Shedding Energetic Debris

The beginning of the end had happened at the beginning of Thanksgiving week in 2010, so it would have been a fair assumption that the holidays were going to be difficult for me in 2011. But by October, I thought I was going to be fine during the holidays and planned to spend them alone.

That was October.

November 1st came and I was not so fine. The idea of being alone Thanksgiving seemed like the plan of a crazed woman. Howard had almost died the night before Thanksgiving in 2010 and I’d spent Thanksgiving cooking a huge turkey with all the fixings while he slept through the day. The cooking had kept me occupied. At the time it seemed a better idea than, say, drinking Jameson and pacing the floor. A year later, I suspected I might be drinking Jameson and pacing the floor if I was alone Thanksgiving of 2011.

When Cindy Morris invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her and her roommates, it was like a postcard from God informing me that my plight had been noted and taken care of. Cindy had been such a solid friend during Howard’s last days, not to mention the months that followed, and here she was, turkey baster in hand, looking after me one more time. Being looked after by someone else had been such a rare occurrence throughout my life that she seemed like some combination of Mother Earth, Mrs. Santa Claus, and all of the Greek goddesses, all rolled up into one person.

It was one of the best Thanksgivings I’d ever had.

But right around Thanksgiving, I began having problems with my gut. Since my gut was reliably healthy, it got my attention. What in the heck was going on? I might have had little experience with being taken care of by anyone else, but I was very good at taking care of myself. I got plenty of sleep, ate healthily, exercised, meditated . . . leaped over tall buildings, bent steel with my bare hands . . . . Okay, maybe I didn’t do those last two things, but I took good care of myself. And my gut was suddenly the gut of a sedentary, junk food eating, hyper-stressed burnout.

As I meditated one Sunday morning, right before going to my massage therapist (David Kochevar), I was told that the problems with my gut were coming from debris in my energy field. And it wasn’t even my own energetic debris. It seemed I’d somehow accumulated some of Howard’s energetic debris during his last six weeks of life. It had been time-stamped to come into my awareness for release a year later . . . and it was now time to dispatch it. I was told by guidance to have David work on my midsection. That would do part of the job.

Fortunately, David is a kindred spirit. Our appreciation for the workings of Spirit—if not the specifics of our personal theologies—tended to dovetail. He had not only been my massage therapist for most of his career, but he had become one of my favorite people in the world. I knew he would take what I’d been told in stride. He did. And I walked out of his office a new woman.

But I knew his work on me was only part of what needed to be done. I wasn’t quite sure of what constituted the rest. I decided to do a shamanic journey, and while I was quite capable of journeying myself, I wanted Antonio to drum for me. Journeying with Antonio was always a richer experience than journeying on my own, just as those who came to me for shamanic journey work had a richer experience journeying with me than they would have attempting to journey on their own. I always likened it to massage: You can massage yourself, but the involvement of another person’s energy makes being massaged by someone else a very different experience than massaging yourself.

I scheduled the journey with Antonio, only to cancel it within a week. I told myself I was crazy to think I could fit a journey into an already over-booked December. But it was more than that. The timing wasn’t quite right.

During another morning meditation, I asked my “council” (a council of spirit guides I often meet with in meditation) what I needed to do to clear the remaining energetic debris, and I asked for their help. They not only agreed to help, they wanted to accomplish the deed right then and there. I was a bit taken aback. Excuses raced through my mind, but really, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. I had no idea why I was balking. What, exactly, would make me ready? When did I think I would be ready? I took a deep breath and told them to lead the way.

And they did. When we were done, I knew that the debris was gone. I felt clearer, more myself, than I had felt all year. And I realized that I had postponed the journey because it was not to take place until the anniversary of Howard’s death had passed. I scheduled it for December 30th, the day after the anniversary.

I spent Christmas alone, at peace. I wasn’t quite so serene on December 28, the day before the anniversary of Howard’s death. The death ceremony, his final hours, the coma he lapsed into . . . it all occupied my mind and surrounded my heart like an old memory, both painful and beautiful. The 29th felt less constrictive, and it seemed fitting. Howard had been released from the constriction of his failing body a year earlier on that day.

I was ready to journey on the 30th. It was a beautiful, profound journey (and, perhaps, a story for another time). When January 1st, 2012 came, I felt ready to reclaim my own life . . . a life richer and deeper because of my travels with Howard as he made his way from life to the great life beyond, a life I embraced fully because I was happy to be among the living, happy to continue my Earth walk, thrilled to see time spread out before me like a carpet of flowers. I was back.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

Visitations

Some dreams are more than dreams—they are visitations. Numerous times, I asked Howard to visit me after he died. That request was sometimes made in jest, but even then, I had no doubt he knew I really wanted him to make an attempt to contact me once he crossed over.

Just a little less than six weeks after he died, he visited me using a dream as the vehicle. This was certainly not the first time I’d dreamed of him since his death, but his appearance in the dream was so vivid, so real, that once I drifted up from sleep, I knew he had contacted me. And it was more than contact; he gave me a sweet and wise piece of advice in the form of a question.

In the dream, I am trying to find a man’s telephone number. We had met and been attracted to one another. He’d suggested we get together and we’d made plans. It is now the day we’d arranged to meet. But I don’t know what time we are to meet or any other details. So I want to contact him. My friend Cindy has taken a call from him but hasn’t given me his number. I realize that it is too early to call her for it, so I am online, trying to find contact information on the man.

As I sit at the computer, I sense that someone is in the room, to my left. I look up and to the left, and I see Howard standing nearby. We just look at one another for a moment.

“Do you always wake up smiling?” he finally says.

The question gives me pause. I cock my head to the right and think. Have I done that? Did I do it that morning when I awoke? I decide I like the idea and realize that I usually do wake up happy.

“I guess I do,” I reply.

I turn back to the computer. Some part of me feels guilty about looking for the telephone number of another man, especially with Howard right there, but I realize that Howard is dead and it is actually okay for me to be doing this. I turn to look at him again and he is gone.

When I drift up from sleep, I realize that this is no ordinary dream, but a visitation from Howard. I also realize that his question is really not so much a question as a statement: Wake up with a smile on your face. Be happy. Carry on with your life. I suspect he is also encouraging me to wake up and accept the possibility of romance at some point when I’m ready.

His fundamental message is simple, but very important to me. It becomes a kind of mantra: Wake up smiling.

Later in the year, in October, I have another visitation during a dream.

