by Becky Aikman
On some level, I grasped what they were all saying to me. I needed to leave. My husband was gone. I knew that. And yet I couldn’t leave him just like that, without a plan in place, and my brain couldn’t form a plan. Whatever anyone said to me—“I’m so sorry.” “Would you like some hot tea?” “Would you like to go home now?”—I could come up with only one response: “I don’t know what to do.”
It felt as if someone with a remote control were changing channels in my brain every few seconds, before any thought could reach a logical conclusion. The loop ran something like this:
“Bernie is gone. There is no point in staying here.”
“I can’t leave him here. He hates the hospital.”
“Let’s face it, Becky, he’s not really in the hospital now.”
“I should start planning a funeral. The nurses think I should be planning a funeral.”
“I have no idea how to plan a funeral.”
“Everybody is waiting for me. They must be hungry.”
“I should eat, too. I need my strength.”
“Wait—I don’t need my strength anymore. I can finally sleep.”
“I should have made plans for a funeral.”
“What kind of person doesn’t plan for a funeral when her husband has had cancer for four and a half years?”
“A person who has been Staying Positive. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I need to talk to Bernie.”
Ah, that was it. I needed to talk to Bernie. Somewhere in my head I knew that that could never happen again. Not even once. Not ever. My head was refusing to process that information. It was like a pinball machine that someone had bumped too hard, and it was going Tilt! Tilt! Tilt! I’m as independent as the next person, but I had talked to Bernie about everything, big or small, for twenty years. Everything from what article I should write to what sweater goes with what skirt. The idea that it wouldn’t happen again was simply too big to grasp. My brain was shutting down rather than taking it in.
Still, somehow, the brief thought that I couldn’t talk to Bernie gave me a wedge in, a way to start functioning, however feebly. No, I couldn’t talk to him now. But I could try to put together what he would have said if he’d had a chance.
I thought back to the day, four and a half years ago, when we first learned that Bernie had cancer. And not just any cancer, but a softball-sized tumor so perilous that even the most hardened oncologists, armored with emotional defenses as secure as maximum-security prisons, patted us on our shoulders and looked at us with open pity. A cancer so rare—they called it thymic carcinoma—that no one knew a protocol for treating it, only a prognosis that, in essence, came down to this: There was no use making long-term plans. A cancer in a part of the chest so obscure (the thymus? I’d never even heard of it) that scarcely anyone had a clue what purpose it served, let alone what to do with a sick one.
My assignment as the supportive spouse got off to an undignified start. Somehow, the doctor who was supposed to break the news to us was under the impression that somebody else already had. We walked into an appointment that we thought was about a persistent but routine respiratory infection, and his first words were, “The tumor is very large. It has to come out.”
“What tumor?” Bernie and I cried in unison, like the Two Stooges.
The doctor slapped some film onto a backlit board and pointed to what looked like a massive ink stain, blotting out everything that mattered in the middle of Bernie’s chest.
Speechless, I dropped like a rock into the nearest chair. The room went momentarily black, and everyone from Bernie to a posse of interns rushed to my side to tend to me—me, the well one.
“Put your head between your legs,” the doctor advised. I struggled to absorb the blow from this inelegant angle.
Bernie took my hand. “I’m so sorry, Beck,” he said.
Afterward, I stood next to him outside the hospital, dizzy and devastated. I was forty-four years old, and I knew that whatever happened next, nothing would be the same. Bernie looked shaken, too, but he took my arm, and his demeanor took on an upbeat energy, common to him whenever he undertook a new project.
“Beck,” he said with resolution, “we just have to put our heads down and go.”
And so we did. Like the journalists we both were, we hopped into a cab, headed home to Brooklyn, and started doing research, reading anything we could about the disease, calling any expert we could find, working the story, the story of how to save his life, for as long as we could, anyway. We didn’t think about the future. We didn’t think about the larger implications. We didn’t think about death. We applied ourselves to the concrete task at hand. We succeeded, I suppose, in that he lived far longer than anyone predicted. The approach became a model for us throughout his illness. Every time we got bad news—the tumor was growing, the chemo wasn’t working, the surgery didn’t remove the whole thing, it was spreading through the chest, it had spread to the brain—we put our heads down and figured out something to do about it, a new specialist to see, a new procedure to try.
Now in the hospital once again, Bernie’s body inert beside me, I was dizzy, devastated, again. And once again, I realized, the only way to keep going was not to think too deeply right now, not that the channel clicker in my brain would let me anyway. I needed to figure out something to do. I couldn’t think about loss. I couldn’t think about how profoundly alone I would be, stretching years into the future. I couldn’t think, except in the most practical way, about death. I suppose that’s one of the handy realities about funerals. They provide the bereaved with a task that’s tangible but not too profound—Danish or bagels afterward?—for the first day or so, holding the enormity of what has happened at bay, if only for a time. I’d have something to do for now.
