Sunday

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.

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'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'.