The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

Finally, then, we named it. That Jim was dying. Together, we talked about that last trip to the hospital—the fever, the delirium, the terrifying rage, those hours in the emergency room while we waited for Jim to get admitted—and though I would have been willing to deal with any of that, what I did not want for him was that he spend his last days in a hospital room, with that never-ending parade of well-meaning nurses and doctors coming in and out, along with the medical students—the trays of bad food, bad coffee, the noises in the night, the smell of ammonia, and never a quiet moment for the two of us to lie together in the dark.

  No music. No breeze through the windows. No Boston terrier on the bed.

  When we left Parnassus that day we knew we would not be back.

  Home again, I filled the house with every good thing I could think of. Changed the sheets on the bed, set a vase of Stargazer lilies on the table on Jim’s side. Lit candles. Put on music. No need to bring in the dog. He was already there.

  “I don’t see any reason why I can’t eat pie now,” Jim said, so I baked him one—apple—though he could eat only a few bites.

  The weather was warm enough that Jim could actually sit outside sometimes, with a blanket over his knees and a cigar in hand. We had a dozen of the good Cubans left. Those would probably last him.

  With no more House of Cards to watch, we switched over to Bloodline, but it had become almost impossible for Jim to follow the storyline of a show. One day, after we ended up watching the same episode three times in a row, I recognized that he was done with this.

  Afternoons, we sat on the patio, looking out over the property we’d planned to grow old in together. We could no longer envision our future as a couple, and the knowledge that Jim would not be part of mine made it terrible to contemplate.

  I allowed myself one image only: the house on the lake in New Hampshire that I’d bought that winter, sight unseen. The boathouse where I’d write. Though in the past, we had talked about everything, I did not speak of this to Jim. Having spent our days on the same path for close to two years, we were coming to a fork in the road. He’d turn one way, I the other.

  “You are swimming now across this vast lake,” my friend Graf wrote to me. (Graf, the friend with whom I had swum since we were teenagers.) “And you know now that only one of you will make it. What can you do but keep moving toward the shore?”

  Sometimes now, during those afternoons on the patio with Jim, I took out my pencils and an old box of oil pastels, and I drew him. The image created by a camera would seem too harsh now.

  It had been years since I’d done much drawing, but now I did this almost daily—Jim in his yellow Warriors shirt, his battered chest and his bone-thin legs sticking out from his shorts, standing in the middle of our bedroom. Jim in his chair, with his Kindle in his lap and a cigar in his hand. Jim in his baseball cap. In the pictures I made of him, I colored his face blue. It seemed better than the pale shade of yellowish beige that was his real color now.

  It was not difficult for Jim to sit still for me.

  102.

  Our friend Jason from Boston—in San Francisco for a conference—drove out to see us. As the visit drew to a close, he challenged Jim to a game of ping-pong.

  This seemed wildly improbable. At the point Jason arrived, Jim was lying on the couch, drifting in and out of consciousness. He had recognized Jason, but he seemed to inhabit a cloud.

  But the mention of ping-pong had the effect of bringing Jim to life. Now he bent to put on his shoes—also another layer of fleece to ward off the cold—and the two of them headed down the stairs, one slow step at a time, and outside to the ping-pong table.

  Something happened when Jim picked up his paddle. A look of focus and intensity came over him that I had not observed in many days. He moved, in slow motion, with obvious effort, but he still had his serve.

  Jason got a bunch of points off of him. Then Jim rallied and got a bunch of points off of Jason. Maybe there was some generosity involved on the part of Jim’s opponent, but the two of them appeared to stay evenly matched to the end. When it was over—a tiebreaker taken by Jim—they put their arms around each other’s shoulders and walked back to the house.

  “I’m not dead yet,” Jim said.

  103.

  One good thing about going on hospice (there’s the opening of a sentence for you) was that you qualified for stronger drugs. Before, the most he could have was Dilaudid, but once Jim went on hospice care, we had a store of methadone syringes at our disposal, and if we needed it, morphine.

  Jim stayed away from the morphine at first. But the methadone was a revelation. It dulled the pain without making his brain so stupid, he said.

  “If I’d only known about methadone sooner,” he told me—and for once, Jim was not making a joke—“I could have kept practicing law.”

  104.

  I sent an e-mail to Liza, the wife of the pancreatic cancer patient in Marin County with whom I’d made a connection back in the early days after Jim’s diagnosis. Like us, she and her husband had also made the choice to travel to Los Angeles every week for the controversial treatment protocol of Dr. Miracle, including the six-thousand-dollar infusions of Avastin, a chapter that now seemed to have taken place a hundred years ago, though it had been less than a year and a half. Unlike Jim and me, Liza and her husband had continued to seek treatment with Dr. Miracle.

  It was always hard, checking in with a friend from the pancreatic cancer world after a space of months or even weeks out of communication. You might discover your friend’s CA19-9 level had suddenly spiked from 300 to 14,000. You might discover he was dead.

  But when Liza wrote back, the news was good. “I know Dr. Miracle’s a pretty unpleasant human being,” she wrote. “And the bills are killing us. But Art’s riding his road bike a hundred miles a week now. Next month we’re heading to Italy.”