It was shocking how ill-prepared I was to accomplish even that. Planning a funeral—This is a job for grown-ups! I told myself in disbelief, feeling like I was twelve. Nobody else in my circle seemed any better equipped. My mother had helped arrange funerals before, but she had come from out of town and didn’t know the ropes in New York. My friends were all too young to have firsthand experience. And the nurses … well, the phone book idea was their go-to suggestion. One of my friends said to me a week later, “Gee, a cancer hospital—you’d think no one had ever died there before.” The ultimate certainty in life may be mortality, but most of us, me most of all, are caught flat-footed when confronted with it for real. Even as it was overtaking Bernie and me like a tidal wave, we had refused to look out to sea, pushing all thoughts of death aside. For our generation, in our culture, in our lives, death was the one unmentionable.
We weren’t alone. The doctors had started retreating already in the preceding week. As Bernie grew sicker and sicker, his vast team fell away, avoiding eye contact, standing on the far side of the examining room, leaving bedside visits to skittish interns. I couldn’t blame any of them. Many had become fond of Bernie, and fond of me, too, I suppose. They had been proud of his unexpected perseverance. For his most devoted physicians, this would be a sad defeat. Our usual oncologist wasn’t doing rounds that week, so one of the hospital’s leading specialists had spent the last several days alternately avoiding me and patronizing me while Bernie lay unconscious in a haze of narcotics. Whenever I asked a question, this doctor would advance into my personal space, back me into a corner in some sort of alpha male display, and speak to me loudly and slowly, as if I were mentally challenged. “Your husband has sepsis. It’s an infection in the bloodstream. Almost nobody survives sepsis, even healthy people, and your husband isn’t healthy.”
I knew that. Chemotherapy had left his immune system too weak to fight a common cold. When I’d rushed him to the hospital on Monday, shaking with fever, I knew we were in trouble, and over the next several days, he slipped deeper and deeper into a coma-like twilight. By Friday, he hadn’t spoken in days, not since Tuesday when he woke up briefly to say what turned out to b
e his last words. “I love you,” he wheezed, and then something else that started with the letter S—I’ll never know—before he slipped back under.
Meanwhile, if I probed for any glint of hope, any suggestion of a solution, the doctor threw up his hands in exasperation and repeated, “Your husband has sepsis …” and then officiously hustled away. Just the day before, he had seen me approaching in the corridor and turned so hard on his heel that he lost his balance, throwing up his hands and waving his arms like pinwheels trying to right himself. My mom and I did a spit take as he did his best to restore his dignity. Deathwatch humor—you take what you can get.
Now I asked my friends in the hall to call some funeral homes for me while I stayed put on the end of the bed. I heard them as they whipped out their phones, eager to help, reaching the same few late-shift funeral home employees who would say, “Didn’t somebody else call about the same guy a couple minutes ago?” Nobody knew quite what to ask, and everybody learned the same few things, which they reported back to me. Yes, someone would come to pick up the body, later that night or in the morning. Yes, they all would charge a ridiculous sum for this service. You’d think they were sending him to Tierra del Fuego and back. And they would all like to know what sort of funeral I was planning. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do.
It began to look as if the nurses might call security to give me the heave-ho, except someone finally showed up to break the stalemate. David Goldenberg was a psychiatrist who had managed a complicated cocktail of medications intended to keep Bernie’s mind on track as the cancer wreaked havoc in his brain, causing memory loss, confusion, anxiety, and sleeplessness. It was a wretched existence, profoundly dispiriting to a man who prided himself on reading obscure books on public policy and knowing every sideman who ever played with Ben Webster. Most people with brain metastasis live for only a few months. Bernie had lasted more than two years in this state, and the drugs helped keep him on an even keel. Dr. Goldenberg turned up at the hospital that night for a visit, and I took an easier breath. He would know what to do.
“How are you doing?” he asked briskly as he strode into the room. He pulled up an ugly plastic chair and sat opposite me. If he found it strange to speak to a woman who was perched on her deceased husband’s bed, her knees hugged to her chest, his face did nothing to betray it. I had drawn a sheet over Bernie by now to spare everyone from seeing him.
I told Dr. Goldenberg about the remote control running amok in my head.
“That’s actually quite normal at a time like this,” he said. I found that information comforting. I might have been a mess, but I was a normal mess.
I told him I didn’t know what to do. “I feel guilty leaving Bernie in the hospital,” I said. “He hated it when I’d leave him here. He kept fighting, no matter what horrible procedures got thrown at him, so we wouldn’t be apart. I can’t walk away from him now. It seems my end of it shouldn’t be so easy.”
“It’s normal to feel guilty,” Dr. Goldenberg said. “There’s no avoiding it.” Then he got down to practicalities. “You don’t have to make any decisions right now,” he said. “You’re exhausted. Go home, get some rest, make some choices tomorrow. Your friends are all here. Let them help you. This isn’t a time to insist on doing every thing yourself.”
Granted, it didn’t take a medical degree to come up with this advice, but it had enough ring of authority to give me some backbone. Maybe a copy of the Yellow Pages would have accomplished the same thing.
After Dr. Goldenberg left, I took a crack at pulling myself together. I might have lost Bernie, my trusted guide, but I knew I couldn’t remain frozen forever in this void between what my life had been and the scary territory that lay ahead. Immobility was the act of a coward. I also knew that I’d have to push back against the guilt I would feel walking out of there. For some time to come, I could see, I would have to contend with this guilt, this new unwanted companion of mine, whenever I did what was necessary to keep on living myself.
