We wheeled Jim all the way to the parking garage, which was a long way, and the strongest nurse lifted him into the car—the last strains of “Blowin’ in the Wind” carrying all the way to our parking spot. For a moment there, I considered whether these good people, the hippie nurses, would think less of us when they saw that our car was a fancy new BMW, but they weren’t the type to judge. Jim said nothing through all of this until right at the moment we reached our car. Then he looked up at me and said, in a whisper, “Did you have a good time, baby?”
“The best.”
After that, no more words.
The drive back to Hunsaker Canyon took half an hour. I knew it would be very hard when we got home, and it was. I could have called hospice to help us, and they would have come. But I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be just the two of us that night.
By this time it was midnight, and I think it probably took me forty-five minutes to get Jim out of the car and into the house, and another forty-five minutes up the stairs to bed.
Then I helped him out of his Bob Dylan jeans and the silver-buckle belt and set his hat on the stair railing. He would not be wearing it again.
But as promised, my husband took me to see Bob Dylan that night. He took me out on the town. He was a man—and always had been—who knew how to show the woman he loved a very good time.
126.
He did not leave the bed again.
At this point he had a way of breathing that made you know he was going to die soon. He no longer ate or took in water and seldom registered the sound of my voice, though I kept talking to him. Singing sometimes.
“Whatever you do,” the hospice nurse told me, “don’t let him get bedsores.” But that was happening now. So every few hours I turned his body over. It was not so difficult to lift him.
One afternoon that last week, a hospice nurse came by—a new one—to help me bathe him, checking his vital signs (vital, but just barely vital) when she suddenly looked up and turned to me.
“Oh my,” she said. “I just noticed how handsome your husband is.”
In those last weeks we had stopped checking his weight. Who needed to know, when the story was clear: The cancer was eating him up from the inside out, and every day he was thinner than the one before. At 125, and even 120, he had remained an astonishingly handsome man. More so than ever in some ways because every angle of that fine bone structure of his had become so clearly defined.
“You look like Clint Eastwood now,” I told him. The new Clint Eastwood, which was to say, the very old one.
Even at ninety pounds, you could see the fineness of Jim’s features—a nose that had once inspired a cosmetic surgeon to ask whether she could use it as a model for clients in search of nose jobs—but of course by the time Jim got down to ninety pounds he had the other look too, the look of a man very near death.
Something else had changed in his face, more profound even than the loss of all the pounds and the skin and muscle, and so much harder to witness. His mouth was slack, and his eyes, that always before would have been fixed on me—or turned to the screen of his laptop, checking on what the Republicans were up to now, but turned more often to my face—had gone blank. I had kept talking to Jim—whispering in his ear as the two of us lay in our bed together, telling him things, reading him our poems—but it had been a few days since he showed any sign of taking anything in.
So much of his handsomeness had come from this aspect of Jim too: the intelligence and the kindness forever evident in his face. Also, how funny he was. What a fine, sharp wit he had, and the readiness of his smile when something amused him, as things frequently did. Because it is not just a person’s features that make him look as he does, I had learned. It’s his spirit too.
Still, he had a beautiful face. Even that day the nurse could see it, though the sunken-in parts of his cheeks had sunk so deep that if he had been lying on his back on the grass in our yard—an impossible image now, but one that came to me incongruously at some point over the long hours I lay there studying his face—or in the hammock maybe, having fallen asleep with his Kindle still in his hands, and if the sky had then suddenly opened and rain poured down, his cheeks would have held water. That’s how hollow they had become.
One time and one time only, Jim had tried to pull himself up off the pillows. He had opened his eyes wide; they had been mostly shut for days. He wanted, fiercely, to get out of bed. He wanted to get himself to the bathroom. He wanted his glasses. He could no longer tell me this, but I knew what he wanted. He pointed to his eyes, and they were burning into me.
Why was I letting this happen to him? Why didn’t I do something? (I, who always came up with one more idea.) I could feel him asking that of me. I was asking it of myself.
His old friend Leonard came over to sit with him. The two of them had been members of a Bible study group together when they were in their early thirties, both fathers of young children, trying to hang on to a set of doctrines both had come to question, both of them suffering the fact that leaving their religion would mean leaving their marriages, and for both that was overdue.
“Jim always wanted to do the right thing,” Leonard said. “It was probably the hardest thing Jim ever did, leaving his children’s mother.”
In the weeks leading up to these days, Jim had hardly ever wanted friends to come by, but he was past caring about this now. Our friend Margaret came over, and our friend Karen. She sat on the bed. Jim had not taken a sip of water in days, but now he placed his hands around the cup and drew on the straw. “I’m a lucky man,” he said, so softly now we had to bend in close to hear. “I have been known.”
There was not a whole lot that mattered more. I had been known too. Known and loved.
After that, words left him.
