"Your hair's gone white," her doctor told me. I hadn't seen him in how long? Not quite a year, not since Patricia died. He wore the customary white coat, ID badge, and stethoscope. I knew he belonged there, but couldn't quite place him.
"Hunh?" I semi-grunted, smiling the 'Do I know you?' smile. Stalling, I asked, "You remember me?" Finally it came. He had been her pain management physician. I can't say I was happy to see him. Truth be told, I had to swallow a sudden violent urge to gag. Nevertheless, it was a familiar face and not entirely unwelcome. Why else was I there, not even a year after she'd died?
"I remember your hair," he said. "It was beautiful. Salt-and-pepper. It's gone white." I must have looked puzzled, or I'd furrowed my brow. "It's still beautiful," he was quick to add. What else could he say? I thanked him. "What are you doing here?" he asked, with a tinge of urgency, a sudden tightness."
Just volunteering," I was quick to reply, not wanting him or the gods to get any other ideas. City of Hope being a renowned cancer hospital, after all."Good," he said, smiling cheerfully, then consolingly, with his voice dropping, "I'm sorry about your friend."
"Patricia," I said her name. It felt both comforting and wounding to say it there and then.
He added her last name, remembering that too, smiling a soft smile again, taking my hand which hung blandly at my side when he reached out to help me shake his. As he walked away, I'd have cried. But the little cupcake they’d stuck me to volunteer with was popping her gum, echoing in the lobby and in my ears. So I chuckled instead, taking my place with her, behind the reception desk. At a very young age, before I was ten, I developed this strange inappropriate response when something is frightening or sad, or sadly rediculous, or when I know there's nothing else I can do.
At horror flicks I'm the nut who laughs when others scream. And at Patricia's memorial, everyone said I was stunning and wonderful and on and on. It's not uncommon, I'm told, when we're in shock to behave in ways that may seem oddly cool and collected, joyful, cold or otherwise inappropriate. "What's funny," asked Cupcake that day, missing or dismissing all that about seeing one of Pat's doctors again for the first time. I was still trying to quell the gag-reflex from the remembered visceral horror of Patricia's suffering. Cupcake wanted to know the joke and why I was chuckling. "Nothing," I said.
It had been over six months since Patricia and I had been there, at City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, where amazing things are done, where miracles of modern medicine
are happening every day, where many, many people survive to live out their lives
cancer free. It was not a year since my Pat had died there. I returned to volunteer because it was familiar, because I missed seeing her, even in such a place, because it was the last landscape where we had been together. I went back a few months after the end for bereavement support-group meetings. Then I returned to volunteer. I could walk the halls that smelled of shit and urine, or bleach and concentrated air fresheners. I could go outside by the fountain to feel the water and the breeze, hike to the cafeteria, or stop at the coffee cart. There I used to tip the girl five bucks for a really awful cappuccino, just because she had to be there everyday, where people suffered and prayed to be anywhere else in the world, where people were angry, or hurting, and always so afraid.
Rare ones were blissfully happy, as we had been happy there too, a few times. Take the afternoon I arrived after work to find my beloved distraught. Her lung specialist told her before I arrived, with no one there to support her, that we should look for a good hospice -- the wretched heartbreak and tragedy of all that -- and the next day when her oncologist told us the other doctor had been mistaken. That was a rare blissful time.
I could walk the beautiful grounds where I'd ushered my Pat for MRIs and CT scans, tiny in her wheelchair, with her bald little head under a red baseball cap or dapper felt fedora. I could even go by the ICU room where we spent the last three days of her life.Oddly, that part of the facility had been shut down. Pat was one of the last patients before it closed. Patricia's passion and mine had been some of the last to fill and gut that particular room. A whole new building was opened and filled with patients in the space since I'd been, since we'd both been gone. So I was volunteering, mercifully, in another building entirely.
