Instead of rescuing him, I found myself slipping in. Depression can morph into a communicable disease. “How was your night?” I asked each morning, making my voice cheerful with expectation. I already knew it was bad when I saw how his body was positioned next to me: face down, one hand holding his forehead as if trying to wipe away his nighttime torment. Evenings were always better. As the night sky darkened, his mood would begin to lighten. We could converse. Sometimes he would lie about how he felt and I knew it was for my sake. He wanted to spare me. I didn’t contradict him. When he said he felt better, my guilt was eased. My love should cure him; I should be able to seduce him into a sweet sleep and a fresh awakening.
The mention of insomnia in conversations with other people brought out all sorts of advice. I listened eagerly. Soak your feet in hot water. Drink hot milk. Read a book. Play this CD. Count backwards by seven. Medications, old and new, were prescribed. And then there were things not to do: Don’t watch the evening news. Don’t read on your Kindle. Don’t exercise at night. We consulted his family doctor, a geriatric therapist, and a psychiatrist. We spent much of August of 2014 traveling back and forth for treatments at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Then, one morning after a two-hour session with a new doctor and an increase in medication, it happened again.
“How was your night?”
“Wonderful.”
That morning he cleared his desk of all the accumulated correspondence and quickly went through his e-mail. He bought three pairs of bedroom slippers online and sent them back the following day, still looking for exactly what he wanted. He went with me to buy flowers; he made plans to have dinner with people every night; he wrote a poem for the first time and read it aloud to me; he fixed the CD player; he listened to Mahler the entire day. His study was now perfectly organized. Two weeks ago, nothing was in the right place.
“It’s a miracle,” I said to the doctor, wishing to bless him. He only nodded. He knew better. Still, he assured us that the depression was not likely to return. I wanted so badly to believe him.
A month later, the beast had him “by the neck” (John’s words). He had bad nights. Nightmares woke him up, carving deep crevices on either side of his face. Desperate for relief, we both agreed to go forward with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), despite my reservations. My father had been treated with electroconvulsive therapy when it was in its primitive stage, and I remembered that my mother had referred to it with horror. My son, a doctor, supported ECT for John, and so did my stepdaughter Martha. I relinquished my hesitation because I wanted John to walk out of the cave and emerge as my husband, the man I knew, the man I had married.
So much hope is placed in doctors’ hands. We endow them with magical powers. I believed in magic after the first recovery. We both did. And then poof, the wand went dead. We endured eight sessions of ECT, driving for two hours back and forth to Hanover, New Hampshire, and staying overnight at Martha’s house in time for treatments at six in the morning. After each treatment, I fed him bits of blueberry muffin like a child and he swallowed them with sips of water. Each time he awoke from the anesthesia, I expected to see the smile of salvation on his face. Cured! Not yet. Patience, patience.
John became more prone to losing his balance. A fall, I feared, could kill him. My arm was in a constant state of readiness. A low level of anxiety permeated our partnership. If he fell when I was with him, it would be my fault. If he fell when I was not with him, it would also be my fault, only more so. I found myself, as an old woman, reliving the tension I had experienced as a young woman. Should I give myself to the children, or should I venture out to my own life? We were fortunate to be at Wake Robin where help was always available. How terrible I had felt when I did not get home from giving a speech in time to watch my son blow out his nine birthday candles. I should have been there when I was elsewhere. Now the same dilemma haunted me. Should I go to my office and write, have lunch with friends, feed my own soul? Bad mother, neglectful wife, selfish woman.
John did not keep me bound to his side. “Go,” he would say, “you’ve got to do your work.” It was I who imprisoned myself. I would call him frequently when I was not with him. If there was no answer on his cell phone, I called the landline. Again, no answer. I told myself that he must be taking a nap. But what if he’d fallen? What if he couldn’t reach the emergency button hanging from his neck? I called again, both numbers. And he answered. He was safe. I was safe.
John began using a cane. He often forgot to use it or misplaced it. When it fell down from where it had been propped—a table, a chair, a counter—I jumped at the sound of the crash. “Are you alright?” I developed a sixth sense, not for my body but for his. I felt like a mother watching her toddler take his first steps, ready to catch him at any moment, arms outstretched. The toddler wobbles, falls, and stands up again, laughing. Now John is in reverse, back to the wobbly stage, and no longer cushioned by laughter. When we walk arm in arm instead of using the cane, it could be mistaken for romance. Sometimes we hold hands, firmly. We have become an old couple, an obstacle in the way. I tell John a cane is elegant; it looks good on him. I have a photo of my father standing still for the photographer on a hiking path in the Alps, his cane planted at a rakish angle, as was the fashion.
Months later, Martha gives us the walker of a neighbor who has died. But I don’t want it in the house. No, we don’t need it, thank you. I put it in the garage. Then I begin to recognize the obvious: I can’t anticipate a fall. By its very nature, a fall is sudden, shocking. Still, I can’t help asking, too often, “Are you stable, are you alright?” The words became a wearisome mantra. I make the decision to get a walker. (The one in the garage had been given to a tag sale.) Whether he likes it or not, I will get him a walker. I have counted five falls in two weeks. He would list to the right and to the left like a sail, and then capsize. I have become expert at placing ice packs on his bruises and Band-Aids on his wounds. Nothing has broken, not yet.
