“I’m really sorry, but I have to go pay my last respects to a good friend,” I say to Eddie, minutes after telling him I got fired. (Boy, I can imagine him thinking, I did not sign up for this.) “But you’re more than welcome to come with me?” (Please come with me, I thought. It would be so nice to have someone to lean on right now.)
It didn’t feel like any of his business, Eddie said, plus he was tired from the flight and needed a nap.
Fair enough. It would be slightly weird to have him tag along. Then again, I’d accompanied Gio, at his request, to a memorial gathering for one of his good friends I’d never met, and I’d found it both moving and inspiring. The point of remembering the dead is not just to pay tribute to the life lost but to lend succor to those shattered by the silence. My friend, Marco’s widow, had practically begged me to bring Eddie along. “Kicking off your first romantic weekend with a new beau at Marco’s memorial? Oh my god, Marco would have loved that. Please bring him. I insist!”
Eddie and I made a plan to meet up afterward.
Back at the hotel, utterly depleted by Marco’s gathering and feeling more in need of a platonic hug than a first sexual encounter with an old friend, I then had to—caveat number three, and I know this sounds petty—overcome my revulsion to thick back hair. Caveat four was the structural delta between us: A man who shops only in big and tall stores versus a woman who often shops in the boys’ department, size fourteen, turns out to be a complicated issue of mechanics. The third night of our inaugural long romantic weekend together was the first time my blood splattered all over the sheets. “Did I do that?” Eddie said, looking horrified.
“I dunno,” I said, feeling all kinds of physical pain down there I’d never previously felt plus embarrassment over the blood bath. It wasn’t like a menstrual blood accident from my pre-hysterectomy days. That I could handle: It goes with the territory of being born with a uterus. This was straight out of a horror film. The sheets were so soaked and splattered, I was worried the housekeepers would think we’d murdered someone. “That’s never happened before.”
Everything else about our rapidly budding romance, however, felt nourishing. We could talk for hours without getting bored. When we were apart, FaceTime stepped in to keep us connected. He loved to gallery-hop as much as I did, and visiting a camera store was at least as big a thrill for him as it was for me, if not more. Biking, my preferred mode of urban transport, was also his favorite way to explore the city. Because money was never an issue for him, thanks to a bottomless cup of TV residuals, his frequent cross-country visits and their associated costs—he liked having dinner out, staying in nice hotels, seeing Broadway shows—were neither a financial nor logistical burden. And it was relaxing for me to get a break from a life of constant impecunity.
It had never occurred to me that one could order both an appetizer and a main course plus a full bottle of wine followed by dessert and coffee without panicking over paying rent. In fact, eating out with friends had become so stressful of late—If I order just the cheapest appetizer and nothing else, will they still make me split the bill evenly?—I’d simply stopped accepting invitations that involved menus and credit cards.
So, yes. Of course. The thought did cross my mind, after Eddie and I had been dating for several months, and I still hadn’t found a new job, that, should we work out as a couple, the financial anxiety keeping me up every night, leading to frequent suicidal ideation, would end. I could write novels again, all day, without worrying about selling them first. I could write magazine articles and scripts, essays and op-eds. I could have healthcare, go on a vacation now and then.
I should also add that I hated myself for thinking this way.
“Have you actually thought about how you would kill yourself?” my shrink had asked when I brought it up again, before I no longer had the proper health insurance to keep seeing him. My Writers Guild health insurance, unlike any other health insurance I’d ever had—all of which had limited the number of times you could visit a mental health professional to thirty sessions per year—paid for 85 percent of unlimited psychiatric treatment. A lifesaver while I had it. Literally.
“Yes,” I said. “And it’s always the same scenario. I throw myself out a window. And I can’t get that image out of my head. It feels…constant.”
“Is there anything that quiets it?”
“Yes. Getting out of bed and looking at my sleeping child.”
“And when he’s not home?”
“That’s a problem.”
The phrase “deaths of despair”—deaths related to alcohol, drugs, and suicide—had begun appearing in newspapers and magazines around this time, thanks to Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s groundbreaking paper published in 2015, followed by another in 2017. The alarm bells were stark: The U.S. population had “a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.” This sudden uptick in white people deaths, they wrote, “reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround.”
And what age adult was primarily affected by these American deaths of despair? As of 2014—the precise year I was suddenly on my own and finding it impossible to keep my head above water—it was Gen Xers, like me, in the thick of midlife. Why? Exactly what you might think: income inequality, lack of living wage job opportunities, and the rising cost of housing and healthcare as either our wages grew stagnant, or we were downsized and/or suddenly facing age discrimination. We’d all played the game by the rules, throughout our adult lives, but you can’t win a game rigged against you. The math doesn’t work. The numbers don’t crunch. They crush you.
So when Eddie called, wrote, and texted me every day from L.A. to say, “I love you,” or when we were out riding bikes in New York, or when we were standing in front of art we both loved or having dinner with friends or walking hand in hand, and I was feeling more grounded and at peace than I had in years, I did slowly allow myself to imagine a future in which kindness prevailed, healthcare costs didn’t make me sicker, and daily thoughts of suicide were muted. By the end of March, I’d introduced him to my kids. Yes, yes, the accepted rule of thumb is that you’re supposed to wait at least six months to introduce your children to a new love interest, but since the younger two had already met him as my friend and then, more recently, as my collaborator, I figured this was different. I knew this man.