But even in the new state-of-the-art facility, with luxury rooms by comparison, even there, every cancer patient I visited and comforted (to get away from the gum-popper down in the lobby), the reborn gang-banger who preached to me about being saved and told me how wonderful his mother was; the retired school principal who hated the food and her nurse but ate it all so she'd be fit for chemo, and didn't want her nurse or me to go away; the shrunken construction worker who must have been Hercules once and regretted the years he had smoked and the booze; all of the patients and the people who loved them were the same. The fear in their eyes was the same as Pat's had been, even when they smiled. It was fear and hope, the hope against hope, the bargaining, and denial, even in faith...it was all about hope, even if they despaired at times through their treatments on every floor and in every room at the City of Hope. Oh how we all HOPED.
Now, I could go and stand outside what had been her window with my forearm resting against the cool glass, and my forehead against my forearm, and not have to hope so hard, not have to hope at all. I could just look at the empty space where she had suffered, where we'd spent some of the most precious hours -- though she'd been unconscious those last three days, and though the conscious days at the beginning of the end, had not been lovely at all, when every breath was impinging and hurting, hurting me also. Now, that building where she died and its rooms were all empty, empty and as ravaged as I still felt inside.
Strangely, the poster board remained standing against the inside of the window where I stood outside, leaning on the pane. It was from a collection of her photography, and pictures of her I'd assembled. You know, to help the staff, the tired nurses and young doctors see her as more than this poor, sick, vanquished old woman (she was only sixty five). It was to help visitors too, remember her in stronger days, teaching days, camping days, Cajun dancing, and dancing with the tide days strolling along the shore. It just seemed so strange to me, the poster board with the pictures pulled off, torn on the surface in places, was still there in her last room, in the old Intensive Care Wing, all but touching my knee through the glass. I'd taken the pictures home without her. How had the poster board remained all this time, standing upright in the room where she died, where I found it and remembered?
That day, I left her body behind, and she left mine. I took her clothes and my ravaged heart home with me. Not a year later, at City of Hope, everything else, the hospital bed, the phone, even the lighting, was all gone. Only wires were hanging from the ceiling and gouged out of a hole in the wall. And the chair, that chair where I sat with her, the chair where I dozed and held her hand and was more afraid and stronger than I've ever been, than I may ever be again, my chair sat by itself in the center of an empty hospital room, while the poster board touched me through the window. I visited them, the empty room, the chair, the poster board, three or four times. They brought it all back, indelibly.
A little over six months was of course, for me (for anyone?), too soon. I tried volunteering for about a month and a half. I tried very hard. When I just couldn't do it anymore, I wrote it off as my un-giving, self-centered unwillingness to put up with the gum-popper and her chums at the end of a long workday, even for the sake of those who were suffering then. Besides that, I was unhappy about leaving our dog, Pat's pup, home alone in the evenings after I'd been gone at work each day, and alone after all we'd all three been through. Lucy had a very big and knowing heart. These months, she still suffered, fawning over me every time I cried. Anyway, in those days, for me at least, it wasn't about Hope anymore at City of Hope or anywhere. I had left the love of my life there. What more could I be expected to give?
Sometimes, as harsh and abrupt as this will sound, sometimes it was about Hate. There was no consoling me after all Patricia suffered, no softening the shock, the unexpected shock of Pat's dying when she seemed, in spite of every terrible setback, to be getting well. After she was gone, when I went anywhere beyond the quiet of our home, I missed the lingering sensations of Patricia in our rooms; the remembered sounds of her opening a drawer, splashing at her bathroom sink, the tines of her fork on a plate, the sound of her restful breathing beside me through the night. When I wasn't home I missed the comfort of our space and our things, Pat's things all around me. But when I was at home, I sometimes missed the intensity and hope of our time at the hospital, and the preciousness of those months, days, and hours, when we lived in hope that she would survive, that we would be safe and happy again.
Suddenly, every day, there were new moments in the churnings when I hated life without my beloved. Sometimes I hated being me, wherever I was. Visiting my parents, I hated how I was sad inside and couldn't always fake it, knowing they had fears of their own with my father's illness and death impending. His was a longer time of suffering and preparation, his illness having been diagnosed long before hers. Now, four years later, he recently died, a few months before this posting. He was ready and so was I. We had said all we needed to say, planning and then living out our quiet goodbye.
