On our visits with Anne and Dr. Rodriguez, technicians began withdrawing fluid from Carolyn’s abdomen. Within a few weeks, it began collecting so fast that we were at the hospital twice a week. The radiological oncologists installed a port to draw off the fluid at home by means of a great glass flask the size of a watermelon. I remember the shock and horror on Carolyn’s face when one of the nurses referred to it as “the new normal.” And yet I was amazed and humbled by Carolyn’s good cheer. She never once complained or bemoaned her fate. We had begun to use a wheelchair for the long halls of the hospital. And each time I wheeled her out of the lab, she would raise her hand high in the air and wave at the staff and call out triumphantly, “Go down and look at the lake!”
December 9, 2012. Debbie and I joined with the girls in putting up Carolyn’s Christmas tree. We got her the expensive kind.
December 13, 2012. On some flimsy pretense, Amelia’s boyfriend, Terry, came to visit while Carolyn and Debbie and Elena and I were all together at our house. And in the grand old style that is so much his way, Terry asked Carolyn and me for our blessing. He intended to propose to Amelia the next day. And in the grand old style that is so much their way, Elena and Carolyn shrieked with delight. A date was set: November 9, 2013. The hunt for the dress was on.
Amelia and Terry gave a Christmas party. The diamond gleamed on her finger. Carolyn laughed as the people surged around her. All was bright and gay. It seemed that we might float forever on this tide of joy and affection with the snow softly falling in the muffled outer dark. Look at Elena, glowing with baby Emmett, not yet one year old. Look at Amelia, radiant with the promise of her coming wedding. Look at the laughing woman who brought these impossibly smart and lovely people into this sweet old world. Surely this was a sign of reprieve.
The girls had always spent Christmas morning at Carolyn’s house, opening presents and eating the poppy seed cake of her Polish tradition. This year Christmas was at Elena and Simon’s. Christmas morning, Debbie and I arrived to find Carolyn smiling—beaming, really—with a heating pad pressed to her stomach. Emmett scrambled through wrapping paper and climbed into empty boxes. Surely at any moment a message would arrive saying that all had been put right.
January and February were consumed with the dress. Carolyn and Debbie attended every expedition with Amelia to find the perfect one. Terry’s parents gave an engagement party. Carolyn celebrated the fact that she felt well and the food tasted good. And yet there was something about the way she held herself, the way she only tentatively entered into conversation. There was an aura about her that conveyed an impression, difficult to pinpoint. She sat in a chair, and people came and went around her. It was as if she were a hologram, fading and shedding its light. She could sense it, too, I think. After she was gone, I found dozens of self-portraits she had taken, as if to illustrate the various sides of her personality. One in particular struck me later. Her head was tilted so that she had to look at the camera in a sidelong fashion. Her green eyes flashed with intense and alluring defiance. How well I remembered that look.
As tradition would have it, I was not allowed to see the dresses Amelia tried on, but I was allowed to drive Debbie out to the stores to meet Carolyn and Amelia and then sit and read at a café for several hours in far-flung places such as Highwood and Wheaton, Illinois. In 2006 Carolyn had made Elena’s wedding dress out of hand-painted silk, which she steamed in her living room in a stovepipe invented for the purpose. But Amelia said, “I did not want to put that on her, and quite frankly I would not have had the patience to work with her for a year on it the way Elena did. It was nothing against her amazing craftsmanship, I just wanted to get it done.” In the search for that dress, Carolyn seemed impossibly cheerful. Photos from those sessions show her grinning, laughing.
At our meetings with Dr. Rodriguez, Anne, ample and cheerful, began asking, “Are you throwing up? Are you throwing up?”
“No,” Carolyn answered each time, a puzzled look on her face. But from the eager way Anne asked, I feared what was to come.
