We had spent years talking—talking when other people would have given up, teasing apart feelings and conversations and the intricacies of daily life. Now she couldn’t talk anymore and so I didn’t either; our narrative became a choreography of silence. I would spend hours at the end of her bed, not knowing much of the time if she even knew I was there. But Caroline and I had begun our friendship with a bond devoted to the elegant truths of nonverbal language: the physicality and hand signals and eye contact that dialogue with an animal entailed. When she had first fallen ill, I had brought to the hospital a T-shirt that she loved, from the Barking Dog Luncheonette in New York, with SIT! STAY! written on the back. I knew all about sit-stay, and how straightforward and essential it was, and so that was what I did. I sat and I stayed.
10.
THAT GREAT HEART—OF COURSE IT TOOK HER A long time to die. They had put in a central line of morphine within the first few days after the bleed, and so I want to believe that her pain was contained enough by the drug to let her float somewhere insouciant and free. I cannot know this, any more than we can ever comprehend the next-door universe of the dying. But the question was what haunted me most, then and for months after she was gone. I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter. Suffering is what changes the endgame, changes death’s mantle from black to white. It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crushing weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death.
Caroline lived for eighteen days from the night she had the bleed. Morelli had all but moved into her hospital room, bringing Lucille with him. (One night, to our battle-worn delight, a new attendant walked out into the hall and said, with a grin on his face, “There’s a goddamn dog in there!”) I had an unnerving amount of energy during those weeks; I knew that grief was somewhere down the line and I staved it off as long as I could. I would take dinner to Morelli in the hospital, or talk to Herzog on the phone with my forehead in my hand. One afternoon I stayed on the phone for an hour with Louise in Minnesota while we both read poetry; the phone call was mostly silence, punctuated with “Aah!” and “Oh.” I reached out in ways that were transient and intense, wept with no warning or not at all, was exceedingly polite to strangers. I called my friend Matthew from my cell phone while walking at Fresh Pond, and when I got his voice mail I left a long, rambling message with a halting question that seemed to me profound, a child’s effort to understand the universe. “What if …?” I cried. “I mean, I know this sounds stupid, but what if death … weren’t a bad thing?”
However ingenuous the question, I know now that I was staggering toward the terrain of the other side of loss. Accepting a death sentence is like falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion. You take it in one bruise at a time—a blow, a landing, another short descent. I was on the verge of exhaustion, but I kept moving with a sense of frenzied purpose, as if I could outrun the fact of what was happening. I had found Herzog’s home phone number the night after I got back from Texas, and called him that evening from the hospital. He came into the room carrying a handful of lilies of the valley—he knew that whatever else had happened, Caroline would be able to smell—and walked over to her and held them under her nose. It was a gesture that took my breath away with its exacting kindness, and in the next few weeks I spoke to him with a distress that I held in check around most everyone else who loved her. Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, “Tell her everything you haven’t said,” and I smiled with relief. “There’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve already told her everything.” The next day they took her off fluids, which was her wish, and when Morelli called to tell me it was done I let out a wail in my kitchen that was an animal’s lament.
THE DETAILS OF dying are sad and grinding: breathing and waiting and breathing and waiting. The body, brilliant machine, knows how and when to close up shop. But Caroline was so strong, and so determined, that even in this final task she moved toward the end with bracing force. I had watched her on the water for years; now she was in the midst of what Anne Sexton had called “the awful rowing toward God.”
And God, for me, was proving an elusive taskmaster. For most of my adult life I had been a lapsed Protestant or foxhole believer; I was always surprised by people who seemed certain about the answer in either direction. But my belief in something larger and more unknowable than human consciousness had never been held to the fire at such an intimate level. Sometimes I would go into the small hospital chapel and sit there in the dark, wearing its silence like a shawl, and then shrug and go back upstairs to Caroline’s room. One especially bad night I remember staring at the light in the outside hallway and feeling the horrendous finality of this road—it seemed for that moment that the end was simply the end, like driving a car into a brick wall with nothing on the other side. It was one of the most desolate moments of my life, I think, and I felt as if the only God in the room that night was a morphine drip. And it came to me with cold comprehension that this was what it was to stare into nothing—a universe in which everything was pointless except the hardwired instinct to survive and endure and then die. What I was witnessing was as ordinary as morning, and now it was Caroline’s time to fall, and I found the lack of light and meaning in that picture intolerable. No wonder we came up with the resurrection myth, I thought. It offered a crack in the blackness, the only way to tolerate this end.
Trying to recapture that bleary insight, I find that most of the power of it eludes me; we are wired to forget. We have to keep on: build bridges, learn language, have babies, beat a stick against a rock and find rhythm. When death shows up, the fragility of all this is revealed. But not for long. Remembering the suck and force of death is like trying to hold water in your hand. What I took away from that dark alleyway was that, when it came to God, I needed not to know—needed the humble ignorance as to whether anything existed outside that grim tableau. In the months that followed, I kept thinking of the phrase “requisite mystery,” as though that could capture my necessary position in the universe now, poised on the line between Knowing and Not Knowing, between what seemed to me the arrogance of religious certainty and the despair of a godless world.
