So Kirsten gets progressively worse for the first few days. She is hooked up to four different pumps which feed into the four-way hose implanted in her chest. She sleeps a lot. A couple of times when I see her, she kicks me out after a short time because she needs to rest. On day three, she starts to puke. They have her on any number of antinausea drugs, but the medicine is too strong, and she pukes everything up and then pukes up bile. I am there for one of these and hold the pink plastic bucket as she hunches over, green liquid dribbling out of her mouth. It is gross, but more than that, it’s just sad. She still has never been sick from the cancer, but now they are killing her. I mean, they are literally killing her. It is really strange to realize that without major medical intervention (the stem cell transplant) , the dose of medicine they are giving her is fatal. I realize that what I am watching is my wife dying. And then, I guess, thanks to the transplant, she will come back to life. So that she won’t die from the disease that’s not making her sick. This whole thing is just so incredibly bizarre.
On the second day I go to the hospital, I feel a big cry coming on. I am just so sad, and yet I have not broken down yet. Probably because there has just been too much to do–call to get the furnace fixed, get my mom settled in, teach my classes, go to the hospital, make dinner–I haven’t had time to get as sad as I know I need to get. I even packed the Prince Greatest Hits CD with “Purple Rain” on it, which is a song that, in times of high stress, never fails to move me to tears, but all I get today is a dribble, even out of the part near the end where he is going “ooo–oooweoo-oooo-ooweeeoo-ooo-oo-oo” in that crazy falsetto, which is usually where I lose it.
And now I am walking down the street going to the hospital, and I feel like I am about to sob. So I do what I have done so much since this started–I call Danny, who has been my best friend since the seventh grade. We lived two blocks from each other for about five years as adults, and–well, saying what he means to me is probably another book in itself, so I call him up, and I tell him I need some help getting my game face on, because I am going in to see Kirsten and I can’t be this sad, I have to be upbeat, but they’re killing her for God’s sake, and I can’t remember what exactly he says to me, but I know that it involves mocking me in some way, and it works perfectly. I think later on that he is the only person apart from Kirsten who would dare to mock me when I am sad about going to see Kirsten in the hospital, and the only person apart from Kirsten who could possibly know that that is the best thing he could do for me. I am lucky to have him.
The days all start to run together. Some days we have conversations where I tell her about my day and she tells me about why she didn’t sleep and makes fun of the medical staff. Some days she is really sleepy, and she says, “I’m sorry I’m not very good company,” and I hold her hand for a while until she says, “I’m sorry, hon, but you have to leave so I can sleep.” I bring her videos of Rowen and of people at church saying hi. She is puking pretty much nonstop through the church video, which is no reflection on lovely people there or their nice and heartfelt greetings, but she does seem to appreciate it. She raises her head long enough to sort of see who’s talking, then hunches over her little puke bucket while they talk. The sound is bad anyway, so not much is lost. One day we have a hilarious time because she is high on Atavan, which is something they are giving her for her nausea but which is also, I guess, some kind of narcotic, and I am high on lack of sleep and caffeine. I can’t really remember the conversation, and I know she doesn’t either, but I just remember both of us sitting there and laughing a lot. Some days I feel good about what’s happening, and some days I feel horrible. I am not used to being able to see her for only forty-five minutes a day. Mostly I just miss her.
Backstory
Kirsten and I have not been separated like this in twelve years. It sucked then, and it sucks now, but then it was also kind of fun in a romantic longing kind of way; now it just sucks.
We met as sophomores in college. We both lived in this Modern Language dorm, which I know sounds freakish, and I guess it kind of was, but I really loved it there because it was where I finally found the weirdos at this big school. My freshman year I lived on a hall where, but for the would-be Scientologist who tried to get his tuition refunded and run away to be re-educated or something, I was the weirdest person there. I am much more comfortable being the normal person among weirdos than the weirdo among normal people, so I was at home in the Modern Language House.