Roshi Joan Halifax, renowned speaker and writer on topics of death and grief, opines on "the myth of the good death" and the hype of "death with dignity" in an interview in the May issue of Shambala Sun. I'm not a scholar or practioner like Roshi. I certainly haven't sat in compassion with as many of the dying or their families as she has. I can affirm what she says from my own experience. I can write about what I know. Sometimes I can even tell about hate from the dark times.
When I was with some of the members of Patricia's old religious community I hated how they so clearly "tolerated" me and my grief, and how some of them used me and my sorrow, taking things of Pat's I gave them, then demanding more of me, and in more ways than I really believed I could give, taking those sacred days and moments from me while I was, or should have been grieving, making my gayness, and Patricia's, part of their political-ritual "happenings," directing me to give more of my time, my talents, and my treasure than I believed I possessed, confident they deserved them. "I need art. I want it," one of them even said, more than once, all but harping. So I gave it. And even before the end of that relationship, when she was still telling me, "You're my sweetie," she also told me she had earned it.
In the midst of all that, because all of that was ongoing, when I got home after volunteering that night, not a year after Patricia's death, I looked in the mirror for a long time, at my face, my hair, and deep in my eyes. It was soothing in a self-indulgent way, to recognize the sadness. And, it was true. Patricia's doctor was right. I'd had, for so many years, a fairly even sprinkling of salt-and-pepper, since my twenties. I wore my hair much shorter then. And, yes, somewhere in the months since Pat left me, the "pepper" I once had, had been trimmed away. So, at 45, after Pat died, my hair had gone white. It was a bit shocking to actually see for the first time. Not startling, no. Nothing frightened me anymore. Which brought me to this, as I looked in the mirror that night:
Which is worse? Hatred so hot you wish you could spontaneously combust before you have to suck-up one more thoughtless abuse, or cruelty, or meanness from anyone who could care less about how you feel or about what is sacred and precious to you; or fear so cold you think you may be growing petrified inside, your organs are freezing and it hurts so much you hope you will die soon, right where you sit? What was happening? What was this part of the journey all about? Hadn't we been through enough? How much further did I have to fall now, without her? Was Hate or Anger becoming my new inappropriate response? How long? How much longer must I live in this particular space within the void without her? And what about God? Where was God?
More months would pass. Again I would find myself at the mirror...asking: How many times must I come and go from these depths in the darkness to find God -- yes, even in the void, that God was the void itself, longing for me, pulling me toward Sacredness...only to feel I might be losing the Sacredness of my life, after all, even as I continued to live it. Was more to be ripped away from me again...and again...and again? How was I to know what was "holy" and "unholy" in all I was experiencing? Hadn't my attempts to just surrender and let go in what I believed were "safe" even "religious" surroundings, resulted in my being used or hurt more deeply than I had been by Patricia's death alone? What about all that?
Four years later, by some miracle or many miracles of Grace, I seem to be all right -- didn't freeze or explode or burn myself up, in any event. I've learned to examine and understand, to write about all this, turning myself inelegantly inside out at times. I've learned to feel and honor every bit, so that in due time, through no special intelligence or skill of mine, I've discovered how it all gets turned around for good. I've studied and practiced in new depths of the void through many dark nights. As I've written here before, I may always carry the desert with me, and could be taken to the brink of the void again, could fall or even leap back in. I don't know. There are amazing things I've experienced and found. So much more to tell you, my friends, about this sacred journey that is continuing through it all, in every now, every precious moment, all through the darkness of night, every beautiful day.
D.M.S.
It occurs to me later...I should add: City of Hope is an amazingly compassionate place where
NEW scientific breakthroughs and miracles are continuing as I write this. They treated Pat and me like royalty there. I went back recently, during my father's last days to find some grief information for my mum. It was a comfort to visit the fountain and the new chapel -- and to leave a note there in "the book" for my father.
If you find this or other posts helpful here, or think someone else might, please tell your friends. If you want to join the email list to receive my newsletter with updates about the book, and free downloads on creativity, journaling and writing from YOUR life, send a comment and include your email to let me know. I won't publish or give your email to any third party -- or just send me an email. Thank you!
Posts
