Not Enough

It reminds me of driving across the Great Basin.  Not that I ever have.  But running west or east, the highways of Nevada and Utah lead from prairie or saline flatlands, up and over mountain ranges, down again into the level desert, up over the peaks.  And I've somehow mentally organized my life around this principle, Range and Basin.  There's always some intimidating event or milestone looming on my mental horizon...and once I am over it, there is...well, it's hard to say.  Thus, the Yom Kippur drash.

What did I have to talk about except Marlou's death and its aftermath and, in particular, traveling in its aftermath?  It loomed for weeks, this bit of work.  I went about the thing assiduously.  Chatting with a rabbi.  Reading a book or two.  Writing a text, then reducing that to notes, then to whatever mental pattern would help me remember what to say and how to say it.  My drash, or sermon, went well and I went out the door feeling satisfied, having crossed one range, heading downhill toward...the flats between the ranges.  Odd that this level area seems so indistinct.  Equally odd that I don't seem to pick up much momentum on the downslope.  Shouldn't I be coasting now, everything effortless for a while?

Because this last Drash Range seemed awfully steep.  I suppose the reasons would seem obvious to an outsider.  I was writing and speaking about the stages of my grief.  Every time I would mentally run through the talk, timing it, adding or subtracting something from my notes, I would find myself in a swoon and either nap or try to.  

Monday, in giving the drash to my congregation, I could feel my own turbulent emotional state, how chronically overwrought things feel, how this seems to have become a way of life.  So, on a day in which there seemed to be plenty of time to read a newspaper, open a book, meet with a friend and run through the drash...everything else would fall away.  I would get to the drash, the drash would get to me, leaving newspapers unread, phone calls unanswered, friends ignored.

And what does it matter?  After all, it's been six months, I keep telling myself.  While others who have been down this road say, forget it.  Even after six years, life won't be the same.  And while I'm absorbing this bit of bad news, what about the next range?  What hurtle am I facing?  Trips, dealing with Marlou's possessions, writing a new book?  The truth is I can't see any major slope ahead.  Life for the moment does not seem to tilt upward.

So has everything sunk downward?  I had that distinct feeling sitting before the Yom Kippur congregation and going through my tale.  Yet the people who heard me had nothing but reassuring things to say.  No, I did not sound down or crushed.  There was plenty of energy in my voice and being.  But things feel chronically sad.  And mortality is everywhere.   

I argue with Marlou.  I am always trying to make a larger point, establishing some worldview.  The smaller point, often having to do with regional politics, is just a learning tool.  Marlou needs to be guided, by me of course.  And as a learning piece, I generally offer up matters of, say, Bay Area transit or medical care or education.  Giving things a manageable focus, then expanding into the larger issue....  The much larger issue of Marlou's deathly absence seems to elude my arguing self.  

Sometimes I think we have unfinished business.  Sometimes I focus on Marlou's unfinished business, which was no more unfinished than anyone else's....  But I feel the sadness of a life uncompleted.  Whose life?  After all, Marlou can't feel sad about this.  And once I'm gone, I won't feel sad either, about my life or hers.

A pervasive sadness.  The sense that important things will end up shockingly incomplete.  That life will be ripped away from me with the most ragged edges showing.

Fairly early in Marlou's cancer saga, certainly before the midpoint, suddenly she began to have pain.  This came on a Saturday afternoon.  And we had a typical exchange.  With the afternoon wearing on, and Marlou's pain not wearing out, I suggested it was time to head for the Urgent Care department at our clinic.  No, she wanted to tough it out.  Well, I suggested, toughing it out was going to get tougher as the medical personnel numbered fewer, particularly after 5 PM.  No, she wasn't budging.  Her pains were getting sharper and occurring more frequently, but she would handle it.  In the best Cando American tradition.

I am a sort of amateur introvert compared to the professional-class introvert embodied in my wife.  As her pain worsened, it was never clear to me what was happening to her anxiety.  

By 8 PM, I was loading her into my van and heading for the clinic.  Saturday night.  Small staff.  Big demands.  All the meshugas of the week's Big Night Out was sitting in the waiting room of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.  Eventually, Marlou made her way into the treatment rooms.  I read, then reread, a magazine or two.

When I was allowed inside Marlou's area, she was drugged and dozing.  A bowel irritation of some kind, the doctor suspected.  Nothing cancer related.  This last part did not surprise me.  Marlou had just had a PET scan, and the cancer was lurking and doubtless openly recruiting for additional forces.  But right then, the cells hadn't spread.  But what had spread, I was convinced, was fear.  Terror, in fact.  And as I observed Marlou's night I saw a real rage bubbling out of her pain.

Around midnight I drove us home.  It unnerved me to see Marlou walking through our familiar environs like a staggering drunk.  She was heavily medicated.  It was all understandable.  The terror.  The rage.  And the drugs.  Hard to accept.  Hard to avoid.

It was only about a week before her death that Marlou told me how frightened she was.  I'd done my best to keep the emotional channels open.  I kept raising the topic, telling her I would be terrified in her circumstances.  Yet she barely confided.  And tragically, all the pieces fit together.  The irritated bowel, which Marlou had as long as we'd known each other.  Anger and anxiety and whatever else, swallowed down and driven into the gut.

And there is, and never was, anything wrong with any of this.  Everyone has driven some dark feeling out of sight and into some harmful place.  It's just that Marlou and I never had the time or opportunity to bring light into this particular darkness.  Marlou brought plenty of light into my life, and I into hers.  I only regret that there wasn't enough time.  Or that we didn't make the best use of the time we had.  It seems that death is too big to consider.  But the incompleteness of life...well, eventually the psyche can wrap itself around that.