April 2009 Archives

After a very early dinner in San Francisco with Joe and Daria, I conduct them to the train station.  It is important that they see how things run on time.  How the wheelchair lift descends, scoops me up and deposits me inside the coach.  I stare through the fluctuations of the electric door to see if they are standing on the platform as the 6:56 rolls south.  Why any of this matters and why I want someone else to witness the efficiencies of Caltrain eludes me.  But this has been a decades-long drama of human improvement in my life, the resurrection of the Peninsula trains.  I identify with the betterment of Caltrain and want others to share this experience.  And once the train departs and San Francisco and points south flash by the windows, the spirit drains from the hurtling scenery.  I do not care.  Marlou appreciated this last, fast train in the evening, how it allowed us to get a quick and pleasant bite to eat at the end of a San Francisco day.  Alone, the whole thing seems empty and a little foolish.

I try to read.  Fatigue sweeps over me.  This happens several times a day.  Still, it is remarkable what things get done.  I manage to make one, in fact, several phone calls, to the California state retirement office.  The people are remarkably pleasant, patient, even indulgent.  Most of the time, I do not snap at them.  Occasionally, I do.  Repeated requests for my name and address prove to me that the world is an essentially stupid and uncaring place.  I let whoever happens to be on the phone know this.  It is not possible to be born twice, I tell one woman.  My address has not changed in the 90 seconds since I first uttered it, I tell a man.  No one says anything.  All tell me they are sorry to hear of my loss.  I am sorry to hear them telling me they are sorry.  Still, we get through it, the paperwork and the forms and the express mail.  There is a sort of progress.

Everything seems feeble, drained of myth, sad and empty in its sobriety.  My landlord, in his mid-70s, regularly sweeps the carport at a morning hour when I, from my rowing machine, inquire after his well-being.  How's it going, Tom?  His answer is always the same.  If he wakes up breathing, or wakes up at all, he counts himself lucky.  Neither of us even pretends this is a joke.  I nod gravely.  He continues sweeping.  I think of the lettuce seedlings I purchased days ago.  They are busy wilting in the raised vegetable garden, still in their plastic containers.  A time to plant.  A time to sow.  A time to refrain.  Fuck it all.

I know longer make the extra effort.  I decide that a play opening in San Francisco in May can open without me.  I am not keen on going anywhere, doing anything.  It's hard to remember the reason for my summer trips.  I am traveling on blind faith.  And I wish to show Marlou's nephews a bit of the world, spend some time with them and connect with someone who has a few of my wife's genes.  A sense of purpose.

Although I have little interest in entertainment, I am making an enormous effort to drive to Oakland on Saturday.  A daylong workshop on mentoring taught by a man I respect.  What on earth is mentoring?  We Americans have an endless capacity for branding.  And yet I know that beneath the jargon, there is still a place for me in the world.  Mentoring, schmentoring.  There must be something there in Oakland.  Why else would I make a 100 mile drive, north and south, in one day?

It's a long haul to San Francisco.  But the haul would be even longer if Lorna had not started turning up, virtually every morning, to get me and my socks and my shoes and my tea and my bran muffin and my clean handkerchief into gear.  She is one of those people who appeared during the Marlou crisis.  People hire domestics in relative profusion in Menlo Park, and all it took was a phone call to some friends to begin getting names.  Lorna was among them, and unbeknownst to me, I had been rolling by her home for several years.  She lives 100 meters away.  It's not much of a commute.  

It's also not much of a job, amounting to one hour per morning.  That's all I need and all I want.  Laid off from the accounting department of some big regional bank, she seems happy to have turned her attention to getting the socks on my feet.  Her help makes all the difference.  It diminishes the day's grimness.  The fact that she has sewn my torn trousers, had her husband tighten my wheelchair footrest and keeps offering to do my laundry, all this adds to the equation.  On days when she has something better to do, there's always Maria in Fremont.  Jewish Family Services even claims to have a volunteer.  My life may be burdened by loss, but the putting on of socks is only a minor part of the daily load.  Thank God for help.

'Usual', asks the Caltrain conductor?  He knows I am heading for San Francisco.  He knows me.  Being known counts for a lot these days.  I am largely unknown to myself.  My future is unknown.  And much of what I have come to know recently about life and death I would rather not know.  So the conductor and his familiarity and the snappiness of the 8:39 AM express, three stops and slightly more than half an hour to San Francisco, all of this nurtures.  I am in good hands, safe, swift and certain.

When the train pulls into San Francisco, the conductor looks at me, then looks beyond me, and asks who wants to get off first.  There is a phantom feel to this.  The wheelchair space is occupied by only one wheelchair, mine.  There is either a ghost wheelchair behind me or...now I see, this man with a seeing eye dog.  I insist that he go first.  The conductor directs the man onto the wheelchair lift, which is something like walking the plank.  The thing projects straight out from the train, hanging in space like a diving board.  None of which the blind man can see as the thing rolls forward and lowers him to the platform.  The lift returns, and I do the same.  The man has unfolded his stick and has a question for the conductor about the location of the San Francisco city tram.  Maybe I can help, I say to the conductor.

I enjoy leading Damien -- we exchange names within seconds -- to the Muni tram stop.  Along the way, I plunk his coins in the fare machine, hand him a ticket and observe his dog.  The shiny coat, perky canine disposition, unfaltering guidance through the station, negotiating doorways, aiming dead center for the street crossing markings.  The least we can do is help each other.  Damien's dad lives in Palo Alto.  We make small talk.  I get off and wish him all the best.

We are all in this together, I am thinking.  Not only do I have home help popping out of nowhere, but I've got major wheelchair backup.  I was just about to shell out a sobering $5000 for an electric folding wheelchair, seemingly the only solution to traveling in Britain without a costly lift-equipped van.  Forget it, said my wheelchair repair guy.  I'll sell you this folding one for $650.  Sold.  The receptionist in my dentist's office, my principal destination in San Francisco, knew about Marlou's death from reading my blog.  The university English professors whom I met an hour later for lunch had attended her funeral.  Now we were eating sushi.  Now enjoying coffee in the sun.  Now saying goodbye as I hail a bus.  