  So was Liza’s husband just luckier than mine? Or had we made a terrible, wrong choice abandoning Dr. Miracle when we did? Maybe if we’d gone with one of those other surgeons, if we hadn’t traveled to Chile, if we’d waited twelve weeks for the adjuvant chemo instead of starting at eight.

  A person could drive herself crazy trying to figure out the answer to those questions. When the truth was, we’d never know.

  105.

  Putting away clothes one day, I came upon a small black notebook belonging to Jim, and I opened it. This was not a diary—just notes about errands he needed to run, things to pick up on his way home (Good olives. Smog certificate. FLOWERS FOR JOYCE!)

  Then came this page covered with small black lines—row after row of them, in groups of five, four parallel lines with a fifth slashing through them on the diagonal. In the margin Jim had written the total count: 118. The number of days I’d been away over the first two and a half years of our relationship. What would I have given then, to have those hundred and eighteen days back.

  106.

  He voted. Because we had never gotten around to mailing in our absentee ballots or reregistering in our new town of Lafayette, this required us to drive to the polling place in Oakland to vote in the Democratic primary. Jim walked in on his own steam and cast his ballot.

  “I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how this election turns out,” he said.

  107.

  The Warriors were in the NBA finals now. Because we didn’t get cable service, we went to our friends Karen and Tom’s house to watch the games, when Jim was well enough. Each time we did, he put on his Warriors hat with the number 73 on the front—for the number of victories that season—and the bright yellow Warriors shirt he’d gotten that day he and Kenny went to see the game at Oracle arena in those amazing courtside seats. I put on a yellow shirt too. Before driving over to Tom and Karen’s house, we attached a Warriors flag on either side of the BMW. As we made our way down the road, they fluttered in the wind, giving us the appearance of a couple of fun-loving revelers.

  Our team was four games into the playoffs, having won three out of the first four games on
ly to lose the next two to Cleveland. Jim was in such rough shape that night I didn’t think he’d be up for the next game but he said he was, though once we got to Karen and Tom’s house, he had fallen asleep on the couch and stayed there that way through most of the game.

  He woke up in the fourth quarter to see the score: the Warriors losing badly. The team’s star—Steph Curry—couldn’t seem to get one ball in the hoop.

  Jim opened his eyes just for a moment, looked at the screen, and shook his head. He looked delirious, though I had checked his temperature, of course—I checked it constantly—and knew it was normal.

  “Steph Curry’s gone septic,” he said.

  Septic. The thing we most feared for Jim. Its implications greater than a lost playoff game.

  By the time the game was over, Jim had fallen asleep again. He did not ask, on the drive home, whether our team had won or lost.

  108.

  “I don’t want to leave you,” he told me. It was nighttime and we were lying in our bed, as close as the drain tubes allowed.

  I knew what he meant here. He was not talking about fearing death. He was talking about his sorrow at leaving me on my own again. He, my guard dog. Going off duty.

  If he had been a soldier—if there had been a war on that he believed in, or if, more simply, he had seen me in danger—he would have been there to rescue me, and never mind the bullets whistling past his head. He was the man who’d scaled a fourteen-thousand-foot peak in the Andes on seven rounds of chemo; the father who’d run two miles with his bleeding three-year-old pressed to his chest, to get her to the hospital; the quiet, sober attorney who’d written the letter that got my daughter her house. He was the one you wanted to have next to you in the trenches, the one you’d count on in a terrible calamity to get you through.

  We were in one now. The problem being that when the terrible calamity came, Jim could no longer be the one protecting me, because it was the fact that I’d be losing him that was the terrible calamity, and when it happened, he wouldn’t be there to offer comfort anymore.

  109.

  Driving into town with me, Jim hit a post in the parking lot and dented the BMW—virtually the only time in his forty-eight years of driving that he’d done something like that.

  A few days later, on a stop at the hardware store to buy more electronic rattraps, he did it again.

  The third time, backing out of a parking lot, he knocked out the special sensors that tell you if you’re getting too close to another car. The repair ran a thousand dollars.

  After that one, Jim laid his head on the steering wheel. He handed me the keys.

  “I’m done,” he told me.

  110.

  Three other times in my life, I had lived through a terminal situation. Only one of those times had been literally terminal, though each was brutal, each a situation for which there would be no hopeful resolution. Nowhere to go. A tunnel with nothing at the other end but darkness.

  The first time it was my mother’s glioblastoma. I was thirty-five when she died, and at that point—though I’d lost my father seven years before—nothing more terrible had ever happened in my life.

  I encountered the second terminal situation at precisely the same moment in my life that I lost my mother, when—for all sorts of reasons that went well beyond the fact that he’d fallen in love with someone else—my first husband had said he didn’t want to be married to me anymore.

  We had continued to live in the same house for a solid month after he’d made this determination. We’d shared the same bed—made love, even, though we did so with full knowledge that we had no future together. We built a fire and lit the match. Nothing but ashes remaining when it burned out.

  The third terminal situation came in those excruciating weeks—six of them—after I knew my Ethiopian daughters would be leaving to live with a different family.