Absent a while, his daughter sent him an e-mail that I read out loud to him, about how much he’d meant to her—and after, when it seemed her words were not getting through, I called her up and then set the phone next to Jim’s ear, on speaker, so she could say what she wanted to him. It was no longer possible to know what he was taking in of the world, but the man I loved seemed to have left the room.
But even as his body wasted away, and his mind lost its sharpness, something about Jim had become more substantial. Something about me had changed too. I was a different person than the woman I’d been eighteen months earlier. Grief and pain had been harsh, but they had served as teachers. We had been through a conflagration, the two of us, and I would have given anything to have avoided it, but we’d emerged like two blackened vessels from the forge—our two beating hearts and our trust in each other all that remained.
An odd irony came to me at this moment, when it seemed as if there was almost nothing left of the man I’d loved, almost nothing left of the two of us, as we’d been, or the life we’d made together: It seemed to me, as we approached the moment when everything would be over, finally, that the ordeal of the disease and the treatment—two separate kinds of hell I would wish on no living human—had turned us into two people we might never have become if the disease had spared Jim. Better ones, though only one of us would survive to benefit from this brutal education we’d received.
127.
Every day they told me he would die, and I hoped they were right. I knew he would never want to hang on as he was now. Hard as he’d fought, he would want this to be over.
On one of those days, a social worker came to see me. “I want to tell you a story,” he said. It was about a woman he’d worked with once, about Jim’s age, dying of cancer. Her brother came to see her—a brother who loved her very much, he told me.
One day the healthy brother had asked this social worker what would happen if he gave his sister more than the prescribed dose of morphine. A lot more, perhaps. She would probably die, the social worker told the man.
And would it be painful?
No.
That night, alone in our bedroom, I took out the morphine. I placed one syringe—his usual dose—between J
im’s lips, and slowly released the plunger. Then a second syringe. Then a third.
I lay down on the bed next to Jim with my face against his hair and went to sleep. When I woke in the morning, I put my ear to his chest.
For a few days now he had only taken a few breaths a minute, so shallow it was hard to hear them, and at first I didn’t, but his heart was beating. Maybe from all those years he spent as a runner, he had the strongest heart.
I had to call hospice then. I was out of morphine.
“How did this happen?” they asked me. They kept close tabs on how much they’d delivered to me. I should have had two vials left.
I could have told them I’d spilled a bottle of the stuff, but I didn’t. “He was just in so much pain,” I said. And maybe he was. Impossible at this point to know.
Hospice reported me to the police. The hospice director who told me was apologetic about that, but they had rules about these things, and I couldn’t fault them for it. We’re not in the business of assisting euthanasia, she told me.
After that, I was no longer allowed to keep morphine in my possession. A hospice nurse brought me each dosage at three-hour intervals, which meant that even in the middle of the night, a nurse would come to our door and climb the stairs to where I lay in the bed beside my husband and give me the syringe.
Then one night a day or two later it seemed important that no one disturb us. I had one vial of morphine left—one that I’d kept separate from the rest of our supply, which was enough to get us through the night without the interruption of a middle-of-the-night delivery. I told the nurse we wouldn’t need her until tomorrow. We could be alone in our bed.
128.
Jim died in the middle of a June night four days after his sixty-fourth birthday, nineteen months after receiving the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, three weeks short of our third wedding anniversary. He died one thousand six hundred and forty-seven days from the one we met. I know this because every first of the month—the first of the month having been the day we first sat down across from each other at that restaurant table in Marin County, California, and began our conversation—we recited the number.
I believe the date Jim died was the sixteenth of the month, but it is also possible that he died on the fifteenth. What I know is that I was lying next to him as I did every night to the end—asleep, but with my hand on the one part of his chest that didn’t hurt when I touched him, the part that didn’t have drains coming out and scars from surgery. By this point in the ever-downward trajectory of Jim’s illness, I was always listening for the sound of the next breath, and for days there at been long spaces between them. Still, I must have drifted off for a few minutes.
It was one in the morning when the feeling awakened me that he had died. A dozen times at least, over those last days, I had placed my head over his heart or my fingers on his wrist or his neck, checking for a pulse, and I would have said at the time, after all we had gone through, that I was hoping to find none—though later the fact that I had ever felt that way would astonish me. Let him lie motionless in this bed. It will be all right if I never hear his voice again. Just let him keep breathing here next to me, where I can reach out in the night sometimes to stroke his cheek, and his thick, wonderful hair.
For days I had been saying I wanted this moment to come, or thought I did. But when it came I realized in an instant how mistaken I had been to suppose that his dying would bring any relief.
I stayed there in the bed with him for an hour, probably, though I did not check the time. His pain no longer an issue, I could put my hand on his belly again the way I used to every night in our old days—the days before the diagnosis. Back then we slept naked, and I had made him the promise I would never buy a flannel nightgown, or any nightgown. We were lovers then, and dressed the part.