The bus driver stops, eyes my wheelchair and begins motioning for the waiting passengers to back off.  She is a large black woman and commands attention as she oversees the sliding and dropping of a wheelchair ramp.  I consider the thing.  It seems awfully steep.  I can imagine myself tipping backwards.  But that's how things are these days.  I imagine everything is tipping backwards, and there is nothing to do but face reality, zip ahead and into the bus.  I start up the ramp and do have this odd sensation.  Actually, it is more than a sensation but an accurate perception.  The wheelchair is falling backwards, for the angle is too steep.  Worse, I have started up the thing at an angle, so that I am not tipping straight backwards, but off to one side.  That is to say, I will fall directly off the ramp and onto the street.

Whoa.  A queuing passenger grabs one of the handles of my wheelchair and tilts me forward.  I continue into the bus.  The driver looks stricken.  She clutches her hand to her chest and all but sobs.  Her response could not be more heartfelt for her own child.  In this instant, I gape a bit myself.  It is as though an actor in a Broadway show has dropped his character and walked downstage to check on the health of an audience member.  I reassure the driver that I am okay.  No, she says, this is not okay.  This is not okay at all.  On the short drive to the Mission Street subway station she even phones headquarters and reports on the near tipping backwards of the guy in the wheelchair.  I am in good hands.

Rolling into my home alone at night sobers me.  Any number of things could go wrong here on my own.  Eventually, they will.  Life and its perils are unavoidable.  Death stalks us all.  The only question is what stance to take.  It seems to me that I live my life with a reasonable level of caution.  And a reasonable level of fear.  And there is nothing to do but keep on rolling.

I usually encounter Mr. Tran, or one of his staff, among the waiting taxis and vans at San Jose Airport.  So it is surprising to see him perched on a low wall just outside Security.  He appears much smaller.  He certainly is much smaller than his American-born counterparts.  Here, leaping to his tiny feet as a river of Southwest Airways passengers streams by, he seems part leprechaun.  He and the Chinese woman pushing my wheelchair have a blunt exchange of Asian-accented English.  Proceed directly to the parking structure, he tells her with surprising force.  She is having none of it and snaps right back.  Or she is having all of it and concurs heartily.  I cannot tell.  I cannot tell a lot of things these days.

Tran, which is actually his first name but frequently substitutes as his last, speeds up to baggage claim in a snappy two-door car.  He tells me this will be more comfortable.  No climbing into his high airport van.  Thank you, I say.  Clearly, he is evading airport rules for vans and van drivers, and I am all for it.  No one can say he is not an entrepreneur.

This becomes even clearer on the drive home.  The Sunday suburbs flash by, traffic nonexistent, while Tran holds forth on the general topic of What Bereaved Paul Should Do.  The first objective could not be clearer to him: go to Vietnam and adopt a child.  He will introduce me to his family in Ho Chi Minh City, and they will line up a child.  This has come at me too quickly to laugh off.  He is already explaining.  Not a baby, of course, but a big one.  Say about 15 years old.  

The freeway is sad and old, its businesses unchanging.  Here one can spend the night, and with a little creativity, dine with the Sunnyvale Elks.  There one can work for a French software company.  Beyond, one can rent office space.  Swedish furniture, acres of it, is on offer at IKEA.  I close my eyes and thank Mr. Tran.  He is thinking of me being alone in my apartment, I say, and he wants me to have a companion.  That this companion would be bursting with hormones, fond of harsh music and seriously considering gang membership, does not occur to him.  He is thinking of me.  

Do I get Social Security?  The answer is no, but the fuller explanation is more complicated, having to do with the benefit over time.  Foolishly, I try to explain this to him, the trade-offs involved in signing up now at one level of income, waiting a few years for another, higher level.  Is no shame, he says.  Everyone get this.  I nod.  

Mr. Tran has told me with great admiration of the impending visit of John McCain to his native homeland.  Vietnamese immigrants in America are, like their Cuban counterparts, very drawn to our nation's right wing, staunchly anti-socialist, anti-government and ultra-conservative.  This is a remarkable stance, this support of Social Security.  I make a mental note of this, pleased that the Republicans have not.

By Palo Alto, Tran is even planning my financial future.  Stocks very good, he tells me.  Now very good time.  You buy stocks?  How much?  Mr. Tran has always been like this, voluble and blunt in the way of those who fearlessly stumble into America and its language.  I tell him that, yes, I have invested in stocks.  Daytrading, he says, is the best.  Do I day trade?  Before I can answer, he tells me how exciting this is.  At evening, after his two kids are tucked away and his wife, pregnant with a third, has crashed out for the night, he fires up his computer and has a go at the world economy.  Insurance up one day, he says, down the next.  Maybe next day is up General Motors.  You buy, then you sell.  I respond admiringly.  Mr. Tran has to be right on top of things, missing no opportunities, never late, I say.  Yes, yes, he says.  And so exciting.  He builds his future.  This going to be nest egg.

You have to admire this American land-of-opportunity dream of risk and reward.  Apparently the headlines don't faze him.  Is the game rigged?  He doesn't seem to think so or care enough not to play.  I tell Mr. Tran, thinking this will impress him, that I invest heavily in foreign ventures.  International high-tech mutual funds.  No, no, he tells me.  Don't invest in Asia.  China and Vietnam are about to go to war.  I tell him that he must be joking or, at least, exaggerating.  No, he insists, a shooting war soon.  I must put all my money in the US.  He isn't investing in Asia.  How much you put in stocks, he asks?  Wearily, I gaze out the window, half expecting the familiar Silicon Valley landscape to change.  I tell Mr. Tran that I also own land, actual property, north of Seattle.  Certainly this will impress him, at least divert him from his current course.  Our discussion is getting on my nerves.

