#SOL17: The Constancy & Curiosities of Love

Last Valentine's Day with Rob in the Palliative Care Center

I.

Today,  I am thinking of you who I don't know.

I see you waiting beside a bed--the lamp light casting a partial shadow on papers you have long forgotten you hold. Or perhaps it's your hand I see reaching to pick up a phone and silence the ringer. Noise shatters the near silence you have come to know. Or perhaps it is you who let winter's coldness in through the doors that still revolve as you rush beyond them into the well lit foyer of a hospital you know too well.

After the death, you may well wonder, how is it that you have found yourself here? Here where the shoreline fails to meet the edge of earth. Here where nothing is sure. Here where the widening space grows too big for your slight body to bridge. Here where machine sounds and the drone of 10,000 bees are impossibly loud. Here where you have forgotten the cadence of your own name.

This is what it means to know an ending, to accept the mortal limitations of self and the one you love.
You will not save him.
You will not save her.
You simply cannot do so.

And now, your life depends on knowing this.
Feelings will come later.


II.

If only 
If only I.
If only I could.

If.

During the last month of life, Rob struggled to breathe and I struggled to save him.
Is there anything as loud as the constant hum and drone of a machine pushing oxygen into lungs that will fail?
And they did.

I kept wanting to save him thinking, This. This is what I was born to do. 
I couldn't.
I didn't.

His life was never mine to save.


III.

After his death, it was a sound like distant bees buzzing that I recall. A long, dark tunnel raised up from the sea like Jonah in the belly of the whale and I knew the comfort and pain of dark interiors.

There were narcotics to be bagged for the police. Liquids drugs to be washed down the kitchen drain. The funeral home to call for transport and clothes gathered and bagged. Everyone seemed to have a job in the aftermath but Dev and me.

I had been so very busy for months.


IV.

Still. So still.

My son sat next to the hospital bed and held his dead father's hand between the two of his. I gathered the adult diapers, the incontinence pads, the medical gowns, the yellow tubes of hydrophilic wound dressing, the too-many-to-count bottles of bedside-care foam body wash, the never-used contour bed pan--all of the things my Rob would have hated and dumped all of it into the garbage. I watched until my son released his father's hand. That was my job, one I promised Rob I would always do.

Watch over Dev, he told me an hour after we learned he had just weeks to live.
Watch over our son. Love him for me. 

To keenly watch is a language of love--one Rob taught me. I have been practicing this way of noticing for the last 30 years.

Later when it was time to sleep I took my phone as I had for the previous 6 months of nights and placed it next to the bed.

The phone did not ring.
There would be no calls from Rob ever again.


V.

I couldn't quite drown the buzzing, not for weeks.
Someone later would tell me, nothing will be the same, and this is the one truth I know a year later.

Nothing is the same.
Nothing.
And some days I am the better for it.
Some days, not.


VI.

After the death,  it's the existential loneliness that most seems to cause distress. My marriage, like yours, shielded me from the truth that we are all alone.

Now loneliness seems sharper, more acute, in the absence of the man I loved and do love.

VII.

A year has past, folded itself and disappeared, like smoke, like ash.

A year later and I know like I know my own name that how I loved Rob in the years we had together and how he loved me mattered more than any charade of life saving I might have dreamed, surely desired.

We were so flawed in our love for one another.
So beautifully flawed.

And that slim truth--that our expressions of love were flawed, is what I hold closest to me these days.


VIII.

Dear friend I do not know.
Dear friend who now enters this club of widows and widowers--a club you, nor I,  hardly wanted to join--the buzzing will clear.
Clarity will return.
Sadness will be redefined as too-sharp moments.

And there will be whole days of joy.

I repeat. There will be whole days of joy.

And beneath that joy--your one precious life will bloom in ways you could not name today. And I hope this blooming brings with it a measure of peace, and something unexpected.


IX.

A friend sent me two words when I was losing Rob, when I was watching him die.

She wrote, Stay curious.

I have. And staying curious has made the most difference.

#SOL16: What Remains

House in the Country (M.A. Reilly 2013)

I.

How can he be gone when all of his stuff is still here?

I try to avoid this room, but last night I came downstairs to walk a bit on the treadmill next to Rob's desk. And though I have cleaned up many of the things Rob had left, so much still remains, more than I can shoulder, more that I want to bear, but I do. A few weeks ago, I finally folded the acorn-color cardigan with the leather-covered buttons he always wore while writing and working at his desk. The sweater is now tucked away in our closet. Before I put it away, I held it up, burying my face in its softness and I inhaled. And there was Rob--so very, very faint. For months after Rob got sick and could no longer climb down the stairs to his office, the cardigan remained wrapped around the back of his desk chair. It was as if he had just taken it off and perhaps had gone to another room to answer the phone or get a class of water or make a cup of tea. That's how fast the cancer and infections changed our lives.

There is the sharp desire to find the man I have lost, the man who was gone so quickly, to find some sense of him in what remains.

II.

After death, there is the illusion that everything waits. My husband's teak desk waits for his return. The heat of day waits for the cool dusk to arrive. The unstructured summer days grow tired and want to give way to the comfort of routine that comes with fall. But this waiting is a story I have tried to live. The want to live is strong even when grief feels limitless.

Life presses on.  Most days I feel this press with a certain urgency. The distance between Rob alive and the present grows greater, obscuring what I can see in my mind's eye, what I can remember. The faint scent of him in the sweater was bittersweet for everything smelled like a hospital, like medicine, and death. The sweater was untainted and held a brief, slim reminder of the man.

And all of this is another form of loss. It is a loss that lends definition to this unfamiliar life I now call my own.

III.

I must confess that at first after Rob died I wanted time to speed along. I prayed for the rapid passing of minutes, hours, days, weeks, and then months. I wanted to roll time along and feel its healing powers.  Now, I feel the slice born from such desire and want to drag my feet, to remain as still as I can be in the moment before his last breath. In that awful moment when I could at least still say Rob was alive. There is nothing but a body after that last breath. Nothing familiar. Nothing once loved. The tenderness of life is gone. But even before that last breath, he was more absent than present, deep in some sleep I could not touch.

So perhaps I want to dwell in late November when the three of us celebrated Thanksgiving and we could not see what was before us even though we knew more than we could not say aloud. Then Rob still sounded like himself and though I know now that each day the spinal compression grew worse, the cancer wrapping itself around his spine like a boa constrictor, I did not know then that he would die before winter ended.  We simply did not see that possibility.  So not then. Not when life was so quickly ending.

Better to linger back three years earlier when the tumor in the apex of his right lung was finding ground. Then, yes then. That was the time to intervene to rid his body of this awful awful disease. Then we were readying to travel to Italy and on to England.  A summer holiday, so halcyon in memory. Then we lived with no warning of what was growing in his lung.


IV.

There is no return to the past without the full knowledge of what will happen. And such knowledge is a price too large to bear.

Each day that passes distances me from Rob and so I want to hold on to what I can't actually grasp and exist in this in-between world where there is no time, there is no death.

The anchor I have always known as my husband has given way
         and I am drifting
where the current flows.

I tell you even my will has forgotten its name.