The Children

Opera, Marlou is fond of saying, teaches us that we haven't lived enough.  Whether they're pushed off castle towers, drowned in the Rhine, strangled by husbands or stabbed on the way home from the cigarette factory, lyric heroines have a particularly tough go of it.  The going gets toughest in the mad scenes.  Blood pushes Lady Macbeth over the edge, Lucia goes nuts trying to spell 'Lammermoor', and on it goes.  While in real life men go mad with at least as much frequency, only women get these scenes in opera.  

It's late afternoon.  I roll to Marlou's side of the bed for a few routine moments.  We don't do much talking, because speech has become so difficult for her.  Most of the time in bed or beside it I stroke Marlou's hand, rub her arm, tell her she's beautiful, let time pass.  She has wakeful moments, but she's mostly drowsy or asleep.  But now she's awake in her heavy lidded way.  She reaches for my arm with what in current circumstance amounts to strength.  This is it, she tells me.  Not much later our friend Laurel takes a peek at Marlou, grows alarmed and summons her mother.  Her father comes too.  We all stand around her bed.

I enjoy telling stories and don't mind if people listen.  Marlou does not like being the center of attention, which she is right now with everyone around her bed.  Laurel continues dispensing early evening medication.  Her patient turns to those assembled and manages to get out, with minimal brain-tumor mangling, 'Has everyone gathered to watch me take a pill'?  

Now I'm thinking that despite Marlou's sudden pallor, she retains remarkable health.  We call the hospice nurse just to make sure.  He speeds over.  Her blood pressure may have dropped, he tells us, but Marlou's cardiac performance is back to normal.  The nurse packs his bag and heads home.  I head for bed.

1:00 AM and Marlou is talking.  She has had it, she says.  Why can't we pull the plug?  She wants to talk to Laurel.  I yell to the front room.  Laurel appears, takes in Marlou's question and without batting an eye, explains that there is no plug to pull.  Marlou is not plugged into anything.  This is a natural process, dying.  It's a process that's bigger than Marlou or Laurel or any of us.  I tell Marlou, now in Laurel's presence, that I know she has to die and this is okay and I'm okay and people will take care of me.  And Marlou can let go.  I want Laurel to hear this, because the words are not mine but those of the Multidisciplinary and Ecumenical Committee for the Dying of Paul's Wife, a cast now numbering in the hundreds, with open auditions daily.  

These words of hospice advice, 'let go', are not proven and defy proof.  But I say them anyway, and despite her aplomb Laurel later reassures me that she feels as lost as I.  No one really knows what to do, including the person at the center of it all.  And this is the only message, the one thing I can tell my dying wife with any certainty.  That she really is the center of everything.  

At times, I understand why someone invented hospitals.  There is an
efficiency of scale in medicating, cleaning and hydrating multiple human bodies at one time.  But Marlou doesn't want to die in hospital.  And this seems entirely right.  She connects too deeply with people heart-to-heart, and she is too sensitive.  Even in her semiconscious state, this afternoon Marlou picked up on a strange voice in the house, two closed doors away...a physiotherapist whispering about my wrist.  For those of us who know Marlou, the image of her in the beeping, hallway-rumbling, bedpan-clanging, world of Stanford Hospital borders on the comical.  And there's her need for order.  Marlou stares at my shirt collar and with her last ounce of strength tries to tell me that the garment is frayed and, she gasps, out of fashion.  I want to tell her that I am too.  Marlou was born to array beautiful things around her.

With her middle-of-the-night medication, Marlou ceases discussing death or anything and drifts off to sleep.  I stare at the ceiling until 4 AM, then do the same.  But 4:30 AM finds Marlou sitting up in bed.  This is something she hasn't done, and hasn't been able to do without the mechanism of our electric bed.  But somehow she has raised herself with her own abdominal muscles.  Seated on the edge of the bed, wobbly but upright, she throws an arm to one side, turns and says to me, 'I want to go to the hospital'.

The hospital?  I stare at Marlou.  No one on the Vast Hospice Advisory Committee has prepared me for this.  It is like mid-Atlantic on the Queen Mary, deciding that you've had it with this oceanic bullshit and want to fly.  Well, I say, the hospital doesn't sound like such a good thing.  I am a bit worried at Marlou's wobbling on the edge of the bed.  

'Why am I sick, and not you'?  I fumble around, in what is left of my own mind, for Marlou's deeper meaning.  I say, well that's quite a poser.  We should talk to Laurel.  A Vast Stupidity has sucked me into its maw.