What kind of land?  What is on the land?  The odd thing about this ride is that it is so close to the pavement.  Normally, Mr. Tran arrives with a minivan.  Now and then he turns up in his own sedan.  This sports car has created an odd impression.  He could barely get my folding wheelchair in, finally jamming the driver's seat forward and wedging the thing in through the single left door, and not without some impact on my single left shoulder.  Nothing on my land, I tell him.  Just trees.  Unimproved, I say, quoting realtor jargon.  Oh, he says.  Oh, just small.  No big investment.

While this is true, I do not entirely agree.  There is a big investment in time, patience and 32 years of property taxes.  Why I bought the land, what I ever expected to do with it, and what I will do with it now are all imponderable.  Still, it is what it is, five acres of trees on the Egg and I Road, named for the novel, at the site of the literary action near Port Townsend, Washington.  Mr. Tran is puzzled at my investments.  I am childless, and he wants to fix that.  He is a fixer, Mr. Tran, and now I give him one final challenge.  My MasterCard slips out of my hands and between his sporty seats.  No worry, he says.  No worry.  We park in front of the apartment, and I swing my feet to the pavement.  I stare at Mr. Tran's shoes.  They are tiny.  I'm certain that his investment strategy includes buying his wardrobe in the children's department.  I am inclined to explore this matter with him, but we are both involved in a new struggle.

The car is low, way too low for me to stand without help.  Mr. Tran is there to provide the latter and has his arms around my shoulders.  It is difficult to see his plan.  All the weight is on my side.  On his, is sheer ebullience and will.  Okay, okay, he says.  I would stare up at him dumbfounded, but it is too dark to see his face.  This is hopeless.  He is way too small to lift me.  Still, it cannot hurt to apply the general principles of body mechanics.  I show him where to grab me under my right arm, explaining that I will push with my left.  Okay, okay, he says, is okay.  He ignores everything I have just told him, grabs me around the waist and lifts me to my feet in the same way that an ant maneuvers a raisin twice his size.  There is no explaining this, and like so much in nature, there is no documentary camera team to record what has me vertical.  Mr. Tran is now muttering okay, okay, clattering at the back of his sports car to assemble my wheelchair in the dark.  No, I tell him, grabbing his arm and crutching to my front door.  Okay, okay, I find card, he says.  

In moments, he returns with the MasterCard, I sign the receipt.  Hello, Marlou, he says.  Very nice.  My apartment is currently something of a Marlou shrine, her photos everywhere.  This one just inside the front door shows her posed by a holiday table.  She stands demurely in the background, dwarfed by her own dinner work.  The photo captures the essence of my empty house.  It is good to see Mr. Tran so cheery about her photo, acknowledging Marlou in an uncomplicated and artless way, then scooting out the door.  It is my ultimate ambition to do the same.

On Monday Lordes, my housekeeper of 20 years and namesake of Lourdes, France's renowned physiotherapy center, spotted a discrepancy in the linen closet.  Actually, to call it a linen closet is somewhat ambitious.  We are talking about whatever closet resides in the hallway, jammed between my apartment's single bathroom and the master, if one can call it that, bedroom.  The bottom shelves of the closet are given over to toilet paper and miscellaneous cleaning gear.  The upper ones house the 'linens'.  And none of these distinctions matter, of course, except that Marlou ran a tight, not to mention traditional, ship in the housekeeping sense, and conditions in this four-plex on Roble Avenue were never exemplary and now they promise to decline.  

So something was missing in the sheet and towel department, and so much is currently missing in my mind, it took a supreme effort to track the items down.  With my life spread among two apartments, one upstairs which I visit on a quarterly basis, there were not many hiding places.  All it took was a brief stop at LaunderLand.  The proprietor was momentarily puzzled, then sure enough, they emerged, one by one, each larger than its predecessor, blue-paper-wrapped bundles of sheets and towels.  Until 2 April laundry was circulating in and out of our local wash-and-fold like currents in San Francisco Bay.  Then it all stopped.  

And here they are, sickroom linens frozen in time, already acquiring the quality of a museum display.  There is so much laundry that the laundress rigs up a temporary holder made of plastic bags, hanging the load off each side of my wheelchair in the back and dropping the third packet on my lap.  The logistics of transport and the scent of fabric softener obscure the fact of how Marlou vomited and sweated out her final days upon these cloths.

Photos of my wife, large ones, have appeared framed and propped up around the front room.  It says something about my current state that I cannot recall their origin.  Perhaps we always had these pictures.  Perhaps my siblings and friends recently assembled them.  The fact that I can't remember only adds to the power of the photographic shrine which currently dominates the dining room table.  It's a permanent exhibition as far as I'm concerned.  And yet, of course, it's not, which is yet further occasion for sadness.

I can see Marlou sitting on our sofa.  The new one, of course, more or less custom-built and, no one would argue, quite beautiful.  The idea behind the sofa was, in functional terms, simple enough.  I could not easily sit with Marlou on its predecessor, a sectional that arrived from Sacramento.  That one curved around our living room and squatted low to the ground, salmon-colored and modern.  I could stand up from my wheelchair, make my way to Marlou's side, sink into the old sofa and cozily watch TV or listen to music only for brief stretches.  The backrest was inadequate.  Standing up to pee, my most frequent of pastimes, took a major effort, with Marlou, pulling on one or both arms, to haul me up.  We spent long hours far apart, as result, me in a recliner chair, Marlou on her couch.

Even when the new sofa was in place, something in me hesitated.  I resisted sofa snuggling, and for reasons that were hard to pinpoint.  And then it started happening.  I would park the wheelchair at one end of the new, higher sofa, pivot and drop into place.  Marlou would draw close to me and, through cooperative effort, get my mostly paralyzed right arm around her shoulder.  Then, the thing that was suspicious became the thing that was poignant.  I needed to be hugged as much as she.  Neither of us was confident in voicing such needs.  Yet being hugged made everything better, made everything painful rise to the surface, and made us both aware of our precariousness.  Living with cancer.  Living with death.  Living with each other.

