Birthday

How long had Marlou been in bed?  That is to say, how long had she been on her deathbed?  I cannot remember so much of last year's dying, and this detail still eludes me.  What I recall is that her parents had gone home, spent a few days in Hawaii, and then I had called them.  Don't rush back, I tried to tell them, for things aren't that bad yet, and the preposterousness of their trans-Pacific travels was hitting me hard.  They were 82, after all.  Don't rush back.  Now it seems the message was for me, not for them.  There was every reason to rush, of course.  Marlou's life and illness were uncertain, but the direction had become clear.  Returning today or tomorrow might not matter, but next week?  Next week was a long and uncertain distance away.

The talk I gave to the Bay Area Expert Witness Association, or whatever it was, that was 15 February or so.  Life being essentially ironic, my invitation to address these particular people seems resonant with extraneous meanings.  I was already witnessing a lot, about to witness more and becoming expert.  Nevermind.  By 1 March, Marlou was in bed, and getting up and out of the bed had become difficult, was becoming more so by the day, and events were coming at me like an enormous highway construction machine.  You see them late at night on the local motorways, lit up like a stage, creeping along in their enormity, smashing or smoothing or paving, crew standing about in hard hats.  Constructing that feels like deconstructing.  

And there was Marlou in bed, looking as though she did not know what had hit her.  Although she did.  She may not have known the details of her death, or wanted to know, in advance.  But the fact of it, that was always there.  She never flinched from acknowledging the end.  She knew she had a year or years and carried on anyway.  Traveling long distances.  Singing in a community chorus.  Losing her hair, vomiting, and still getting up each day.  And having witnessed it all, what was there to do but shake my head in admiration and stand by?

And then came the birthday.

What is a birthday and what does one do with it?  We made it a point to celebrate each other's.  Always.  And with the disease and its distortions, birthday celebrations only intensified.  My 60th, for example.  At that point Marlou was high on crank, one might say.  And one does say.  What was the stuff?  Steroids, I guess, drugs given to mask the effects of chemotherapy.  And, one kept thinking, if the mask is this extreme, what are the actual drugs like, the so-called therapeutic ones?  

Questions of this sort floated by, floated away in the confusion, and really they were minor.  Marlou was on what she was on, and the steroidal speed had her "on" switch pressed down hard permanently.  So I turned 60 with a flurry of iridescent versions of the number 60 floating down about the room, ceilings draped with paper decorations and Marlou lining up an extensive program of group singing, CDs piled and ready, a small number of invited guests standing about bewildered.  And I, for once sensing the tenor of the evening correctly, toasted the love of my life.  Once all the extroversion was over, it was a relief to fall into bed together.  At least we had that.

We still had that with Marlou abed permanently.  And at night, holding hands, side by side, staring into the ceiling darkness felt much as it always had.  For night reveals the blank uncertainty of life, its vastness, its petering out or ours pleasantly merged together.  As were Marlou and I, bed drifting like a boat, heading for the falls, perhaps, but for the moment, only feeling the current.

And then came the final birthday.  Marlou's was on 6 March, and since no one forgot, neither her parents nor me, the day must have been on our collective minds.  One well-designed feature of Jewish holidays: they begin at sundown.  This makes eminent psychological sense.  Once things grow dark, they grow inward and their resonance comes at us.  It's there already with the dark of the previous eve, so go for it.  Start acknowledging.  Light the candles, stop the food, whatever gets you in the flow.  So there it was, 6 March, following 5 March, Erev Marlou.  And there we were, the three of us, gathered at the foot of the bed, Dick and Joan smiling birthday smiles at their dying daughter.  Me at my wife.

The hospice nurses were buzzing about already.  But not just then.  There had been a break in the medical action, I suppose.  But the air was heavy with the question of the misery creeping across Marlou's face.  What could be done about it?  And if nothing could be done, would it drag us with it?  This medication or that medication?  Was the doctor coming or not coming and did it matter?  Surely there was some good in this moment.  It was Marlou's birthday.  And the three of us were standing there bedside.  What happened?

What could happen?  Marlou's sensitivity to noise had only heightened.  Sounds bothered her when she was healthy, and when she was in pain, they assaulted her.  That may have been one reason why no one sang Happy Birthday to You.  But there was another, starker reason.  The birthday wasn't happy.  We could feel it, all of us, certainly Marlou.  The vomiting and nausea wiped out any thoughts of birthday cake.  And presents?  Presence was all Marlou had left, all we could exchange.  Any conceivable gift either enhanced or mocked the situation.  A new bathrobe would be the last bathrobe.  Deathbed flowers or a plant?  Too funereal.  There was nothing to buy, nothing tangible to give.  Still, I think Joan managed a card.  It was very brave, in retrospect, for she is a sensitive woman and must have felt, deeply felt, the futility.  The last birthday card.  I couldn't do it.  I did not give Marlou a card.  She could barely read her mother's.  The cards that arrived in the mail got arranged by someone else, perhaps Joan, along the window.  I can't say that Marlou noticed them.  She was noticing less and less.

In short, it was a hopeless birthday, the beginning of hopelessness itself.  Of mounting horrors.  And for me, the startling sense that there was nothing I could do.  Our human exchanges were diminishing.  There was barely time to say hello and goodbye.  Life, what was left of it, was gradually being consumed, consumed in pain.  Which was, in retrospect, true for both of us.  Marlou was dying, the "we" of us was dying, hope was dying and the future was dead.  

A year later, the future has survived.  It's not even on life support.  Or is it?  What has happened is still happening on some level.  And Marlou's birthday has returned.  It is drifting into port, like an abandoned ship.  Even skipperless, I am glad to see it.  Only a couple of weeks ago, the nation stopped working because Washington and Lincoln were born on days in February.  And we remember.  We remember their faces are on our coins.  We remember to stop working.  We've forgotten everything else.  And that's okay, because they've forgotten us too.

Marlou loved what was manly in me.  Define manly?  She didn't, and I shan't.  I'm hyperconscious and self analytical enough.  She knew what she liked and let me know it.  And when what was manly lacked confidence or expression, she had a way, an effective way, of helping me find myself.  My better self.  Marlou liked men, weaknesses and all.  I'm not sure that my own mother did.  But Marlou did, growing out of an essentially good rapport with her father, I would guess.  In any case, I am conscious of this legacy, how she helped me advance in ways unexpected.  And in ways unexpected, a year of grief is giving away to a year of less grief.