In the dream, I have been sleeping and awaken. I’m troubled by something that happened before I went to bed and get up, deciding I won’t be able to return to sleep immediately. I walk through the house, noticing that some things are out of place, not put away by me before I’d gone to bed. Worse, I see that I have inadvertently left the front door open with my keys in the lock. I pull out the keys, shut the door, and return to bed, admonishing myself for my carelessness. Someone could have walked right in. I return to sleep.

I awaken (in the dream) and realize that I’d actually been dreaming earlier and hadn’t really gotten up. I can sense that someone is in the house. I get up and go into the guest bedroom. The light is dim, but I can see a form on the bed. I walk over to the bed and realize that it is Howard lying there. I lightly touch his chest and realize that he is solid, not ghost-like. He rouses.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. Then I bend down and kiss him on the lips.

“Soon I’ll be going into stasis,” he replies.

Without his saying anything else, I realize that he is telling me that when he goes into stasis, he won’t be able to contact me again. Somehow, I also know that “stasis” means that he is transitioning into a new form and will be going somewhere new.

When I drift up from the dream, the sense of how physically close I have just been to him is still palpable. I consider the word “stasis” and realize that the meaning of the word in the dream visitation is not any definition with which I am familiar, so I pad down to my office, pull out the dictionary, and look up the word. Sure enough, I see a definition that is consistent with this concept of being between one form and another.

But . . .

Time passes. I have recounted the dream to a few people—including Howard’s sister, who has a BS in nursing and, therefore, understands the concept of stasis. No one has ever heard of the definition from the dream. I find it all curious, so I eventually return to the dictionary and look up the word again. The definition I’d seen that morning in October is simply not there. I know I was fully awake when I looked for the word. I know what I saw. But now it is not there.

I laugh and shake my head. It seems that Howard was very clear about what he meant when he used the word. And he was not going to let the mere fact of a waking reality definition get in the way of his dream visitation definition. So when I looked up the word that morning after the dream, I saw what he wanted me to see in the dictionary.

It was so Howard, so like him. I knew he’d managed to hover nearby for just a bit that morning, even after I awoke.

He may be off somewhere, in another form, but he still manages to whisper words of encouragement now and then and he still gives me his opinion when I ask for it. But . . . there have been no more dream visitations.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

The Things I Missed

By fall, I had grown accustomed to the word “widow” and to the fact of widowhood. I found myself referring to Howard as “my late husband,” a term I was sure would make him double over in laughter on the other side. In his best Jack Benny imitation, his left hand cupping his jaw and his right hand supporting his left elbow, I imagined him saying, “Well!” in mock frustration, then arguing that his timing had always been impeccable.

I missed “my late husband” in many ways, and not the least of them was his goofy humor. He didn’t pull out the Jack Benny often. More often it was his East Indian guru—an irreverent imitation of Deepak Chopra—or his Transylvanian vampire version of the song, “You Do Something to Me.” I may or may not have had the power to mystify him, but he had the power to make me laugh every time, without fail, with his Transylvanian vampire rendition of that song. He’d done a little standup comedy in his youth and he not only chose to look at life with humor, he chose to take the events and happenings of our everyday lives and use them as material. My job was to roll my eyes and fight to keep from cracking a smile. A tiny drawing of an egret would be accompanied by “Egrets? I’ve had a few.” He was willing to do slapstick but preferred taking the ordinary and putting a little twist on it. If all else failed, his answer to practically everything was, “Let’s all get naked.”

I missed our conversations. He was erudite, smart, and philosophical. We agreed on many things and disagreed on many others, but we never lacked for interesting talk. His head for facts and my head for concepts gave us one nicely balanced mind between us, and he was one of the few men I’d ever been close to who could keep up with me intellectually. The fact that I didn’t want to talk politics and he didn’t want to talk metaphysics didn’t hamper us. There was always something to ponder aloud and roll around so we could get a good look at its many sides. And we were always as happy talking about the birds at the feeder or the flowers coming up in the garden as we were talking about the meaning of life. In fact, it could be argued that we viewed the birds and flowers as inherently meaningful components of life.

I missed having a companion who was at much at home at the opera as at a Rockies game. I missed dinners on the lower deck, under the flowering crab. I missed trips with him to bookstores and antiques stores, and I missed having a beer or glass of mead with him at Wynkoop Brewing Company.

I missed his unique stride, which was just a tiny bit bow-legged and always taken with the kind of casual confidence that made him look as if he owned the turf on which he tread.

I missed our morning ritual. As I put on makeup and styled my hair, he would stop outside the bathroom or dressing room door and wait until I paused what I was doing to turn to him. Then he would say, “You’re gonna look pretty today, aren’t you?” or “Are you putting on your fascinators?”

I missed his calling me “Little One,” sometimes emphasizing the word “One,” as if to say, “Forget the first three wives, you’ve always been the one.”

I missed that particular brand of loyalty and integrity he shared with a few other remarkable men I’d known, a commitment to what was right and true, with no apologies for loving America or staying true to his friends or being just a tad bit conservative. Well, okay, maybe more than a tad bit conservative.

I missed the fact that he knew as many lyrics as me and I even missed his annoying habit of playing fast and loose with lyrics, changing them at will if he couldn’t quite remember all of them or if he just wanted to be perverse.

I missed his native view of the world, a way of seeing things so different from mine that it was sometimes startling to me.

Often, something would flit by on the screen of my consciousness, something that caught my attention because of its absence, or caught my attention because it called up a fond memory, or caught my attention because a sight or sound or smell or internal sensation reminded me of that particular uniqueness that was him . . . and was gone.

That the particular uniqueness of any human cannot be replaced became something I came to understand in the same way we come to understand the uniqueness of a sunset or a spring day. That uniqueness is there and then it is gone. Nothing can replace it. It, and everything else, is fleeting and gorgeous and just a little sad . . . because it is fleeting and gorgeous.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

The Tears

The tears just came when they decided to. I had little control over it. I’d never been able to make myself cry, but I’d been able to keep myself from crying. Now it seemed my psyche and emotions were calling the shots and I could either accept it or stay holed up in my home for however long it took before I could emerge back into society without the threat of tears overtaking me. I decided to accept it.

Besides, my feelings and behavior were surprising to me and I was curious about them. How would I feel next? What would I do before the day was out? I felt pulled along by some higher force that knew what was good for me better than I apparently did. Mostly, I was okay with that. But when I dissolved into tears in public, it was, admittedly, a little disconcerting.