The dorm was unremarkable except that it had this really cushy, nice lounge with a kitchen, comfy furniture, and this kind of solarium deal. It was a great place to hang out, and Kirsten and I did a lot of hanging out that year. We, along with five or six other people, came to call ourselves “the lounge rats,” because we were just there all the time. There were many many Saturdays when everyone would kind of stagger down there at like 10:00 a.m., sit around and shoot the shit for a couple of hours, talk about how we all had work we needed to do (sometimes if somebody really felt the need to pretend they were going to study, they would bring books that they never opened), drift out at about noon to get sandwiches or make mac and cheese in the kitchen, drift back with food and say Okay, after lunch I am absolutely starting my work, and then sit around shooting the shit until around dinner time, when we would frequently find ourselves so lazy that we would get a pizza delivered from the pizza place we could see right across the street and endure the disgusted looks of the delivery guys rather than get off our lazy asses. It was really great.
Although Kirsten and I spent hours in each other’s company, we never spent any time together outside of this group, so in a strange way we didn’t know each other that well, and we did not become a couple right away. I actually ended up dating a non-lounge-rat woman that year. Well, “dating” is not exactly the right word. I mean, we did go on some dates, but it was a college relationship, so what we mostly did was have enthusiastic, inexpert sex in those tiny, uncomfortable dorm beds. I should say in fairness that I am speaking only of myself when I say “inexpert,” because I was a virgin before this and had an endurance of about twenty seconds, and when I think about it I guess that means I can really only speak for myself when I say “enthusiastic” too.
Anyway, this woman was actually dating some guy who had gone away for a semester abroad, so I was The Other Man. Which ended up hurting, because I wanted her to pick me, but she told me from the beginning that she wouldn’t, and because I was an idiot I thought we were in love, and because she wasn’t she knew that we had fun together and shared a mutual attraction and that was about it, but it took me years to realize that I resented her for not believing the lies I told myself about our relationship, and that she was right and I was wrong and I caused myself a lot of grief wanting this relationship to be something it wasn’t.
The only real negative implication of this is that over the summer after all this ended, my ex-girlfriend from high school came over and just threw herself at me, but she was also dating somebody else, and since I was tired of being somebody’s piece on the side, I pretended that I didn’t get that she was throwing herself at me, and I know that it was the right thing to do, but I still sort of regret it. How pathetic is that?
Kirsten and I finally spent some time alone together at the end of that year, when we were both getting our paperwork together for our junior years in the U.K. We went and got passport pictures taken, picked up forms, and stuff like that. It was all aboveboard and totally non-romantic, but I felt vaguely guilty because I was “dating” somebody else and this felt kind of like a date. We then kept in touch over the summer–she lived in Boston and I lived in Cincinnati–and later that summer her sister Nan got married and moved to Cincinnati, and so Kirsten came to visit her, and this happened to coincide with my friend Rick’s big polka party that he had been planning for weeks, so I suggested that she come along, and she agreed.
Now when I say polka party, it was just a party where Rick was playing a lot of polka music; it’s not like there we
re actual accordions or anything. I don’t remember much about the party except that Kirsten and I did flirty stuff like throw ice at each other, and I was sort of starting to wonder about that, and one of Rick’s friends was hitting on Kirsten and I found myself getting totally jealous, and I hated this guy for years because of this, and Rick would say stuff like, “but he’s a really nice guy!” and I’d be like, “he was hitting on my wife!” and Rick would sensibly reply that she wasn’t even my girlfriend, much less my wife at the time, and eventually I did hang out with this guy again and found that Rick was right about him. An interesting postscript is that after we left, the cops showed up with this decibel-o-meter and gave Rick a ticket for violating the noise ordinance, but he decided to go in front of a judge for some reason, and when the judge heard that it was polka music, she laughed and dismissed the case.