Or so I thought. Suffice it to say, there’s a reason why marital vows include the phrase “in sickness and in health.” It’s easy to love a healthy partner. The real test is when someone you claim to love gets sick.
After leaving my meeting with Dr. Hou, nearly six months into my relationship with Eddie, I call him in L.A. to tell him about the decision to remove my bum cervix and to ask him, please, to be my postsurgical caretaker. “I realize it’s a lot to ask,” I say, but only because I’m still not used to asking for help. It’s a tic, this throat-clearing preamble. I do realize it’s a lot to ask. But I also know it shouldn’t be.
“Sorry,” he says. “Hospitals are not my thing.” His mother died in a hospital when he was in college. It’s too traumatic for him. “I’m not good at hospitals.”
I am nonplussed by this response. “My dad died in a hospital,” I say. “That’s often what happens in hospitals. People die. And it’s traumatic. How did you deal with the birth of your son?”
“That was really hard for me.”
I picture his wife, having just finished the painful work of labor, having to comfort him instead of vice versa.
He asks for time to process. It’s a lot to take in. Sure, I say, trying to show him the empathy I myself am asking for, by seeing my request from his point of view: the annoyance of having your first postmarital girlfriend get sick six months into a new relationship; a visceral fear of hospitals. I google “fear o
f hospitals.” It has a name. Nosocomephobia. And it’s not only apparently quite common, the internet is rife with advice on how to get over it.
The following night, he doubles down. “Look,” he says. “I talked to my shrink, and he says I do not need to go.”
“Your shrink?” It is our first major fight, over the phone, and it gets ugly.
Hospital trauma, Eddie says, is real. And I should respect that. My bum cervix is real, I say. And he should respect that. What does he think the rest of our lives are going to look like, now that we’re in our fifties, rainbows and unicorns? I’m pretty sure that hospitals will play at least a recurring if not starring role. (“Enjoy this time of your life,” Nora once told me, when I was complaining about the vapidity of a recent holiday party. “By the time you get to my age, your entire social life will revolve around hospital visits and shivas.”)
“Let’s talk tomorrow,” I say. “When we’re both less angry.” I hang up the phone and cry myself to sleep. How can a man who tells me he loves me, several times a day, not be able to show it by showing up when I need him? Does every man lack empathy? My ex’s Asperger’s shrink had posited that all men fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. It was just a matter of where.
The next morning, I call my friend Tad to get his male perspective. Tad has met and liked Eddie. A lot. And he has known both me and my romantic history since college. He didn’t trust Gio. Thought Durkheim and I were mismatched, energy-wise. Was wary of Santi’s intentions: love or a green card? A writer of brilliant and often hilarious profiles for The New Yorker, each drilling down to the essence of his subjects by filtering out the noise and noting only the telling details, Tad has a preternatural ability to read humans. “Am I asking too much?” I say, starting to cry again.
“No,” Tad says, “but give him time. He may come around.”
I wish Eddie could understand my needs without my having to spell them out, beg for care, or shift my limited focus—during this particular moment of real fear—onto his irrational ones.
“I know,” says Tad. “But for him those fears are not irrational. They are as real as yours. You either have to accept him for who he is, faults and all, or…”
“Or?”
“Or not.”
That night, I write Eddie a long email, in which I say, as kindly but as bluntly as possible, that his not showing up at my bedside will be the end of us. In a sense, I’m almost glad we’ve had to face this challenge early on. Better now than several years from now, when I’ve moved out to L.A. or he’s moved here to New York, or whatever it is we would have decided. “My needs, vis-à-vis a potential partner, are clear,” I write. “Whomever I choose next as a life partner has to be able to show up, as best he can, even if his best is flawed.”
Begrudgingly, after many more discussions with his shrink and me, he agrees to come. But not to the hospital itself. Only to my apartment after the surgery is over, and only for a couple of days. Following more tears, professions of love, and negotiations, he finally agrees to come to New York the day before my surgery to join my daughter and me at the hospital, but he will go only as far as the waiting room. When they call us into the pre-op room, with its curtained pens of humans awaiting excision, he has to leave, he says. He can’t see me in a hospital gown. It will be too triggering.
My daughter’s jaw drops to the floor as he waves goodbye and heads downtown to see the Rauschenberg exhibit at MoMA. “He’s going to a museum? While you’re getting surgery? Mom, seriously. Fuck this dude. You deserve better.”
“I know,” I say. Dating in middle age, I tell her vaguely, as we wait for the anesthesiologist to arrive, has been…challenging.
When I awake from having my cervix removed, my daughter is standing over me in the recovery room holding my hand: a nice change from my hysterectomy, when I awoke to the sounds of the nurses whispering, “Where’s the husband? We can’t find the husband.”