Just before the start of the Labor Day weekend, I rush to the rehabilitation center at Wake Robin and request a walker. Reluctantly, John agrees to try it out. When he places his hands on the two handlebars, he smiles. I smile. He will be safe. I alone am no longer responsible for his safety. The walker is my friend. John agrees that graduating to a walker does not mark the end stage of his life. Walkers are parked everywhere at Wake Robin, lined up like alert soldiers. He treats his like a new toy, and I have to slow him down when we walk to our cottage. We joke about speed limits.
One day after dinner I suggest that we walk around the semicircle of our cottages. The doctor has recommended more exercise to improve his stability. With the walker, we will be fine. I stop to look at a neighbor’s window to assess the progress of their renovations. “Not much going on,” I say.
John takes one hand off the walker to take a look. He begins to sway, gently at first, as if he might right himself. I stretch my arms out to him, but I can’t reach him in time. He falls, slowly it seems, but he hits the sidewalk hard.
“Are you hurt?” I ask several times, hoping for the right answer.
“Yes.”
“Where does it hurt, John?” He can’t say. I manage to pull him to his feet and we walk with my arm around his waist and his arm around mine. We head for our door. Panic practically fells me. What if this fall had been “it”? What if I had killed him? In my mind I replay the video of his fall again and again. I had been transfixed in disbelief as I watched him go down. I thought he would stop. But he didn’t.
“It was my fault,” I lament.
When we arrive at our cottage, step by careful step, he says, “I’ve got to lie down.” He didn’t say that after previous falls. He is pale and shaken. He has hit the right side of his head—not too hard, I think—but a bump is beginning to swell. I get the icepack and put it on his forehead. He complains of chest pain, possibly a broken rib. Should I press the emergency button, the button I had once dismissed as unnecessary? We didn’t need it then, but we do now. I
find the emergency pendant hanging in the bathroom and press the blue center twice. It seems longer, but it takes only a few minutes for a man from Emergency Services to knock on our door. We speak briefly and conclude that John should go to the emergency room. I see the flashing red ambulance from the window. Two uniformed EMTs, a man and a woman, pull the oversized stretcher into the bedroom. So that’s what the wide doors are for.
I am instructed to follow in my car, but not to go through any red lights. I promptly disobey and keep up with the ambulance, wondering if the flashing lights are routine or an indication that John is badly hurt. But we are lucky. The x-rays show no broken bones. John can go home.
But this was John’s sixth fall. My doctor son, Adam, and the attending physician recommend that John not return to our cottage but go to the skilled nursing unit at Wake Robin instead. There he will be protected from further falls and receive physical therapy. I agree, feeling both guilt and relief. Our relationship is changing; he will live in one place, and I—no matter how close by—will live in another. He is entering a state of dependency, a state he will grow to hate.
We have one more night in the same bed; the nurses can’t admit him until the next morning. I sniff his clean body. I feel his hand rest on my thigh. I reach out for his shoulder and listen to his breath. When will we be blanketed together like this again? He gets up three times in the night, at three, four, and five o’clock, to go to the bathroom. I have asked him to wake me up each time so that he will not stumble in the night. In the morning we are both exhausted. Still, it doesn’t seem reason enough to move him to skilled nursing. But we go, he with both hands on the walker, me with one hand on his arm.
I give him up.
But only for the time being. He moves back to the cottage. Then he falls again, and begins shuffling his feet when he walks. New x-rays yield a diagnosis of a subdural hematoma caused by falls. An operation follows, and a slow recovery. Our lives are cyclical: brief recoveries when we dream about sailing on the Queen Mary II, and then the nightmares repeat themselves.
One night when John is in skilled nursing, I improvise. I ask a nurse to place a white tablecloth on a round table in the activity room. I set a bottle of red wine in the center and take the blue and white china plates out from my tote bag and frame them with silver knives and forks and blue linen napkins. Then I walk down the hall to John’s room, number 205.
“Dinner is ready,” I announce like a butler. He rises from his chair carefully, every motion mentally rehearsed before translation into movement. He grasps both handles of the walker, steadies himself, and takes the first step to set the others in motion. He cannot, will not, fall. I walk by his side, mimicking his rhythm. We reach the make-believe dining room and John expresses delighted surprise.
“How did you do this?”
“I got permission. I brought a picnic.”
It’s Sunday night, the only night when no dinner is served for residents. He could have had dinner with the other nursing home patients at four thirty in the afternoon, but we rebel against institutional time and besides, I wanted to cook. I had clipped a new recipe from the New York Times: velvet chicken, plus my favorite vegetable, parsnips, and his favorite, spinach. I didn’t have all the ingredients for the chicken. I used flour instead of cornstarch, light cream instead of crème fraiche, and omitted thyme out of necessity. I was generous with the Dijon mustard.
