Of course, there's something a little odd. He is sitting at the edge of the hospital bed, catheter draining, and I'm on the commode.
"Very comfortable," I say (the seat is down). "Functional furniture."
"Dual purpose," Rich says. "You don't have to get up."
I laugh.
"I'm glad I'm still funny," he says.
Then the slide starts, the pretend-normal scene shifts. His brain is being squeezed and a frantic rat-a-tat begins of I have to take my pills...shave, I must shave, shower...where's the bathroom...
And for the next three hours I'm up, down, running to the kitchen, the bathroom, answering the phone, soothing him sometimes softly, sometimes not.
Then.
"I love you so much," he says. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
We wait for the ambulance to take him to the Hospice facility. We wait two more hours.
This is familiar, I say. Pre-surgery, post-surgery, all the medical visits -- those days all I could do was wait, fast, and think.
And now, nearing the end, we sit together. Waiting for Rich's move to his final home. Fasting because we're both ravenously hungry but too tired to eat as much as we need.
Now, I'm eating a late supper, of whatever. I left Rich to come home to sleep, to shower -- but not think because then I will look for Rich but I won't find him. Only his shirts and shoes and pants that he will never -- no, I won't think.
Rich calls me. Says he's tired, is going to bed, needs to find all the e-mails he sent that are missing.
"I'm so lonely," he says.
Me, too.
Candace
1 comment:
It sounds like hell, Candace. I'm so sorry. Thank you for writing about it, I can't thank you enough for that. You're really taking me deeper here too.
Rich is always going to have a really big presence, even if his body is somewhere else. Please enjoy that -- enjoy that big presence, in the closet, your thoughts, the atmosphere around you. He is not his things or even his body. That may be about all the comfort available in the situation, since the loneliness is very real. "Bleib bei dir" says my coach, when I feel lonely. It means, stay with yourself. Be your presence to yourself. You are not alone. You have you. For the "You" to be enough takes a lot of going deeper, I know. I work on this every day from a different perspective, from the "not having had a 'Rich' in my life" perspective. You have had a Rich life (he has the perfect name). Better to have lived and loved and have the pain than to have the pain of having missed it all, that absence. It's flood or drought sometimes.
Could be that coming up, following "something" (life together with Rich as it was) is "something more" even when it feels like less, because you take all with you from the "before now" into the "now." I mean to say, the loneliness and the togetherness will take you to the next place, and it will be peaceful, and you are already there, waiting for you, and there may be comfort in that.
I think learning to combat the loneliness is one of the "going deepest" lesson of all. We are born and we die alone, and in between we have the chances to connect with others and to make peace with our apparent alone-ness. The connections are real even when not felt -- connection to the self, then to others.
Hurt is part of this too. It's a hurting time, and a hurting experience. I will stay in the moment with you. Bleib bei dir. Stay with you. Ich bleibe auch bei dir. I stay with you too. One moment at a time. I love you. Heather
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