Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS were a blur of bad dispatches. More tests revealed that the cancer had metastasized to Caroline’s liver and brain; by the weekend, an oncologist had joined the team, and they had started emergency radiation to the brain and a five-hour initial (and desperate) round of chemotherapy. The antibiotics had cleared up the secondary pneumonia, and there was a small window between the diagnosis and the debilitating effects of the treatment when Caroline didn’t feel sick. We were all in shock, consumed with the errands of crisis, making lists of people to call and objects to procure that seemed essential: a favorite T-shirt, a tortoiseshell comb. Morelli had figured out a way to smuggle Lucille into the hospital after the evening shift had begun, and we would climb on the bed with the dog and pass around Italian takeout. Caroline started telling dumb jokes one night, with me and Morelli laughing, and then she stopped midsentence and we all stared at one another, the scene out of some weeper made-for-TV movie. Everything about it felt absurd and precious, filtered through that brief brightness that appears when death is in the room. The first night of the diagnosis, Caroline had told me that she had asked Morelli to marry her, and that we had a wedding to plan, and there was a piercing tenderness to those initial days that helped to contain the next several weeks.

  She called me early one morning and I grabbed the phone and said, “Are you all right?” and she said, “Yes, I’ve run away—I’m thinking of going for a row.” The hospital was by the river, and her upstairs room overlooked the bend of the Charles where rowers passed each morning, and she could see them at first light from her bed. Within a few days she had asked the nurses to keep the curtains closed. But on that morning she was still kidding around, still able to pretend that she would be back out there soon enough. “I miss us,” she told me on the phone that morning. “I miss our lives together.”

  Because we knew everything had changed, the ways in which we communicated this to each other were as careful as they were certain. We talked about the will she was having drawn up; she told Morelli and me one night that we had to promise to walk the dogs together once a week forever. “My boat and my linen,” she said, about her bequest to me; earlier that month, I had borrowed half the jackets in her closet for a trip I had to take to Austin in a few weeks. Her wryness prevailed above all else. “Oh God,” she said to me the second night after the diagnosis, when we were making lists of people to call. “Now I’m going to have to listen to people’s remission stories.”

  But at night, when I had left the hospital, I would come home and stand in the dark in the backyard, where the viburnum was in bloom, and bury my face in its fragrance and weep. After I had walked Clementine, I would go online and read about non-small-cell adenocarcinoma in the medical journals. The word “prognosis” had not yet entered our conversation, but I knew. I had called two friends who were physicians, and both had been kind enough to give me their unadorned opinion. Neither believed she had more than a few months.

  I took lots of notes during these phone conversations—scrawled, elaborate notes, quotes from the doctor friends, my way of organizing the unfathomable. “Worst, most advanced,” I wrote, underneath “stage four—non-small-cell adenocarcinoma.” “Tumors in liver … Radiation will help with pain and with swelling of brain.” And then, in smaller script at the end of the page: “No help at all in prolonging life.”

  Caroline’s doctors disagreed as to the cause and origin of the tumor on the lung: A pulmonary specialist was certain it was smoking-related; an oncologist was equally sure it was not. This mattered greatly to Caroline and not at all to me, though I tried to shield her from the verdict of the lung specialist, whose work in the trenches may have steeled him from the wreckage he had to see each day. Caroline had stopped smoking in the week before the diagnosis, and she clung to this: Her recoveries from anorexia and alcoholism had been long battles against self-destruction, and she needed to know she had made one huge effort to save herself here. The reason I cared less about the tumor’s origin was pragmatic: As much as I had worried about Caroline’s smoking, its causative agency had not a shred of effect on the diagnosis, any more than being pushed off a building protects you from falling off it.

  On Friday, the night they started the chemo, Caroline was in bed wearing the T-shirt I had brought her, an IV in her arm, when I came in. She asked if she could keep the shirt; of course, I said. She asked me to set and program her new underwater sports watch, so she could time her laps in the pool when she got out of the hospital. She had always paced her steps to mine and now I was doing the same, dipping when she led. “If you had told me before all this,” she said that night, “about somebody with lung cancer and metastases in four places, I’d have said, ‘Oh my God, he only has six months.’” Then she held out the slender, muscled arm with the IV and shook her head and smiled. “But these doctors don’t know how strong I am.”

  All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that crevasse between space and time that stays fixed in the imagination. I remember it all because I remember it all. In crisis with someone you love, the dialogue is as burnished as a scar on a tree. It shocks me now what I remember, though I suppose it shouldn’t, because I have Caroline’s voice fixed in my heart. That voice: the inflection, the range, the perfectly timed humor. This I would not lose.

  By Monday, the effects of the chemotherapy had taken hold. Caroline had called her therapist—a man she had known and loved for two decades—in the first days of the diagnosis, but he had not yet been to the hospital; each of them may have been trying to postpone the grimness of the situation. That day she had lost whatever physical and psychological composure she possessed. She was violently ill, and weak, and I spent most of the afternoon sitting next to her while she slept. Four or five hours passed, during which Caroline would wake and start and then drift off again. I would exchange one cold rag for another and reassume my post. It was an odd and effortless station in which both time and thought disappeared. Later, Caroline told me she had dreamed all afternoon of me and her brother, who was in and out of the room as well.

