Dr. Mata

I am awake hours before our 8:40 AM appointment with the oncologist and start working on waking Marlou before 7:00.  She sits up reluctantly, gripping the mattress edge for balance and stares puzzled at the hotel carpet.  Now she rises slowly and wavers as though uncertain where she is.  Staggering, knocking against the wall she heads to the toilet, vomits.  She returns to bed.  Twenty minutes later she is up again, and somehow, we are out the door on time.  Marlou lurches through the crisp morning, holding the handles of my wheelchair.  She really needs one of her own, but never mind.  We are making progress.  

And within the hour Dr. Mata flings open the door of an examining room, slides a chair close to Marlou and positions herself, all in one fluid motion.  She asks Marlou how she is.  The answer couldn't be clearer: garlic.  Does the room smell of garlic, Marlou asks, and isn't it coming from Paul?  And if he just left the room for a moment wouldn't we know?  Actually, I wonder if Dr. Mata hasn't been hitting the vindaloo curry pretty hard herself.  Okay, I say, I will leave the room.

The room I will leave it is a sterile, windowless cube, cut off from everything, including sound.  The examining table sighs.  Dr. Mata pats my knee.  Her other hand is rising, fingers moving up Marlou's cheek.  She is touching both of us now, but looking at only one.  You have mounted a brave effort, she tells Marlou.  And now it's time for something else.  Marlou needs no more treatment.  Her decline has been swift, the doctor says.  The only goal now is comfort.  Dr. Mata has a hospice service in mind, an excellent team that can keep Marlou at home, in her own bed.  Dr. Mata, holds Marlou's fingers in her left hand and continues to hold her face with the other.  She keeps her hand on Marlou's cheek, tears streaming down it.  Time, seconds or minutes, I cannot say, passes.  Marlou, you have been very courageous, she says.  Maybe it's time to let go.

Dr. Mata has left a molecular biology laboratory at Berkeley for this, clinical work with patients.  God knows why.  But as though reading my thoughts, she tells us now.  I have learned much from both of you, she says.  Dr. Mata has recently had a baby, and the infant's picture stares at me across a jar of cotton balls.  I stare back.  Marlou is crying and I am crying, and everything has been leading to this.  And now all the world's possibilities are in this room.  A silent class of second graders has risen, tiny hands holding the backs of chairs, and they are staring at us.  All are present, no tardies, no absences.  They know what is happening to the adults.  They are waiting.

In our hotel room Marlou stares at this morning's room service fruit plate.  She gathers a few items from the bathroom.  I do the same.  She stretches out on the bed.  I want to call the bellman and ask for help with packing.  Marlou sits up.  She goes about the gathering and arranging and packing of things.  When is checkout time, she asks?  Still 11 a.m., I tell her.  Sarcasm has me in its grip.

Marlou does not want to go home.  She wants to go to a healing service at Menlo Park's Episcopal church.  I am very tired, but one doesn't argue with such requests.  Before I know it, I am parked and sitting in a redwood chapel, and the English rector is asking if I want to take part.  No, I tell her, and there is no time for explaining.  I try to smile as warmly as I can.  This woman has come to our home, talked to Marlou in privacy, and the least we can do is turn up here, it seems.  I watch the ceremony.  The Eucharist, I learn, is not a church object, but the communion ceremony.  I want to ask the British minister about the article.  After all, it's not 'the Christmas' or 'the lent,' so why is it 'the Eucharist?'  But this is no time for questions, and all I can do is thank her.  Marlou is not a churchgoer, and now she is here in this woman's chapel, and she is welcome.  And she is dying.

Marlou enters our apartment, eyeballs the scene and pronounces the new carpet too light.  She had thought it would go better with the furniture.  She falls heavily asleep on her bed.  The hospice nurse phones to announce she is on her way.  Within the hour, she is at Marlou's bedside, getting her patient under the sheets, pasting stickers with the hospice number on every phone she can find.  She is Irish, miniature and voluble.  I can tell her narrative is driving Marlou nuts.  By the end of the afternoon, another nurse, a trainee, has joined her.  Also, a social worker.  Everyone is trying to get the lay of the medical land, sense the psychological environment.  And chat.  Marlou is not a chatter even when she is well.  I lie beside her on the bed.  You have to get these people out of here, she tells me.  I assure her they will be gone soon.  This is a lie, but it will do.

Marlou can barely speak.  One side of her face is losing feeling, she says.  Also one arm.  A leg is weakening.  Can you feel in this one, I ask, stroking the arm nearest to me?  Yes.  There is nothing to do now but lightly rub Marlou's forearm.  I know that human limbs can lose feeling.  My left hand, the only one that moves, hasn't registered tactile reality for more than 40 years.  But I can feel the warmth of Marlou's skin.  A soft womanly glow passes from her to me.  It has been passing for years, and I have barely considered it.  Now, it is all there is and seems to have always been, everything to me.  Marlou and her hypersensitivity and her quality of heart and now, yes, her anger and always her unflinching sincerity, all this is now emerging from her right wrist.  

I lean toward her, a major neuromuscular event, getting my torso on its side so that I can rest my cheek on her palm.  Marlou's hand on the side of my head sends me into the usual swoon.  In these moments, I am utterly secure, loved and nearly amniotic.  People are arriving soon.  The next day will bring more nurses, friends have announced their visits and Marlou's parents will spend no more than a few days in their Oahu home before boarding the next plane for San Francisco.  My brother and sister, families in tow, will arrive next.  I can see at all, Gianni Schicchi with a house full of wailing, but no one laughing and no Puccini.  I can take it.  What I cannot take, at least not now, is the certainty that this very hand beneath my head will soon grow cold.