In January of 2011, I sobbed in front of the entire Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA) group as I thanked them for their support. Little more than a week later, when I held an open house to honor Howard’s life, I managed to make it through that event without tears. But in February, I mistakenly thought I could attend that month’s CIPA meeting without a repeat performance of tears. I hadn’t considered that there would be people at the February meeting who hadn’t been at the January meeting. When our eyes met, the tears began to form at the corners of my eyes.

At home, no day passed without tears for the first three months or more. I missed Howard, to be sure. But sometimes I suspected the tears were more about the loss of what had once been between us than the absence of him in the moment. It was tricky stuff. At times the tears felt like the necessary discharge of built up energy–a kind of relief valve. At other times, I felt they were little more than a form of feeling sorry for myself. Mostly, they didn’t last long, but I could never predict what would trigger them. Going through his things? Making dinner for me instead of the two of us? Canceling his credit cards? Maybe those things would trigger tears and maybe they wouldn’t.

I was finally ready to have a face-to-face meeting with the Social Security Administration by the middle of April. I was there primarily to file for the death benefit–all two hundred and fifty-five dollars of it–but I had also been told I needed to talk with them about widow’s benefits, something I had no clue I might qualify for. I was taken aback by the almost immediate combativeness of the young clerk. She behaved as if it was her job to protect the government’s money from fraudulent filers, and I might be one of them. She disliked the marriage certificate I presented, but ultimately accepted it. She drilled me not only about Howard, but also about my first husband. I’d arrived an innocent, but had the odd feeling of being a criminal because I was being treated like one.

I managed to hold it together until she referred to my dead husband as my “second ex.” I clarified. I’d divorced my first husband. He was my “ex.” My second husband had died. I was a widow. Haughtily, and with a shake of the head, the clerk said that to them (the SSA), they were both my “ex” husbands.

That was it. I started to cry. I looked her in the eye and said that I guessed she’d never lost a husband.

And she softened. From that instant, the formerly combative clerk was more advocate than opponent. She apologized. I apologized for crying. I said that while she could refer to my first husband–the one I’d divorced–any way she wanted, I expected a bit more respect for my dead husband. She apologized again. But I couldn’t stop crying, and it was more than a few tears sliding down my face. I was sobbing and I struggled, with limited success, to curb it. The clerk handled my business as quickly as she could, apologizing again for making me cry.

When I’d finished my business (and discovered that I would, indeed, be receiving a widow’s benefit), I made my way back to my car and stopped trying to keep the sobs in check. I just leaned over the steering wheel and let them have their way with me. Once I could actually see straight, I drove home.

By summer, the post-death fog had lifted and the tears were no longer a daily event. But when my youngest sister was diagnosed with cirrhosis in the liver she’d been given some years earlier to replace her failing one, the impact on me was cumulative. She went into a quick downward spiral, and I responded to more than her plight. My feelings about her plight were piled on top of the still-raw loss of my husband. Grief upon grief. Threat of loss upon loss. Social events I’d been looking forward to were now impossible and drifted by without my attendance. Some of the returning life in me had been sucked out with the news about my sister.

Still, I was working. I was seeing clients. I was managing.

Then, in July, I presented a recently expired “bird bucks” certificate for ten dollars off to the clerk at Wild Birds Unlimited. The certificate had arrived shortly after Howard’s death and had been forgotten until I found it buried in my billfold, days before my trip to the store. I didn’t want to lose the ten dollars. My hope was to have the certificate honored and I actually thought I could make my case without tears.

It would be fair to ask why in the world I thought I could do that. It would be fair to ask why I felt compelled to ask that the certificate be redeemed, even though it was expired.

My answer? I don’t really have one, but I suspect that there are clues in the words, themselves: lose, redeemed, expired. Maybe I just didn’t want to experience another loss. Maybe it seemed to me that enough had “expired.” Maybe my subconscious was looking for redemption. And maybe a cigar is just a cigar and a “bird bucks” certificate is nothing more than that. Life’s mysteries are not all profound and mystical. Sometimes they are mundane, the only profundity to be found in their abject silliness.

When tears threatened, the young man behind the counter went looking for help. The gray haired woman who emerged from the back room assured me that the certificate would be honored. Before long, she was offering words of solace that sounded right out of a grief training manual and I began to feel like a character in a Monty Python movie. I couldn’t laugh in that moment. Let’s face it, feelings of embarrassment bordering on mortification do not segue into belly laugher easily. That would have required a level of spiritual adeptness I most assuredly found lacking in myself in that moment. True, I wasn’t far down the road with my discounted birdseed before I saw the humor in it, but standing before the bird expert cum spiritual advisor, I just didn’t have access to it.

Tears and laughter do, I came to understand, often share the same psychic space . . . and I could hear my late husband laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation all the way home.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

The Organic Nature of Grief

When my husband died, I had many a conversation with friends and family members about the grieving process. The term “grieving process” was one most people seemed to understand, and I thought I had at least a sense of it, myself. I’d had a fair amount of time to get used to the idea that Howard was dying as he made his pilgrimage through cancer treatment. I expected to be heartbroken but also a bit relieved when he died and I expected to be my old self, whatever that was, fairly quickly after his death.

I was right about being both heartbroken and relieved when he died. I was wrong about being some version of my old self quickly after his death. I wasn’t even sure what my old self was when he died.

My “self” had been on its own pilgrimage for a dozen years or more. I’d transformed and transformed again. I was familiar with transformation and more comfortable with it than most of the people around me seemed to be. My friend Cindy Morris, a gifted astrologer, explained this by saying, “Well of course! You were born with Pluto in your eighth house.” My own take on it was that I’d experienced enough transformation to know there was little use in fighting it. Ride it as if riding a surfboard on a mammoth wave, that was my attitude.

But in February of 2010, I’d gone to Lake Titicaca in Peru to join with other shamans and many pilgrims in the reactivation of the Solar Disc. That experience had changed me profoundly. Many years earlier, during my shamanic apprenticeship, I experienced a change right down to the level of the DNA. That was profound. When I came back from Peru, though, I felt like someone who had reincarnated into the same body. I looked like the same person I’d been, but I wasn’t.

During the remainder of 2010, something in me opened further as I accompanied Howard on his slow march to death. After his death, when I could sort myself out from that part of his energy field still hovering about me, I realized that one of the blessings of having been with my husband as he was dying was that it further softened me, further opened me to what it meant to be human. One side effect of the transformation triggered in Peru was that I was better suited to accompany my husband on that march as it quickened its pace, and one side effect of having done so was that many of the barnacles and unidentifiable encrustations of life had been worn away. What was left of me was someone I actually wanted to know.