Within minutes Laurel staggers into our 5 AM bedroom.  She has a capacity for either exuding or feigning calmness.  In fact, Laurel could stand under the exploding Hindenburg, quietly note the appearance of flame and suggest that observers might want to increase their distance vis-à-vis the Grim Reaper.  

In any event, Laurel is taking all this in, Marlou sitting, Marlou gesturing and, now, Marlou yelling.  She wants the hospital, dammit.  She wants to go to the fucking hospital.  She has, in fact, 75% recovered within the last few minutes.  Now, she asks us both, why is she sick and I healthy.  She wants the poison center.  She wants me to hand her the phone so that she can talk to the poison center.  Marlou wobbles at the edge of the bed, reaches in the direction of the phone.  We are trying to kill her, she says.  She has had it.  There is even more, but the narrative is hitting me too hard, disorienting me too much, and I now expect Marlou to turn her head 360° as in 'The Exorcist'.  I flick the wheelchair control to high and exit for the kitchen.  I shut the door and call the 24-hour hospice line.  The nurse comes on remarkably quickly.  I run through my account of things.  The nurse listens.  I tell her Marlou seems uncontrollable.  A silence.  I have run out of words.  

Perhaps, the nurse asks, Marlou has accused you of stealing her money?  I haven't mentioned this part, and the question seems downright clairvoyant.  Yes, I say.  Something shifts.  Morphine, the nurse says, coupled with the other drugs, a brain tumor, and the general drift toward death often add up to temporary dementia.  The stealing-the-money thing is the most common, she says.  Will she come over, I ask?  No, she says.  A stranger in the house would be a bad idea.  What am I supposed to do, I ask?  Wait, she says.  This won't last long.

I hang up and, sure enough, sounds from the bedroom tell me that the mad scene is over.  It has ended not with an opera curtain descending, but in the way of cancer, with vomiting.  Marlou's parents are in the bedroom now.  Soon her father is in the kitchen asking me to come back to bed.  Marlou wants you, he says.  She is sleeping, barely breathing.  Lying on her side.  I am pulsing with anger and pity.  And something else.  A strong desire to run away.

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Familiar Peet's morning customers stand in the carpark, looking slightly lost, carrying on conversations.  I recognize two baristas in the park across the street.  No one is quite milling or quite moving, and the plate glass windows of the coffee salon are covered in plastic.  There appears to be no one inside.  Yet the public has assembled.  Nothing seems to be happening here.  Everything has stopped.  We know a civic emergency when we see one.  And while this unknown thing filters about our tiny suburban center, just look around.  Unaccountably, spring has blown into town.  The trees are blooming.  The daffodils are past their peak.

Friday evening and my friend Arnie produces two plates containing my Oakland cousin's Mediterranean chicken stew, a salad, some bread.  He works unobtrusively, producing food in what can only be called a presentation.  When dinner is over he will whisk things away, magically wash them and ask what else he can do.  But for now he's doing what is best, sitting down at the dinner table with me.  It has been a long time since Marlou and I did this and, of course, we will not do it again.  So here we are, two guys, enjoying each other's company and aware of the change.  This instant and unwilling reversion to bachelorhood should not seem so crushingly sad, yet for the moment it does.  Gamely, I produce a Web document, 'Jewish Mourning and Funeral Customs for Interfaith Families' and regret that I still do not have the concentration to read this or anything else.  Arnie promises to return early in the morning.  I say goodnight, and as soon as he is gone all psychic hell breaks loose.

It's quite remarkable that Marlou with her half-paralyzed body manages to get clear around the bed so that she is sitting up on my side.  Our night help, a timid Filipina woman, has alerted me.  And sure enough, there Marlou is, insisting that she wants the telephone.  She wants her oncologist to pay a visit.  This request has the ring of the rational about it, except that Marlou is essentially beyond oncologists.  There is no more treatment, just pain management.  

Marlou is furious with me.  I expect her to die on schedule, she says.  She wants her parents to come downstairs.  Her parents arrive, and she wants to call her friend Liz in Los Angeles.  I tell her she has every right to be angry.  I retreat to my office and guiltily pick up my mobile phone.  The night nurse and I have a chat.  Nothing is illuminated, and this time I stay away from the nightly mad scene until the vomiting concludes.  I angrily slide into bed.

I will sign up for a six-week tour of Saturn's rings, with an optional day excursion to Jupiter, before taking another ounce of death-and-dying advice from any expert.  No one knows anything.  My advice to Marlou that she can let go, and I am okay, all this has done nothing but agitate her.  She is refusing her newly prescribed tranquilizer, because she doesn't trust me, she says.  Perhaps she fears that she will take the pill and never wake up.  Perhaps what parents experience with their firstborn, nights of crying and no sleep, the scent of bodily byproducts, wafting about the house...maybe death comes the same way.  We return to our unpolished core, make a mess and keep everyone up at night.

One thing is for sure.  Marlou is no longer the good girl, pleasing everyone, ignoring her own needs.  She is saying what she wants.  And what she wants is impossible.  Maybe if you have the consciousness to sense your own potential, you also suffer the curse of the unfulfilled.  Marlou's spirit is emerging, and it is not always pretty, but it is always honest.  I cannot help her during her night madness, physically or psychically.  This evening when Marlou was at her highest pitch of lunacy, as she sat on my side of the bed, misdialing phone numbers and ignoring the advice of her parents...be calm...take a pill...I put the hospice nurse on hold, put the receiver down and briefly rolled into the bedroom.  You have every right to be angry, Marlou, I said.  Too bad, she said, she wasn't dying on schedule.  You have every right to be angry, I repeated, rolling out of the room.  I wasn't saying this for her, but for me.

Someone advised me to help Marlou hold her space.  We are fond of psychobabble in California.  We give space.  We share space.  Our spaces are good or bad.  And with everyone so spatial, it's very easy not to listen.  But I remembered my first real job, as a science writer.  Theoretical physicists devote their lives to space, whether it can be folded or is elliptical.  Now, holding space, the emptiness and source of creation, seems the only thing to do.

In the late afternoon, which afternoon I cannot say, for these slow days of Marlou's end-of-life agony have lost all form, the two of us talk.  A light rain is falling outside, an event of note in arid California.  My brother and his wife are visiting, if that is the word for taking over the vigil for the next few days.  They converse with Marlou's parents in the front room, while the two of us spend the evening in the bedroom.  I have parked my wheelchair close to Marlou and hold her hand.  I tell her one of my early recollections of Berkeley campus life.  From time to time I would wander into the geology building and have a look at the seismographs.  The machines came in all sensitivities.  Some could withstand an earthquake on the campus fault, others picked up temblors from Japan to Kamchatka.  There was nothing wrong with being sensitive, the instruments seemed to say.

Marlou takes this in.  She says that she sees her life as a lantern box.  She says that her light was meant to shine through others.  It has shined through me.  She says that she was destined to find love, and unselfish love.  And she was destined to lose it.

Her words render me mute, without thought.  Except for one thought.  My life began in an unhappy family, orbiting about an unhappy marriage.  I have found a happy marriage.  Where humans in their intimacy hurt each other, and then heal each other.  Where there is teamwork...until tomorrow or next week.

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I'm on one of my brief forays to the outside world and dash about Trader Joe's in search of superfluities.  Actually, I am killing time while Walgreen's puts together the hospice's prescription for mindnumbing drugs.  The current dose isn't keeping Marlou calm and anxiety-free, which explains my state of advanced fatigue.  Still, taking care not to drive into one of the shop's columns, I spot a kid sitting in a shopping cart.  He may be two years old, and we recognize each other.  My wheels have a primal appeal to little boys.  His mother is gazing hard at organic olive oils, so I brazenly give the kid a wave.  Inexpert at waving, he pumps his hand up and down, smiles broadly, and my work is done.  I don't know what my work is.  I'm running on no sleep, fight-or-flight adrenaline and dim hope.  Within moments, I'm through the check out and hurtling for Walgreens, then home.

It's not losing sleep over it.  I ponder the expression, consider its merit, then discard it.  I do not believe that Marlou's late-night conversations, however superficially incoherent, are devoid of meaning.  At 1 AM last night, she began discussing the children.  Exhausted and desperate for literal meaning, I suggested that she meant Avery, our six-year-old neighbor.  No, Marlou said with a voice heavy with paralysis and barely intelligible, she meant all the children.  First, she wanted to know how young the children would be at her funeral service.  They must be at least eight years old, she said.  Six years old was too young.  As for Avery, he would never forgive us.  He would never trust anyone again after her death.  There was no reassuring her.  She was, and is, somewhere else.

Someone must take care of the younger children, she said.  Death, though she did not use this word, would be too much for them.  I wonder if Marlou's struggles, described in a very understated way, amount to loss of innocence.  Perhaps now she knows life's savageries so well that she is seeking protection, wishing to warn others...one cannot say.  In any case, on it goes, resurging at 3 AM, then at 5 AM, this concern about the children.  They children are very real to her, and they are numerous.  I think of the kids Marlou, and I, have never had.  An early-morning pill puts her to sleep, but nothing puts her to rest.  She is working on something, working out something, churning and restive.  And, yes, it's the drugs and the swelling brain and doubtless the collapse of her organs.  But it's her.  It's what I have.  And I prefer to see and believe in her story.