  When the phone rang I grabbed it to keep from waking her. “Caroline?” said a man’s voice. “No,” I said, “this is Gail.” “Oh, Gail,” her therapist said, recognizing my name and knowing his would be familiar to me. “This is David Herzog.” I cupped my hand around the mouthpiece. “I was going to call you,” I said. “You need to get up here. Now.”

  He was there that evening, and Caroline and I laughed later at my no-nonsense imperative—at my ability to do what she could not, which was to reach for him across the divide of fear. He was a bear of a man, and I became fiercely fond of him in the next few weeks, relying on his strength and straightforward kindness when the rest of the world seemed respondent to some deranged gyroscope. It was Herzog I spoke with when medical and emotional realities collided; he who called every day or two to see how I was holding up. I could talk openly with him about what Caroline was enduring and what time she had left. We assumed a ready-made mantle of intimacy that could not fail us: Ours was a wind tunnel attachment. We knew we were both central to Caroline’s life, and we knew what we each stood to lose.

  Here was another meadow of familiarity that Caroline and I had shared over the years. Herzog, as she called him, had been a pillar in the life she had rebuilt on the other side of anorexia. With our strong attachments to powerful fathers, we had each found sanctuary with male psychiatrists. More central was a mutual belief in psychodynamic therapy: the long, mountainous (often monotonous) version, in which you stayed in the room with your fears and history along with a witness who could bear the depths of your story. We lived in a cultural milieu—East Coast, post-1960s—in which therapy was taken for granted, and we each considered the work we’d done there crucial to who we were and to all ground gained. Caroline and I believed in the transformative power of therapy as surely as we did in AA or facing the truth or the loyalty of dogs.

  Caroline stayed in the hospital for the rest of the week,
until she was strong enough to go home; Morelli moved into her house to take care of her. The doctors wanted to get her stable with meds and radiation so that she might endure the next several weeks of chemotherapy. Her tribe of friends and extended family had taken on every detail of incapacitating illness; there were dog walkers and cooks and drivers at every changing of the guard. She had entered that zone of infirmity difficult for the worried well to appreciate: We were all circling her like heartbroken hens, while Caroline was simply trying to swallow a bagel or get through a phone call. At her insistence, she and I tried taking a short walk at Fresh Pond with the dogs, maybe a hundred yards or so around the upper leg of the peninsula—a five-minute loop under normal circumstances that now took three times as long. We stopped on a bench to rest, gave the dogs a biscuit, started again. When she faltered, I put my arm out to steady her, a reversal of roles as wrenching as it was automatic.

  She had started to exhibit small neurological symptoms, which I believe above all enraged her—she dropped a towel twice in front of me and refused to let me pick it up. We maintained a dialogue during these days that was partly code, but still as surefooted as Caroline used to be when crossing a stream. “You’re just trying to get out of making me soup,” I would say, referring to the old promise she’d made to cook for me when I got old. She called one night after she’d met with her oncologist for the first time outside the hospital, and started quoting the statistics on prognosis that were an optimistic version of what I’d read: the clinical trials under way, the new research studies at Mass General, the outside odds of two to five years to live. Her voice was soft and bright during this recitation, and I listened without saying anything, conscious of how harsh the light was in the living room.

  “The point is to buy time,” she said, and we were both dry-eyed and quiet. I didn’t want her taking care of me and I wasn’t sure how to take care of her, except to drive to chemo appointments and cook useless food and pay attention to her every cue.

  But she broke down when she started losing her hair. “I know this seems ridiculous,” she said. “But it’s the only thing I can focus on. The rest is too huge.” The man who had cut her long hair for years came over to her house that weekend to chop it all off; he brought a dozen roses and refused to take any money for his effort. I got a brochure on side effects and hair loss from the American Cancer Society and ordered a half dozen hats and scarves for her to wear, and one day in the waiting room outside chemotherapy we were looking through the catalog together and laughing, and tears started pouring down my face, even though I hadn’t felt like crying. Now I couldn’t stop. I shook my head and tried to dismiss her reaching for me.

  “I’m afraid of letting you know how bad it is,” I said. “I’m afraid if I tell you, you’ll think I’m not strong enough to take it and you’ll try to hide your fear.”

  “Gail,” she said. “I already know how bad it is. In some ways this is harder on you and Morelli than it is on me.”

  We were surrounded by other people waiting for chemo appointments, and no one even glanced our way during this exchange, except for one woman who passed us a box of tissues and went back to her magazine. I found this a relief and an education: No one in this place seemed uncomfortable at the emotions of strangers. We had entered a subterranean culture of extremis, where people were dying or trying to live and the heart was laid bare.

  That was a bright afternoon at the beginning of May, and we had gotten to the hospital early and then sat outside in the sun, cross-legged on the ground and facing each other. By now Caroline’s professional life had been put on hold, but she had one outstanding writing assignment she had forgotten to cancel, an essay about her and Lucille for a dog lovers’ magazine.

  “What am I supposed to write about?” she asked me. “That the only thing worse than losing your dog is knowing that you won’t outlive her?”