But that person I had become was grieving and it became very clear to me very quickly that grieving was not a process—at least not a process as most of us have come to think of the term. It was neither rational nor linear. It had an almost unidentifiable beginning, but a beginning sometime before Howard’s actual death. It could not be flow charted, Gantt charted, or PERT diagramed. There was no chain of events as predictable as Kubler-Ross suggested in her theory on dying and death.

No, grieving was far more organic than that. It seemed to flow according to the laws of nature, as opposed to following models structured by man. In everyday terms, that meant, among other things, that I could not predict what would take the wind right out of me, nor could I predict when that would happen.

I also couldn’t predict which days would be inexplicably sorrowful any more than I could predict which days would be filled with pure joy, just because I was alive. I couldn’t predict whether I would want to see others or be alone, nor could I predict who I might want to see. Much of the time, though, I did want to be alone. What I felt most of the time when I wanted to be alone was not unhappiness, but something more like curiosity about the very air around me and interest in my own internal landscape.

Grieving, it seemed, was filled with surprises—some of them pure astonishment and others numbly shocking. And it was as organic as fertile earth.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

Widowhood 101

“Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll be fine.” The naïveté and hubris of those words are breathtaking. But, then, I’ve had some time to learn just how wrong I was about it.

I had lost both of my parents, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends and lovers, beloved animal companions. I thought I had some experience with death. In fact, I did have experience . . . I just didn’t have experience with losing a husband.

I made that pronouncement within days of Howard’s death. I used it as a shield against the pain I saw reflected in the eyes of my friends and acquaintances. Even when they said little or nothing, their eyes were a mirror of the grief I held and refused to admit to others. I’d already been through the hard part—the long process of his dying. If I’d handled that, I was certain I could handle what came next. As it happened, I was right . . . and also just a little wrong.

Within twenty-four hours or so of my husband’s death, I’d packed up most of his clothes and shoes (with my sister’s help) and handed them off to my friend Gretchen Minney for donation to the Birds of Prey thrift store. If anyone but family and close friends had known how quickly I divested myself of his clothing, they would have been stunned. But I’d had a long time to plan the chain of events following his death. Months later, I saw the wisdom of it. If I’d waited, I might have clung to more than the few things I kept. It was a good move.

I also wasted little time rearranging the house. It was a relief to have the hospital bed, oxygen concentrator, and other accoutrements of end-stage cancer out of the house. Just looking at them made me weary. I moved furniture around, too, and got rid of a few pieces. I needed to reclaim my home for the living, so I bought a comfortable reading chair for my bedroom, moved Howard’s leather wing chair from the living room, replacing it with something new and comfortable, and rescued my small secretary from sickroom status.

Within a month, I held the post-death party I’d promised to have at the house. It was something of a homecoming for Lakewood PD people with whom Howard had worked in the 1970s. Many others came, too, including some of my friends, colleagues, and clients. I was grateful for that. Still, it was something of a blur. I fortified myself with champagne to serve as hostess—rather than crumbling widow—and got through the day.

My friends and colleagues in Boulder Media Women sent cards, many with checks. It was more than a thoughtful gesture, it was a gesture that saved me from worrying about the cash I needed to live on for that first month following his death, a time when I was completely unable to even contemplate work.

For the first several months after Howard’s death, I moved through my days, attending to the administrative and mundane details that had to be managed. I filed the will. I got Howard’s name removed from the vehicle titles. I battled with the annuity company to distribute the funds coming to me in a way that would benefit me optimally over time.

I learned a thing or two in that battle with the annuity company. Those who have just lost a spouse are easy prey for questionable behavior on the parts of those who have something to lose by that death. If I had folded in my grief, it would have cost me a good deal of money—at least a good deal of money for a simple woman with limited funds. Howard had worked hard for that small bit of money he’d tucked away and I refused to allow it or his efforts to look after me with it to be disrespected by problematic practices on the part of the annuity company. Besides, I knew I would need those funds over the next few years.

They gave IRS citations I knew didn’t apply. They blithely argued that they simply couldn’t do what I asked. The agent who had sold the policy—one of Howard’s oldest friends, a man who considered him a mentor—had difficulty believing that if the company said they couldn’t do something, they could be wrong.

I called in my own version of the “big guns”—my longtime broker and financial advisor. I’d always been a minor client, but he rose up to offer support as if I were a major account. Ultimately, I didn’t have to press my broker into service. My tenacity got the case taken all the way up the chain of command to the highest levels of the company for a decision. They agreed to distribute the funds as I requested. I wondered how widows and widowers with less tenacity dealt with these things. I was sure I knew the answer: many didn’t—and got run over by big companies during the most vulnerable time of their lives.

But I didn’t expect the fog that hovered over me. Hadn’t I removed the cords that connected Howard and me during the death ceremony before he died? What was this miasma enveloping me? I was a shaman; I read energy. What in the world was I experiencing? It took a while to understand. Howard’s energy field and mine had overlapped more than I had ever guessed. He was gone, but remnants of that field remained and the part gone felt like a black hole. It felt a little like being blindfolded, spun around, and set loose in a room that was completely familiar but disorienting because it wasn’t being experienced in the usual way.

I couldn’t even bring myself to use the word “widow” yet, but I was beginning to understand what it meant.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

Moving into the Mystery

“Pittsburg,” is the only part of what he says that I can make out. He sits up, trying to muster the strength to do what I know he cannot: move from the bed to the commode next to it. He has asked a question that I cannot decipher, except for the word “Pittsburg.” I can think of no connection to Pittsburg, no conversation we’ve had about the city—nothing. Either I, in my weariness, am just not putting together something obvious or he has drifted farther away cognitively. I consider the possibility of the former but suspect it’s the latter.

I have given him his morphine and I eventually get him to lie back down, but he sits up again almost immediately. I tell myself that if I could get a bit of Adavan in him, he might be less restless, but he won’t take the Adavan. I call Antonio, thinking that he may be more successful at it than me, but before Antonio can get to the house (a thirty-five minute drive), Howard is down and has taken it. I call Antonio’s cell to tell him that he needn’t come, but he insists on coming anyway.

While Antonio is at the house, Kristen, the hospice angel of a nurse who had helped get him back into bed the previous night (Christmas night), calls. She had promised to follow up and is fulfilling that promise. She manages to convince me that we can get a hospital bed into the room without removing the queen-sized bed and her description of how we’ll manage it makes sense to me. Howard needs the restraint of the sidebars and I need the ability to move the bed up and down.

