Where?

Where is she?  The question slides into my mind just outside of Peet's, and it's enough to stop me dead in my battery powered tracks.  The fog is closing in, and the sky is making a pathetic attempt at rain.  Marlou used to call Menlo Park's center, consisting of little more than one street and a few side branches, Tiny Town.  I sip my sugar-free mocha and stare at Tiny Town through the gray.  It seems an exquisite torture, and entirely appropriate that California should express cultural and environmental collapse in the form of a drizzly drought.  

There was a time when Marlou and I used visits to Peet's to recover from fights.  At other times, it was a good place to escape the confines of home and plan whatever needed planning, Marlou wielding a yellow notepad, the two of us steering the domestic ship.  And it was a place to get caffeinated, of course, when the midlife batteries ran low.  The whole thing was hardly a crowning experience, seemed rather mundane much of the time and it's over now.  So the question hits me, just outside the improbably named Hoot 'n Toot Cleaners, where is she?

I bounce along the pavement, my sugarless mocha cup running low, but not quite low enough.  There's a trick to coffee and wheelchairs, and it has to do with finishing the drink before turning off the main street.  The mocha will become a major encumbrance when I begin one-handed fishing for my house key.  The efficient thing is to stash the cardboard cup in a public rubbish bin on the main street.  Quite a decision, whether to force the coffee down now or continue bouncing toward home with the hot liquid still in the hand I will need to hold the key.  Disabled life is extremely non-spontaneous.

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The Menlo Park Chorus erupts into high-ceilinged sound in a church, just hours later.  Lorna, my Filipina neighbor and newly acquired sock-applier and shirt-buttoner, has gotten me into my suit, and I'm trying, in vain, to get the notes into my voice.  I'm completely out of practice.  Furthermore, I have been dreading this memorial concert in honor of Marlou.  It is a wonderful thing, and it is entirely her due, but it still promises to be an ordeal.  Perhaps because the event has gone through my mind so many times, the opposite is true.  During the concert I tune out the chorus director's dedication to Marlou, get into the target area regarding the notes and make it through the program.  On the way to the reception, I wait in a doorway, light rain drifting.  I take this instant to tune in to myself.  And, yes, it's okay.  I head for the church social room and begin munching nuts.

In the morning I awaken in a miasma of physical disgust.  Aware that it is time to rise from bed, eliminate and shower, a generalized revulsion for the body and its functions takes over.  The feeling is almost feverish.  In fact, it occurs to me that I may have a fever.  The line between the state of health with its sense of robustness, and the state of disease or fever, all this has blurred.  The human body, my human body, seems a wholly biological process, mechanical and fatiguing.  I stare at the ceiling.  I stare at the clock.  I have to get up to open the door so that Lorna can come in, make tea and put on my socks.  On this particular morning, this seems the only reason to rise.

Steinbeck's Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, remain on their Oklahoma farm even after they no longer own it.  They stay there until a banker's flunky bumps their house with a tractor, and the trauma of this, being knocked off foundation, triggers their exodus.  To me, this is a reminder to honor the spirit and its losses.  Material privation is only part of the story.  It seems indulgent for me to be wallowing in loss at a time when I have adequate income and resources and many people do not.  Still, this is an adequate metaphor, knocked off my foundation and wandering in something like shock.

I sit up in bed very slowly, aware that everything aches, maneuver myself into the wheelchair and begin the day.  It may have hit my body before my mind, the memory of what this day is.  It is a non-Lorna day.  No one to make tea, put on socks, get the life forces moving.  Personal assistance seems to make all the difference these days.  I am quite capable of putting on my socks, if anyone wants to know, but the strain seems enormous.  I have no patience.  Every bodily position makes me sore.  My irritation flares at the slightest provocation.  Dropping things, knocking things over, losing things, tearing things, staining things.  And because I am tired, inattentive and preoccupied, these events happen all day long.  Each fuels my own sense of incompetence and desperation.

It is midmorning by the time I get myself dressed and prepared to face the so-called world.  By the time I'm out the door, the mission already seems futile.  My idea was to go out for coffee on the day I have no help.  A sort of treat.  Which already feels like a burden, and because of the advancing hour my plan changes.  I stop in at Sky Nails so that Mai, Vietnamese queen of manicures, can have a go at my fingernails.  Her shop is relatively empty, and in my state of mind, it seems that if I don't tend to my fingers now, it won't happen.  Normally I chat during these appointments, make some effort at conversation, but there seems nothing to say.  Mai, who knows about Marlou's death, makes no effort to chitchat either.  At one point, near the end, when she is rubbing lotion up and down my forearms, in needless and utterly essential manual contact, it occurs to me that it wouldn't hurt to say something about the weather.  Will it rain?  The thought evaporates from my mind faster than the passing storm.  Will it rain?  Both of us know I don't care.

Marlou's death, the physical horror and agony of it, seems to have gotten into my being.  I feel it in my arms, sense it in my ever swollen ankles, and see it prowling about my apartment.  Is this what we all face?  Apparently.  No one can predict the future.  I might go like the flick of a light switch, picking lettuce this afternoon.  Or I might have every ounce of joy squeezed out of me slowly, my endurance drained, dignity trounced, dying of slow torture.

One day near the end, Marlou called her mother into the room.  Here, she said with matter-of-fact certainty, take this.  Marlou slipped off her ring, a much prized and resonant family heirloom.  Give it to Nancy, Marlou said.  I could see how it was now, the shedding of things.  The deepest life attachments cast off easily, the future abandoned.  Regarding terminal sedation, the doctor had explained at Marlou's bedside, do you understand....  Yes, Marlou said.  Yes and yes.  Though it was all moot, for the doctor demurred, and Marlou was gone within a couple of days.

And eventually, I may think of her as gone, rather than agonizing about her going.  I don't know why her horrid final month has me in its grip.  Something about life, the depths of its injustice, the brutality of its workings, all of this has come at me as a sort of postgraduate lesson in existence.  This puzzle of the worst things happening to the best people has troubled religious thinkers forever.  It simply horrifies and angers me.  In the end, there are two questions.  Where is she and why?