The Vitamins We Take

The hair started falling out in clumps that spring—post-divorce, post-layoff, post-thirty-five. Each shower became a mourning ritual, watching strands spiral down the drain like tiny suicides. That's when Lisa started me on the vitamins. "You need Biotin," she said, sliding a bottle across the café table. "And Vitamin D. You're practically translucent."

Lisa had been my friend since college, the kind who measured love in practical gestures. She was the one who found me the therapist, the one who told me my ex-husband was emotionally abusive three years before I believed her. Now she watched me count out pills with that careful expression she used for rescue animals.

The bull—it was a bull, massive and bewildered in the slaughterhouse parking lot—was the reason we'd met for coffee that day. I'd taken the photo that morning. News photographer, five years in, still flinching at death. "He looked so surprised," I told Lisa. "Like he couldn't believe this was how it ended."

"Everything looks surprised before it dies," she said, which was exactly the kind of thing she would say. Lisa worked in hospice. She'd stopped being surprised by death years ago.

The vitamins made my urine radioactive yellow. They made my hair grow back strange, coarse in some places, thin in others. I kept taking them anyway. We all have our superstitions.

Two weeks later, I got the call. Lisa had collapsed at work—aneurysm, massive and instantaneous. No warning. No opportunity for goodbyes. At the memorial, her sister handed me a bag she'd left for me.

Inside: three bottles of vitamins. Expensive ones, professional grade. And a note: "For when you're ready to stop surviving and start living again. The bull was always going to die. You don't have to."

I still take the vitamins every morning. I still photograph death. But sometimes now, when the light hits just right, I take pictures of life instead. Lisa would say that's progress.