I MET A DEADLINE the day of the night she died. Not because I was acting tough, but because I knew she would die in the next twenty-four hours and that afterward I would collapse, and for now writing would buy me three or four hours in a relatively pain-free zone. I wrote that day because it was the only thing I knew to do, and I suspect it’s what she would have wanted, and would have done herself.
I had been at the hospital until late the night before, a Sunday, and left her brother and sister and Morelli there and come back home and slept a frighteningly deep sleep for ten hours. Caroline had lost consciousness three days earlier. I had sat by her side counting breaths until the numbers themselves stopped making sense. When I last held on to her, she was burning up with fever and seemed to be working with furious energy, even in her stillness. She had left us all days before.
Monday night my phone rang a few minutes after midnight. I sat in bed staring at it while the machine picked up, and when I heard her brother’s voice I thought for a split second, If I don’t pick up the phone she won’t be dead. Then I grabbed the phone and said, “Andrew?” and I heard his gentle voice telling me what I already knew. After we hung up I turned out the light and lay in the dark for a little while, and then I got up and called Sandy, Caroline’s friend in Philadelphia, who answered on the first ring. We stayed on the phone for a long time, and we lit candles together at the same moment, like children capturing fireflies in a jar.
I stayed composed over the next few days in a way that alarmed me. Caroline knew concentric circles of people in and around Cambridge—dog people, writers, rowers, people in AA—and by now her illness was public enough that people often stopped me in the neighborhood to
ask how she was. The afternoon after her death, I walked over to Fresh Pond with Clementine, and two or three people stopped me, and one older man broke down in tears when I told him. I had the unnerving calm of a chaplain. “I’m so sorry,” I said, my hand on his arm. “She died last night at midnight.”
I would learn to accept these periods of equanimity for what they were: reprieves from the vortex. But they startled me at the time, as did the foggy memory I would have of this later, along with a few other primal responses. I went home and started cooking enough black beans for an army, even though no one was scheduled to appear. I found myself counting friends with a child’s cruel pragmatism—who was remaining in the tribe? When I realized I was doing this, with a singsong interior list-making, I scribbled down the names and posted them on the refrigerator: These were the people I could call at three a.m. I never called anyone at three a.m., probably because I had the list.
The black beans were gone by the end of the night. People started coming to my house and then kept coming, wandering through the kitchen into the backyard or sitting on the front steps. Marjorie, whose seasoned wisdom was born from her own losses, walked into my garden with a beautiful smile on her face; Tom called, crying—“Oh my God are you all right?”—then appeared with bags of Chinese food. Francesca, who didn’t know Caroline but cared about me, walked in with a honeysuckle vine that’s still growing in the tangle of the garden. Kathy, the dog trainer who had first connected us and had become a good friend, stood in the kitchen with her husband, Leo, crying and laughing while I told the story about Lake Chocorua and Caroline’s mission to teach me how to row. There were dogs and people and empty plates all over the house until midnight, when I finally took an Ambien to sleep. Alongside all this heartache was an irony and a wonder. Caroline and I had reached out to each other from similar shelters of quiet and solitude. Now she was gone, and her leaving had flung open my doors in every direction.
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence and linear expectations, where I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. I would move as though I were underwater for weeks, maybe months, but those first few days between the death and the memorial service were a dazed cascade of tears and surprises. A part of me went through the appropriate motions with frightening alacrity: finding the poem to read at the chapel on Friday morning, practicing it aloud. But another part of me had the simple conviction that I wouldn’t be able to get from point A to point B—that giving her over, in spirit and in public, was as perplexing and unfathomable as string theory. My old friend Pete, out of town when she died, called from Ohio to see how I was. I told him what I had been afraid to say. “I don’t think I can do it,” I said about getting through the service the next day. “I don’t know how to do it.”
He was quiet for a minute, and then he said something of such consolation that I will hear him saying it forever. “You know, Gail,” he said, “we’ve been doing this as a species for a long time. And it’s almost as if—it’s like the body just knows what to do.”
CAROLINE, WHO HALF BELIEVED that her circumspect existence kept her relatively unknown and thus protected from the masses, would have been amazed by the service. The chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery was filled and overflowing. There was a cold, pelting rain all that morning, and Kathy had come to my house to get me; when we drove up to the entrance of the chapel I told her I didn’t know if I could get inside. To her great credit, she did not rush to reassure me or assume I was speaking metaphorically. “Can you get to the door?” she asked. It was four yards away. So I got to the door, and Morelli was there waiting, and from there I was all right.
I read a poem that morning from Louise Bogan, “Song for the Last Act,” the first lines of which are “Now that I have your face by heart, I look / Less at its features than its darkening frame.” For two days after the service, I carried the meter of the poem in my head, a sweet interior background to the walks I took, the laps I swam, the last thoughts before sleep. It was as though some ancient choir had taken up residence inside me, giving me this exquisite chant, a measure of my own movement and accompaniment to an otherwise unspeakable sorrow. After two days, it disappeared as naturally as rain on pavement.