Within an hour of Jim’s death, his handsome, ravaged face had taken on a different look, and not just because his skin was cold now, and the little color that had remained was gone from it. Death happens in an instant, but the life drains out of a person over the minutes and hours that follow. I took this all in as I lay there in the partial dark: felt Jim’s skin getting cooler, and then cold, watched his eyes sink deeper into the sockets. His mouth was open, so I closed it.
Tuck. Several months had passed since my son Willy had asked Jim and me if we’d take care of his dog while he went out of town for work. Mostly to please me, and to help Willy out, Jim had agreed, though he had never been much of a dog person.
Boston terriers possess the trait of not simply wanting to sleep on the bed with you, but under the covers. Pressed up against your body—all the way down at the end of the bed if possible, curled up around your feet, or maybe around your butt. This was how Tuck slept with us, and though at first Jim had expressed mild shock at the idea of sharing our bed in this particularly intimate way with a snorting, occasionally farting dog, he had come to like Tuck and then to love him.
So when Willy returned from his trip and announced his plan to come retrieve his dog, I had asked if we could keep him a little longer. As time had passed, and Jim spent more of it in the bed, Tuck’s presence there beside him had become a source of comfort, and Willy had agreed to let him stay on.
That’s where Tuck was the night Jim died, and after, he had stayed there pressed up against Jim’s body and mine. With no more breath coming from my husband, the only breathing I heard then came from my son’s dog, and it had the effect of offering a very small measure of comfort.
After an hour or so I got up from the bed and made my way downstairs. Tuck stayed under the covers next to Jim.
I didn’t call anybody. It was still the middle of the night.
Later, I knew, people would start coming around and there would be things to do, but at that moment, I wanted to be by myself in our house. Not quite alone yet, as I would be after, because Jim’s body remained in our bedroom, even though Jim himself was gone from it.
I stepped out into the night. The moon was high, and it was a good night for stars. So many other nights Jim and I had studied them together. Not simply a lover of science, but a believer in it, Jim could always point out particular constellations and planets. He knew how far away each one was, and how long ago it had been born.
Just a few weeks before, he’d read out loud to me a news report—not from the New York Times, which had not covered this event that, for Jim, seemed like one of the biggest news stories of the year—concerning a discovery that one of Jupiter’s moons could actually sustain life. Jim followed this kind of thing closely, and updated me on developments as they occurred, even though he had to recognize that, try as I might, I failed to share his level of excitement over them. Few could have.
But perhaps the pleasure Jim took in this most recent discovery was particularly acute for another reason. Maybe the vastness of the universe, and how small we all are in the face of it, how fleeting our presence on the planet that is, itself, so infinitesimally small, offered some small comfort to him as he watched the last days of his own life on it dwindle away. We were all dying anyway, and though he surely could have found no joy in the prospect of the people he loved—like his children, and my children, like me—dying too, maybe it felt less lonely, and the thought of what he was missing less terrible, to be reminded of this.
After I came inside again, I made a pot of coffee. I looked at my watch. Three o’clock. When daylight came I would call the children, but for these few precious hours, I would be the only person who knew that Jim had died. I poured my coffee, same as I had every other morning. Always before, until just four days earlier, I had poured two cups and carried them upstairs, then climbed back into bed with Jim so we could have our coffee together. When so much had been lost of the life we had first pictured for ourselves, this had become one of the last remaining pleasures of our day—so much so that if the coffee hadn’t turned out as good as I wanted, I’d pour it down the drain and make a whole new pot. This, at least, should be how we wanted it.
; Now there was just my cup, and I set it on the kitchen table and sat myself down in my chair. I opened my laptop then. Brought the mug to my lips and set my fingers on the keyboard. I began to write this story.
Afterword
Here’s what happens when you love someone a great deal, and he gets sick, and then he dies.
All those months you spent taking care of him, it was almost as if the two of you were one person. He was the one with cancer, but the pain consumed you both. You were off in the North Atlantic somewhere, stranded on an iceberg, and though it was brutally cold in that place, and every single thing about being there was hard, you were together on your iceberg. There was hardly one thing that took place that you did not share.
Then your iceberg broke in two. You floated off in one direction, he in another. And though the place you ended up is a warmer one, with sailboats passing by, their bright flags fluttering in the breeze, and people waving and calling out to you—sunshine again, and maybe even porpoises circling with their smiling faces—your fellow traveler has disappeared. His iceberg melted away with him on it. New things are happening now that you experience and he does not. (Some wonderful. Some awful. What would Jim have thought about the election of Donald Trump? That would have killed him, I said to a friend, the morning after. If he wasn’t already dead.)
Maybe this is what people mean when they say, “Life goes on.” This is the good news and the terrible.
It began that summer, this process of drifting out to sea. It doesn’t mean you cease loving the person who left. Everything that you had and everything that happened remains with you. Life doesn’t stop, is all. Not yet anyway.
Some hours after Jim died—after the men who had taken his body were gone—I got up from my chair and began to occupy myself with household chores. I stripped the sheets from our bed and threw away every plastic medicine container. Stuffed that inflatable pillow in the garbage. I did many loads of laundry.
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