own self, from my own thinking, from my life.  For about ten years after that my mantra was that "I don't want to die".

If I was job hunting and it got tough.

I don't want to die.

If I was in an argument.

I don't want to die.

If I was lonely.

I don't want to die.

If I had to pay a bill.

I don't want to die.

I lived a decade focused on not wanting to die as an overcompensation to at some point considering dying.  But that too, ala The Secret was calling in the impulse, the desire to die by considering death through not dying.  Every time I brought up to myself not wanting to die I was emotionally eroding myself, my inner strength so that when I stopped chanting it to myself I was left with the alternative of dying.  

Then I died.

To be fair, I was in the hospital and they gave me the wrong medication and the meds flipped my gourd out and I literally started to feel myself dying.  My body slowed down, my thoughts became sludge-like, my life didn't so much flash before my eyes as it went through an organized check list but I just kept getting sicker and sicker until one day I lay on the bed and accepted death....and closed my eyes.

Then much like my Lana Turner twist in Prospect park a decade earlier, I woke up.  It wasn't some sort of---"I want to live!" movie scream (good movie by the way) but it was more of----oh, I'm not done here yet.  Again. 

I try to take one day a week to just rest, to sleep, to get 12 to 17 hours of sleep---to rest this mind, this heart, this spirit.  I have found that I no longer have to be everything to everyone. I regularly give myself permission to curse people the fuck out and to walk away from any person, place or thing.  That was one of the big engines of my death revelry---I had a terminal case of the Disease to Please.  I caught this disease from exposure to sexual abuse, parents with multiple addictions and my own prodigious intelligence.  My knowing gave me so much insight early on that it flooded my brain with too much information and not enough emotional maturity to handle it.

Yet I was never conflicted about how I define my sexuality including men and women, and I guess transsexuals (there was that one time.....) but not animals nor children, as omnisexual.  I sit with a lot of men, some women too and they tell me of their angst at whichever way their sexuality wind blows---ohmigod, they lament it, they sail on the pain, they crucify themselves on their feelings, on their confusion.  People tell me lots of stuff because I am non-judgmental---that doesn't mean I don't have morals or some beliefs, it means that I'm extremely flexible in what I see in people, what I expect.  Rarely am I finger wagging as much as asking---"Was that your best thought?"   I simply can't imagine being so upset by it but I have considered killing myself over break ups that now I realize I was reallllllllly lowering myself to even try and attempt to love such a person.  That I was in truth, finding ways to abuse myself and here's what makes me a motherfucker---when I connect to the bottom line truth of what I'm doing---I shift immediately.  In order for the phoenix to rise, first it must burn.

I had a friend a few years ago who was self destructive and passive aggressive but I was loyal to this friend because one of the Disease to Please and two because we'd been through so much.  Then one day I found out, ahead of time, that the friend intended to betray me and ruin my work and home stuff with some financial madness.  Suddenly I got it about this person.  Not that I hadn't gotten it years before, not that people hadn't mentioned it, not that the writing wasn't on the wall but I got tired of softening the person's madness.  I got up and silently walked away.  Not a look back, not a dark word, just bounced.

Another time I was in looooooooove.  LUV---Love! and this dude was bouncing back and forth in his madness and I was I willingly participating with him.  We went to dinner and as I was letting him convince me that he was available if and maybe I did such and such  I looked at his teeth.  They were little rat teeth to my eyes.  I got up and walked away.  I yearned for this guy, I cried for him, I pleaded with the Universe to give me this---and suddenly he arrived back as a possibility and I said no.

I realized from the two instances that those were times that I died.  That with each of them I left some deformed piece of myself that was the key, the rope in our relationship.  I killed off some element of myself to free my belief that they were appropriate for me.

Are there days when I still don't' want to die or do want to die?  Yes and no.  Oddly once I popped back from the whole hospital stuff---the death urge was gone because I was alive.  I let go of that mantra because to my own knowledge at the time, closed my eyes in what was to be death.  Circle completed.  I wish I could tell you that as an only child, the healthiest member of my family, and I'm eating kale and every other green veggie to drop a few pounds and avoid diabetes and heart disease and cancer that have buzz sawed through my family, that I don't see death on the horizon directly and passively.  I see it in the horrendous things my family have done to their bodies, I see it in the amputations and the cancers and the high sugar levels and I know that I'm going to outlive them all.  On one hand---yay, I live! but on the other hand, I'll be alone probably within a decade or so---all of my original family will be gone.  Don't get me wrong---I don't like all of them and a few of them hopefully there will be some pain in their deaths---but I will have my other family, the family I've created but not those people.  

Another "me" will have died.  No one but me will hold childhood memories, secrets, knowledge of who's in various photographs.  And not being "known" but still existing I expect will be immensely freeing and terribly lonely too.  I discovered at my mother's birthday party a few weeks ago that a cousin remembered the walls of our apartment when I was what---3 or 4 years old and when he mentioned it---I had the blurry picture.  But only a couple of people remember that.

One of the roads my sexuality offers is a sort of spiritual/physical suicide of hope of self through fear and a rapacious predatory sexuality towards men---terming them meat or trade, debasing the homosexual with sexuality.  I teach a workshop where we work on dismantling fear of men, anger at men and once I prick the skin of that beast it all comes out.  I often stand a midst anguish and pain and I have to not identify with it but see it, comfort it, reshape it maybe even bring some closure to it.  Then I go home, both energized and drained and I contemplate my own selves, all the dead ones and if there are more within me, ready to die.  And how will I know when I lose a parent or a child or a lover, if the "me"that's dying isn't just a piece of useless char but one day, the real me, the totality of me?  

Thank you for reading and if you liked this check out the other blogs or one my books on Amazon.com
Kyle Phoenix
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Top 5 Regrets of the Dying on the Kyle Phoenix blog

Don’t wait until your health fails before living the life you want to live


by: Bronnie Ware, from: AARP, February 1, 2012


 For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to 12 weeks of their lives.


People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learned never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected: denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Yet every single patient found peace before departing. Every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have not honored even half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they’d made, or not made.

It’s important to try to honor at least some of your dreams along the way. It’s too late once you lose your health. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

This came from every male patient I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks, and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks: love and relationships.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called “comfort” of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to themselves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is your life. Choose consciously, choose wisely and choose honestly. Choose happiness.