  Her voice was ragged, and I knew she was someplace past fear where I had never been, and I also knew that the best and hardest thing to do was keep my mouth shut and listen. Every false promise of hope or reassurance was a flight away from where we were now, which was sitting in the sun on the grass at Mount Auburn Hospital, my fingers circled around her wrists.

  CAROLINE MARRIED MORELLI IN EARLY MAY, IN OUR friend Marjorie’s backyard garden. If it was a wedding under fire, her friends turned it into something pastoral. The indomitable Sandy, Caroline’s close friend and former editor at the Phoenix, was a tall redhead who now lived in Philadelphia. She burned up the highway during the weeks of Caroline’s illness, arriving the week before the wedding with five pairs of red shoes for Caroline to choose from, and a vat of homemade rice pudding. Caroline’s cousin Monique provided the knockout burgundy floor-length dress that she had been married in. The morning of the wedding, our friend Terry—who generally enlivened the neighborhood by keeping chickens in her backyard—lined the entire block leading to Marjorie’s house with satin ribbons and lilies. Morelli did double duty as a photographer, a brilliant maneuver that gave him a way to get through the day while capturing it for the rest of us. Lucille was the ring bearer (Caroline had found her a satin pillow harness), and I her humble handler. Caroline had asked me to find a poem to read, one about love and commitment that was true to circumstance. I had searched for days for something appropriate: Most love poems don’t assume storm clouds gathering overhead. But I understood what Caroline wanted; as much as she and I both longed for happy endings, we didn’t necessarily believe in them. Now life was proving to be rougher than that in every dimension. I finally found a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay that was both bearable and true, that spoke to Fate’s destruction of “destiny’s bright spinning.” Caroline called while I was reading it.

  “I have one,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s too dark.” Then I read her the first few lines. “I pray you if you love me, bear my joy / A little while, or let me weep your tears.”

  “That’s it,” she said abruptly, halfway through. “That’s the one. You have to read it.”

  I have a photograph of the two of us that Morelli took that day: We are holding on to each other like a pair of saplings. The night after the wedding, she and Morelli and I were all flung on her sofa going over the details of the day. “How do you feel?” I said to Caroline, next to me on the couch, and she closed her eyes and smiled. “Consoled.”

  THREE DAYS LATER I flew to Austin for a four-day trip; I had been scheduled for months to appear at a university commencement. I called Caroline from my gate at the airport and made her laugh with a story about the security guards of a post-9/11 world, who had absconded briefly with my cowboy boots. Then my flight was called and my voice caught. “I don’t want to leave you,” I told her. “Go,” she said. “Nothing is going to happen to me while you’re gone.” It was the last spoken conversation we would have. She called my home phone in Cambridge that night to leave a message, and said the doctors wanted her to come to the hospital the next day—they were worried about a couple of new neurological tics that they assumed were transient, a result of the radiation.

  I had to be onstage for a two-hour ceremony at eight o’clock Friday morning; when I left the stage and checked my cell phone, I had three new messages. Caroline had been taken by ambulance to the emergency room in the middle of the night with what turned out to be a series of bleeds in the brain. She had lost the ability to speak; it wasn’t yet clear what she could comprehend. I was standing on the University of Texas campus while I learned this, hearing it first from Caroline’s cousin Suzanne, a physician, and then from Marjorie, who knew enough to tell me to come home. I found a flight routed through Chicago that left Austin that afternoon. I’d been given an honorary award that morning and, rushing to the car, I dropped the plaque I’d received on the street and chipped its frame. I almost left it lying there. It was an awful split second, as though all the little tokens of life were being swept away by the undertow of some darker truth. I got back to Cambridge after midnight.

  Part
of the abrupt horror of the next few days, for those of us who loved her, lay in not knowing precisely what had happened and what her experience of it was. Caroline’s eyes were wild with fear when I walked into the hospital room. When someone told her I was there, she gave a cry of distress that meant two things to me. One was the simple voice of recognition. The other was that she knew what my presence meant, and how bad it must be if I had flown back across the country.

  Take away the words and you find all the adornments that surround them. Body language, gestures, the story of the eyes. Morelli and Caroline’s brother and sister were supposed to have full medical proxy, but the papers, drawn up that week, were not yet signed. We were trying to see if she could grasp the situation and hold a pen. I took her hand and said, “Caroline, it’s me. If you can understand what I’m saying, squeeze my hand.” She answered with an immediate, strong grip. “Okay,” I said. “We need to get your signature on the proxy. If you think you can—” Her response interrupted me; she almost broke my hand. It was an entire sentence of meaning, full of impatience and efficiency. I held on to her while she scrawled her name on the forms.

  Her arms became her eloquence from that day on. One night when I was sitting next to her bed, I laid my head down on the mattress beside her, and Morelli saw my weariness and got up to place a towel underneath my neck. It was one of countless acts of grace he provided in the next few weeks, when nothing much mattered but the light in the room and the number of breaths taken. Then Caroline flung out her arm and ran her hand through my hair, enough to comfort me for days, and we stayed that way until we both dropped into sleep.