Death took us both

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

Jane-and-Harry died December 10, 2010 just before  8 p.m. EST in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. Four years later, I still have not made peace with that fact nor been able to adjust to the reality of it in any but the most superficial of ways. Jane is buried next to her mother in a cemetery in Fall River, MA. The headstone that marks the grave still does not bear the date of Jane’s death.

I haven’t forgiven myself yet…

Jane was my wife for 21 years, three months and eight days. We knew each other for almost exactly four years before we married–and we knew the day we met that we were soul mates. But the knowledge terrified us both. We did not go on our first date together for two years after that first meeting. We were that afraid we would screw things up.

Saving each other from worse than death

I’d had six relationships before Jane, if you count kindergarten and one case of unrequited love in high school. I was the second person she’d ever been out on a date with, and her first boyfriend. I was 38 when we married. She was 35.

Jane-and-Harry died…

Jane told me several times that I had saved her life–but never more poignantly than the day before I took her to the hospital for her final battles against the cancer that eventually killed her. And I told her several times that she had saved my life–and my soul–over the course of our marriage–and never more poorly or awkwardly than on that day.

Joining two souls beyond Death

 

Our wedding vows consecrated our bodies as one flesh. Our souls were joined long before that event. We both believed we had lived many lifetimes together. We both believed–and I believe now–that we were destined to live many more in the future. And we both believed I would recover from losing her very quickly because of that belief. What, after all, is the passage of even 100 years in the lives of two souls who counted their existence in billions of years? In that scale of things, even lifetimes of separation amounted to no more than a business trip.

…I had saved her life…

We were totally wrong about that–at least from my perspective. Seven days from now, I will visit her grave on the fourth anniversary of her death. The pain is not less than it was the day she died. The quality of the silence in the house has not changed. The emptiness of the space in the bed next to me at night has not changed. The absence of her touch or the sound of her voice at any point during the day or night has not changed. The missing her has not changed.

Death and loss take no holidays

All that has changed is my ability to deal with those things. They are–on most days–less debilitating than they were. For the first year after Jane’s death, I don’t think I ever slept more than three hours a night. Going to bed is still difficult, but once there I sleep for 5-6 uninterrupted hours. When I do wake up, most nights, I can get back to sleep. I rarely dream of her last days in the hospital now. Instead, I dream about the better times or have conversations with her about what I am doing and what I’m thinking about doing next.

Our souls were joined long before…

But the tears still come with little or no warning. I was in the grocery store Monday, walking down an aisle. I was looking for candied fruit for the fruitcake we made every year. I reached to pick it up and maybe the colors struck me in just the right way, but my eyes were brimming up with tears. Later that night I was watching a scene from Gods & Generals in which Lawrence is talking to his wife–and there we were. The tears came down across my face.

What Death took

Jane and I were a couple in a way it is difficult to describe to someone who has not had that experience. It wasn’t that we finished each other’s sentences or dressed to match each other–we didn’t do either one. But even separated by the length of a school, we could be on the same page. I taught English and she taught AP Biology, chemistry and physics in the same building.

Going to bed is still difficult…

One summer, I grew a beard. I’d had one when I was younger, but Jane had never seen me with one except in pictures. She liked how it looked, but was not really in love with how it felt against her face in the end. Still, I kept it to begin the school year while we saw whether it would soften. My students were stunned by my appearance and wanted to know why I’d grown it.

A story without death

“Ms Dybowski and I had an interesting summer,” I dead-panned. “The CIA asked us to come back to work and go to Afghanistan to look for bin Laden. I grew the beard as part of my cover.” Now neither of us had ever been spies or undercover agents. Nor had we been to Afghanistan. Our knowledge of any of the languages there was non-existent.

High school students can be pretty gullible, but I really didn’t expect them to swallow that whopper whole. We maintained a certain air of mystery about our outside interests and our students knew we both had a dry sense of humor that could be missed if they were not paying attention. But this tale was way over the top.

One summer, I grew a beard.