Anyway, both Kirsten and I were headed to the U.K. for our junior year–she to London and me to Edinburgh. We wrote letters a lot, and once she came up to visit and we went to the movies and then to a pub and came back to my room, and something was on the verge of happening, I mean I was about thirty seconds away from going for the awkward first kiss, when my friend Hugh burst into my room drunk off his ass and planted himself for a good hour. That pretty well killed the moment, so nothing happened, but now I was thinking about her all the time. When Christmas break came, I went to London for the first week, and I just remember thinking that it was too much for me, I had to say something. So at some point we were out walking around London and I ended up picking her up, I mean literally lifting her off her feet under some pretext I no longer remember, so I was holding her around the waist and I said something smooth like, “so what’s going on with us anyway?” and she replied something equally smooth like, “I dunno,” or something, but we decided that something was happening, and I remember the first time we kissed we were standing outside the British museum, and for the whole rest of the week we held hands and kissed constantly, and it was just wonderful.
We saw each other at least twice a month for the rest of the year and wrote letters daily. I took the eight-hour bus ride from Edinburgh to London what seemed like a hundred times, and you can tell how in love I was by the fact that I came to love those bus rides. They were full of romantic anticipation, (too much! Magic Bus!) and even now if I saw the bus station in Edinburgh I would probably well up, because the bus meant Kirsten, and even eight hours on the bus was painless because she was waiting at the other end.
We called each other a lot, and this was frustrating, because in my dorm the phone was down the hall and through a door, and hardly anybody ever heard it ring, and in Kirsten’s dorm there were three phones for the entire dorm, and I had to depend on the goodwill of some sullen person who was trying to watch their Australian soap opera in the lounge next door to answer the phone and then page the person on the PA. Then I would wait for a long time for her to get downstairs if she was there and wait even longer if she wasn’t there, and all the while the minutes would be ticking off of my phone card.
Anyway, we did the best we could to stay in constant contact, and we saw each other a lot and drank a lot and kissed a lot and had sex a lot, and after we came back we were pretty much inseparable–we both lived in the Language House again as seniors, and we went to Taiwan for six months after graduation and then moved in together right after that. We had shitty first jobs and a shitty first apartment together, learned to cook together, got married, had a kid together, and basically I went from being a kid to an adult with her, and when I say I don’t know who I am without her it’s because we have been together as I have become everything –husband, parent, teacher–that makes me who I think I am right now, and as I sit here writing this she is in the hospital and I miss her so much I can’t stand it. I literally think the last time I spent this long without sleeping next to her was the summer after that junior year abroad, and it sucked then, but it sucks a whole lot more now.
Nobody Likes a Smartass
One day I bring in and hang up Christmas lights in Kirsten’s hospital room. I do such a crappy job that they all fall down in the night, and Kirsten’s dad does it right the following day. He also brings in a sign that Kirsten and I have been talking about since day one. She has this window that faces the corridor, and she can never really leave the room, so we decide that she needs a sign that says, “Please Do Not Tap on the Glass. It Disturbs the Animals.” She gets her dad to make it because he is the master of clip art, and she wants little pictures of zoo animals surrounding the words. One day I go in and it is hanging up. I think this may be the only positive thing about this whole experience–who’s going to tell her to take it down? Who would dare? They may or may not find it funny (not, in most cases–as I have noted, irreverence just doesn’t seem to play very well with medical types), but they damn sure aren’t going to take it down. A few days later, in a similar spirit, I steal a bunch of stickers from her room. They are safety orange and say CHEMOTHERAPY in big black letters, and I have seen them stuck on the bags of crap they are pumping into her, but I stick one on my shirt, and I offer them around at work, and some people politely decline, some people give this nervous sort of “heh-heh” and say “uhhhh…I guess it’s great that you’re keeping your sense of humor, heh-heh” and sort of edge away from me uneasily. I think maybe only one or two people have any idea why I think this is a funny thing to do. I’m not really sure I do, but I think it’s all about changing the power dynamic–not just between us and the medical people, but also between us and the treatment, us and the disease. In the hospital they take these stickers very seriously, as they have to, and I am glad they do because it helps everybody be damn sure which of the five bags hanging on Kirsten’s incredibly heavy IV pole have the toxic substances in them, but the beautiful thing is that we don’t have to take them seriously at all. Kirsten is planning to smuggle out a roll and then surreptitiously stick them on my teacups and stuff.