I stood up, stepped out the door, and informed my little group of supporters that I would go now. They told the nurses I would arrange for a funeral home to come for Bernie tomorrow. Back at the bedside, I said a few words to him, feeling the full absurdity of talking out loud for the first time in my life to someone who wasn’t there. I gathered his things, his glasses and his keys and his clothes, no longer of any use, in a hospital laundry bag. Then I kissed him. His skin was smooth and cold. One more moment. “Good-bye, sweetie,” I said, and turned away, hard.
I walked out into the hall. I didn’t speak. I didn’t look from side to side. I certainly didn’t think. If I had, I might have had to acknowledge what I was leaving behind me: a twenty-year union, the most important of my life, with a man who could never be replaced. I took one step ahead, then another.
I couldn’t know what awaited me beyond those steps, that it would take all my depleted strength, that it would be harder than anything I had known. My friends drew close. I could feel them encircling me like a ring around a dark penumbra. I summoned Bernie’s words from the start of this nightmare: I put my head down, and I went.
chapter
FOUR
it was too soon for me to form any coherent, conscious thought, but on some level, that was probably the beginning of my wish to find someone else like me. I had the first inkling that I might have found not one but five of them that January night of the first meeting of our group. On the surface, we weren’t much alike—we weren’t even at the same stage of widowhood. But there was something extraordinary about that meeting. It was heartrending but exhilarating, too. It filled a long-empty hole.
Let me put it this way. Have you ever been to a party where everybody shared their deepest feelings about everything closest to their hearts and then laughed until their insides hurt and then went home and stayed up all night as everything kept spinning in their heads—and they weren’t stoned? Me neither. Until the night of that dinner at Denise’s.
On the subway back home to Brooklyn I couldn’t stop going over and over the evening in my mind. Oddly, I kept coming back to the movie Thelma and Louise. One catastrophe in the first reel and the characters were on the run, speeding toward an uncertain future, their identities up for grabs as they propelled themselves through one hair-raising scrape after another. Our gang at dinner wasn’t exactly on the lam in an old Thunderbird, but the death of each husband had set in motion a world-changing series of unfamiliar predicaments. All the women, we learned, were in the process of remaking, reinventing, and rethinking who they were and how they lived and where they lived and what they did and who they cared about and who cared about them—all the issues that overwhelmed me at first when Bernie died.
As Louise said to Thelma—or was it Thelma to Louise?—“We seem to have some kind of snowball effect going on here.”
But putting it all into words, telling anecdotes, framing it with humor, lightened it somehow, because, finally, we’d found women who knew exactly what we were talking about. Women who got the sorrow, women who got the jokes.
After that first hour, as Denise had said, there was no use pretending that what had happened hadn’t happened. We were comfortable talking about death and its aftermath—these were our lives, after all. There were no tears. But getting through the hard stories about what had befallen our husbands freed everybody up to talk about the stuff nobody else wants to talk to widows about, the messy stuff everybody was working on right then.
The challenge for me was getting a word in edgewise. Over dinner, I had planned to explain the details of my utterly amateur widows’ support scheme and ask the women whether they would be willing to risk it for a year. But faced with the formidable personalities assembled in front of me, I couldn’t get up the nerve. Why would the independent Tara conform to anybody’s schedule but her own? Wouldn’t the busy Marcia find this a frivolous use of her time? And would all of them regard the idea of consorting with widows irredeemably glum? Dawn seemed to enjoy ample opportunit
ies for dating. Maybe the others did, too, not to mention working, raising children, mastering the violin for all I knew. Every time I got closer to bringing up my idea, I backed off, and somebody steered the conversation further from my goal.
I lost my first chance when we moved into Denise’s jewel box of a dining room, where the walls were painted a glossy shade of vermilion.
“I love this red room … it’s so feng shui,” Tara said. “And I love the door.”
Denise was backing through it, carrying Tara’s salad from the kitchen. “That’s the reason we bought this apartment,” she said. “My husband saw this door.”
It was a swinging door, an original Art Deco beauty with a porthole in it, like the doors on classic ocean liners. Denise and her husband, Steve, had bought the apartment only two and a half years ago, a year before they married. The place was a wreck when they first saw it, and the door was lying on the floor with broken hinges, but Steve restored the door’s original luster, along with everything else.
“Steve could fix anything,” Denise said, pleased but wistful.
All that work had fashioned a room with informal charm, the unassuming product of the couple’s personal touch. The door, the red walls, the golden light from a vintage chandelier, and a flea market table lacquered in shiny black enamel imparted a cozy glamour. Our gathering took on some of that personality as we sat down to dine.
Steve’s death, we learned, had placed this home in jeopardy, because the mortgage was too steep for Denise to manage alone. Everyone she knew was urging her to move, but instead she was working like a demon to bring in more money, signing up new novels at her publishing house and loading up her nights and weekends with part-time jobs. Sleep would have to wait, not that she was sleeping anyway. She might need to rent out the second bedroom, too. A roommate at the age of thirty-nine—hardly anyone’s dream scenario.