Before I Die

 “She’s very pale and very blonde and her acne makes her look kind of savage. I’ve never had a spot in my life. It’s the luck of the draw.” 

There is a certain amount of irony and understatement in this observation about Zoey’s acne, given Tessa’s own, much more significant health problems. It is not the first time in the novel that Tessa will muse about the randomness of fate.

“If I keep dancing, the dark corners of the room won’t creep any nearer, and the silence between tracks won’t get any louder.” 

Tessa is often motivated by the idea that constant motion and activity will fend off her illness and allow her to act out her anger. While her manic activity may keep her hopelessness at bay for a while, it also prevents her from really noticing the world around her.  

“Maybe we don’t have to have sex. Maybe we could just lie down and snuggle up, find sleep in each other’s arms under the duvet. Maybe we’ll fall in love. He’ll hunt for a cure and I’ll live forever.” 

While Tessa has picked up Jake in a nightclub to lose her virginity to him, her sexual aggression masks a need for stability and comfort. Though she is determined to live fast and boldly, a part of her wants rest and relief. In this way, she is more like her best friend Zoey than either of them realizes. 

“I tell her where Mum lives. I confirm there’s no emergency. I wonder if Mum’ll get sent some kind of bill. I hope so.” 

Tessa calls a psychiatric hotline while visiting her mother but is unable to articulate her problem to the operator. This is because she can’t quite describe her anger at her mother’s offhand style of parenting, which flares up during small moments. In this situation, Tessa is mad because she has suddenly realized that she is unable to confide any of her deep stresses and fears to her mother. 

“Pinpricks of light like fireflies bat against my eyelids. I can hear my own blood coursing, like hooves pounding the street. The grey light outside the hospital window thickens.” 

While enduring a hospital check-up, Tessa imagines her body as an apocalyptic nightmare, with scared running horses and flashing lights. Her imaginings echo the painting she sees on her doctor’s wall, which depicts a scene from the 16th century bubonic plague epidemic—a panicked running woman in a darkened field. Tessa deeply identifies with the painting’s sense of inevitable destruction.   

“‘I hope you die while I’m at school!’ [Cal] hisses. ‘And I hope it bloody hurts! And I hope they bury you somewhere horrible like the fish shop or the dentist’s!’” 

While Cal knows that his older sister is dying, her illness has become part of his background and her impending death is still not quite real to him. His exaggerated nastiness hides his deep grief, a feeling that will emerge later in the novel.

“All matter is comprised of particles. The more solid something is, the closer the particles are held together. People are solid, but inside is liquid.” 

Tessa makes this observation while throwing keepsakes into a bonfire, one of the times she angrily lays waste to treasured childhood items. As she burns her belongings, she compares the impermanence of objects with human frailty—and with her own frailty in particular. 

“But I want to show [Cal] the rats on the towpath, the leaves ripped screaming from the trees, the way people avoid what’s difficult, the way this man in pajamas is more real than Zoey, trotting up behind us with her big gob and silly blonde hair.” 

Tessa’s illness makes her impatient with the masks that people wear. To Tessa, people’s social hypocrisy is just as ugly as is the sight of river rats. Her desire to show her younger brother Cal the darker, rawer side of life is heightened by the fight that she has just had with her friend Zoey, and by her sense of Zoey as compromised and hypocritical. 

“Even when I was a really little kid, I recognized the signs – the butterflies that crisped up in jam jars, Cal’s rabbit eating its own babies.” 

While Tessa generally thinks of her illness as random bad luck, she also occasionally thinks of herself as fated and doomed. In this quote, she speculates that her morbid sensitivity and alertness to the dark side of life led her to get sick. 

“She turns to go, then at the doorway turns back. ‘You want some sweet and lovely things, Tessa, but be careful. Other people can’t always give you what you want.’” 

Tessa’s mother’s advice is incongruously sensible and restrained, considering she has spent her life chasing what she wants, with little regard for the consequences. It shows her mother’s complexity and suggests that her independence has been harder than she lets on. 

“It’s so difficult to get what I want. I worry that people only give me things because they feel guilty.” 