It is a stroke of luck that Antonio is with me. Kristen has ordered the bed and it arrives in less than an hour and a half. Kristen continues to behave as if she has angel wings. She comes to the house and the three of us manage to move Howard from the guest room bed to the hospital bed—no small thing because even though he has lost a great deal of weight over the past month, he is still somewhere around two hundred pounds . . . of dead weight.

Howard is semi-comatose and cannot help at all in this process. That’s the downside. The upside is that he also cannot fight against it. He has refused a hospital bed up to this point because it represents death to him. But it can no longer be avoided and he is, indeed, close to death.

In a moment of overwhelm, I call my sister Maureen, who has offered to drive out from Illinois to help with Howard’s care, and tell her, “I give up. Come on out.” But after we have Howard settled, I think, I can do this. Nevertheless, I’m glad she will be on her way. I’m not sure she will actually make it before he dies, but I will be relieved to have her there with me.

And now the waiting begins. The next couple of days are a blur. I consider what should be done before Howard dies and call his sister Ann and his three sons, not simply to alert them to the fact that he is close to death, but to give them a chance to say whatever they want to say to him. He is beyond words now, so he won’t be able to talk to them, but I can hold the telephone up to his ear and they can talk to him.

They all want to do this.

With each, I hold the telephone to Howard’s ear and tell him that he need do nothing, just listen. I’m fairly certain that he can still hear, even if he cannot talk, and I want to give him permission to just listen and not struggle to even try to get words out. But he does try to get words out with each of them. He’s unsuccessful at this except with his oldest son, Jim.

Jim makes his peace with his father and it brings me to tears as I hear what he says over the extension. Then, quite miraculously, really, Howard gathers the strength to say what Jim and I later agree is, “Okay.”

Once his closest family have had a chance to speak to him, there is really nothing more for me to do but try to administer his medication and wait. He hasn’t lost the ability to swallow yet, so I am able to give him his liquid medication. I do my best to make him comfortable and wait. I’m restless.

I talk to Antonio on the 28th and he tells me he’s coming over to do ceremony. He and his wife, Helena, come. I welcome their calm strength. Even though I’m a strong woman myself, I can stand outside myself just long enough to realize that the one leg I always have in the other realms, as the shaman I am, has actually pulled more of me into those realms than the part of me that is on this side. I’m unbalanced, too much in an altered state and too little grounded. Ceremony is actually the best thing for me, whether or not it is something Howard would want if he were lucid enough to state his preferences.

The death ceremony we do is so magical and so what is needed that I’m less restless afterwards, more at peace. [The details of this ceremony can be found in my March 28, 2011 post, titled “Death Ceremony.”]

No more than a couple of hours after they leave, my sister arrives. I make dinner for us and, not long after we sit down to eat, I hear something coming from Howard that I’ve never heard before—a gurgling, gasping frustration. I tear into his room with Maureen on my heels. We get there just in time for me to hold his body up as black ooze issues from his mouth. One eye stares at me and the other has rolled back. He has entered a coma.

Maureen and I clean him up, which takes no small effort. The sheets must be changed, all of his clothes must be swapped out, and his adult diaper must be changed. Mo (the diminutive I’ve long used instead of my sister’s full first name, Maureen) has just arrived to be swept into the most difficult kind of help to provide. I had told her, before she came, that she would have to be tough to manage this. She hasn’t even had dinner before she’s put to the test.

We have to cut off some of his clothes because the combined strength of the two of us is not enough to effectively move him. And I’m not about to call hospice. This is sacred duty; I need to perform it and Mo is willing to join me in it. His clothing is insignificant at this point because he won’t be wearing it again and getting him clean and comfortable is what is needed.

Mo and I struggle so much to get the job done. We take sides on either side of the hospital bed and try to manhandle the sheets and clothes without doing harm to my poor dying husband. Eventually, I look up at her, start to laugh, and tell her we’re like the Keystone Cops. We’re clumsy and incompetent, moving about with too little purpose and using too much effort, but we manage.

When we’ve finished and return to the table, Gretchen Minney calls. She’s just returned from spending time with family out of town and I can hear in her voice that she is jet lagged and weary. She wants to know how Howard is doing and when I tell her, she insists on coming over, even though she’s barely put doen her luggage.

Dinner shifts, becoming almost a celebration. It’s an odd celebration, but it does seem like one. I’ve opened a bottle of champagne. I’ve made a good meal. Gretchen, Mo, and I seem aligned in knowing that Howard is about to break the bonds of human form, step out of his body, and step into the mystery. And that is a very good thing.

Finally, Gretchen leaves and I settle Mo in my bed. The only other option is the bed in the guest room and I’m the only person who should be in that room on death watch. She retires, as do I. I lie awake for a time, listening to Howard’s death rattle. The hospice nurse had prescribed drops that sometime eliminate the sound, which she has told me can be quite disconcerting. The drops have worked until now. And I now understand what she means. I’m too weary and too relieved that the end is near for a mere death rattle to rattle me much. I fall to sleep and sleep like the dead until I awake with a start at around 1:35 a.m.

I look at the clock and realize I’ve missed giving Howard his morphine and Adavan on schedule. Then I realize that the death rattle is gone. I leap from bed, go over to him, and can hear that he is still breathing—softly, gently. I give him a small dose of morphine, thinking that it is probably unnecessary, and I pull up a chair and sit next to him, rooting under his covers to take his hand. It won’t be long now. His breaths are so infrequent that I think he is gone more than once, only to hear him take another breath. His sleep apnea over the preceding several years has, thankfully, prepared me well, and I am not jarred by the sporadic breathing.

I have a headache and after some minutes, I get up to take something for it. The combination of stress and champagne have left me with a head that doesn’t quite feel like my own and it is distracting. I want to be clearly focused.

When I return to the room and wait for the next breath, there isn’t one. He’s gone. I look at the clock and see that it is ten minutes of two and I’m startled by the knowing that he’d awakened me so I wouldn’t miss this moment. He knew I wanted to be there and he woke me up so I could be. What a blessing! I thank him, even though I know he’s not actually there any longer. In fact, he has mostly been gone for days. And the death ceremony had helped the rest of him go.

I think about something he’d said, sometime over the last month. “I don’t think we told each other we love each other enough.”

He was probably right, but we had told one another often enough and we’d shown one another in many ways. And he’d given me this last gift of love—waking me so I wouldn’t miss his death. What is enough when it comes to love? There is never enough when it comes to feeling the love, murmuring the words, acting in love. But I’d come to the knowing, years earlier, that any instant of love is not lost, but reverberates on in the universe—onward, outward, past the farthest reaches.