Dr. Rodriguez gently referred Carolyn to Michael Marschke, the palliative care physician. We went March 8, 2013. He was forty-five minutes late, which seemed a bit outrageous for someone who deals with people who have everything except time. As we sat in the waiting room, a young woman came in with an older woman. The younger one was impossibly thin. She walked unsteadily to a love seat and lay down on it, curled up in fetal position. And again I feared what was to come. Carolyn was already much thinner than she should have been.
When we were admitted at last, we were met by a man in his fifties, tall and rugged with salt-and-pepper hair, casually dressed. He introduced himself as “Dr. Mike.” He asked Carolyn when she had received her diagnosis. She told him 2007.
“You’ve lived a long time,” he said.
We were horrified. It was like a slap in the face. He said we should call for hospice services.
We went back to Rodriguez. Surely there’d been a mistake. Didn’t all this mean that Carolyn had less than six months to live? What about our neighbor, Charlene, who’d had the same diagnosis, the same treatment, as Carolyn and was in complete remission? Why couldn’t we choose that option instead? There has been a terrible mistake.
Carolyn never regained enough strength to move to her apartment, which lay vacant, overlooking the blue-green lake. She, who always insisted that people get out of their phones and books and distractions and look at the marvelous lake, that freshwater sea, saw the lake but one more time on an outing on Lake Shore Drive.
We set up a single bed in her own dining room. A door opened onto the deck, and once the weather broke, we put out potted geraniums, pansies, ivy, begonias.
In memory it seems as if we were all there at her house all the time, though that must not be true. But one day we were all there, Elena, Amelia, Debbie, Emmett, and I. Jonas was only ten years old, so he wasn’t there. Carolyn had a sewing room in her house that she called the Plaid Room because it had once been papered in plaid, though it no longer was. She had a large soft love seat in there, and Debbie found her seated in it as the girls sat nearby going through their mother’s collection of tiny ceramic shoes. Debbie handed Carolyn a card with Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat on the front. As Carolyn sat there, Debbie watched her read what she’d written.
On paper we have a complicated relationship. But in my heart I think of you as a dear friend. We’ve come a long way since we met, and I hope you feel the same. You have graciously shared two beautiful daughters with me and now a grandson. Without your compassionate soul, this powerful family would not exist. Thank you for all of your joy.
Carolyn looked up from the card, and the two women stared at each other for a long time before Debbie crossed the room to hug her, tears in both of their eyes. “Thank you,” Carolyn said.
March had turned to April. In the mornings I would help Carolyn get to a chair so that she could look out at the flowers and the fern garden and watch the white-throated sparrows and warblers arrive from the south. The buildup and draining of fluid had continued to increase. Her CA-125 had gone mad, measuring in the thousands. She had begun throwing up regularly. She wasn’t in pain, she said. It was just discomfort, exhaustion. At her last meeting with Dr. Rodriguez, she had said, “I’m tired of always feeling like shit.” She was in a constant state of nausea.
One morning I arrived to find her sitting up in bed throwing up into a Tupperware bowl. I ran to the kitchen to get another. While I took one to the toilet to empty it, she threw up in the other. I took the full one and gave her a clean one, and she continued to throw up as I shuttled back and forth from bed to bath. I don’t know how many times we did that. When it was over, I sat on the bed holding her so that she wouldn’t fall over. I hadn’t held her that way in many years. She was so thin. She lifted her chin and turned her head. Our eyes met.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
When I told Debbie what had happened, she sai
d, “Of course. We all have a past. We’re all adults here.” Sometimes at night I wept, and then Debbie held me, too.
One of our former neighbors, a member of Carolyn’s book club, came to visit. Roberta Glick was a renowned brain surgeon. It was a beautiful April day, and the doors of the house were open to the breeze and to the view of the flowerpots on the deck. After her visit, Roberta and I stood outside talking. As I walked her to her car, she said, “If Amelia wants her mother at her wedding, she’d better have it now.”
“Now?”
“I mean this week or next. Yes. Now.”