THE RAVAGES OF EARLY GRIEF ARE SUCH A SHOCK: wild, erratic, disconsolate. If only I could get to sorrow, I thought, I could do sorrow. I wasn’t ready for the sheer physicality of it, the lead-lined overcoat of dull pain it would take months to shake. Whatever I thought I knew about loss—what I had anticipated about the After Caroline state, when the fear would be over, the worrying ceased—I had no inkling that it would mean deliverance into a new, immutable world. I lived in the reality of Caroline’s absence all the time, it seems, and yet sometimes the fact of it would nearly knock the wind out of me. One night a couple of weeks after the service I tried to make dinner for two friends, and I managed to get about half a meal together before I realized I didn’t know what I was doing. They sat there kindly before their spartan plates of chicken and rice—I had forgotten to make anything else—and I excused myself and went into the kitchen and held on to the counter. She’s dead, I thought. The word itself was brutal. I had always disliked the euphemisms the culture embraced for dying: “gone,” “passed on,” “passed away.” They seemed avoidant and sentimental, a way to bleach the concept of death of its declarative force. Now I knew why we’d diluted the vocabulary. She’s dead.
I read everything I could to comprehend what I was going through. Mourning and Melancholia, W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson. Poetry helped more than Freud. Painstakingly, probably automatically, I began separating the Gordian knot of dual loss: My distress for Caroline in the last weeks of her life was a different matter now from my own battered loneliness. Everything about death is a cliché until you’re in it. I was half mad with desolation, and it often came masked as anger. What the books don’t tell you is that some primitive rage can invade out of nowhere, the only bearable alternative to being with the dead. Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.
I found myself doubting or dismissing the intensity of our friendship, as though I could discard the love and therefore skip the pain. This worked for about twenty minutes, or until I would say to someone we both knew, “Oh well, maybe we weren’t that close,” and the listener would burst out laughing. I started trying to remember all the things I didn’t like about her. There weren’t very many. Or I would take the boat out on the river and talk to her aloud—so much and so often that I began to refer to a certain stretch of water as the Church of Caroline. I gave her reports on Lucille, told her about generous or foolish things people had said or done, let her know how all of us were holding up. One afternoon I had an inkling of how I must look—a solitary woman in a scull, smiling and talking to her invisible friend—and my chest seized with the potential nuttiness and emptiness of my one-way conversation. “What’s worse?” I asked her. “If I talk to you and there’s no one listening, or if you’re there waiting and I don’t talk to you?” I thought how helpless, probably irritated, she would feel at my silence. So I kept talking. I complained about incidents that had happened years before. “I don’t think you should’ve been mad about my losing the boat seat,” I would say. “It was an accident!” Or, “You were always in a hurry. Why were you in such a hurry?”
On a cloudy, windless day in late summer, Morelli and I met to move her boat from Riverside Boat Club, where Caroline had been a member for years, to my boat club a couple of miles upriver. It was a day we had both been anticipating, maybe fearing, for weeks, because we knew what Caroline looked like on the water and what rowing had meant to her. We parked my car at Cambrid
ge Boat Club and drove together to Riverside, where a rower who had known Caroline helped us locate her scull and carry it from the inside bay down to the water. I had brought my own pair of oars; Morelli wanted to keep the set Caroline had used. No one spoke while we put in the boat and attached the oars. Then I hugged Morelli and they pushed me off from the dock, and Morelli stood there watching while I rowed away. Caroline had loved this boat and taught me to row in it; she had logged some five hundred miles a year for the last decade of her life. She had been a picture of stillness itself, carried by flight. I didn’t want Morelli to see me break down, and for the first fifty yards I could concentrate only on this: that I had to keep going or he couldn’t stand it. I got to the first bridge and made the turn, just beyond the last point where I knew he could see me. Then I squared the blades and pulled the boat into the shadows, and put my head on the grips and cried.
11.
MORELLI AND I TOOK CARE OF HER HOUSE ALL THROUGH the first winter, before it was sold, taking turns driving over to pick up mail or start the car or check on the heat. It was a particularly fierce winter, and I would walk into the foyer, where it was about fifty-five degrees, and feel the sadness ahead of me; it was like walking into fog. Life interrupted: Caroline’s shoes were still lined up by the door; her coats—one for every kind of dog-walking weather—still had biscuits in the pockets. On her refrigerator door was a photograph of the two of us, our arms flung around each other, that Tom had taken that first summer at Chocorua. I could never bear to take the photo from where she had placed it years before, and one day when the house was being dismantled it simply disappeared—no doubt thrown out with the old spices and plastic bags and everything else that constitutes the bread crumb trail of a life. Morelli had taken Lucille to live with him since Caroline’s last trip to the hospital, so her scent was gradually fading. I always made these trips to the house with Clementine, who barked with excitement and looked for Caroline and Lucille only on the first visit. Her nose must have told her what I could not, and after that she simply stayed by my side while I made my way through the house.
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