Still, they weren’t sure whether to believe me or not. Instead, since several of them had chemistry with Jane the next block, they held their peace, certain they would get a straight answer from her. Jane knew nothing of what I had told them and could have laughed at their question. She didn’t.

“Were you and Mr. Proudfoot really in Afghanistan this summer,” they asked?

“Yes,” she replied with a straight face, “And let me tell you, those burkhas are itchy.”

I’d made the story up on the spot. I’d never discussed it with her. But her answer was psychically perfect.

It took us weeks to get our students to believe we’d been kidding–and some of them are still nor entirely convinced.

Couplehood

We knew each other that well because we never made major decisions about anything without talking to each other–and rarely made even minor decisions without discussion. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust each other or were incapable of making decision without the other’s input. Rather, we wanted to be sure we had considered all the angles on everything before making a commitment. We knew that we were smarter and more observant together than we were separately.

‘Were you and Mr. Proudfoot really in Afghanistan…’

For example, we looked at more than 400 possible houses before settling on the one I still live in. We had a checklist that included the dimensions of every room as well as the shape of the yard and the position of any trees on the lot. This house was a shell when we decided to buy it. We looked at light fixtures for days and discussed the pros and cons of each one in each room before making a decision. We did the same thing with the flooring, the cabinets, the exterior and interior colors. We studied grass seed and foundation plantings and landscaping–even lawn mowers and snow shovels.

Human work

There was no such thing as man’s work or woman’s work. We both cooked–though Jane was the better cook–we both cleaned, we both mowed the lawn and pruned the trees and shrubs. I did more weeding and vegetable gardening, perhaps, but only because I enjoyed doing it more than she did. She loved cross-stitch and other forms of needlecraft–which I have no facility with–and filled the house with examples of her work.

It wasn’t that we didn’t trust each other… 

On a hot summer afternoon, we would sit under the trees and read or write or work on some craft we loved. The majority of the ornaments on our Christmas tree are things Jane had created. We would work together on finishing a piece of furniture or designing a new flower bed. If one of us wrote something, the other would play editor.

To Hell and back

Sometimes we argued with each other. Sometimes we got angry with each other. One day, Jane was so angry she told me, “Go to Hell–And come back.” Then we both laughed. “Well, at least I told you to come back,” she said by way of apology. We might go to bed angry with each other, but by morning the fit would have passed. Before Jane’s illness, we spent just one night in different beds–and that was because I was out of town for a conference. We both hated it so much neither of us ever went on an overnight again without the other.

…no such thing as man’s work or woman’s work.

Yet we had very different interests we pursued without a second thought. Jane loved playing tennis. In the summer, she would play for two hours every morning with her sister. Sometimes she would get an invitation in the afternoon to go play doubles with three male teachers we knew. While I like watching tennis, it was never a sport I had much interest in playing–and what ability I had was so far below hers that it would spoil the game for her were I on the court. I had interests, birdwatching, for example, she found equally dull and excused herself from.

Great expectations

While we were both politically quite liberal, I was more of an activist than she was. We never discussed whom we voted for after the fact, though we explored every candidate and issue in detail together beforehand. Most of the time, I think, we agreed in the voting booth, but I suspect there were sometimes real differences we simply ignored. But those differences were more a matter of the pace of change than where we wanted things to end up.

‘…at least I told you to come back…’

We both fully expected to grow old together, gradually losing our physical and mental strength over time at about the same rate. Then we would die–if not at the same moment, then close enough to it that the other would not have too long a time before joining the other. We both come from long-lived families that tend to stay sharp and healthy into their 80s and 90s. We believed we would have 30-40 years together after retirement

The argument

Two nights before she died, we had a horrible argument that left us both angry and frustrated. It started when she told me she wanted me to help her into the bathroom so she could use the toilet. She’d been on bedpans and catheters since the operation that replaced the valves in the right side of her heart three weeks before. I had to tell her that I couldn’t–and that the nurses couldn’t–that moving her that far would risk pulling out the needles that were keeping up a steady drip of medication, risk pulling out the monitors. Getting her out of bed meant putting her in a lift–and that lift would not fit through the bathroom door.