  Then, even more painfully than was true in my marriage, I had known the experience of making my way through the days with the terrible, sick knowledge—sitting like a stone in my stomach—that when I said good-bye I might never again lay eyes on or put my arms around two girls I had once believed would be part of my family forever.

  When Jim went on hospice there was nothing metaphoric about the terminal situation he and I inhabited. We were going our separate ways soon and we knew it, but this one wasn’t a divorce or voluntary relinquishment. After months of rejecting the idea—months we’d spent grasping for every increasingly far-fetched prospect of a cure—we woke every morning now with the full awareness that Jim was going to die. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but soon. As much as we might have anticipated this, and might have known this as early as that first day we received the diagnosis, a profound shift occurred once we went on hospice. For eighteen months my focus remained lasered onto a single objective: saving Jim’s life. Now I could do nothing but shepherd him in the gentlest and most loving way to the moment of his death.

  We had lived on hope for eighteen months, and when that was gone, there seemed to be nothing. No doubt some people locate comfort in the form of God at such a point, and I want to believe Jim found some solace there, though his relationship with faith had been a complicated one. Only a handful of days before, I had watched him take the communion wafer. But in the night, when I turned to him, he told me he was afraid. In all our time, it was the first time I’d heard him say this.

  The worst wasn’t dying, he said. The worst was the thought of not living anymore. Not getting to have our life together.

  Over those last weeks in the hospital, when Katie Kelley told me the cancer was back and there was no more to be done about it and I was standing in the hallway outside Jim’s room, taking counsel from Bridget, I had talked with her about how much I wished that Jim and I could acknowledge the truth of what was happening to him.

  Now that he had done this, I wondered why I ever supposed that it would make anything easier. Denial—if that’s what Jim had engaged in—was viewed in many quarters as indicative of some less spiritually elevated, less enlightened way of living. But denial had allowed him to get out of bed every morning and perform his pushup. Denial had inspired him to call his friend Woody and suggest they meet up for golf. Now in addition to everything else that was gone, he had lost that last shred of hope, and the fact that this was so had left him in a landscape of desolation more vast than all of the Olancha wilderness.

  111.

  Looking for some place we might locate a little joy—or failing that, a pleasurable distraction—I sent an e-mail to the men with whom Jim played music, suggesting that we gather for a jam session.

  The day was set, this time not at our house in the canyon, but at the house of a guitarist friend from The Family, Rich. Other friends from the Storkzilla group would join us too: Allan on drums, Tony on accordion, Dave on keyboards, Mike on guitar. And Jim on bass.

  There was a long run of stairs leading up to Rich’s house, and for the first time, Jim did not argue when I took the amp, but he made it to the top of them on his own.

  How many times over the fifty years since he’d bought his first bass had he lifted his instrument out of its case? In slow motion now, he swung the strap over his head and placed his left hand on the neck of his Fender. Left hand checking the tuning, right hand on the strings.

  I was never a musician. So it is hard for me to say what it was about how Jim played the bass that distinguished the way he played, except to say that he did it in the way Jim did many things. Unconventionally. For starters, he had a very good ear—could always tell when an instrument in some band was out of tune. Even when there were a dozen musicians onstage he’d know which one it was. Sometimes, when we’d be listening to a band, he’d mention, quietly, that the bass player, workmanlike, had chosen to follow a predictable series of notes. Jim liked to take the bass line off the beaten path. He was not a man to easily display emotion. But when he played on those four strings, he did.

  I can still see Jim as he was in our fri
end’s living room that day, standing up as he always did when he played, and a little off to one side. Never the center of attention or the lead, but just see what happens to a piece of music when you take the bass line out of it.

  He probably weighed less than ninety-five pounds by this point, though we had stopped checking. He had on his black jeans as always and his black fleece, and his Patagonia parka and his Maine Woods hat. His ring finger, on the neck of his guitar, was missing its gold band—a source of distraction at the time. Every morning he told me were going shopping for a new one, first chance we got.

  As much pain as he must have been enduring at the time, Jim did not choose to sit. His back remained straight as he was playing, and his head was raised upward in the manner of all rock and rollers when they play a stadium, and they want their music to reach the last, most distant row of fans. Here in Rich’s living room, there were just the wives to listen. Aging groupies, I liked to think of us. I, Jim’s number one fan.

  The men played a couple Rolling Stones songs that afternoon, and one by Creedence Clearwater: “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” They played “Kansas City,” and—at Jim’s request—“She Loves You.” Then “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  Ever since the terrifying night Jim’s fever had spiked, when I’d driven over the bridge to bring him to the hospital as my ER doctor friend texted me messages about sepsis and asked me, at three-minute intervals, what his temperature was now—we had carried a thermometer with us wherever we went. Why we did this is hard to determine, since the decision to go into hospice had meant that in the event of a fever spike like the last one, we would not seek medical attention as we had that other time.

  Having made the decision not to pursue extraordinary measures again, we would have nothing to do if Jim’s temperature went up besides placing ice on his feet and giving him a Tylenol, and waiting. It was as if, like a suicide bomber, the man I loved now wore a package of explosives strapped to his chest that might at any moment of the day or night be detonated.