The Long Goodbye:
5-1-2011
There is no getting off the train now. We are barreling toward the last station and
the sun is dropping through orange clouds behind us. A woman who looks eerily similar to Sylvia
Plath is seated in front of us, chatting with a soldier home from war.
We flash through a gloomy city filled with dusky warehouse
buildings and bruised tenements with bricks missing from the facades and
corners, panes of glass gone from the windows.
The country, once we rumble out of the city, is stark mostly without
trees or even a long roll of landscape.
But what if I am wrong?
What if the soldier is just now shipping off to war?
***
Uyen’s legs have turned into bags of sand. She can no longer move them at all. Her vision sometimes goes fuzzy. She is no longer able urinate or initiate a
bowel movement. The tumors in her brain
are injecting heaviness and uselessness into the rest of her body. Still, when I glance over at her, she manages
a smile.
5-3-2011
There is no protected lee side on this island, friend. The idea is just to hang on through the
storm.
5-4-2011
For nearly ten days I have been lifting Uyen in and out of
bed, in and out of her chair, and wheeling her between the two in her
wheelchair. Today, she was at a markedly
low level of function. Mostly she slept
in her chair. We never engaged in any
manner of real conversation all day…not until late this evening when I
purposely glanced her way and found her eyes fixed on me. “I’m sort of bed-ridden now, aren’t I?” she
commented.
“Yes, you are,” I answered her.
“That’s not good, is it?”
“No. You need to be
upright to remain healthy.”
“Maybe tomorrow I can try to stand and walk.”
“That’s a good idea,” I affirmed.
Uyen nodded.
Tomorrow. Then, we
begin all over again.
5-5-2011
Nope. No walking
today. No standing upright. Not even so much as sitting upright. Uyen’s body has betrayed her, has become a
big bag filled with Jell-O and bones. In
the last hour, she has taken to shaking.
Strangely, she feels no pain.
A few days ago, she stopped using the 3-day Fentanyl pain
patches. She blamed them for her
“weakness” and inability to walk. She
blamed me for fouling her stomach by giving her some wrong pills at a bad time
of day. In truth, the steroids are
clawing at her stomach. As for her
trembling, I suspect her body is feeling pain and reacting to it. I sat beside her and reasoned as best I
could. “Maybe,” I suggested, “the
shaking is your body telling you that you are in pain, like the way you spasm
when your legs sense something.”
Nice try on my part.
Amazing, that she feels nothing of the cancer that has
ravaged her from head to toe. Not even a
slight headache. Today, however, is the
first day she didn’t smile at me. Not a
single smile all day.
***
We are not in this lovely sunset evening together. She has no desire to talk, but she is not
asleep, lying supine in her bed.
Sometimes, I simply sneak into the bedroom sit in a chair beside
her. Her eyes fall open and remain that
way. She looks up long at the ceiling
but is obviously seeing something either nearer or far more distant and immense
than that.
This morning, Millissa, her hospice nurse, asked me if I had
told her that it was okay for her to leave.
“She still thinks that she is staying,” I answered. “I can’t be the one to say otherwise.”
She would never forgive me for that betrayal. Not me.
I can’t be the one to cheat her out of this life we shared. I thought, as Millissa went into the bedroom
to talk with Uyen alone, about The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, the
famously grim short story written by Katherine Anne Porter.
We are not entering the pink house. We are not ascending the verdant hill. We are not so many things.
***
Did someone else say that God sometimes wields a sledgehammer…or
was that me?
5-6-2011
Uyen has developed catlike behaviors—not the quirky leaps
and quickness, not the sharp eyes—rather, she has reached the far end of the
feline spectrum. I sometimes enter her
room and find her eyes open, but both unfocused and unflinching. She now refuses food and pills and will sip
only the sparest amount of water.
Cats do that. Cats do
that and I know the reasons why.
***
Uyen’s brother called from Vietnam
5-7-2011
Uyen said today that she wants to fall asleep and not wake
up again. “I am tired of people fussing
over me,” she added.
The quiet and the unease are long.
5-8-2011
Mother’s Day. Helen
missed her connecting flight in Denver Wolf Creek Canyon ,
having caught a flight to Great Falls
A few minutes ago, I heard Uyen moaning, which has become
her signal that she wants something.
Usually she wants water. For a
while I could hold a straw to her lips and she would draw water from a glass. Once she failed at that, I took to pouring
sips in her mouth with a tiny medicine cup.
When I rushed to Uyen’s side to see what she needed, she issued the
first full sentence of the day. I didn’t
understand her at first and asked her to repeat. “I need to be stirred up,” she said.
“Stirred up?” I
leaned in closer. “Do you want me to move
you in the bed?”
“Stirred up…yeah.”
In spite of circumstances, we both laughed.
“Okay, dear, I’ll stir you up.”
***
Helen arrived home, went to Uyen’s bedside, wished her
mother a “happy Mother’s Day,” and burst into tears.
5-9-2011
Early this morning, I dragged a blanket and some pillows
into Uyen’s room and I curled up on the floor just so I could listen to her
breathing. Roxie, her little cat, has
been sleeping one her bed most of the day, purring.
Today, we began a new phase.
I am to make my dear wife vanish one drop at a time. I am the one giving her liquid morphine and
ativan. Each drop I give makes her
vanish a bit deeper inside. She has
stopped moaning for more water. From the
outside, I make giving her the drops look easy, like feeding a saved bird or a
bunny, but only I know that each clear droplet weighs a full ton. Each drop crushes both of us.
5-10-2011
Outside, in the pre-dawn indigo, the new grass looks black. The mountains are gray. So dawns the most quiet and desperate day.
5-11-2011
Somewhere near 1:30 this morning, something took me back
into Uyen’s room. Something about her
breathing. The short draw. The long holding silence. I stood beside her for a while. I kissed her cheek. I touched her hand with a single finger. Afraid to leave her alone again, I went out
into the living room and then dragged blankets and pillows into the room so
that I could nest on the floor.
I was not on the floor long before the faltering and odd
rhythms of Uyen’s breathing brought me upright and beside her again. I stood there for no more than five minutes before
I left Uyen’s bedside and leaned into Helen’s room.
“Helen. Helen, wake
up. She is very close.”
Back in Uyen’s room we each took a side of the bed and took
up Uyen’s hands. Helen was there for
only a few sparse seconds before Uyen drew in the last sweet air, gently exhaled
again. All the clocks at 2:00. The moonshine world outside gone gray. The silence with a new kind of weight
entirely new to me and Helen.
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