A friend of Amelia’s from college had been engaged and planning a wedding but had eloped at the last minute. She sent Amelia her unused wedding dress by overnight express. The next day Amelia rushed to a tailor Carolyn knew well. The dress was ready in the morning. As word spread, Carolyn’s friends gathered around. Christine, Carolyn’s lifelong friend and former college roommate, asked Amelia, “What do you want on the cake?”
“All I could think of,” Amelia said later, “was Snow White.” To Christine she said, “I don’t know. I don’t know! Bluebirds?”
Father Chris at St. Vincent de Paul Church arranged the service. Terry’s father, Tony, booked a restaurant for the reception. Christine’s daughter Annie, who is Amelia’s lifelong friend, ordered the flowers.
I took Amelia to a pawnshop to get the rings. When Elena married Simon, Carolyn had given her a tiny ceramic box with two tiny ceramic shoes inside. Carolyn and the girls had what they called the shoe gene, which made it physically impossible not to stop in front of a display window that had shoes in it, especially when in France or Italy. The tiny shoes she gave Elena were each an inch long. Carolyn gave her a note with the shoes telling her to always keep something that was just for herself. On Amelia’s wedding day, Elena gave one of her shoes to Amelia. “I know she would have wanted to give Amelia something special,” Elena said.
The day before, Amelia, Terry, and I held Carolyn over her kitchen sink and washed her hair. She was as frail as a doll yet smiling and determined. She would look her best for the wedding.
I was awed by Terry’s bravery. A lesser man would have run screaming from the room.
April 21, 2013. Midday. Carolyn was taken on her last ride along Lake Michigan to St. Vincent de Paul Church to see her youngest daughter married. Our baby, who at four years old would rush onto the beach when we’d arrive in Door County for vacation and yell out, “Who wants to be my friend?”
Celestial light shone through stained glass of the church. Carolyn smiled, hand over her heart, and glanced heavenward as the soprano sang “Ave Maria.”
April 22, 2013. Roberta gathered the book club at Carolyn’s house. The group discussed The Eustace Diamonds, the third novel in the Palliser series by Anthony Trollope. I puttered around, bringing drinks and removing glasses. Carolyn had a small glass of juice in her hand, but she was too weak to hold it. It slipped from her fingers and splashed on the Tabriz rug that I had bought her as a gift one Christmas long ago. I rushed to soak up the juice with paper towels.
“Don’t worry,” Roberta said. And teasingly, to Carolyn, asked, “Do you have anything to add?”
“Plenty,” Carolyn said, her voice barely audible. Then she launched into a complex and articulate legal discussion about the intricate plot involving expensive diamonds of mysterious origin. Her dignified whisper drew us all in toward her.
Emmett calls Debbie Gramma Deb. He knows her as a deeply loving grandmother and a delightfully good cook. In a way, Emmett has been the child she never had. Indeed, this family, with all its complications, has become the family Debbie longed for.
Now Elena has a second child whom Debbie and I dote on. I think back to Carolyn playing with Emmett and saying, “I just want him to remember me.” Emmett calls Carolyn Grammy and is surrounded by reminders of her—the photos, of course, everywhere as in a shrine, but also Grammy’s chair that she had reupholstered in dark green plush, and Grammy’s bone-handled pocketknife that she gave me to keep for her (Emmett likes to hold it for long periods of time and knows not to try to open it). Grammy’s rolling pin, with which she made her pies, hangs above a doorway in Elena and Simon’s kitchen. Then there are the many recordings she made for Emmett of Beatrix Potter stories, such as The Tale of the Pie and the Patty Pan and, of course, The Tailor of Gloucester. So Elena works hard these days give Emmett and CC memories of Grammy. CC, whose name is actually Carolyn Claire, is four years old and very jealous that Emmett got to meet Grammy. Sometimes she cries and gets very upset about how unfair that is. “And I tell her,” Elena told me, “that I’m upset, too, and that no one would be more upset than Grammy. And I feel a twinge.” CC has recently said that she wants to drop the childish nickname and be called Carolyn.