The new sofa proved a bit too low.  It was still helpful for Marlou to grab my arm and help me stand.  Until helping became impossible.  Then Marlou began to hurt, hugging no longer felt as good, so we sat and held hands.  The weight of age or of experience was now making it harder for me to get up from the new sofa.  I bent my legs under me, leaned very far forward, sought my center of gravity and worked my way to the vertical.  It was hard work, but there was harder work to come, and then there was no work at all.

For days, I recalled scenes of Marlou's death agony.  Gradually, the scenes have gone away.  Now the apartment feels too full of things.  I don't know what to do with all the food.  There are cards that came with flowers, cards that came with gifts and cards that came with nothing except signatures, and I need to look at them all, some for a second, even a third, time.  Very little has been registering.

Already in moments the awareness settles around me that mine is the apartment of a survivor, displaying relics of the one who did not survive, full of bills to pay and forms to complete.  And then, once the relics have been shelved and the details dealt with, nothing.  It is hard to see a way forward.  But one always appears.  What is even harder is seeing the way backward.

Marlou's essential qualities come at me out of her photos.  When she lost her hair, the first time that is, she consciously decided to create a remembrance portrait.  In a headscarf, with help from our friend Clint, she staged a latter-day Vermeer, with two pearl earrings.  She wanted to take a picture, she said, while she still looked good.  This statement contained much about Marlou.  Her capacity for open-eyed sobriety.  And a matter-of-fact regard for her own beauty.  While she looked good...Marlou could sense both the 'looks' and the 'while'.  And in quoting Vermeer, who knows?  Marlou was drawn to this painting for reasons that involved more than a headscarf.  For now, it is a pleasant mystery.

As for the other photos, they show her radiance.  Even in the last year, when resignation had settled over her features, Marlou shone.  She had a warmth that emerged naturally.  There is a message in her glow.  It is a message for me.  That I can expect this of life, that I can expect to have this quality in my days.  The quality may not come from a single person in the future.  But I can seek it in the people I have around me.  Love was not easily transmitted in my childhood home, and much of my life it has not felt like something I deserved or could count on.  Now it feels like something to expect and readily exchange.  And that may be why amidst the bills and forms and items to dispose of, and the vacant travel plans and eerie creaking of my empty apartment, something important has arrived from Marlou.  Via invisible UPS, signed for, opened, assembled and now part of me.

A friend phones to interrupt my morning tea with an offer of coffee.  Being in mid-process, the tea has steeped to an angle that is near vertical.  I tell my friend yes, abandon my plans to dilute the muddy liquid with more boiling water, and down the stuff as is.  Coffee at Peet's?  Why not?  I have made it to the tea stage of the morning at 10:30, and more caffeine can only help.

It takes me a long time to dress.  It takes me a long time to sit up in bed.  It takes me a long time to consider showering.  A sleep deficit exerts a strong influence on my days, and like the debt of some central bank, there is no erasing it, for the interest is constant and the terms are hopeless.  I keep imagining a fall in the morning bathroom, skidding across the tile, something cracking.  Worst, I imagine this happening alone, lying for a long time undiscovered, dying fractured and alone.

The days are better, although annoying.  Napping at 1:30 in the afternoon, my hard-to-come-by sleep jerks out of itself with the sound of knuckles on wood.  Surely, it is my mother-in-law from upstairs, and why can't she just come inside?  Another rap.  I have swung my right leg off the bed, and the left non-paralyzed one now follows slowly, owing to the destabilizing effects of sudden movement.  My balance is not what it was.  My nap is not what it was.  In fact, it is over.  I straighten myself to standing, pivot and drop into the wheelchair.  Placing my feet on the pedals would be madness, because of the time required, so I hold them off the ground, inert right foot supported by innervated left leg, and roll, footrests folded, to the front door.  A third knock.

Outside, my mailman is standing.  He holds the afternoon's post.  There is a box outside for this sort of thing, but he has a question.  Is it true?  Chinese was his first language, English is a second, and I would not recommend a third.  Because my wit is at its end and I am operating on a thin margin, it is all I can do to talk to this man.  He has been kind to me for many years, carefully tucking my mail under the metal flap of my house address sign for easy reach.  Is it true?  He means Marlou, of course.  I nod wearily.  He visibly starts, then hands me the mail.  He tells me that he just saw her a few weeks ago.  What kind of cancer was it?  Colon cancer, I reply.  Oh, he says, down here, pointing at his bottom.  A pause.  He tells me he will do anything for me.  Just ask.  I thank him, shut the door.  And is it true?

My home gives every indication that it is.  Pictures of Marlou have been propped up around the living room.  They dominate the piano, occupy her former desk and greet visitors just inside the front door.  Marlou photographed well.  She had a glow, and this is apparent, in different ways, throughout my temporary portrait gallery.  Marlou standing demurely with quiet pride beside the table she had set for some holiday, glasses sparkling, plates shining, candles glowing.  Standing back to back with my sister, mildly clowning.  And bending over my wheelchair to give me a hug at a bar mitzvah.  She looks beautiful in the latter.  And the fact of our relationship, that one of us was crippled and rolled, one of us stood and died, all of this comes at me.  Is it true?

I ask myself the same question soon after my friend walks in the door.  Coffee.  We head to Peet's the long way, via the dry cleaners, but the route is not long enough to contain his story.  My friend's brother had died, I knew that.  My pal had headed north for the funeral and so missed Marlou's.  What I didn't know was that this was a murder-suicide, and two human beings are dead, one at the hand of the other.  And what emanates from these events is so complicated and far-reaching that my own grief acquires a certain perspective.  I stare at my friend, feeling the relative shallowness of my own experience and the stupefying weight of mortality.  I ask him how he is doing.  He seems not to fully know.

