Sex and Death by Leslie Tucker

I think about sex a lot lately and it’s because there’s so much death occurring all around me. I’m viscerally preoccupied with both, the death and the sex and I’m not certain if my morbid thoughts help me escape my animal nature or reaffirm it. Of what I am certain is that facing brain-rattling losses is making me crave the intensity of the most life-affirming act I know. Yes, the volume cranked all the way up, the licking and sweating, the hair pulling, the yowling with pleasure kind of sex. I’m seventy-three and have had plenty of experience with it.

Death first. In the last five years two of my closest friends, Elizabeth and Madelyn, have suffered the loss of their husbands. Elizabeth’s vibrant husband Art went suddenly, attacked by a “double hit” large B cell lymphoma. He had abdominal and back pain for a few days. ER docs found the tumor. Surgeons pronounced it inoperable. Aggressive, 24/7 chemotherapy followed for a week, and the treatment seemed to be working. Suddenly Art was unable to move or speak.  He died barely 5 weeks after his first stomach pains.

Madelyn’s husband, John couldn’t or wouldn’t put the cigarettes down. From the time she met the teenager with the sparkling engineering brain and throughout the course of their forty-plus year marriage, he smoked three packs of unfiltered Camels a day. His death was a gruesome one and spanned a four-year period. 

Of course, I feel queasy over the loss these two deaths represent for my two close women friends, but there’s more: these two men were the best male friends I have had in my lifetime. We were always straight with each other. No emotional forgery. We broke the code on male-female friendship at our first meetings and told the short versions of our long stories to each other with ease, confidence and trust. I don’t have any close male friends now that Art and John are gone. I miss them and I miss their perspective on the world.

 Death is conspicuous these days here in our small, closely-knit community. Healthy-looking humans of both sexes have been dropping like flies. They’re at the Wellness Center in tights and t-shirts one day, gone from the earth the next. Strong male, former college athletes, female spectacles of physical strength and agility on the tennis courts, and male and female expert hikers of our Carolina steep mountain slopes—disappearing!

Now the sex. Fresh in my mind right now is how easy, how joyful it was for a female like me, coming of age during the feminist revolution in the late 1960s, one who never shied away from asking for what she wanted, to obtain sexual pleasure. I realize how fortunate I am to have had over thirty years of boyfriends, lovers, a first husband, and post-divorce lovers, all of whom listened and seemed to care.

The final and best sex of my life was with my second husband of 26 years, the 73-year-old-man I am married to now. The man whose body has been bombarded with blood-pressure drugs since he was 26 and who was told he could not survive without them. The man who was never told that those wonder drugs would have decimated his virility, would have made him impotent, even when he and his second wife still yearned for each other. And that all the stinking little blue pills advertised on TV couldn’t fix it. 

Some days I wonder what kind of a wanton old woman must I be? The husbands of my dearest friends have gone missing from the earth, from their sight and mine, forever. My stomach churns as I mourn for them. Yet my erudite, loving husband is here with me, blabbing politics over morning coffee, – sharing mundane occurrences of our life as we plan the world travel we love. We visit our healthy children and grandchildren, scattered across the continent. At home, he asks what we need at the grocery store, he kisses me goodnight and massages my shoulders when they’re sore from yoga body planks. The honest titan of a man who when asked if I could tell this story, in full, said, “Of course. Tell the truth.” Yes, he offers me everything. Yet I am selfish, I yearn for more from him. I want to make love the way we used to, to consume each other with vigor and tenderness.

I believe that death is the ultimate insult to those of us who love this life so much, which I do, and that the loss of sex is the penultimate one. I want to scream out loud.

Maybe I’m not smart enough for the life I’m living these days, attempting to decipher and survive the physical and emotional massacre of ageing. I’m now entangled in my best friend Elizabeth’s monumental loss, how she has lost herself within it.  I’m witness to her loneliness, my eyes stuck wide open, facing her nightmare, my nightmare, and the fact that my husband could easily be next.

And this is tough: The rigid dichotomy of yearning for the most life-affirming act that is now lost to me. Making love, feeling the electrical connection to my husband, the person I love most in the world, as he slides inside and we pin ourselves together, eyes to eyes, living laser beams, the way we used to, the way we thought we always would. The shame I feel for acknowledging this longing sickens me. The understanding that the losses yet to come are more abhorrent than anything I have experienced, haunts me. Am I so self-obsessed? Or do other women have the same craving? I don’t mind that the mucosal lining of my vagina has thinned and dried, but I hope to keep my brain better lubricated, not allowing it to shed itself like a snakeskin.

No one I know has ever talked about it— and I need to talk about it.

Life’s greatest primal drives are to reproduce and to avoid death. Austrian psychoanalyst Freud, and French theorist Foucault, argued that the two are fused, that the death instinct pervades sexual activity. Foucault even framed orgasms as petit mort, or mini deaths, and my best ones have felt like I imagine death to be.  An invigorating ticklish heat followed by an intense wave of energy. Then the best part: a mind melting buzz while levitating out of my body, flesh tingling. Floating away. I want to know about other women but it’s difficult to find that information, so here is what I’ve learned about myself.

When I have been involved in intense, regular sexual activity, for weeks or months, even years at a time, my brain works better—orgasms raise cognition for me. And that’s what I want most: for my brain to function at its best, especially now that I’m older. And of course, I read years ago that orgasms ease stress by flooding our brains with dopamine and endorphins. A long-divorced friend of mine used to smirk and say that after a stressful day at work she had to make the choice of running five miles or calling up an old boyfriend to come over.

I don’t want any old boyfriends. I want my husband, the man who changed my life during the first thirty minutes we knew each other by exposing the person he was to me. The person who has been at my side, no holds barred, for over twenty-seven years. The man who convinced me that marriage was right for us, even though I swore I didn’t want or need it.

I also know that he and I do everything you have read about for handling stress and remaining intimate without having intercourse. You can save the Oprah Show solutions. We have faced down death, have made all our end-of-life decisions. We both understand our financial circumstances with precise coherence. Where the money is. Who gets which political poster, necklace or antique rug. Which adult children will handle which tasks, who will take our dogs home with them. It’s all decided and written down. Copies are in the estate lawyer’s vault.  

For now, we stride ahead shouldering our invisible carnal loss. We grab our life by the proverbial balls, plan and participate in political events, brainstorm one trip while on the way home from the last. We bask in the radiance of six healthy grandchildren who walk forward on this earth. We read and read. We talk and talk. Our conversation is decades long and never stops. We enter and receive each other with our hearts, hands and minds, in every way imaginable–without using our genitals. We hold fast to each other every day. Every damn day.

I have sung, loud, the song of the body electric, of limbs and blood and sexual desire, of the urge to live. But even the power of poetry cannot make an individual life or individual virility last forever. We die, and we die piece by piece. Most often it is women, like my friends and me, who hang on to the last, and who, in our abiding strength, embrace our longing and grieve and prevail. 

Leslie Tucker, a former Detroiter, lives on a Carolina mountainside and refuses to divulge its exact location. She is an avid hiker, zip liner, a dedicated yogi, an ACBL Life Master in sanctioned bridge, and enjoys anaything that requires a helmett. She holds degrees in business and music. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, TINGE Magazine, The Baltimore Review, So to Speak, Prime Number magazine and the Press 53 anthologies where her essay Lies That Bind won First Prize for creative non-fiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.