Emmett listens, rapt, to her strong and tuneful voice as the tailor of Gloucester talks to his cat, Simpkin: “And oh, Simpkin, with the last penny of our fourpence buy me one penn’orth of cherry-coloured silk. But do not lose the last penny of the fourpence, Simpkin, or I am undone and worn to a thread-paper, for I have NO MORE TWIST.”
When it ends, Emmett asks, “Is Grammy dead?”
She died the morning after the last meeting of her book club, in April, that cruelest of months. I was alone with her and could tell by her breathing that it was time. I called the girls to come quickly. Emmett, who had just turned fourteen months, was in Elena’s arms when she came in. Seeing the situation, she called Simon. He came and took Emmett from Elena so that she could go sit with Carolyn. While Emmett and Simon played on the living room floor, Elena sat by Carolyn’s bed holding her hand until Amelia got there. “It was clear that Mom was waiting for Amelia,” Elena said later. “We held her hands, and Amelia described her shoes to Mom.” They were ballet flats covered in golden sparkles.
I heard one of the girls say, “Oh, Mama. I love you so.”
The urn containing her ashes, a reddish wooden globe, was nestled in a richly colored wreath of flowers and displayed in St. Vincent de Paul Church in Chicago. There was a tremendous party, of course. Debbie carried the urn on her lap on the ride from the church to the Lincoln Park Conservatory, which Elena and Amelia had rented for the occasion. Debbie was shocked at how heavy Carolyn was and marveled at the mere fact that she held Carolyn in the end.
The Lincoln Park Conservatory, a great structure built of iron and glass in the high baroque of the 1890s, houses a mature tropical jungle. Along the winding paths among palms, fernery, orchids, and bromeliads, we danced as the music played and the slides flashed images of Carolyn’s life from infancy on. The urn was on display in its wreath of flowers. Men in livery went among us, as Carolyn would have bade them do, offering delicious treats, champagne, and wine. Debbie and I danced to the “Tennessee Waltz.”
Once when Carolyn’s wrist was broken after the ice-skating accident, I was driving her to therapy. It was a long drive, and we talked of everything under the sun as we had when we were young and immortal. I said, “I write about survival. What advice would you give?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Keep on dancing,” she said.
When it was all over, I thanked Debbie for letting me do it, for lending me, so to speak, to the cause. With a woman less magnanimous than Debbie, the outcome could have been most unpleasant. Her bighearted response surprised me: “I didn’t have to give it much thought,” she said. “Alan was there when I was sick. And you were the love of her life, you know.”
Elena and Amelia had a bench placed in the park overlooking the lake. A small brass plaque on its back gave Carolyn’s name and said, “Look at the lake!” At the time, the spot they wanted, before the old skating pond, was being renovated, so the city placed the bench a block south with the intention of moving it once the desired spot became available. But doing things the way the city does, they placed a second bench by the skating pond without ever removing the bench a block south. So now Carolyn has two benches saying, “Look at the lake!” And that is so fitting fo
r her style.
Amelia and Terry were already married when their planned wedding took place at the same church that November. The first wedding had taken place before a small crowd. This one drew a large crowd. The sky was somewhat cloudy, the weather brisk. The girls had had a special bouquet made that would be placed at the feet of the Virgin Mary in Carolyn’s honor. As Amelia and Terry were crossing the vast nave with the flowers, a cloud moved away, and a shaft of sun fell through stained glass and followed the couple like a spotlight, suffusing the entire church with an otherworldly glow. Debbie leaned over and whispered to me, “It’s Carolyn. She’s here.” And I felt humbled at the realization of how lucky I was to be allowed to watch all of these powerful women come to know one another, to love one another, and to find their strength as they embraced the rough and joyful reality of their lives.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to John Rasmus, my editor of thirty years. These essays would not exist without his talents and efforts.
Chemistry of Fire Page 29