And I feel it, right then.

And I continue to feel it.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

Christmas

I was walking on eggshells. I’d been sworn at enough the previous night to make me more than a little careful around my husband. He was dying—days from it at most, as far as I could tell—and he wasn’t himself. But I was weary of being the bad guy. While he had been the quintessential noncompliant patient for some time, I had been the annoying person trying to persuade him to comply, arguing against his attempts at doing things he could no longer do—things that would require me to call for help. I was the annoying person who knew how close to death he was and wouldn’t pretend it wasn’t so. I was the annoying person who was seeing him at his most vulnerable on a daily basis.

My tactic of the day was to walk on eggshells with him. Unfortunately, he was still lucid enough to know that something was off between us. He wanted to know what was wrong. I demurred. He conjectured that I was upset because he wasn’t dead yet.

That was downright cruel. I knew he was close to death and I wanted the release of death for him, but I didn’t feel impatient about it. There had been times over the nearly four years since he’d been fighting the metastasized cancer that I had certainly wondered when it would be over and fantasized it being over. But as his death drew near, I’d felt the sacred quality of it and felt honored to be witness to it. I wanted the release for him, but felt in no hurry for me.

I didn’t feel honored to be on the receiving end of swearing and cruelty, though.

In tears, I told him I couldn’t comply with his wishes to leave the door to his room closed, now that the commode was in it. He looked at me as if completely confused and said, “I don’t understand you at all.” And in that moment, he meant it. In that same moment, I considered the possibility that this statement might be true of the entire relationship between us.

He said he wasn’t hungry, but changed his mind and decided he wanted scrambled eggs. I made the eggs. He pulled himself up in the bed by grabbing onto the covers and ate a bite or two. Then he sat there for a long time, as if he’d forgotten he had a plate of eggs in his lap.

I said, “Your eggs are getting cold, Dear.”

He replied, “Shut the !&%$ up.”

I left the room in tears.

The hospice nurse had asked what we usually did on Christmas and suggested that I follow our traditions, to the extent possible. Not much of what we usually did was actually possible, but it was Christmas Eve and I decided to make a grocery run to buy some of the things we usually had on Christmas morning as we opened gifts: shrimp, caviar, smoked salmon. Against all reason, I also bought a standing rib roast, which I found in the reduced section. We’d often had standing rib roast for Christmas dinner and even though I knew he would not want it—any more than he would want the shrimp, caviar, or smoked salmon—I decided to buy it. At least he would be able to see that I was treating Christmas as I usually did and wasn’t exactly on death watch.

He was quiet that evening. I climbed into bed with him for a bit and lay there, allowing my mind to wander to our life together. Here we were at the end of it. And it was, for the moment, peaceful. I kissed him and told him I loved him when I left the room. And he said, “I love you, Dearie.” That erased any hurt I had sitting in my gut from earlier in the day.

The next morning I came into his room and said (with all the Christmas cheer I could muster), “You made it to Christmas.”

“When was the last time I did that,” he replied.

I could have taken it as just another bit of wry humor from him, but he had said it wistfully and a few days earlier, he had commented that he felt as if he’d been through all of this—this process of dying, in this body—before. I had suggested that he was describing déjà vu and he allowed that it might just be that. I’d told him I had a couple of theories about déjà vu and asked if he wanted to hear them. Surprisingly, he did.

I suggested that he might have planned all of this before he came into this body and that he was experiencing what he had planned out. An alternative theory was that he was leaving his body some of the time and coming back in (something I knew, in fact, was happening), so he was sometimes watching himself from outside his body.

I might have proposed other theories—I had them—but left it at that. He had little to say but seemed to be considering what I’d said.

I brought out our usual Christmas fare, though he had little interest in eating any of it. He seemed to like the smoked salmon more than anything else, but that only meant he had three bites of it to the one nibble of shrimp and no nibbles of the caviar. Nothing had tasted right to him for months, and over the past week he had eaten and drunk so little, I knew he was edging closer and closer to death.

I brought the few gifts to be unwrapped—all for me because everyone finally understood that he wouldn’t be around to use anything they would give—and opened them on the bed, commenting on each. He could barely stay awake for it, but he made an attempt and managed it, just barely.

He slept most of the rest of the day, though his sleeping was interrupted at least once by an attempt on his part to leave the bed to make his way down the hall to the bathroom. I could not let him even try at this point. I told him that if he needed to go to the bathroom, he had to use the commode. He objected. I pressed. He objected. I finally told him that if he made an attempt to get to the hallway bathroom, I would pick up the phone and call hospice or go next door to ask for help because I knew he would not be able to make it there and back and I was smart enough to know that I could not restrain him. I knew he was royally pissed about this and told him that I couldn’t let him hurt himself, that I was not his enemy. He insisted that I was his enemy and I told him that he would rethink this position at some point. What I didn’t say was that he might rethink it once he was on the other side and had some perspective.

His body was fading and his mind was fading with it. One moment he was sweet and peaceful; another he was irrational, agitated, and angry. He seemed to be losing sight and hearing, too, and I was unable to tell how much of his behavior had to do with what must be the alarming fading of these senses and how much had to do with the malfunctioning of his mind. But I did know that his mind was abandoning him rapidly.

Christmas night he struggled to the commode and was on it for an hour, then two hours more a little later. He now had no energy to lift himself from it and slide back onto the bed. I attempted to help him, against his wishes, and failed. I knew I couldn’t leave him there all night. I had not option but to call hospice. He sat on the commode babbling, “Blueberries, blueberries, blueberries.” I wondered if his mind had left him completely or if he was trying to avoid swearing. It was frightening to see this brilliant, virile man in this condition—even though I’d been present during the entire downward slide.

Kristen, the hospice angel of a nurse on call on Christmas night, came from the other end of the metro area. Together, we managed to get him settled.

He was not only on morphine at this point, he was on Adavan, a drug meant to reduce anxiety and/or depression, often prescribed to people who are at the end stages of dying. I had come to understand, both from my online research and from my conversations with his hospice nurse, that patients who are dying are often restless and disoriented. Adavan helped with that.

