Content warning: This post will be discussing death in some detail
There’s a saying, often attributed to Hemingway that “writing is easy, all you have to do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein.”
I definitely don’t think writing is easy, but I am going to be opening a vein. I feel like my writing has been blocked because I need to get the piece you’re currently reading out of my system before I can get started writing anything else.
Unlike the rest of my internet presence, I don’t often talk about my personal life very much on this blog. That said, there has been some major upheaval in my personal life which is going to inform the rest of this writing. I’ll go into details after the jump.
Thanks to one three day stretch, 2022 has been the worst year of my life by a considerable margin. It began on the morning of February 22nd. As usual, I woke up before my wife and got ready to work. Because of the pandemic, my office was still closed, so I’d be working from home. I went downstairs and made some scrambled eggs for breakfast, brought my wife’s plate upstairs and put on her nightstand. Went down the hallway to my home office with my own eggs and a big mug of coffee and logged into work. After being on a meeting call for an hour, I went and checked on my wife. She was still asleep, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that she hadn’t touched her eggs, since she usually wakes up, checks her phone and ears breakfast before going back to sleep.
I gently shook her, asking “not hungry today?” and didn’t get a response. A slightly firmer shake and she still didn’t respond, not even a muttered expletive as she rolled back over. At this point, something felt wrong and I was trying to remember how long she had been asleep in the same position. I realized that it had been well over twelve hours and started to panic a little bit. I stared at her chest and could see that she was still breathing.
I was concerned, so I called a friend of ours, who also happened to be my wife’s doctor even though she was based up in Albany, NY.
I told her the situation and she told me to do what I probably would have done in the first place had I been thinking straight and call 911. Roughly 15 minutes later, I had police and ambulance technicians (I’m not sure if they were EMTs or paramedics, as you might imagine I wasn’t able to concentrate fully. Though I did remember to ask to see ID.) The police asked me what happened and so I told them exactly the situation described above, and then the ambulance folk were transferring my wife from the bed to a stretcher and then to an ambulance.
The police officer told me which hospital they were taking her to and advised me to wait and take a few deep breaths before heading that way myself, since they didn’t want to see me in a traffic accident. I did wait, sitting on my stairs until I could feel my heart rate slow back down to normal. Which is just as well, as one of the police officers knocked on the front door about then to let me know they had taken my wife to a different hospital than the one they had initially told me. I still didn’t fully trust myself to drive, so I did a couple of displacement activities: feeding my pets, making sure that I had crated the dog, grabbed both my wife’s ID and my own, and checking that my phone and de facto GPS was charged. It probably wasn’t longer than 10 minutes. I drove to the hospital and parked in the ERs visitor bay.
Once I got into the ER, my wife was hooked up to a heart monitor and a painkiller IV drip. They had done some tests, but still had some neurological things to check. I squeezed her hand and told her “I’m here.” I still think she squeezed back before they wheeled her over to whichever machine they used for brain scans. When the scans were done, the nurse showed me a “massive” shadow on them, which was probably a brain bleed. The next step was to have a neurologist examine the scans. He did just that, concurred with the nurse that it was “massive” and described it as a “non-traumatic brain hemorrhage.” At least now I knew what was wrong, which was a crumb of relief. Unfortunately, the neurologist’s next sentence utterly obliterated that sense of relief. “I’m afraid it’s inoperable.”
My wife wasn’t ever going to wake up. I reached out to my ex-wife and son to let them know. I also sent a message to my father, mother, and sister to let them know. It had to be messages due to the time difference. I did get hold of a local friend and told her what was happening, and she said she’d come to the hospital.
I remember just sitting in the hard plastic chair in the ER section looking at my wife fighting to breathe (she had never been one to give up without a fight), and just feeling drained. The friend came by and just sat with me for a little while. It wasn’t too long after that the hospital moved us out of the ER to a room in the neurology department.
This was when my life was effectively on pause. For two days, I either sat in a scratchy recliner or in a plastic chair in front of a desk in that room. Because I both needed some kind of displacement/distraction activity and to continue earning income since my bills didn’t go on pause, I was logged into my work laptop and trying to work from the hospital room. I imagine my contributions weren’t up to their usual standards but it was a grounding which I desperately needed. I was still working eight hours a day but they were rarely consecutive and certainly were not remotely on a 9 to 5.
For most of the time though, what I was doing in that room was watching my wife in the one fight that she simply could not win. She was fighting mightily against her brain to stay alive and I could hear every loud, rasping breath even as they became less and less regular. This was really the only time since we had said “I do” that I was completely unable to help her in any way. I was hoping that the morphine drip meant that she was at least comfortable. Even if it wasn’t helping, I did continue to talk to her, reassuring her that I would be there for her no matter what. I would occasionally hold her hand or just watch her breathe.
I couldn’t stay there the entire time, so I did run home a couple of times to feed the dog and cats, as well as walking the dog. Those were some of the fastest walks I had ever taken him on, since I wanted to cover the usual distance and get back to the hospital room as quickly as possible. I don’t know if my presence helped or not, but I knew these were to be my last moments with her and I wanted as many of them as possible. That said, I would not wish the experience of sitting in a small room mostly by oneself just waiting for someone to die on anyone.
