Ashes

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.