But what I was experiencing with my husband had been confusing over the past week or so. According to what I’d read, there was a pre-active phase of dying and an active phase of dying. The former could last a couple of weeks, while the latter tended to last three days or so. These were, of course, averages. I’d seen his lower legs and feet swollen (pre-active phase) and blue (active phase) one day, then fine the next. It was crazy making. He had the restlessness and confusion of the pre-active phase, along with prolonged periods of sleep, overall withdrawal, coolness of skin, decreased intake of food and liquids, and comments that suggested to me he was trying to resolve anything unresolved between us. But he had been lucid most of the time and had not shown other signs of being in the active dying phase . . . for the most part. He was becoming incoherent, was losing his physical senses, and was—the shaman in me saw—mostly gone.

Sometime earlier, I’d intuited that he would be gone by Christmas. It hadn’t occurred to me that his essential nature would be mostly gone by then, but his body would still be with me.

Yet, I knew time was very short.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

Drama Everywhere

“I wonder why I’m sleeping so much,” he said, as if he truly didn’t understand it.

I reply, “Your body is shutting down. So you sleep. Your metabolism has changed.”

Of course, the fact that he was on a low dose of morphine administered more than once a day had something to do with it, too, but I didn’t point that out. I had said, “Your body is shutting down,” and not, “You’re dying.” We both knew he was dying. I’d been more willing to say it than him, but I didn’t need to say it again.

His hospice nurse thought that this comment was meant to prepare me for his death. I almost snorted at that. I’d been prepared for his death for some time; he hadn’t been. He understood he was dying at this point, but he didn’t seem to understand that he might not just go from being lucid and vital to dying in an instant, that, instead, his body might shut down slowly.

On December 23rd, he asked what day it was and I said, “It’s Mom’s—my Mom’s—birthday, December 23rd. My mother had been gone since 1995, but I always remembered her birthday.

I was taken aback when he replied, “Do you want me to die on your mother’s birthday?”

“Well, that’s up to you,” I said. “And I think of death as more like graduation.”

And it was time for him to graduate. He was fading. He was now attempting to use the commode instead of fighting his way to the bathroom, but whatever in him still held on to some sense of personal dignity inhibited him. He was having trouble managing the pull-ups and I’d had to change the sheets in between hospice visits. He couldn’t bathe himself but wouldn’t let anyone else bathe him, either. The previous day, I had managed to get his bed in order and had given him some clean clothes, but after undressing and struggling with the pull-ups, he’d accidentally put the dirty clothes back on. He had spent his limited supply of energy and had just gone back to sleep in his dirty clothes.

Later, he awoke and said, “I think I’ll take a shower today.”

I’d thought that we were past that. There was no way he could make the short trip from the guest bedroom, down the hall, into the master bedroom, and into the shower. He barely had enough strength to sit up. Yet he believed he could do it with my help. My help? When he went down—and he would surely go down—he would go down like an ancient tree and would take me with him.

I reminded him of the debacle some days earlier. He’d insisted on taking a shower and was going to struggle his way to it. I’d at least convinced him to wait for the hospice nurse to help him. I’d actually thought she would talk him out of it, but he was determined and she was willing to stick with him until he demonstrated to himself that he couldn’t manage it. His oxygen tank in tow, he’d managed to make his way to the master bath. It had probably taken forty-five minutes to an hour to get that far. But he couldn’t actually get into the shower. He sat, defeated, on the toilet and allowed the nurse to at least wash his torso and legs. Then it was a very long struggle back to the bed.

But when I mentioned that event, his reply was, “I did shower.” I reminded him of what had transpired and his faulty cognitive function kicked into high gear and brought back enough of the affair for him to recall that he hadn’t actually gotten into the shower that day. “She kept saying, ‘You don’t have to do this,’” he said, “so I eventually let her do it.”

Let her wash him, he meant—something he could scarce imagine.

He slept most of the day on the 23rd. I had a hair appointment I badly needed to keep, but I thought I would have to cancel it because I could not leave Howard alone at all at this point. But Cindy Morris made keeping my appointment possible. She agreed to come and keep an eye on Howard. I asked her to just sit in the dining room, facing the closed door to the guest room, and stop Howard if he tried to leave the room. He couldn’t make it the bathroom any longer but frequently forgot that fact and would attempt to get up to make the trip. He needed to be protected from himself and she had the grit to agree to be his protector, even if for only an hour and a half or so. It was hugely courageous and an equally huge gift to me.

When I got back home, I heated up some homemade soup for the two of us. She’d brought some vegetables and a small dessert to go with it. We were eating and chatting when I realized, with a start, that I hadn’t given Howard his morphine on schedule. I left the table and went into his room. Unfortunately, he had made his way from the bed to the commode and barked at me when I opened the door. He might be dying, but he still wanted complete privacy when it came to the commode. I backed up and went back to the table.

We had the monitor on the table with us and could hear him straining and in discomfort. Was he trying to get back to bed? Was he struggling with the pull-ups? I couldn’t quite decipher what he was doing from the sound. After a time, I went back to the room. He was still on the commode. This time he didn’t just bark, he swore at me. In fact, we could hear the “God damn you, Melanie,” over the monitor as he continued to swear at me after I left him alone and was back at the table. More time elapsed. I was worried about him. This time I knocked. More swearing.

Cindy was a trooper. She just took it in stride. I was concerned about Howard, and I made every attempt not to take his swearing at me personally. He was dying. He was losing cognitive functioning and what cognitive ability he had left was very annoyed by his failing body and the fact that he couldn’t hide the fact that his body was failing.

Once dinner was over and we’d chatted for a time—our talk punctuated by Howard’s swearing, as heard over the monitor—she’d had enough and was ready to leave. But just as she was getting ready to go, an ambulance came down the street in front of my house, lights flashing. It swung off E. 3rd and onto Bellaire, the cul-de-sac my house sat next to. More emergency vehicles followed. They all pulled up to a house in the middle of the street. While we didn’t know the couple living in the house, we’d seen the man who lived there many times, attending to his yard and sitting in a chair, just inside his garage, watching the neighborhood.

Cindy stayed. We looked out the back door and talked about what we’d done as children when emergency trucks pulled into the neighborhood. She’d grown up in the Bronx; I’d grown up in small towns in the Midwest. But it seems that the response was universal, at least when we were growing up. We would stop whatever we were doing and either peek out our windows or go outdoors for a good view of the activity. Life drama, right in front of us, had been more compelling that eating, sleeping, television, work, or anything else. Everyone we knew when we were growing up came to a stop when emergency vehicles were anywhere nearby. The girl from the Bronx and the girl from the Midwest still did.

Someone was brought out on a stretcher, but it was difficult to tell for sure if it was a man or a woman. Someone was ill or injured bad enough for an ambulance to have been called. Could someone be dying across the street? What were the chances of two people on the same block dying—or close to it—at the same time? Everything in my life had become a bit surrealistic, but this sent my mind sliding off the edge.

