One and a Half Weeks

I have a week and a half left in this body with all of the people and creatures and plants and trees and sloping hills and rivers and rocks that have been my home for a decade…or my whole life. I can’t say this out loud. I cannot find the courage.

I still have a to do list from August that is not nearly close to being done. A million unfulfilled bucket lists that wallpaper my skull.

Crying is not enough. Lorazepam is not enough. Hidden frozen special dad made chocolate cake made me smile. But then I ate it and it wasn’t enough.

I have people trickling out of the tiny cracks from long ago, some of whom were passerbys in the hallways of my awkward adolescence, filling my email and messages with so much love and support and unexpected notes of songs and dreams. I know how held in love I am by my family, my friends, my communities, people connected to people connected to people who love me and now they love me too. Somehow my cup is overflowing.

There are ancestors waiting for me in their sparkliest of sparkles to join them in song and dancing. There is music that only my soul can compose on the other sides, some with fae, some with spicy moths and butterflies, some with such tightly knit/tangled in love limbs and flesh and flesh and flesh and faith that all I can do is pick a note to harmonize and melt into their orgiastic love song, which is of course creating newness on earth…a flower, a creek, a homeless madman’s sudden understanding so he giggles because he sees us and know his time to come home is near, a gust of snow, a hurricane, a cat’s gentle purr.

I have a week and a half until I go to the deep home, the dirt home, the expansive flying seeing everything home… to angels with thousands of eyes, to Valkyries carrying me to the meat and meade…into the trunk of the world tree to hold Odin’s eye until I forget to remember…my mouth full of pomegranate seeds dripping their sweet blood down my body as I take voracious bites of her flesh, the wisdom and knowledge of all things flooding my spirit with such a love I could never dream of here in my Lindsay Lu body.

I have a week and a half to love as deeply and fiercely and tenderly on fire as possible.

I have a week and a half to dot the “T”s and cross the “I”s

I have a week and a half to show someone my nonsystem for all of the herbal remedies and teas I have made for thirteen years.

I have a week and a half to get my room to the state I want to leave it.

I have a week and a half to eat more delicious food and have a very serious donut tasting flavor texture icing filling comparison test.

I’ll be lucky if I finish a few books and look at the work of some of my favorite artists.

I hope I have time for a few tarot readings and feeding the fairies.

I hope I can tell everyone that I love that I love them.

My friend Sophie asked me the other day what my spirit visiting signatures will be. This is my gift to you.

If you find a piece of glitter somewhere strange on your body and it doesn’t want to be removed, that is me kissing you.

If you find yourself in overwhelming giggling joy as you are doing something divinely mundane like brushing your teeth or buttering toast, I am ecstatically dancing in your heart and massaging the edges of the muscles to help them stretch.

If suddenly you find mugwort, cleavers, mullein, and cornflowers where they were not before, I planted them for you.

If you suddenly feel the need to make out with flowers and then eat them, especially lilacs, magnolias, sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias, and the good roses (not from a store), also white cedar and mugwort, that is me.

If you come across slugs suspended in time and space, making the most beautiful love, I am definitely watching too.

I will be in a gentle swarm of ladybugs and the long legged spiders who chill in corners, just watching and occasionally working on my web.

One and a half weeks. One and a half fucking weeks.

I’m breathing now, finally.

I can do this.

I wish I could strap Chicken to my chest.

One and a half weeks.

From Lindsay's obituary, "Lindsay Luise Abromaitis-Smith – artist, puppeteer, herbalist, writer, lover, and pleasure activist – died on November 1, 2025, at her home in Quakertown, New Jersey. She was forty-four. She lived with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) for 13 years and ultimately chose to end her life on her terms through Compassionate Endings- New Jersey’s Medical Aid in Dying. True to her spirit, Lindsay met her death with a roaring celebration – a costume-clad festival of love, ritual, and release that she designed herself."

Photo credit to Tristan Cox and art direction to Caroline Yes