As Tessa grows sicker, she needs comfort from the people around her, but has a hard time accepting the fact that people are driven by both selfish and selfless desires. Before, she felt a need to escape these bonds and obligations because depending on people was more frightening to her than her most dangerous escapades. Now, she just wants her loved ones to act less out of pity towards her and more out of a genuine desire to take care of her. 

“But I still care. When am I going to stop caring?” 

Tessa discovers that dying is not a slow and peaceful fade, as movies often portray it. Even while her body weakens, she is not reconciled to the idea of leaving the world.  

“I like it – the stall and shove of traffic, the deep thrum of a bus engine, an urgent siren in the distance.” 

In her increasingly weakened and isolated state, the ordinary sights and sounds of the world console Tessa. She appreciates the chaos of a city street after being in the hospital, alert to the raucous clashing sounds of traffic because of her love of man made and natural storms. The traffic noises mirror her angry, conflicted, and determined internal state.

“Rain lashes softly at the window, washing [Cal and Dad] transparent.” 

Sometimes Tessa feels like a ghost; other times, the people around her appear ghost-like to her. As she watches Cal and her father clean up the deliberate mess that she has made on their lawn, by throwing all of her things out of her bedroom window, she sees that they have turned a frustrating duty into a lighthearted treasure hunt. Her illness has transformed them almost as much as herself.  

 “But he glows with the future. I can see it in his eyes. He got on a train and he went to Northampton. He’ll go to so many places without me.”

Tessa can often see the hope and resilience of the grieving people around her better than they themselves can. Even while Adam sees no future for himself without Tessa, she sees his future as a kind of aura around him. The suggestion is that to be alive and healthy is to be inherently optimistic. 

“Fat, kind Philippa, helping all the people between London and the south coast to die.” 

Tessa initially resents her home nurse Philippa, but eventually grows to appreciate her. Though Philippa seems staid and bossy at first, Tessa gradually sees that she has her own brand of tact and directness, honed from years of working with terminally ill people. The main reason Tessa so dislikes Philippa at first is simply because Philippa’s presence reminds her that she is dying.  

“Number eleven. A cup of tea.” 

As Tessa’s world grows smaller, her desires become simpler and easier to fulfill. Formerly she yearned for fame and foreign travel, but now she simply craves a cup of tea. At the same time, her needs grow more elemental and enormous: She wants the people around her to rescue her from her dying.

“I want a biodegradable coffin and a woodland burial.” 

Tessa often attempts to make sense of her dying by situating herself in the natural world, as opposed to the constructed, social world of her friends, family and school. Here, she does so literally, planning her death so that it disturbs the natural world as little as possible, and instead contributes to the cycle of life

“‘I’m going to be the only kid at school with a dead sister.’” 

This statement is typical of Cal’s layered repartee with his sister Tessa. It is jokey and flippant on its surface, while also expressing his grief and distress about being left behind. It also shows the degree to which Cal, as a younger brother, expects Tessa to comfort him about her death.  

“It comforts me to know that in other countries with different time zones, women are washing clothes in rivers and children are filing in to school.” 

While dying, Tessa fluctuates between a very small perspective and a very large one. Sometimes she takes comfort in the idea of distant lives going on around her, as if she is already a ghost. At other times, she only wants herself to live. 

“I laugh a lot. I’m a laughing skeleton. To hear us – Adam, Zoey and me – is like being offered a window to climb through. Anything could happen next.” 

Although Tessa’s friends and family cannot rescue her from her fate, they can still console her in small ways. That Tessa is able to laugh even while dying gives her a sense of randomness and unpredictability. More than once, she comforts herself with the thought that anything could happen next. 

“I put Lauren Tessa Walker at my shoulder and swim my hand in circles over her back. I listen to her heart. She sounds careful, determined. She is ferociously warm.” 

Tessa has a reverie about meeting her friend Zoey’s baby, who in actuality will be born shortly after Tessa’s death. In her daydream, Tessa gets a sense of animal tenacity and willpower from the baby—one that is in all living creatures, including Tessa herself.  

“please get into bed and climb on top of me with your warmth and wrap me with your arms and make it stop” 

Towards the end of her life, Tessa’s physical need for Adam becomes a primal need for warmth and connection, as much as a sexual need. The lack of punctuation in this sentence indicates Tessa’s thoughts are helpless and instinctual—something she could never say aloud to Adam.