A little before noon on the 24th of February, I ran home to take care of the animals but instead of rushing straight back to the hospital, I took maybe ten minutes to shower and change clothes. Of course, the moment I stepped out of the shower I got a phone call from the hospital. My wife had died, and despite what I had told her earlier I wasn’t there for her when she did.
I still don’t know how I managed that final drive to the hospital. I remember my head was pounding, that I had a lump in my throat the entire way there. I did make it back to that room. It was immediately obvious that she had finally lost her fight. It was remarkable to me just how different a dead body was from an unconscious body. One last kiss on the forehead and a whispered “I’ll always love you. Goodbye” before she was taken to the funeral home and cremated.
That was six months ago, and that is the reason that grief is still very much on my mind. The Kübler-Ross model says there are five discrete stages of grief and we move through them in an orderly fashion. Bluntly, that is a lie. Human emotions are all a lot messier than that and defy easy categorization. I’m sure it’s different for everybody but my experience is the only one I’m familiar with so it’s the only one I can share.
Firstly, and possibly the simplest consequence of things , I haven’t had a full restful night’s sleep since the 21st of February. My sleep cycle is mostly starting to coalesce into something resembling a pattern but it’s not there yet.
One of the reasons the Kübler-Ross model doesn’t work for me is that the very first stage is denial. I’ve found it impossible to deny that she’s gone. Every room in the apartment I’m typing this in has memories of her and she’s simply not there anymore. When I wake up in the morning, there’s nobody on the other side of the bed. When I’m in the kitchen cooking, something that we loved doing together as a big couples activity, I’m only making food for me. I no longer have my sous chef to help, nor do I get to be her sous chef. When I’m watching Jeopardy!, I no longer have to compete to shout out the question first. When I go somewhere, I’m always the driver now, and I no longer have to take five minutes to load her wheelchair into the back of the vehicle. There’s a hundred other activities every single day that I do by myself that we used to do together. The older cat has a distinctive “where’s mama?” meow and I tell her “Mama’s gone.”
So denial has never entered into it. I still talk to her memory most days, telling her about things I’ve done or things I’m going to do. One of those things I’m planning on doing is attending DragonCon this year because a lot of people who helped my immensely by contributing to a medical bill fundraising stream online will be there, and I want to thank them personally and I don’t think I’ll have a better opportunity.
Unfortunately, I feel incredibly guilty about going, because I know she wanted to go, to meet those very same people, since they had become online friends over the course of the pandemic. Now, I’m going without her and I worry that I’ll feel bad if I enjoy myself there because it’s enjoyment that she should have had.
So guilt is one of the stages of grief that does apply to me, but it’s very cyclical. Any time I do anything that I think she would enjoy, I feel bad about it. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t attend various meetups for groups we belonged to for roughly four months, and it’s sporadic even now. There’s some things I just won’t do even now because, to me, doing them dishonors her memory. An example of that is a local club does a “Rain” event where they have the sprinklers on indoors and everyone’s there having a good time under the warm water. It was one of her favorite things to do, and easily our best night of 2021. I think it happened this past weekend. I probably would have loved it, but I just could not go.
The other of the major stages that applies to me is depression. Thankfully, it’s not an ever present thing, again running somewhat cyclically. In the initial few weeks, I had a lot of “why couldn’t it have been me instead?” Which was somewhere between depression and survivor’s guilt. For the most part I can get through my days in a relatively calm fashion, but every once in a while, I’ll get hit by sadness like a ton of bricks. I can mostly trace those days by looking at my bank statements, as I indulge in retail therapy for those. It sometimes helps, but it also often leads to more guilt in that I think “I wouldn’t have gotten this if she was still here,” or “she would have loved this.”
I’m doing a few things to try and get myself straight. Because of the “memories in every room” thing, I’m making changes where I can. Small things, like different bedding, or a new desk, or a sofa slipcover. Really, anything that makes the room look different to what it did when she was alive. This even extends to my own appearance. I had been growing my hair out with the pandemic, partially because it was kind of fun and partially because she enjoyed playing with it. I think it was the weekend after she passed that I just got it cut so that the “me” in the mirror didn’t look like the “me” she hung out with.
I’m in a strange place when it comes to memories, because I don’t think I could watch a video of her, or hear a recording of her voice, especially her magnificent laugh, without being overwhelmed. I’m almost grateful that there aren’t that many photographs of the two of us together because she was the photographer and had crazy high standards for how she looked in photographs and would delete any that weren’t to her standards. Personally, I thought she looked beautiful in all of them but I’m biased. That said, there are certain things that are mementos of her that I’ll never even think about parting with. One of the less obvious ones is a Valentines gift she got me, a set of polyhedral dice that are “coffee and sugar” themed in a collapsible cup. They don’t look like anything special, but they were the last thing she gave to me before dying and as such, will be the only dice I won’t share or loan out to people.
I don’t really know how to finish this blog, so I’ll thank you for reading and indulging me in some catharsis. Actually, I think I’ll end with a quote from my favorite author, Sir Terry Pratchett
“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”
I find a great comfort in that, for I know her ripples won’t be dying away any time soon.
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
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