When I open the plastic containers, a lovely aroma swims over the table. I spoon the food onto the plates, careful to make them equal. I wish I had brought candles. But they aren’t needed. We create our own light. I drink two glasses of red wine alone. John has to abstain because the doctor said alcohol interferes with his medication. We make a toast, wine clicking with water.
“To your health,” I say.
“To your health,” he replies, and gives me one of his warm smiles. I kiss him in return.
CHRYSALIS
You came out of it
born anew, like
yesterday, almost
not quite, but
good enough for me.
How did you claw your
way out from the chrysalis?
Scratching all that time,
scratching . . . scratching
until you caught a thread
that unraveled into sight
and sound, until you slid
back to me, arms
outstretched,
wavering in the air,
until the ground rose
up to our feet.
5
Late in Life Love
I WAS SEVENTY-ONE and had been on my own for ten years when I fell in love. Like most women that age, I had secretly hoped it would happen but never seriously expected it to. I had watched my older brother court a variety of girlfriends after his wife had moved to Washington and he was virtually single. He was a successful seducer; women fell for him regardless of their age or his.
He confided in me, “It’s much harder for women,” and I soberly agreed while feeling envious of his ability to behave like an old rooster. Some years after my divorce I had begun to peruse dating sites. I knew that they produced many wonderful romances, but I dared not enter my name for fear I would be discovered: “Former Vermont governor, late sixties, looking for . . .”
I first came across the name John Hennessey when a generous check came in the mail for my lieutenant governor’s campaign in 1978. It was from New Hampshire. I learned that John and his wife, Jean, were strong supporters of Democrats, and female Democrats in particular. The checks kept coming when I ran for governor. What if I hadn’t accepted John’s invitation to join the advisory board of Americans for Campaign Reform, a new organization he and others were launching? What if I hadn’t met him for lunch the following fall after his wife had died? What if I hadn’t said yes when he wanted to brief me on the organization’s recent developments? What if I hadn’t had an extra ticket in my purse for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra’s performance that night?
“What’s the program?” John prudently asked.
“Beethoven’s Ninth.”
What if he hadn’t loved Beethoven’s Ninth?
People began to see us sitting together at the symphony. A year later, as we were walking in the rain to another performance, a young woman rushed by us and exclaimed, “I’m on my way to the symphony, to meet the man of my dreams.”
John is the man of my dreams. It was serendipity that brought us together. Neither of us calls on God very often, but we both believe in destiny. It had to be. Although we had lived separate lives for so many years (seventy for me, almost eighty for him), we had been at some of the same places, had read the same books, enjoyed the same music, and had visited the same museums. Most importantly—and unexpectedly, since John was the former dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business—we had the same liberal Democratic politics. And John liked strong women, something that his first wife, Jean, and I had in common. He, not I, would refer to God as “she.” When we explored the past, we found so many common threads that it was as if we had led parallel lives. “I can give you ten years,” he said, when we agreed to get married. That seemed like forever.
John, who would shortly turn eighty, was remarkably young for his age. Mentally alert, physically strong, we could do everything together. Unlike younger couples who struggle to achieve a balance between work and life, we were unencumbered by young children or career ambition. We traveled to all the places we wished to go: Switzerland, England, Egypt, China, Italy, France, India, and more. John accompanied me on all my book tours in every part of the country and kept four-by-six note cards about every event, jotting down the date, place, names, and reaction to my speeches. He kept his admiring eyes on me the whole time I spoke, never looked bored or fell asleep, and would give me instant feedback about my talk, almost always laced with praise. He edited my writing. He was, indeed, the perfect partner, intellectually, emotionally, and romantically. John would say to me, “I know you,” and he d
id.
How often did we say how lucky we were to have found one another? We felt like young lovers. And we must have looked the part. Our heads bent close in conversation in a restaurant prompted a young couple to stop at our table.
“How long have you two been together?” I think they expected at least fifty years.
“Just six years. This is our second marriage.”
They did not evidence disappointment. “I hope we’ll be like you when we grow old.”
I LOVED YOU WHEN YOU DID THE DISHES
I cooked, you did the dishes.
Did I love you for that?
I listened to the distant
clattering in the kitchen
while I sat in my chair,
reading the newspaper.
We shared most tasks then,
but you did the driving
and I could sit
still by your side,
with only a rare glance in
the rearview mirror to
check if it was safe to pass.
Now I do everything:
cook and wash the pots
and meet
the dishwasher’s
greedy demands.
I make the bed, which you once
made when we slept together.
I push your wheelchair,
and straighten my back,
not letting it sink
into a stoop
before its time.
I feel my muscles tighten,
up the incline;
I wish you could feel it, too,
from your glued position.
You need me now to move
in any direction:
up and down,
and around corners,
without bumping into
things, like winter boots,
thrown casually on the floor.
I take the lead, pulling
you out of yourself, and into
the world I inhabit.
You visit me, from time to time,
Coming of Age Page 3