And then I had a moment of complete clarity. I had been so focused on my little patch of earth at 1093 E. 3rd Ave. and the drama in my own home for so long, I’d lost perspective, lost the understanding that drama was happening elsewhere—often nearby—all the time. It hit me in the gut, moved up to my brain, then settled in my heart: At any given time, there are people within a block of me enduring one drama or another. Someone might be dying. Another might be grieving a death. A third might be suffering a serious illness or suffering through a divorce. Someone else might be in the deep well of chronic depression. One of these people might share their suffering with me but most wouldn’t. I didn’t even know most of the people who lived nearby. But I understood, in one flash that moved through my system like an electrical charge and settled in my heart, that there was now and always would be suffering around me.

I was changed by it. There was something utterly tragic about it and, at the same time, there was something comforting about the fact that others were sharing this aspect of the human condition. I was appalled by the fact that any part of the knowing gave me comfort and was stricken with sadness by the thought that there would always be others nearby suffering. My heart constricted in pain. And then it opened a little wider than it had been before—to take it all in and make a home for it.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

I’ll Miss You when I Die

Howard had accepted morphine. He’d also accepted oxygen, though he hadn’t used it much. Trisha, his hospice nurse, had managed to convince him to accept things I couldn’t have gotten him to even entertain. I wasn’t a doctor or a nurse—just a shaman. His faith was in allopathic medicine, and he trusted Trisha.

That said, he didn’t trust his hospice nurse assistant much. He felt treated like a nursing home patient with Alzheimer’s by her: disrespected, assumed to be losing his mind, treated like a child. The first time or two she came to the house, she’d gone into his room, bent down over him, greeted him, and asked him if he knew who she was and what day it was. It had infuriated him. He’d finally barked at her—and even dying, his bark could turn a pro football player into a shriveling nincompoop.

What he hadn’t accepted were a walker and a commode in the bedroom. He’d fallen multiple times, once in the middle of the night and another while I was out for a quick coffee with my friend Lisa Niederman, at his strong encouragement. Not only did he feel hovered over, he also knew I hadn’t left the house in days, and he wanted me to have an hour of freedom from the hovering.

The first fall happened in the middle of the night. I’d been awakened by what had sounded like porcelain being crashed into but didn’t intervene, knowing that doing so would only make him angry. In the morning, I discovered that he’d kicked the ceramic wastebasket as he went down. He’d managed to get himself back to his bed and hours after the event, as he told me about it, he made light of the whole incident. The second fall, the one that happened while I was out with Lisa, had left him so weak he had to crawl his way back to the bedroom. This he admitted sheepishly when I returned home.

I wasn’t the only person who hovered. Diana Wilson was coming on a regular basis and on one visit, she asked how he was eating and was very concerned when I admitted that he was eating very little—the occasional bottle of Ensure, the rare carton of yoghurt, and little more. She seemed to think that he could not build strength if he wasn’t eating when, of course, it was no longer about building strength, it was about the body going into dying mode.

On another visit, she saw music CDs next to the bed and seemed to think she could cheer him up if she played some music. I wanted her to back off. He would fall asleep within minutes of her leaving and any music playing would inhibit my ability to keep track of how he was doing through the baby monitor. Besides, the look he gave her when she offered to put music on was his if-you-insist look, the one he used when he was agreeing to something he didn’t want, just to please the other person.

But when she suggested that they do some drawing together on her next visit, I’d pretty much had enough. He weakly went along with the idea, as if it were a possibility when, actually, he could hardly find the strength to pull himself up in bed to talk with her. It appeared to me that she wanted to believe he wasn’t as bad as he was. As she was leaving, I asked her not to bring up drawing again because he was closer to death than she realized and had barely enough in him to receive visitors, let alone draw. I knew what I was saying pained her, but it needed to be said. And she conceded.

On yet another visit, I found myself eavesdropping on their conversation through the monitor. I couldn’t hear well, but the conversation seemed to have turned to dying. He told Diana he thought he knew what it was like to die. He had her attention on that one, I was sure of it. Later, he told me she’d moved in closer to hear what he had to say. “I think you just forget everything. You forget the next thing you were going to say.” Listening from the kitchen, my heart lurched.

Diana then said that some people who’d had near death experiences had reported being in a tunnel and seeing a while light. This was certainly not news to Howard. Not only was he married to a metaphysician who spoke freely of such things, but he had a strong—though strongly denied—metaphysical side to him, too. She asked if he could see a white light. His reply was, “I forgot.”

He was making a joke with this statement. He’d already said that he thought the dying person forgot the next thing they were going to say and he’d delivered the punch line like the standup comic he’d been in his youth. I had no idea if Diana had gotten the joke.

But I could also see beneath the joke. Howard was losing cognitive function and occasionally forgetting what he was about to say next in mid-sentence. When it happened, he first got a confused look on his face, then confusion morphed into fear and fear morphed into annoyance—all within the space of a few seconds.

The falls became more serious. He took out one of the towel racks and a bit of drywall with him during one. I couldn’t get him up without help. Howard swore at me when I said I was going to call hospice. He did not want them coming; did not want them to see him in that condition. I told him that if I couldn’t call hospice, I was going to call Antonio. He swore at that, too, but I knew he would view help from Antonio as less humiliating than help from hospice. Antonio not only came to the rescue, but returned the following day and repaired the wall and remounted the towel rack. During another fall, the combined strength of both Antonio and me could not get Howard up and I ran next door to beg my neighbor to come help us. I was sure my neighbor would be shocked by the state of things, but he pitched in without a flinch.

Finally, Howard accepted the idea of a walker and a commode in his room, though he wouldn’t promise to use either. Within twenty-four hours of their delivery he said to me, “I think I’m about done. I can’t get to the bathroom and I can’t use this.” He pointed at the commode.

“I know,” I replied. I did know that he was, as he put it, about done. And I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

One night, after I crawled into his bed to nuzzle him, he was weeping a little and taking deep breaths in an attempt to quell it. I said, “You know, you waste a lot of energy trying to keep from crying,” to which he replied, “I know.”

Clearly, we both knew a few things we weren’t talking about much. But one thing he said stopped me in my tracks. “I’m going to miss you when I die.”

I laughed in response and pointed out that he’d be on the other side; he wouldn’t be missing me. On the contrary, I would be missing him.

But later—much later—that comment reverberated through my mind. Could he miss me when he was gone? Would he? And if so, what would that be like?

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall