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

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

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

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

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

Long before I knew Howard, he and Pete had gone to the Santa Fe Opera together. They’d donned tuxedos and were, no doubt, on the prowl . . . and I’m sure they made quite an impression on the ladies. Howard had stood up for Pete when he married the second time around and Pete was Howard’s confidant to the extent that Howard allowed himself to have one (apart from me) at all. Pete could hold his own in almost any conversation with Howard and they were both dedicated to a code of integrity and service. In other words, they were close. And Pete was one of the first people Howard introduced me to when we slid down that slope from friends to lovers. My acceptance of Pete and his acceptance of me were that important to Howard.

Howard and I had spent some lovely times with Pete and his wife Kim, but for the most part, the men got together without their wives—usually for a beer and a chat. But that changed somewhat when Pete began working outside the metro area, up in Chaffee County. It changed even more when Pete switched political party affiliations and decided to run for sheriff. The political shift was inexplicable to Howard, a committed Republican (juxtaposed against my own committed position as an Independent). The decision to run for sheriff was, in his mind, ill advised. He saw his friend as too innocent to last in politics and too upright and honest to be able to stomach it for long. He couldn’t support his friend’s political ambitions and his friend was immersed in them.

As with everyone else, Howard had done his best to hide his declining health from Pete. The two hadn’t seen one another for months. Howard was hurt to the core, but too stubborn to do anything about it. I suspected Pete was the same. I doubted Pete understood just how close Howard was to death and I knew, in my own core, that if they didn’t see one another before he died, Howard would die unsettled about it and Pete would regret it.

After an aborted attempt to reach him Thanksgiving weekend, I let the matter sit for a while, hoping that word would get to Pete about Howard’s condition and he would come by. When we didn’t hear from him, I took matters into my own hands and called Kim at work. I might have begun the conversation calmly, but if so, it lasted for no longer than a few seconds. I was desperate to get them together and had to choke back sobs just to talk. I explained how little time Howard had and how much I knew he wanted to see Pete. I admitted that I knew Howard was hurt by Pete’s lack of contact and said that I suspected Pete was hurt by Howard’s lack of support. And, as usual, unable to do anything but tell the truth as I saw it, I suggested that they both had more pride than brains. Kim agreed.

Pete called sometime thereafter and made plans to come for a visit. I made him promise not to tell Howard that I had instigated it. Pete came, pulled up a chair next to the bed, and the men chatted as if only days—not months—had gone by since they’d seen one another.

Something lifted in my heart with that visit. I knew that Howard would die easier, thanks to that visit.

Before he left, Pete asked Howard if he could come by again. Howard encouraged him to do so, and as I walked Pete out to his car, I encouraged him to do so, too. But I doubted there was time for another visit before Howard died.

Before the visit, Howard had wondered aloud why Pete had decided to come. He asked if I had a sense of it. I lied as convincingly as I could, knowing that the truth would be known to Howard soon enough, once he’d died and had the broader view from the other side. I believed it would be important to Howard for Pete to come of his own accord, as opposed to coming because I—the wife of the soon-to-be-deceased—had implored him. He needed to know that Pete really did give a damn. So I offered a conjecture or two, but kept the truth to myself.

After the visit, Howard’s musings turned to the reasons for Pete’s asking if he could visit again. “All these years . . . neither of us ever asked a question like that. We knew we didn’t have to ask,” he said. He was perplexed. Why would Pete ask?

Of course, the two hadn’t really addressed the rift between them during the visit. They hadn’t gotten any cards on the table. So Howard was left wondering. Did Pete think Howard was still annoyed with him? Did Pete think Howard would fear he, Pete, was still annoyed? In Howard’s mind, the chat itself should have answered any such concern and should have answered Pete’s question without his ever having to ask it. They were buddies; no need to ask if he could come by again.

He might have been perplexed by Pete’s question, but he was pleased that Pete had come to see him. And maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed to me that something lifted in Howard’s heart, too, because of that visit. There were few things he seemed to need to have resolved before he left, but this was an important one. It was as resolved as it was going to be and he was more at peace. That was enough for me.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

I had always taken care of myself and my appearance, but now I found myself taking special care to dress well and attend to my grooming. I traded in shoes that clicked on my wood floors for those that were as quiet as . . . well . . . a church mouse. I became more attentive than usual to the cleanliness and neatness of the house and I wanted only soft music playing. I felt calmer, more congruent, and more at peace with myself than usual and I found myself speaking in hushed tones. I carried myself with a kind of dignity I had never before noticed. And then one day I realized that I had made sacred space of my entire surroundings. It was clear to me that Howard was nearing death and the very air seemed charged with all that was holy.

It wasn’t that my husband was a particularly “holy” man. He was a man, with all the idiosyncrasies, charms, failings, peculiarities, gifts, talents, and personality eccentricities of a man. But that was actually the point. He was human and he was dying and I seemed intuitively bound to treat this moment in time as the significant and ephemeral instant of magic and mystery that it was. He was my husband and, therefore, important to me. But he also seemed to stand for humankind itself and the essential goodness of humankind.

So my house had become a church without my consciously making it so. And the space seemed poised, waiting for something important to happen.

This is not to say that there was little activity. In fact, there was so much activity, it was sometimes dizzying. Hospice is a blessing and an army of help, but that help rings your doorbell on a fairly regular basis and has to be let in, communicated with, attended to, and put in interactive mode with the dying party. That dying party was Howard and he remained intent on being entertaining—that is, when he was not being a curmudgeon. He carried both with no apparent paradox.

Apart from hospice, friends began to appear at the door. The word had gotten out—through the phone lines, Internet, and thin air—that Howard didn’t have long. He had refused to allow people to see him in bed, but one day, Joe Schalmoser stopped by without notice and Howard allowed him into his sanctuary, where Joe found him propped up in bed. A month earlier, Howard had been downright rude to Cindy Morris—a friend of mine who had become his friend, too—when she followed me upstairs as I announced her arrival. He’d refused to be seen at all. He simply had not been willing to allow anyone to see him in any kind of compromised condition (as with an open bag of Depends nearby). And now he was welcoming Joe into his bedroom, treating his bed like a throne.

Then Pat and Mary Ahlstrom—old friends from the early Lakewood PD days—came by. He had softened to the idea of people seeing him in bed and with their visit, he softened further. He now wanted to see people more than he wanted to appear to be something other than he was—a dying man. Diana Wilson came on a regular basis. She had been a dispatcher at the Broomfield Police Department when Howard was chief. Years later, they connected again because of art. They were buddies and my sense was that she understood, very clearly, that the chances to see Howard were running thin.

Tom Deland, Broomfield’s chief of police since Howard left the post, came and brought his two deputy chiefs with him. It was an act of respect.

A woman who had been his paramour years before I was in the picture came to see him. She had been important to him and there was still an easy intimacy there. She’d also had cancer and knew what she was seeing in him.

She was one of the few who did. It was excruciating and frustrating to me that many of his friends and some of his family still did not seem to understand that he was dying—and going quickly. Those out of town just couldn’t see what I was seeing and Howard did his best imitation of a robust man when he talked with them on the phone.

When I wasn’t tending to the revolving door and Howard’s needs, I found myself doing things I did not want to do at all, but knew needed to be done. Like calling All-States Cremation to see what they needed from me before Howard’s death. I talked with them and faxed them information surreptitiously, which was not difficult since Howard slept when he had no visitors. And he hadn’t been downstairs to my office since the day I brought him back from his last transfusion.

I also called the assistant to my Raymond James broker to get some money because I knew my attention would not be on work for some time and any monies coming to Howard via direct deposit would stop, abruptly, with his death. Early in December, I finished an editing project and energetically shut off the flow of work so I would not be distracted by potential clients I knew I would be unable to serve until sometime after his death.

I had no time for clients anyway. Everything—and I mean everything—took more time than I would have thought. The incoming telephone calls, the visits, tending to Howard, the updates on his condition for family and friends, keeping the house and yard tended to—everything took more time. When I was in my office, I would sprint up the stairs to his room, two floors above, every twenty minutes, just to check on him. Even after my friend Helena Mariposa sent me a baby monitor so I could keep tabs on Howard more easily (one of the best gifts anyone can give to the caretaker of a dying person), I continued to wear a path up and down those stairs, just not quite as often.

Just making sure that I was there if Howard fell or otherwise found himself in a fix took time. If he had to go to the bathroom, he slowly and painfully pulled himself up in bed, swung his feet over the edge, sat for a long time to rally his strength, hefted himself up, and slowly, over many minutes, inched his way to the hallway bathroom, which was just steps outside the guest room door. Then it was half an hour before he made the slow and treacherous trip back to his bed.

Everything took on an enhanced level of difficulty and we were both behaving like Olympic gymnists, taking on the difficult moves and intent on mastering them.

But I was also on the receiving end of some remarkable acts of kindness. Out raking leaves in early December—thanks to cottonwoods that held on to their leaves like Scrooge clutched his money purse—I felt overwhelmed. I’d already raked and bagged at least twenty-five bags of leaves earlier that fall. The prospect of more sucked the life right out of me, but head down and shoulder to the project, I started in.

Then neighbors from across the street called over to me. “You look like a lady in distress,” Glenn teased. It must have been that obvious. He and his wife Kathy came over, rakes in hand, and the task was accomplished quickly. They hadn’t known that Howard was dying until I told them that day, barely able to hold back the tears.

Heather McBroome, who had been doing shamanic work with me for several years, stopped by one day, wanting to help. When you are in the thick of crisis, you can’t even readily see what someone else might be able to do for you. I told her the only things that really needed attending to were things no one else would want to take on, things like taking Howard’s truck in for an oil change.

I have no idea why it seemed urgent that this task be done. He certainly wasn’t going to be driving that truck again. Perhaps I knew I would and that it would be a long time before I’d have the presence of mind to get the oil changed. Heather didn’t blink. She took the truck in for an oil change.

Some of my friends—most notably Antonio Arguello, his wife Helena Mariposa, Cindy Morris, and Gretchen Minney—understood what was happening perfectly and were rock solid support. There was support, too, from Boulder Media Women colleagues, clients, old friends, and new friends.

But Howard’s sister Ann was right there at the center. She and Howard were very close. I knew that what was happening to him was felt by her five hundred miles away in Ogden, Utah. Through the ether. Through the blood. Through a lifetime of energetic connection. I called her regularly to keep her abreast of what was going on. She’d been a nurse for many years, so we could talk in a kind of shorthand. Then regular calls became daily calls. I didn’t want her to be blindsided when he slipped away. But in truth, I also needed her. I needed to talk to someone else who loved him, I needed a witness to what was happening who had a deep heart connection with him. That would be Ann.

I’d always loved Ann and, over the years, I’d come to feel that she was my sister, too. But that sisterhood took on a new depth. I didn’t want to burden her with the details, but there was something important in sharing them with her. The details allowed her to be there with us. And she could not be there physically. She’d had polio as a child and that had developed into post-polio syndrome, decades later. She could get around, but she couldn’t get around easily, and there was no way she could handle the stairs in our house. I knew that it pained her to know that her big brother was dying and she couldn’t be there with him.

And I needed her, even if only by phone. I didn’t have to explain my exhaustion to her, didn’t have to explain my tears. She understood the term “incompliant patient,” which was the precise term that described him, and she understood it not simply because she had been a nurse, but because she knew her brother. I felt that Ann and I were bonding in the most intimate and painful of ways—through the dying process of someone we both loved.

That was sacred space of a kind, too. The space between me and Ann, me and Howard, me and my friends and family—it was all becoming sacred space. I knew it was a little like holding one’s breath—it couldn’t last forever. But much of my daily experience, it seemed, was becoming one ongoing experience of holy communion. I was hyper-focused on Howard and his process, under the kind of stress that one is mostly unaware of while experiencing it. I was sometimes exhausted, sometimes manic with energy, and sometimes cranky. And yet, everything took on a quality of sacredness and every interaction had become one of holy communion.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

Late in November, I awoke in the middle of the night and sensed that the entire upper level of the house, the bedroom level, was filled with spirits. I could identify some: my council of guides, my mother, what I sensed were his guides and some of his ancestors. Others I could not identify. These specters returned, again and again, over the coming weeks. When I first sensed my father, I was surprised. While my mother had adored Howard (and he her), my father had died long before Howard and I met. They hadn’t known one another. Then I realized the sense to it. Like Howard, my father had been in the military. Like Howard, he had been an intellectual and a writer. Like Howard, he’d enjoyed chess. Of course he was there. They were going to be great friends on the other side. I was eventually able to discern what I thought were Howard’s parents and his cousin Jack among the ghostly visitors. It was comforting, and it was also telling. I knew that they were all there to help him with the process of leaving his body.

I was happy to take comfort in whatever form it came. After years of bucking up, I cried every day, multiple times a day. I mostly kept it from Howard, but not always. He didn’t question it. He knew his time was short. Some nights, I crept into bed with him, put my arms around him, and just lay with him. Sometimes we talked; other times we just soaked up one another’s presence. And sometimes we wept together. Those were sweet times, those nights. There was a deeper level of intimacy than we’d had in years—maybe a deeper level of intimacy than we’d ever had. It wasn’t about words and it wasn’t even really about physical proximity. It was about the partnership, the unstated contract between us to be partners during this pilgrimage to his death. The unstated understanding that we were what we had been saying for years: best friends. And best friends sometimes just witnessed one another’s lives. I was his witness.

He slept most of the day every day. He could no longer get up and down the few stairs from the bedroom level to the living level without a struggle. He only struggled to do so once or twice a day, mostly to get to the kitchen. I was happy to bring food to him, but he needed to demonstrate to himself that he could still make the stairs. He made one effort to sit in the living room, then asked for a chair in the bedroom. Antonio helped me move a comfortable one from the journey room (the room in which I did shamanic work with people) in the lowest level of the house up to his room. He used it only a few times, but just having it there made him happy.

Everything was beginning to make me nostalgic. I turned on the television to find an episode of Globe Trekker on Fiji. We had been married in Fiji. Another day, the movie When Harry Met Sally was on. I smiled and cried because it was one of many movies he liked a good deal. And while Howard often referred to the house as my house—an accusation more than anything else that I’d arranged it according to my own tastes and needs—everywhere I looked in it, I was reminded of Howard and our life together. It was as if he were already gone. And in some ways, he was. He was slipping further away from me every day.

Yet, a few days after Thanksgiving, he asked if we were going to see the new Harry Potter movie. He had almost died days earlier and he was completely unable to get down the series of stairs that led outside. Still, he seemed to have told himself that he could do this. When I finally got ready to return the borrowed oxygen tank to the cancer center, he said, “I’d like to go with you.” Again, it was a physical impossibility for him. Did he sense that he would never again see the nurses and doctors who had been so kind to him? Perhaps, though it did not occur to me at the time. What did occur to me was that he was becoming farther and farther removed, mentally, from his physical reality. Getting to the bathroom was a major undertaking. Leaving the house? No chance.

Finally, in the last days of November, he agreed to hospice. But even here, he insisted on doing it his way. He slept until he had just enough time to get himself up and together before they came to the house to meet with us. He dragged himself to the shower, dressed, and struggled his way downstairs to the dining room because he did not want them to see him as an invalid. He did not want hospice to see him as an invalid.

The meeting was a negotiation. The hospice staff quickly determined what he was made of and that he would need more than their respect, he would need their agreement to participate in the hallucination that he was not the dying man they saw before them. They stepped up. They’d done this before. He had feared that bringing in hospice meant he would no longer have access to blood transfusions. I knew that he’d already had the last one he would need in this life, but it was an important consideration in his mind. They assured him that it was not beyond the realm of possibilities and that it could, in fact, be done at home.

At one point, during the discussion with hospice, he said, “Maybe I’ll just disappear . . . leave the house, drive away, and not come back.” It was a threat. He wanted them to know that he was still in charge. He wanted them to know he’d already had enough of his body betraying him, before signing on with them, and he didn’t want nonsense from them (or me).

Of course, he would have needed me and a couple of strong men to get him downstairs, outside, and into his truck by this point. Still, I had no doubt he could still drive if he could be helped to his truck. Where would he drive to? No question about that. He would be off on another adventure. Maybe the trip to Alaska he’d been sorry to have never made. No Thelma and Louise action from him. Never.

Unbeknownst to him, hospice and the nightly cadre of spirits were preparing him for his next adventure. No escaping to have an adventure on his own. Not this time.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

He was taken to the emergency room, as opposed to the ambulatory care unit where he was to receive his transfusion. We were in for a long day. There is irony in coupling the word “emergency” with that particular unit in a hospital because there seems to be little urgency to the treatment received there. But on this day, the emergency room was bustling. On our way to the hospital, we had passed a serious looking accident, not half a mile from the medical center. If you’re going to have an accident, being close to a hospital is genius. By the time Howard was ensconced in a treatment room, the human wreckage had arrived at the hospital.

Still, they were living up to my expectations, at least as far as my husband was concerned. He was not a priority and we were mostly left alone for long periods of time. Ultimately, the medical staff wanted to admit him and keep him tucked away in a room at least overnight, thereby providing me with an opportunity to demonstrate that I could be trusted on the “no ambulances, no hospitals” pledge. He and I were a united front: no admission.

Hours—and endless frustration—later, he was placed in a private room in the ambulatory care unit and they were beginning preparations for his transfusion. Even as an outpatient, he was going to be there all night. The transfusion would take that long, not only because they were going to give him four units of blood, but because he had to be given saline infusions after each unit of blood. This would, of course, put a demand on his already overworked urinary track. Fortunately, there was a bathroom right outside his room. Unfortunately, he was hooked up to a monitor because of the earlier incident. In theory, that meant he would need to buzz an attendant every time he needed to go to the bathroom. In practice, I knew he would simply rip the sensors off, thereby setting off alarms, and struggle unassisted to the bathroom.

It didn’t take him long to prove me right. It was not only going to be a long night for Howard, but also for the ambulatory care unit staff. After helping him order some food, I made my escape. My presence all night would be of no help, and I was not keen to be an observer to the paces he was going to put the staff through. It had been morning when we made our way to the cancer clinic and it was now past sundown.

In a moment of stress induced practicality, it occurred to me that I should make a stop at Gretchen Minney’s house on the way home. She had some of my canning jars and I needed to collect them. I called to see if she was home. She was. I told her I would swing by to get the jars on my way home from the hospital. Hospital—the magic word. That was all I needed to say. By the time I reached her house, she had a plate of hors d’oeuvres and a bottle of champagne waiting for me, along with an open heart and a willing ear.

Every once in a while, a friend not only proves herself, but demonstrates her keen understanding of your precise needs. Even the best of friends do not often manage that, but this was one of those moments. It had taken me ten minutes or so to get from the hospital to her house, yet all was waiting for me when I arrived.

Awards are given for all manner of heroic acts, but never for an act like this. How would it be submitted? How could it be described? I couldn’t say that she had saved my life. Technically, she did not save my life that night. But I would argue that a glass of champagne, some nibbles, and the simple act of bearing witness to a story of crisis are highly underrated as life saving measures.

I was gravely worried and with good reason. When I brought my husband home the next morning, he went to bed immediately and slept most of the day. The following day, which happened to be the day before Thanksgiving, he was no better. In the past, transfusions had perked him up and brought color back to him. This transfusion had done neither.

That night, he was uncomfortable to the point of admitting it. His entire body was rebelling and in pain. Breathing was especially painful. He had been prescribed Ambien to help him sleep and oxycodone for pain, but had taken little of either. Now he asked me to bring him both. My husband, the stoic, was moaning and I found it unsettling. I couldn’t imagine how bad it had to be for him to be moaning. This was the man whose pain measurement was based on the level of pain provided by a gunshot wound. I gave him the requested medications, climbed into bed with him, and held him. After an hour, he felt no better and he looked scared.

I knew I needed to act and I knew whatever actions I took would be further demonstration—or the lack of it—that I could be trusted to follow his wishes. I asked if he wanted an ambulance. He was adamant that he did not. I had to honor that, but I also had to do something. I told him I was going to call Antonio. He fought against it, wanting no one to come, but it was either an ambulance or Antonio.

Antonio, the shaman to whom I had been apprenticed, was not only a shaman, but a nurse. He had urged me, over the last few months, to call him—night or day—if I needed his help with Howard. It was after 11:00 p.m. and I was ready to take him up on his offer. I called to find that he was still awake. I explained the situation and I think he must have been getting his clothes on, preparing to leave, before he hung up. I knew, from years of driving between my house and his, that it was a thirty-five minute drive. He arrived a good ten minutes earlier than it should have taken him. He had clearly ignored the posted speed limits all along the way.

I crept into Howard’s room to tell him that Antonio was with me. Howard was delirious and nearly incoherent. He muttered, “No, no. I’m asleep. I’m asleep,” thinking, in his confusion, that I had called an ambulance. I explained that it was Antonio, no one else, and that he had come to see if he could help.

I had never witnessed Antonio’s work as a nurse and was stunned by his ability to gain Howard’s compliance and trust with little more than a few well chosen, calm words. Well . . . that and summoning up the kind of energetic power few but those of us who practice shamanism can muster. He took Howard’s vitals. Blood pressure: 60/40. Pulse: forty beets per minute. Respirations: almost undetectable.

Antonio met me outside the room and told me it was unlikely Howard would make it through the night. In fact, he thought Howard would pass very soon. We sat, side by side, on the cedar chest at the foot of my bed in the master bedroom. And we waited. I had some Jameson’s I’d bought to make hot toddies with and I got each of us a slug of it. He might not have needed it, but I did. Years of treatment and months of declining health had skidded, abruptly, to a stop early Thanksgiving morning.

But after an hour, Howard was still among the living. Weak vitals, but still alive. Antonio went home, expecting that the next call from me would be the call to say that Howard had passed. He had no sooner left than the moaning began again. I called his cell and asked what to do. He suggested I give Howard another small bit of medication.

Sunrise found me exhausted and anxious . . . and my husband still alive. Thanksgiving Day. It was not clear to me if I should be grateful that Howard was still alive—my immediate instinct—or sorry he hadn’t passed during the night. And there was no way to know if he would make it through Thanksgiving Day.

What I did was so predictably Melanie-in-survival-mode that I saw it for what it was, even then. While Howard remained semi-conscious, at most, I made stuffing, baked the twenty-two pound turkey, and otherwise carried on as if there would be someone other than me to eat Thanksgiving dinner. And I gave thanks for everything good and true in the world.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall

The radiation treatments were coupled with a regimen of steroids. The steroids made Howard a little cranky. Then they made him easily annoyed. Then they gave him the kind of short fuse he’d had twenty years earlier and which he’d gotten over as age and life softened him. At first, I didn’t like the transformation. Then it scared me. He accused me of trying to control him when both of us knew that neither of us could actually control the other. That had been worked out years earlier. When he became instantly angry over something trivial and actually raised his arm, as if to strike, he frightened both of us. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Neither of us was sure it was the steroids, but I suspected as much. He called his doctor and quickly went off them. Within a couple of days, he returned to the kind of equanimity we were both more comfortable with.

In only a couple of weeks, the radiation treatment was complete. In a matter of speaking, Howard was fully cooked and he was weakening before my eyes. I had become proficient at determining when he needed a blood transfusion and I was sure he needed one. For a couple of weeks, I nudged. He wasn’t ready. Then I pushed. He still wasn’t ready. Finally, I asked him what was going on, why he seemed reluctant to call for an appointment to have his blood tested. He’d had blood transfusions when he needed them for months. Why was he dragging his feet now?

Something in my tone, combined with his weakening state, broke through the defenses. He admitted that he was putting off having his blood tested because his radiation doc had told him that if there was a reoccurrence of his symptoms, he should have his wife drive him to the hospital. I was certain that his doctor was referring to the symptoms related to the cancer having spread to the dura—the numbness in his face, for instance—and not the weakness associated with needing a blood transfusion. But it was the word “hospital” that had brought him up short. He feared that all of the doctors were giving up on him and he would now be consigned to hospitalization. And that was the last thing he wanted.

It took him a good minute or two, after dropping this bit of information, to add that he did not want to complicate his life—meaning the hospitals and everything that went with it. He was near tears. I bust out laughing.

“Complicate your life? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Complicate your life? Could it get more complicated than it already is?”

And then I invoked the Gretchen Principle. Gretchen, meaning Gretchen Minney. The Gretchen Principle was a reference to something she had done when her husband, Bill, was dying of a brain tumor and found himself in the hospital. He wanted out. Gretchen understood the implications of doing so, but broke him out anyway. She commandeered a wheelchair and they escaped.

I told Howard that I would not allow anyone to keep him in the hospital against his wishes. I added that I was in agreement with him to stay out of hospitals if at all possible. I promised to break him out, as Gretchen had done for Bill, if necessary. He was relieved and seemed to relax a bit.

It was a good agreement. We would need it soon.

The morning he finally decided he needed that blood test, he slowly made his way from the upper level of the house to the lowest level and took a seat in my office, where I was busy editing.

“I need you to drive me,” he said.

I turned to face him, raised my eyebrows, and told him I would drop what I was doing and take him. “I need you to drive me” was code for a lot of things.

I had been concerned about his driving. His doctor had not forbidden him to drive because he hadn’t had a seizure, but driving seemed risky at best. He’d fallen more than once coming to or going from the truck when he felt particularly weak. He’d made it into Newsland on one occasion, only to fall once inside. An ambulance was called. He was mortified and talked his way out anything but a quick check. That he’d actually told me when he returned home was a surprise because he had been embarrassed and it was exactly the kind of thing he might have kept to himself. Apparently, he had come to the conclusion that he needed a confidant about such things and I had proven myself trustworthy. Not an easy decision for a former Marine and Chief of Police.

When I’d expressed my concerns about his continuing to drive, he had promised me that should the day ever come when he felt he could not drive himself somewhere, he would ask me to drive him. I hadn’t believed him, but he was doing just that—right in front of me. I was not so much surprised by the fact that he was too weak to drive as I was him admitting it.

He was so weak that I’d told him, wryly, that he’d be dead soon if he didn’t go for a transfusion. It was that critical. I had seen him in need of a blood transfusion before but I had never seen him this weak.

Slowly and with care, we got into my car and made our way to the cancer clinic. It was only my second time there. He had insisted on going alone for all the time he’d been treated there. I’d gone with him when we discussed the matter of radiation treatments, less than month earlier. When we arrived, the nurses immediately saw what I had seen. They took a blood sample and assured him that even without seeing the results, they could tell he needed a transfusion. I offered to place a bet with them on the number of units, knowing it would be at least three. That told them pretty much all they needed to know about the wife. They could see that I was neither naïve nor weak spirited. They could also see that I was not going to be placated or assured. I was calm, I wanted answers, and I wanted to know what we needed to do for my husband—right then, right there.

Three was an underestimate. He needed four units. The nurses were very concerned. He was used to having the blood work done one day and the transfusion the next. There wasn’t going to be a delay this time. He was going to get that transfusion as soon as we could get him to the outpatient unit at the hospital and he was going with an oxygen tank in tow. His blood oxygen level was 82-85%. No compromises, no leaving without the tank.

He objected. They persisted. He growled. They were adamant. He did not want to be seen as an invalid. Didn’t matter. They rigged him up with a tank while they made arrangements for the transfusion. Arrangements made, we left the clinic with an oxygen tank trailing us. I got him settled and the tank settled. Just as I was about to drive off, heading for home to grab a few things before continuing on to the hospital, he said, “Be careful,”—meaning that I should take care with my driving.

I left the car in “park,” turned to look at him, and said, “Are you kidding? Be careful? We can’t get into an accident. We have an oxygen tank in the care. If we’re hit, we’ll blow up.”

The absurdity of it was so funny that it was verging on Monty Pythonesque. It wasn’t quite . . . but we would be all the way there shortly.

At the hospital, I swung around to drop him off at the door. He was not going to let me help him in and he was not going to let me get him a wheelchair. The best I could do was drop him off, snag the closest parking spot I could, and sprint back to him. I found a spot very close and was away from him for less than sixty seconds. Too long. As I approached the hospital doors, I could see that he had never made it inside. He was on the ground with a flock of people around him. To make matters worse, the automatic doors kept opening and closing on a woman who was also on the ground. I soon found out that she was a nurse assistant who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was coming in as he was and when he began to go down, she tried to catch him. She was a small woman. Even ill, he was a large man. The doors thwamped and thwamped on her until someone finally stopped the beast.

Howard was on the ground, conscious and annoyed. Doctors and nurses were gathered around him. That part was good. Someone called for a neck brace and a board. That part was also good. But numerous people kept asking him the same questions, over and over. “Are you conscious? How long were you out? Did you lose consciousness? Can you move?” And on and on. One time would have done it as far as Howard was concerned. He wanted to answer the questions and get the heck out of there. He was embarrassed, unhappy at being prone, and becoming increasingly annoyed by the mantra being murmured by the medical staff in the form of questions.

If there was any chance that Howard might get a glimmer of understanding that he had waited just a tad too long to go in for a blood transfusion, it would happen right there as he lay on the cement in front of the hospital doors. It was alarming, but it was so . . . so . . . Howard. There was something just a bit funny about it. The thwamping doors. The fact that I knew some version of “Just shoot me” was being muttered just enough under his breath as to be imperceptible to anyone but me. The surreal quality of it all.

Not funny at all was my internal radar. It was on alert and sirens were going off inside. I knew that this was the beginning of the end.

Copyright 2011 by Melanie Mulhall