a wonderful life

Two to six weeks, the nurse tells me. Didn't Rich tell you?

I ask him. He says he has no memory of seeing the Hospice physician. I believe him. He can't remember much anymore.

This isn't Rich.

A friend from childhood sends me an e-mail. He remembers the boy who played a winning-is-everything game of "Risk," who was smart, who helped others, who never had a bad word for anyone.

So the man I knew, who was this and so much more (including the "Risk" strategy -- I played with him once, and never again).

I'm now taking care of the details of life that Rich actually enjoyed.

This isn't me.

Soon, there will be no more "us." After so many years, I can't imagine another way of being.

We had a wonderful life.

Before I leave him tonight, Rich sadly mumbles. I ask for a repeat.

"Our marriage went sour," he says.

"When?"

"Last few months. It's been death, not life."

"We had a wonderful life," I say.

He closes his eyes. Go now, he says.

An hour later he calls.

This is Rich. Voice light and upbeat. He will see me tomorrow, have a good night, it was a good day.

And this is what I want to remember when he goes forever, and there will be no tomorrow.

Candace

even to the dregs

We are in the Hospicare kitchen, the Sunday volunteer and I.  I'm heating up Rich's dinner of a friend's home-made calzone and my farmer's greens stew while he's making a grilled cheese sandwich for another resident.

"Excuse me," he says, "but are you okay?"

During the past four weeks, we chatted while preparing our meals.  Today I'm silently efficient.

I hesitate.  

"My husband is dying.  Of course I'm okay."

He assembles a pastor's face.  He pats my shoulder.

I decide not to kill him.

Earlier in the day I had a latte at my usual coffee spot.  Although the coffee is excellent, it is never served with frou-frou floating atop the steamed milk.  Except today, when the barista who knows me, knows Rich, hands me a surprise. 

I will have to drink this through a heart.

"Thank you, " I say, going moist.  "You made my day."

She smiles, a bit embarrassed, and turns to the next customer.

I decide I love her.

And the heart stays whole, even to the dregs.

"You're such a softie," Rich says when I tell him about my heart latte.

"But not with this volunteer," I say.  "I'm not here to make others happy."

And then he tells me about the morning's nurse who, he says, is angry with him, and he says he will try to behave better.

"You're not here to make her happy, either," I flare.

He looks at me, bewildered.  

"Aren't we all here to make others happy?"

I say nothing.  I put my head in his lap.

I decide my heart will stay whole, even to the dregs.

Candace

leaving

It's more significant to leave than it is to arrive.

--Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Astronaut

Life at Hospice runs backwards.  Each day will be worse, and when it's not, when today the loved one smiles once, or eats more, or curses the nurse, we outsiders who visit say oh! she's such a fighter, or he's so tough, or the doctor gave her only two weeks but, look! it's now five...

What silliness we speak.  They're all leaving, sooner rather than later, and it's not because they're weak-kneed cowards.

They -- and soon everyone reading this -- will be explorers, too.  

Michael Collins said it well.  A hundred years from now, he said, humans will still remember the Apollo 11 landing on the moon,  but more as a footnote.  What will endure is the journey of Apollo 8, the first of the missions to escape the Earth.

Leaving behind everything familiar is the heart-breaking part.  Explorers are honored and remembered not as much for what they found, but for their courage to go.  After all, many of the "Great Explorers" got lost, didn't know where they were when they arrived, and never made it home.

I know Rich has to go.  He doesn't want to.  And I wish he were not taking so much of me with him.

Candace

more dung

It's easy to be grateful to all the good people in our lives.

But the loads of dung are what keep me sane.

Pile #1:  Medical bills for Rich's last experimental procedure, an "out of network" event.  In what other business would practitioners charge thousands for what surely will fail?

Pile #2: Today's visitor (again) flogging his religious agenda.  Rich is too polite to tell him to fuck off.  I'm not, but he visits when I'm gone.  So I send a fiery e-mail, and the Hospice staff promises to be my substitute pit bulls.

Pile #3: Rich's ice cream vanishes from the freezer, several times.  The hungry offender is a Hospice mate who can't swallow solid food, and this is easily forgiven.  But now Rich thinks that all his food is stolen, and...thank you, meaningless bills and assholes and food gone missing.

Such dung is insulation for my heart.

Candace

floaters

Floaters, my eye doctor says.  Nothing to be concerned about, quite common, often triggered by stress and depleted qi.  Most of the time, they won't cause any problems and should vanish in about three months.

Take care of yourself, he says as I leave; I try, I say.  We have known each other for many years, and we both wanly smile, understanding that his advice can't be heeded and my response is of the head, not heart.

Yesterday Rich and I were visited by the resident Hospice physician.  Rich knows him a long time; Rich's father was his patient.

"How are you?" Rich asks him, offering his left hand in greeting.  This is now Rich's only moving limb.

"The question is:  How are you?" the doctor responds, smiling.

"Some days I feel like going on, some days like giving up," Rich says.

The doctor listens.  He doesn't say how narrow is the path between the two roads.

Afterward, the doctor talks to me.  This is a different kind of cancer, he says; he hasn't seen this before.  Unlike most cancers which, in the end, hungrily consume all of the body's nourishment, a chordoma is "benign."  It doesn't travel, it wants only to feed itself.  

"It's location," I say. 

He asks me about the prognosis.  I explain what I've seen, and learned.  Once the chordoma crawls toward the spinal region that is controlling the lungs...

Rich's breathing is becoming more difficult.  

"Maybe a week," the doctor says.  "Once it gets to the lungs."

The nurse on duty reassures me after the doctor leaves.

"It will be longer," she says.  "More than a week, I'm pretty sure."

This is no surprise, I say.  I've known for years this would be the end.

I watch the pair of floaters dancing before my left eye, in the beginning trying to sweep them aside, or turning my head this way, that way, perhaps shaking them loose, forgetting they don't exist out there.  

I watch Rich floating away, and what's out there isn't him, I tell myself, he's in here, and he will not vanish.

Candace  

pain and joy are one

please call me by my true names...

so I can see my pain and joy are one.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Dave's A1 Hauling came for our bed.  For $162 and change, Dave loaded onto his truck a mattress both saggy and soggy, one that I could never imagine sleeping on, alone.  Or otherwise.

Joy for it's going; we had been wanting to get rid of it for a couple of years.

Pain for the reason, now.

Food is delivered by friends to Hospice almost every night.  So much, I'm considering moving our mini-fridge into Rich's room so that we don't consume all of the space in the communal kitchen. It's an international feast, of Norwegian fish balls, homemade pizza, Costa Rican rice and beans, tempeh stew.  And lots of ice cream, sorbet, gelato.

Joy for the care with which it is made and seeing the faces who deliver it.

Pain for watching ever-hungry Rich awkwardly fork the meals mostly into his mouth, always some dropping onto his shirt and lap, eating not at a table -- never again -- but half propped upright in his Gerry Chair.  

Friends come one afternoon and make music on baroque recorders.  Others, a few days later, come with voice and harp and dulcimer for a donations-requested performance, all proceeds going to Hospice's music program, and when Rich hears how can I keep from singing...

He cries.  For the first time, almost ever.  For joy in the beauty that he tastes.  For pain in its vanishing.

Today I took a "day off" to focus on sleep, chores, errands, yoga, and a leisurely cafe au lait.  We spoke on the phone, but I did not visit.  Rich says I need the rest, and I know if  I did not take these 24 hours, my heart would be taken over by a frustrated Rich taken over by a tumor and all the reasons I loved him would be forgotten.  

Love him, not loved.

Joy for the past -- and now.

Pain for the past -- and now.

These are our true names.

Candace 

 

a great life

Rich's identity is being stripped away, piece by piece.

As physicist, for one thing.  This life no longer is held in his mind.  

As athlete, for another.  He no longer tries to walk because the nerves have stopped sending the necessary signals, and in response the muscles yawn and take their rest.

What remains is the best.  It's Rich, refined, growing into a peace unseen in weeks and months as the battleground shifts from "beating it" to "bearing it" and letting the chordoma carry him into the land where bullshit ends and life begins.

"Thank you for a great life," I say, sitting in the Hospicare gardens with the sun beaming on us.

"Life is meant to be great," he says.

At this moment, there are no other possibilities.

Candace

wanting

What Rich wants, no one can give him.

He wants to live.

He wants to work.

He wants to love me.

Instead, visitors bring food.  And a boom box, CDs, a message board, flowers, a plant.

"People think they know what I want," he says.

He eats the food.  

What he doesn't want is crazy religious talk, or miraculous cures talk, or talk that goes on and on and on.

Because Rich isn't going on and on.

Each day, another piece of Rich is going, and this isn't what I want.  After returning home from Hospice each night, I stay up late in a house filled with him and cry and then watch my anger -- not at the illness (the poor chordoma is just trying to survive, too) and not at any god, and not even at his dying (this is a habit humans seem to have).  It's at the times we hurt one another, and disappointed one another, and forgot to ask the question that slams into me now, over and over: What if I never touched him again?

I know the answer.

What a great dance it has been.  Even if we forgot too many times that, one day, the music would stop.

Rich is still here.  This is all I want.

Candace