My mom used to tell me, “nobody likes a smartass,” and while it certainly seems true that the people where Kirsten is don’t know what to make of her and the people where I am don’t know what to make of me, we are completely on each other’s wavelength. and I think I can presume to speak for her when I say we both like at least one smartass.
Invasion of the Parents
Early in Kirsten’s hospital stay, my mom moves in. It goes fine initially, but I’m nervous because the last time I spent any time at all with my mom was for a week last Christmas in Cincinnati. It felt like a very relaxing, laid-back visit. When we got home, however, I found that my mother wouldn’t speak to me for three weeks. She later explained in a letter that she was heartsick because she felt that we were shutting her out. I had no fucking idea what she was talking about. She was mad about the fact, for example, that when she said she would babysit so we could go to the movies, we went to the movies and came home without staying out for five hours so she could bond with Rowen.
I remain baffled by this, but when I have grandchildren I know I will come to understand and that it will suck. So anyway, that incident was the last long visit we had, so I am nervous about what this one is going to bring. I guess I lied when I said that my mom doesn’t have any long-simmering resentments, because ever since Rowen was born, there has been this tension about why do we live in Boston, why don’t we line Delta’s pockets and come to Cincinnati more (Mostly because it costs a hell of a lot less to fly one person out here than three people out there).
My mom has developed a story that explains all this. It goes like this: she always encouraged me to be independent, and then I spread my wings and flew away forever. And this is a partial version of the truth, but it leaves out the fact that we got on each other’s nerves to a shocking degree when I came home for summers in college–basically we just couldn’t figure out how to be adults in that house together, so she acted like I was fourteen and so did I. Also, as I’ve said, we weren’t really too connected to my mom’s extended family when I was growing up, and we
didn’t belong to a church or anything that would sort of anchor me to the community, and the only thing larger than our two-person nuclear family that I felt connected to was my group of friends. And of all of them, only one still lives in Cincinnati, and even he’s moving.
So the story is just more complicated than I am this independent kid who flew away. I mean, I did fly from the nest, but, you know, I was also pushed. Okay. The corollary story is that I am unreasonably exasperated with her. Now any adult with living parents can tell you that parents are just annoying. I mean, they are wonderful, and they gave us life, and I am mindful of the fact that I am here bitching about the people who are making it possible for me to continue to live my life at all while Kirsten is in the hospital, but the fact is that they are also just annoying. I do not mean this specifically about my mom, or Kirsten’s parents. I do not know any adult who does not find their parents occasionally exasperating. And yes, I am fully, poignantly aware that I will one day be annoying to Rowen, and I hope that my mom is still around when that day comes so she can point at me and say, “See? Adult kids are just a pain in the ass! They never listen to your advice and they get all huffy if you so much as put a plate in the wrong place or make a simple suggestion about how they might do something differently with their kid, but they don’t want to hear about your parenting experience, even though you obviously did a good job, just look how they turned out….”
One night while my mom is here, Kirsten’s parents come over to take us all out for dinner, and we go to this really good pizza place which is almost ruined by the melancholy folk stylings of this John Hiatt wanna-be guy singing and playing guitar. I mean, I’m paying money to go out here! If I wanna be miserable I can stay home! So the story of me as independent wing-spreader who doesn’t sufficiently appreciate his mom and is unreasonably exasperated by her just becomes too powerful when there are three of them and one of me. Now I know how they feel when it’s just one of them and two of us–they must hate it. I am sure we assert the story of them as meddling and occasionally feeble in a way that one of them can’t fight.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 11