I need a paper napkin, or think I do, and roll to the counter where they reside among packets of sugar, plastic cup lids and wooden stirring sticks.  The woman snapping the top on her cappuccino turns out to be Carla.  Miraculously, I recall her name.  It has been years since we have seen each other, and it turns out she is still in the PR business.  The years have had virtually no effect on her.  I say this, and she brightens.  I brighten too, remembering that we always liked each other, always hit it off.  And she has such a pleasantly warm force field around her body, I can't help wondering if maybe some reconnection, exchange of phone numbers, some next step might be in order.  So long, she says.  Marlou had illusions about escaping the bedroom where she died.  And I have illusions about escaping grief.  I remember the paper napkin and return to the table.

Another table comes back to me, one from 40 years before.  Not long after my injury, ensconced in a rehabilitation hospital, two friends came to visit.  They put me in a folding wheelchair, got me in their car.  And soon I was sitting in a restaurant somewhere.  An outing.  I was getting out.  The conventional wisdom was that getting out of the hospital was good.  In fact, the sight of people casually enjoying themselves disturbed and irritated me.  I could not imagine a life among them, observing the life that had been mine only a few months before.  I must have had some trouble maneuvering the menu.  Perhaps one of the two girls held it for me.  I ordered something.  Food arrived.  We talked.

One of them leaned forward.  She told me I hadn't smiled all evening.  I stiffened and searched for a reply.  No memory exists of the words, but I recall the sense of shame and failure.  I had failed to be cheery or failed to communicate or not done what was supposed to be done.  Certainly, she meant well in visiting me, for we were not close friends.  Only university mates.  And now a threesome of table mates.  And I never heard from either again.  Nor did they hear from me.

At some moments, one-sided conversations are best.  Silence has its merits.  Because this 40-year-old memory is still with me, it must contain a lesson.  That the girl, and that is what she was, might have said to me, the boy, that she felt terribly sorry or sad or confused or ineffective.  And that she was glad to see me.  Whatever the circumstances, I was still me, and it was good to be there with her friend at a table, the three of us.  Nothing required of the evening.  

Recently a young rabbi, perhaps half my age, warned me about shiva.  People don't know to be quiet, he said.  You should not feel obliged to speak.  You pick up a bit of knowledge over 40 years, wandering the wilderness or not.

The strangest of the things Jewish in which I currently dabble is the memorial candle.  People from my congregation brought it, my sister helped me light it, and there was nothing more to do but watch it.  The candle lasts a week.  On this night, my first alone, Marlou's parents having returned to Hawaii this morning, I rolled up my wheelchair ramp and saw the flame through the blue glass of its weeklong protective lamp.  Marlou's funeral was seven days ago.  I am acutely conscious of this, watching the candle flicker.  The light will fail.  I expect it to be out by morning.  It's easy enough to mark the week.  If you want 'push', a reminder e-mail would do splendidly.  Even an alarm clock would get the message home.  But a candle dies a special death.  Like the human spirit, it strives, flickers until exhausted, then gives up its vapor.  The heart breaks small pieces, so that it does not split in two.

The lettuces have reached their maturity, and I am beginning to give them away.  The weather hovers between cool and warm.  The most sheltered spot is the brick terrace that Marlou envisioned and gradually brought to life with the help of workers and friends.  It is morning, a Sunday morning, and the café where I usually consume an enormous bran muffin is closed due to Easter.  Plenty of other cafés are open, but they are full of people, and now I have the illusion, and I know it is one, of everyone having someone, of all tables occupied by couples or people on the way to being couples.  So I slide by these establishments and open the door of an empty burrito outlet. 

 

Sitting at a table, alone in the eatery, I consume beans and fish and flour tortilla.  Outside, on the way to Peet's, women are wearing broad and elaborate hats.  I vaguely know there is a tradition behind this, the Easter bonnet, and we Americans are a conservative people, and all this headdress is not a bad part of it.  At Peet's, I get three lattes to go.  I phone Dick and Joan, Marlou's parents, and this brings me back to my terrace.  The three of us sit around the bricks, Joan and I make small talk about the flowers, and the day progresses.

 

I am very conscious of their imminent return to Hawaii.  Until now, until these last weeks, our relationship has been a rather formal one.  Now we have been through too much not to know each other in a certain dimension.  Joan tells me the small flowers are not zinnias, but I am certain they are.  Dick is obsessed with feeding the bluejays small pieces of bread.  I am trying for the first time in my life to avoid small pieces of bread.  I have nothing in my background, and not even any particular reason, to observe Passover.  But now I am having a mild go at it.  Any sort of structure feels good these days.  I bought a box of matzoh at Safeway.  Bob, my British cousin in Paris, e-mails me that I am confusing shiva with Shiva, the Hindu god of death and destruction.  I respond that they are virtually one and the same.

 

Like an initiate in some ancient cult, these weeks have brought me into some forbidden sanctum of death knowledge.  The nature of that knowledge is unclear, but it keeps revealing itself.  I do my best to submit.  I recall only two dreams since Marlou's death, and both are frightening. 

 

Anything can feel poignant.  I once had big plans.  Now nothing seems big.  Except the North Atlantic.  The one time I crossed it, the vastness and constancy, the utter blackness of the night and brilliance of the stars, seemed to erase everything, even Marlou's cancer.  I am sailing to Southampton again in June, this time alone, a sad and solitary voyage that has to be done.

 

As thoughts and feelings come to me, I try not to bat them away.  From what I know of it, the week of shiva is heavy on personal help.  The grieving person is supposed to hang out, veg out, act out and flip out.  Until day eight when, the worst out of one's system, it is time for something else.  Actually, if I recall, it is time for another three weeks of mourning, then a year.  There is a downshift of grieving gears, as though the end of the month of mourning, if not in sight, is at least possible to conceive.  All in all, structure, human companionship, some sense of what to expect...all this is good.  Because the feelings keep rolling.

 

It was when Marlou's friend Liz told me she had seen spasms, a telltale sign of paralysis, in one of Marlou's legs.  My father had died of a brain tumor, as did his sister and his brother, and I have always feared the same.  But I never contemplated this.  That a brain tumor might emanate from Marlou's colon.  And now she was weakening, losing the power of speech and movement, while a sledgehammer of pharmaceuticals was trying to pound the pain out of her.  The paralysis, which I know a bit about myself, seemed the cruelest insult.  But for me it was a known insult.  Weakening, loss of movement control, bed.

 

Which was why on the first of Marlou's mad nights, when yells made me throw open the bedroom door, the most astonishing thing was to find the patient out of position.  In the darkened room, the worst condition for a half-paralyzed person to attempt movement, Marlou had somehow gotten up and moved from her side of the bed to mine.  There she was sitting up on her own, for the first time in weeks, and transported under her own power across the room.  Disturbing yet heartening, for the mad thought...perhaps my wife was better...even as she was demanding the telephone to call the Poison Center, hitting the wrong keys...then vomiting, then medicated sleep. 

 

It must have taken everything Marlou had to get around the bed.  And once she had gotten to my side, she must have known that was the limit.  I know she was trying to escape.  No physiotherapist was in attendance, yet Marlou had gotten herself across the room, in the dark on one leg, to make a phone call.  And now phones were beyond her.  Calls were beyond her.  And the next time she raged, she would rage in place, on her side of the bed.  The will to live, the sadness of the failing body, the desperation to flee advancing death...it all keeps coming back.

 

                                                            *                                                           *                                                           *

 

'Show me where Marlou died'.  Victor is 11 or 12 years old, and he asks this question as he walks into my home, fresh from a day and a half drive from northwest of Seattle.  He is the adopted son of my cousin in Port Angeles, Washington, and has come a long way.  Badly neglected and mistreated by drug-addicted parents, Victor could barely sit still when Marlou and I met him at a family gathering three years ago.  Now, thanks to my cousin's family, he is much more settled and focused.  The two of us stand at the foot of the bed, and I show him where Marlou had her last breath.  He seems satisfied.  I am not.  Victor wanders out to the front room and I hear him ask my brother, 'Who is going to take care of Paul'? 

 

The question is a perfectly good one.  Having been adopted, Victor easily adopts others.  He has only been around me and Marlou for a few short days of his life, on family occasions separated by two years, but apparently the adoption is permanent.  News of Marlou's approaching death upset him.  A family psychologist suggested that a trip to the funeral would be a good experience.  At Marlou's memorial service, Victor proudly signs his name in large and irregular lettering in the guestbook, accompanies his father to a pew and sobs without stop.

 

In the morning, I am determined to give Victor an essential boy's experience, one that is hard to come by in his woodsy and rural bit of the Pacific Northwest: a train ride.  He arrives with Dave, his father, just after 8 AM, and we set out for the station.  Victor explains to me that his birth family is Italian.  These family, who are not in his life and have all the substance of myth, exert a strong pull on him.  Italian, he explains, is a very small place.  There are hardly any people there.  America is much bigger.  I assure him that he means Italy.  No, he means Italian, and it's his country and his people, and there's no arguing.  It is an enormous credit to his father that no one is sweating the finer points of Victor's education.  The kid has survived grave childhood abuse.  The near-term goal is to build human relationships.  Victor is doing his best with the rest.  He tells me he is going to visit Italian someday. 

 

When the 8:35 express rolls in, two guards step off and drag out a lift.  One guard cranks me up into the train.  As I roll my wheelchair into position, she politely asks about my wife.  There is an awkward silence.  Victor, heading for his seat, says over his shoulder, 'she died'.

Somewhere, distant yet close, there are 100,000 chinook salmon, and this is good...no, it is bad, for there used to be millions...but the radio has turned itself on and, for the first time in a long while, the news has turned my sleep off.  I have had at least six hours, and if I am not refreshed, at least I am no longer war weary.  No more exhaustion mixed with adrenal urgency.  Things are not quite right, but they seem like things.  And one thing I must master is this radio.  I truly believed that the alarm had been set to go off one hour later, but this is a new bit of electronics purchased for Marlou's time in bed.  And I am an old guy who cannot master anything digital without weeks of hard work.  And on this Friday, my time in bed is over.

So is Marlou's, and my feelings about this keep changing.  For the first week, I could not, or would not, abandon my final sight of her.  Marlou was cranked up in bed, one eye shut, one half open, gasping for breath and...lacking any terminology other than the medical...unresponsive.  She seemed not to hear.  With her eyelid halfway up, she appeared to see and not see.  Marlou had lively eyes, and now they were horrifyingly not so alive.  Whatever her clinical state, I could see her capacity for seeing.  Her eyelid was either slitted open or slitted shut.  And she was either staring at our bedroom door or the bedroom door was staring at her.  She seemed paralyzed, unable to move her eye, the eye still open, helplessly taking in her final hours.

Somehow, over the course of a week, I began to accept the possibility that Marlou had been unconscious.  The eye had not fully closed, but her outer awareness had.  All this made some enormous difference to me.  For small thoughts had been creeping at me for days.  That I might have shut her eye all the way, if that was her wish.  Or held the eye open so that she could see me and we could see each other.  But the truth was gradually weaving itself.  Marlou in those final hours did not react when I called her name.  She did not grip my hand when I held hers.  She was not in need of my help, but perhaps, of my presence.  She was not abandoned and neglected...and not alone.  Nor was she in hospital.  Nor was she in pain.  She was beyond pain and moving beyond life.  And at the time, the pain of all this was too much for me.  I did not fail her, but life failed her.  As it does for all of us.  As a doctor friend explained, the unusual thing about Marlou's dying was that it occurred at home, not in the dim light of room E-14, Oncology West.

I have never sat shiva or done any of hundreds of things Jewish, but lacking any other roadmap for the current time, why not?  The shiva effort has run right into Passover, delaying start of the home ritual, but the general idea seems fine.  I'm not only accepting help, but taking advice from all quarters.  My brain is wholly occupied with matters such as Marlou's half descended eyelid.  The bills, the bank accounts, whether anything remains of my so-called investments, or whether the freezer is stocked with food or with munitions, all these matters exceed my intellectual capacity.  My brother thinks I should hang on to Marlou's car.  Fine.  My nephew thinks I should use my frequent flyer miles.  Done.  Joan, Marlou's mother, thinks dinner should be at 6:30 PM.  Why not?  I am drifting, acceding, and not unpleasantly.  It is not quite accurate to say that I am floating on a river of grief.  But I am moving with a river of emotion, and the best thing is to don a life jacket and leave the rest to those with the paddles.

From my office window, I can see people approach.  Most are bearing food.  Some, flowers.  But all are bearing down on me.  They waft into the house and demand my attention.  But I have none to give.  So they talk to each other.  And oddly the whole thing works splendidly.  On one occasion, a knot had gathered in the living room, so I closed the door to the office and stared blankly at my computer screen.  A few minutes later I stared just as blankly at a piece of challah, remembered the first half of the blessing and holding everyone's hand.  In the end, I announced my intention to head for Peet's.  Several friends and family rolled out the door in a sort of convoy.  The two of us in wheelchairs, Jeanette and I, sat next to each other over coffee and talked about disability life and times.  Then we went home and everyone but me worked on dinner.  It was fine.  It was all fine.

Sleep hasn't been so fine.  Something in me has stayed clenched and has not relaxed -- until this very morning.  And then came the picking up of Marlou's ashes.  I haven't actually felt them, the ashes.  Felt their weight.  Dick, Marlou's father, took the package at the mortuary.  At some moment, a private moment, I will at least do that, hold the box or whatever it is.  Hard to say, for the container arrived in a velvet bag.  

Marlou joked about scattering her brother's ashes.  She waited somewherewith her sister-in-law, if I recall correctly, holding her brother's remains on her lap.  The ashes weighed a lot.  Marlou quipped, "He's not heavy, he's my brother."  And doubtless I will find some smartass thing to say when we convene at Monterey to release Marlou to the winds.  And someone will say something funny about me, I hope.  And on it will go.  As it does in my garden, where I take great pleasure in looking at the cultivated remains of last year's tomatoes, this year's cover crop and a persistent set of crumbling stalks which could be broccoli from two years ago.

I want to look inside the box.  There are too many temptations to joke.  Wife in the box.  Marlou condensed to something granular.  I can't imagine that the box's contents can be anything other than puzzling.  How did we wind up like this, Marlou and I?  And when we really wind up together like this, will anyone even notice?  The thought that we are headed in the same direction, ashes to ashes, comforts me right now.  It's no big thing, not if one looks at the garden.  Everything fails, falls, then falls apart, then becomes a part of something else.  Like lettuce, not to mention spinach, both doing quite nicely behind my apartment.

At 7:30 AM I regard, appreciate and generally take in the slick blue plastic pad that covers the foldout worksurface in my kitchen.  The latter is covered in Masonite, perfectly rounded, and it probably looked stunning in 1955.  In this era, I'm too internal and cerebral, a.k.a., spaced out, to notice or care about kitchen styling.  What is capturing my attention at this moment is the blue plastic floppy thing.  It gives every appearance of being precisely what it is not.  It is not slick.  It shines and shimmers, but it grips.  The things it touches do not slip, but hold fast.  That is the whole idea.  This is my blue plastic gripper.  Designed for quadriplegics, the one-handed, the weak, the elderly or the desperate.  It anchors a glass jar while I turn the lid.  It prevents my dinner plate from slipping...I have taken to eating here.  At this moment, it is my personal anchor, reassuringly functional.

 

Betsy, Marlou's cousin and the current all-night helper, wanders in.  I drink my morning tea, try to manage a smile.  Betsy mentions the eye.  It is the thing that I have been seeing daily and discussing never.  Marlou has gone blind in one eye.  She no longer sees.  The eyeball orbits crazily.  Coyote's cartoon eyes do the same when the Roadrunner smashes him over the head with a frying pan.  Marlou has been shutting the affected eye, speaking with a sort of permanent wink.  She's going blind.  My wife is going blind, losing the power to see.  And something about this is so wrenchingly sad that it crushes the tears from my own eyes like juice from an orange.  This development apparently fits within the hospice's keep-the-patient-comfortable parameters, but not within mine.  It is 7:45 AM.

 

The night nurse and I had a talk.  Who was the night nurse?  My eyes are not circling, but my brain is spiraling, but now I see him.  Rod.  I want to die, Marlou told him, I can't take this anymore.  Rod folded his arms respectfully and said he was sorry.  He said he was very sorry.  Actually, I was not sorry someone had heard this.  Some official needed to hear.  And now, maybe finally word of my wife's horror and abandon will reach a responsible party.  One with an M.D.  And there's Rod's question.  Should we consider heavy sedation?  Just knock Marlou halfway out and let her coast in a pharmaceutical sleep until the end.  I have decided I am all for this.  I am convinced this is what Marlou wants.  And what I want is for the doctor to call and discuss what laughingly might be called next steps.

 

The doctor calls in person.  She's not terribly keen on this matter of sedation.  She asks Marlou about the vomiting.  What if we can control the vomiting?  The medical team will inject Marlou with something that will dry up her stomach and cease, or greatly reduce, the retching.  Marlou is on an endless cyclical path...overcome with thirst, drinking water until she is sated, then throwing up the contents of her blocked stomach.  This goes on all day, vomit emerging without warning and with considerable force.  My wife, my private and decorous wife, lives in a world of bile-stained nightgowns and sheets.  The doctor is keeping her comfortable.

 

The doctor is taking her time, talking to Marlou's parents and hardly rushing off this morning, one must acknowledge that.  All of us, Marlou, her father and mother and me have talked it through, this pharmaceutical road to oblivion and decided it sounded just peachy.  Only this morning, while Marlou's cousin knelt beside her on the bed, I asked Marlou if she wanted drugs.  I asked this more specifically, in fact, twice.  With a lawyerly thoroughness and a stentorian voice, I told Marlou that it was possible to give her terminal sedation.  She would sleep until she died.  Did she want this?  I asked the same question another way, specifically referring to phenobarbital and its sledgehammer effects and going into a deep slumber until the end.  What about this?  Yes, Marlou said.  Yes and yes and yes.