Then she told me she wanted to go home–and I had to tell her she couldn’t–that she wasn’t strong enough and that she needed to go through rehab first. “You’ll be out of here right before Christmas,” I told her–as they had told us both earlier in the day. “Rehab will take until the first of  February–and then you’ll come home. We’ll go to New Hampshire for a week–like we planned.”

‘I want to go home,” she said. “I want to go home tonight…now. I want to sleep in my own bed.” Every sentence was a breathy rasp and a struggle–as every word had been since they had put in the breathing tube in her throat so they would not have to intubate her again. It was a combination of reading lips and trying to make out the words she had not yet entirely succeeded in learning how to form. The exercise frustrated us both at the best of times.

We both fully expected to grow old together…

I explained again why that couldn’t happen. She sank into a sullen silence, then returned to wanting to go to the bathroom. I went out to consult with the nurse about making that happen, knowing already that it simply was not possible. The nurse came in and explained it to her in much the same way I had already done. The explanation just made Jane angry at both of us–and even more angry with me.

The nurse left and I tried to distract Jane from her helplessness with a Celtics game. She liked watching basketball and previous games had taken her mind off her troubles before–but not tonight. She would not look at the screen. Instead she glared at me. I tried showing her a comedy, a drama, a sit-com. She glared at me. I tried a channel that was just music. I was angry now, myself. Still she glared.

I talked with her some more–explained why she couldn’t use the bathroom like she wanted, explained why she couldn’t go home yet. Her glare said, “You don’t love me; you never loved me. If you did, you’d get me out of this bed.”

Time out

Finally, I gave up. I walked out of the room for a few minutes to try to calm myself. It didn’t do much good. I wasn’t angry with her. I understood her frustration. I was frustrated, too. We’d been in the hospital for 26 days. I’d been sleeping on the fold-down couch in her room for 22 of those days. I wanted us both to go home, but knew that was still weeks away. I’d explained it all the best I could. The doctors and nurses had explained it the best they could.

‘You’ll be out of here right before Christmas…’

But we could get up when we wanted, use the toilet when we wanted. My world was limited, for the most part, to the corridors of the hospital. But her world was limited to what she could see from her bed and the chair next to it. She felt trapped and alone and there was nothing I could do to change any of that. I could be there every waking moment of every day, but just the fact I could get up and move without help was a painful reminder of what was denied her. It made me an alien to her at times–and it had to hurt.

That I couldn’t fix that made me angry–especially at myself. Not for the first time, I wondered if it would not have been better if I had let her go the first time she’d gone into a coma. Not for the first time I wondered if I made a mistake letting myself be convinced not to let her go when she had gone into the second coma. Logically, I had made the right call on both occasions. I know that now and I knew that then. Our mantra was, “So long as there is a fighting chance, keep fighting. When there is no longer a fighting chance, let go.”

Death’s doorstep

I took a deep breath and went back into the room. “We both need sleep,” I told her. “Do you want the TV off?”

She glared at me.

That I couldn’t fix that made me angry…

I turned away and lay down on the couch. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I opened them. She was glaring at me. “Go to sleep, love. You need to sleep.”

Every time I opened my eyes, she was glaring at me. Every time, I begged her to go to sleep.

Death’s truth

At 4 a.m., they came in to do the overnight x-ray. I left the room while they did it. When I came back in, I sat with her until the sun came up. Somewhere in there, she softened. She still wasn’t happy. But the edge of anger was gone. In retrospect, I think she knew she was dying–that the reason she wanted to go home was so she could die in her own bed.

By 10:30 a.m, she was in a coma again. At noon they told us there was nothing more they could do. That afternoon, we began planning to take her off the oxygen and the feeding tube and everything else so she could die the way she had always wanted to. But it would be in a hospital room and not at home.

‘Go to sleep, love. You need to sleep.’

I haven’t forgiven myself yet for that final argument, for not realizing what she was trying to tell me, for not sitting up that whole night with her holding her hand. I thought I was seeing one thing when something else entirely was happening.

Jane was 56 years and 23 days old when she died of a cancer her doctor had never heard of. Her death changed everything.