“Where’s Eddie?” I say.
“Being a tourist still, I guess?” says my daughter.
“I thought he’d somehow see the light and come around.”
“Mom, seriously?” She rolls her eyes. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit,” I say. “Like I’m about to pass out from the pain. Thanks for being here.”
“You’re welcome,” says my daughter. “You have a morphine button. Use it.” She sleeps in the chair next to my hospital bed that night, both of us periodically awoken by loud beeps when the saline solution runs low. The next morning, she helps me dress, pushes me in a wheelchair, and helps me into a taxi.
When we arrive back in Inwood, Eddie helps me into bed. I can sense his discomfort in witnessing my pain, but still, he’s here. That’s something. And I’m grateful. I ask him to please pick up my pain meds at the drugstore. He seems relieved to be given an errand outside the apartment. “Sure!” he says. “Do you need anything else?”
I stare down at my torso, still pumped full of air from the surgery and crisscrossed with incisions where the robot arms had diced and dismantled my cervix before pulling it out through a port in my belly button, bit by morcellated bit. One of the incisions hurts far worse than the others. In fact, it feels as if it’s burning. “Does this look infected to you?” I say to Eddie, pointing to it. It’s warm to the touch, tender and snot-colored.
Infected incision, June 2017, © Deborah Copaken
“Yes,” says Eddie, barely able to look at my ravaged body.
I tell him to wait on fetching the pain meds until I text the above photo of the incision to my surgeon, as I might need antibiotics now, too. This was the right call. My surgeon’s office immediately phones in a second prescription to the drugstore as well.
My mother has sent a bunch of containers and bagels from Zabar’s, the famous Upper West Side food mecca, just like back when my daughter was born and she drove up with my dad to help out with cooking, cleaning, and errands for the first week of the baby’s life: a true gift, grandparents who show up like that and help out with the infants and fill the refrigerator with deli salads. But that was when I was married and living a middle-class life around the corner from stores like Zabar’s and the Gap, instead of dollar stores and pawn shops, and not living hand-to-mouth on $403 a week in unemployment and the rapidly dwindling scraps of my 401K, most of which are going to pay the COBRA bill and a slumlord.
The contrast between these two me’s, when the familiar containers of cream cheese and egg salad show up twenty years later, feels stark. Back then, in 1997, I had a brand-new baby, a working uterus, my parents’ physical presence and care, a marriage, a half-decent if modest home, a job with benefits, and a father who loved to take my toddler out for bagels at Zabar’s while my mom stayed home to keep me company as I nursed the infant. Now I have hospital-averse Eddie, who announces he’s leaving in two days; five fresh holes in my torso; an infection; a new stack of bills I can’t pay; a void where my reproductive organs once resided; a holy health hazard of a home; weeks of solo recovery stretching far ahead; and a custody hearing six days away, at which I’ll be representing myself.
If I were my mother, it would make me sad to visit 2017 Deb, too. Which I think is the main reason she’s not here but her food is, though I’d give anything for the obverse. The tearful fight we will have about this after Eddie and my daughter leave in two days—when I beg her to come up and help me out, but she says she can’t—will be heartbreaking for both of us. Weeks will go by when we won’t speak, then months.
“It’s not written anywhere that you must have a relationship with your mother,” my shrink will tell me, when I ask for an emergency session over FaceTime, “if it causes you more pain than good. Estrangement is an option.” Normally Swiss neutral on every topic I broach, he’ll seem visibly angry after I make my wishes to be cared for clear, and they go unheeded.
“But I love my mom,” I’ll say. I was done b
eing angry. I have learned to accept her as she is, not as I want her to be or wished she would have been. Isn’t that the whole point of therapy? To come to some sort of peace with the unmet needs and traumas of one’s past in order to move beyond them?
My mother came of age, I remind my male shrink, in an era even more inhospitable to women than mine. She was told she couldn’t go to medical school. Talking back could get her hit. She went straight from her father’s home into her husband’s, without any transitional moment to figure out who she was or what she might have achieved on her own. She got married at twenty, had me at twenty-three, my sister at twenty-five, my twin sisters at twenty-nine. That’s four girls under the age of six before she turned thirty, during a period when women still didn’t have a right to their own credit cards and wouldn’t until she turned thirty-two. She had no help at home, a spouse who traveled four months out of every twelve, undiagnosed anxiety, depression, and most likely premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which wasn’t even a clinical diagnosis until well after her reproductive years, plus she must have had some unresolved anger from her own childhood traumas.
Yes, I’ve often had to mother myself. But my mother gave me life; she sends Hanukkah and birthday presents every year; she loves my kids; she shows up at happy milestones (the grandkids’ shows, graduations, bar mitzvahs, etc.); she giddily hosts my children and me every summer in Bethany Beach; and she loves me, I know, in her own way. The past is the past. And that past is both my millstone and my superpower: a black hole of sadness and a wellspring of resilience, forever intertwined. “The law of compensation,” the teacher in Truffaut’s L’Argent de Poche calls it. That film made me weep when I first saw it in high school French class, for reasons I was still too young to grasp.
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