 

Which got me on a sort of phenobarbital roll, somewhere between resignation and relief.  But within a few hours the doctor was at Marlou's bedside and asking a very different question.  What if?  Drying up her stomach, ending her vomiting.  Shouldn't we give this a try?  Marlou said she wanted to die a natural death.  This sounded utterly ambiguous to me.  Very well, the doctor said.  She ordered a costly and difficult-to-obtain injectable from some distant realm.  Someone called to say that a courier was on the way.  No one can claim these hospice people are slouches.

 

I am convinced that Marlou's desire to please people is so deep-rooted that even now she will not easily say what she wants.  I think that I should be able to intervene here, help her speak her mind.  But this is like a Greek drama, and the leading character is fate.  At this juncture, her psychology is part of her destiny.  She has spoken her lines, delivered her part, and the doctor has done the same.  And now I have to exit.

 

                                                            *                                                           *                                                           *

 

It turns out that ordering Domino's pizza takes considerably longer than calling in home healthcare staff.  We can get you someone in an hour, the agency tells me.  I have decided that Betsy and Liz and Laurel and Susie and Debbie comprise an impressive cast, but they need understudies.  The first arrives in late afternoon.  She is a Tongan, with shoulders wide enough to get her into the NFL.  Call me Bo, she says.  She has a plastic name badge, promises to stick around for the next 12 hours, and that's good enough for me.  I roll into the bedroom and introduce her to Marlou.  From the front room, I hear Marlou's father ask in his hard-of-hearing voice if this woman is a nurse.  I have no margin, no tolerance for anything, nothing but fatigue and general ire.  I want to tell him that Bo is not only a nurse, but a qualified brain surgeon.  She has been called in to perform an operation.   Bo will separate the halves of Marlou's skull with her bare hands and pluck out the brain tumor like a rotten olive.  It's very impressive, I want to tell him...you might want to have a look.  Another phone call, this time from the hospice nursing office.  There's a night nurse on the way.  We are staffing up around this apartment.

 

                                                            *                                                           *                                                           *

 

At dusk something creeps in through the window cracks, slips under the carpet and emerges fresh and cool from our uninsulated plaster walls.  It is the future, tinged with the dread I carry from childhood.  Things shift an angle.  I roll to Marlou's bedside, adopt the familiar hand-holding pose, and she yanks her hand away.  I ask her what is wrong.  Oh, Paul, she moans, stop it.  I reach for her hand.  It is not clear to me if she can see or what she can see.  She jerks her hand away, what is left of it, bony and light as an emaciated feather.  Go away, she tells me.  Honey...I begin.  She tells me this is stupid.  Everything is stupid.  I ask if she is in pain.  She manages a surprisingly loud no.  And, she adds, go away. 

 

Things are ramping up, heading a certain direction, and even the home health aide, this one a Filipina, is looking alarmed.  I decide that none of this is going to hit me.  I do something manipulative and self-preserving.  I ask a leading question: would she like her mother and father?  Yes, she says.  Yes.  Now.  Okay, I say, and send the aide upstairs.  When I hear the footsteps of the parents, I roll into my office, mutter something to the father and shut the door.  A bedroom colloquy ensues, the hard vocal edges reaching me, but not the words.  There is vomiting.  I roll into the bedroom and offer to lower the bed.  Marlou nods wearily.  We have transitioned into night.

 

The night nurse is named Jean.  She arrives fresh and enthusiastic.  How this is possible at 9 PM eludes me.  I tell her Marlou has been angry.  I also tell her of what has more recently transpired, that Marlou has told me she is frightened.  News of the latter washes over my face like sad clown paint.  My wife is paralyzed and blind and frightened, and the night is young.  Jean and tells me she is going to remain in the apartment for several hours.  What the hell.  I tell her that I am going to bed.  Not to sleep, of course, for that hails from my now distant past. 

 

With all this staff present I go for maximum assistance.  The aide helps me off with my clothes, positions my legs under the sheets, and I throw a T-shirt over my eyes to block out the full-bore medical illumination.  Presently, Jean turns down the lighting.  She pulls up a chair and talks to Marlou.  She asks about pain.  Marlou grunts.  Jean tells me the room reminds her of a restaurant in Honolulu.  I mention that Marlou's parents live on the north shore of Oahu.

 

Jean begins talking about her days as an Army nurse, how she liked walking in the sand near the hospital at Kaneohe.  Does Marlou like the warm sand?  Can she feel it now?  All granular and squishy....  I say that Marlou always loved Hawaii.  I'm using the past tense, and I can't help it, because this is creeping into everything these days.  She loved Hawaii and the way the air felt, she said, like body temperature.  The amniotic climate.  Can you feel the sand, Marlou, asks Jean?  Marlou says yes.  She smiles.  This is the first time I have seen my wife smile in what must be a week.  Her face even in the dim light is open and childlike.  Marlou squeezes my hand.  She loves the warm ocean sand, she says. 

 

And it has always been here, all this time, whatever this is...hope.  It is something I do not easily experience.  I have endurance but lack a natural belief in tomorrow.  Which is exactly what Marlou has brought to me and now am losing and have to find again. 

 

                                                            *                                                           *                                                           *

 

The new supports for my tomato plants arrived in the post this very afternoon.  I have pumped so much blood meal into the California soil that the lettuce wriggles its roots in anticipation of a salad plate.  Avery is gearing up for a weekend trip to Disneyland, wearying his mother with a six-year-old's account of the afternoon.  Inside, Marlou has been breathing watery and irregular breaths.  A nurse and a psychologist, here are on separate missions, have both told me in the most unobtrusive ways that this long afternoon, with California bursting with spring life, that this will be the last for my wife.  Joan, her mother, Dick, her father, hold one hand while I hold the other.  Marlou's rattling gasps would sound ghastly but for what has transpired in this bedroom over the last few weeks.  This is it, says the nurse.  There are no breaths.  And now there is no Marlou.  She is dead this second day of April, 59 years old.