Entropy

'So you found each other late in life.'  Outside it was March, and inside my office it was me, two nurses, one hospice social worker and the Angel of Death.  We crowded into the small space with equal readiness.  Medical veterans all, we were highly adaptable.  A meeting was wherever life jammed you at any particular moment, with or without chairs, comfort or, of course, sleep.  Everyone had gathered to discuss Marlou's dying...how much pain...how much dosage...how much longer.  

And how was I?  Crying, of course.  My defenses had grown as thin as my aging skin, easily going purple at the whisper of a bruise.  I said the same thing more or less each time I got in a small space with the hospice team.  How could this be happening just as life was getting good?  The fiftyish nurse Kaye mentioned the found-each-other-late-in-life angle, thereby collapsing another emotional floor, one of the endless levels of loss and tears.  She pushed a box of Kleenex my way.

Like a fireman in a burning building, step the wrong way, the timbers collapse, and you plummet from the substantially bad to the incredibly worse.  For I could feel it now, how our romance always had this bittersweet just-in-time quality.  And now there wasn't even time.  Loss of childhood, loss of body, loss of wife.  And I wonder, wonder, wonder, who, who wrote the book of love....  Because I know who wrote the Book of Job, and he or she, or more likely a Republican committee, is a vile mother fucker and is going to pay.

The pattern of recollection, the way things come at me from the past, the thread unwinding...this must be honored.  Which was why this morning as I stared blankly at the tea brewing and the kitchen dawning and the refrigerator humming, there it was, Marlou's redwood deck.  In the first couple of years we dated, me taking the train to and from Sacramento, she driving the freeways to Menlo Park, we saw a lot of each other's homes.  And in the years following her divorce, Marlou's backyard had fallen into decay.  

Gazing through her bedroom plate glass there was, she said, in that tangle by the back fence, a hot tub.  I could see nothing.  Marlou assured me it was a ruin.  To my left, along the splintering redwood boards that separated her property from the elderly woman next door, there had once been a vegetable garden.  I could see no evidence.  And in the foreground, just outside the window, was the deck.  Redwood, fabled for its longevity and virtual immunity from weather, was not supposed to look this way, steps broken, boards collapsing, paint flaking and nails emerging.  The Deck of the Hesperus.

Marlou rolled over in bed, put her arm around my shoulder and said things had been hard since her divorce.  This was a no-no, letting the property go seedy.  Marlou, whose interior-decorator bedroom was all about drapes and bedspreads and carpets that worked together in ways I could barely grasp...for her, the lapse of maintenance, the descent of landscape architecture into ruin...all of this must have been hard to bear.

Yet life has its dissipation, its entropy, its depression.  Sometimes the road to ruin leads to knowledge.  And things have to fall apart.  I can see that, understand it, but the insight would be bearable in someone else's story.  Somehow in Marlou's...and by extension mine...this truth seems crushingly sad.

And there is more to it.  Marlou had joined a Sacramento woman's group.  Led by a psychologist, the weekly therapy sessions could only have been a milestone.  Marlou's parents subscribe to the flinty, American conservative self-sufficiency ethos.  Which, it must be acknowledged, can get you and the oxen through a sod hut winter in Nebraska.  But possibly not without the neighbor's help, even if the neighbor is 15 prairie miles away.  And so, now it comes to me, the story unwinding, how Marlou asked her women's group for help.  Would they come by and lend a hand in the garden?  

I wasn't present the day this question got asked.  I know nothing more about it.  But I knew Marlou well enough to know that asking for help was very difficult.  The divorce...the abandonment of the home Miss Haversham style...needing psychological help, not to mention practical help...this is how we become.  It's how Marlou became.  How I became.  The burden of sadness about it...well, somehow that's me...and like radioactive waste or formaldehyde in a mobile home...it just takes time to dissipate.