Diary

A Widow’s Story

22 January 2011

imageJoyce Carol Oates has written a moving story about the last week of a long mariage. It reminded me a bit of the feelings I had when some years ago my best friend died in front of my eyes although the young body continued to walk on this planet as if nothing had happend.

February 15, 2008. Returning to my car, which I haphazardly parked on a narrow side street near the Princeton Medical Center, I see, thrust beneath a windshield wiper, what appears to be a sheet of stiff paper. At once my heart clenches in dismay—a ticket? A parking ticket? At such a time? Earlier this afternoon, I parked here—hurried, harried, a jangle of admonitions running through my head like shrieking cicadas—on my way to visit my husband in the Telemetry Unit of the medical center, where he was admitted several days ago for pneumonia. Now I need to go home for a few hours, before returning to the medical center in the early evening—anxious, dry-mouthed, and head-aching, yet in a state that might be called hopeful, for since his admission into the medical center Ray has been steadily improving.

His oxygen intake, measured by numerals that fluctuate with literally each breath—90, 87, 91, 85, 89, 92—is increasing. Arrangements are being made for his discharge into a rehab clinic nearby. But first, in the late afternoon of an interminable and exhausting hospital day, can it be that our car has been ticketed? That, in my distraction, I parked illegally? The time limit for parking on this street is two hours; I’ve been in the hospital for longer than two hours, and I see with embarrassment that our 2007 Honda Accord—eerily glaring-white in the February dusk, like some strange phosphorescent creature in the depths of the sea—is inexpertly parked, at a slant to the curb, left rear tire over the white line in the street by several inches, front bumper nearly touching an S.U.V. in front of it. If this is a parking ticket—at once the thought comes to me—I won’t tell Ray. I will pay the fine in secret.

Except that the sheet of paper is not a ticket from the Princeton Police Department after all. Opened and smoothed out by my shaky hand, it’s revealed as a private message in large, block-printed letters, which with stunned, staring eyes I read several times, like one faltering on the brink of an abyss:

LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH

A little more than a year earlier, in January, 2007, my husband and I were in a serious car accident, the first of our married life. It would seem ironic in retrospect that this accident—in which Ray might easily have been killed, but was not killed—occurred hardly more than a mile from the Princeton Medical Center, in an intersection that we often drove through on our way into Princeton and on our way home. It is an intersection I drive through now, as if in a dream of nightmare repetition, in which my very grief is rebuked: You might have died here! You have no right to grieve. Your life is a gift.

The accident occurred on a week night. As we entered the intersection, out of nowhere—on the driver’s side of our car—there came a hellish glare of headlights, a screeching of brakes, and a tremendous crash as the front of our car was demolished, the windshield shattered, and air bags detonated.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, we were too confused to gauge how lucky we’d been that the other vehicle had struck only the front of our car. A few inches back and Ray would have been killed or seriously injured, crushed in the wreck.

Our air bags had exploded with remarkable rigor. Ray’s face, shoulders, chest, and arms were as battered as if he were the hapless sparring partner of a heavyweight boxer; his hands gripping the steering wheel were splattered with acid, which left coin-size burn marks that would sting for weeks. Beside him, I was too rattled to comprehend how powerfully I’d been hit by my air bag. For the next two months, my bruised chest, ribs, and arms would be so painful that I could barely move without wincing. But in our wrecked car, in the euphoria of cortical adrenaline, we had little awareness of our injuries as we managed to force our doors open and step out onto the pavement. A wave of relief swept over us. We are alive! We are unharmed!

Two police officers drove us home in their cruiser. They were kindly, courteous. Near midnight, we entered our darkened house. It seemed as if we’d been gone far longer than just an evening. Our nerves were jangled, like broken electric wires in the street. I saw that Ray was “all right,” as he insisted; we were both all right. It was true that we’d come close to catastrophe, but it hadn’t happened. Somehow, that fact was difficult to comprehend.

I began to feel the first tinges of pain in my chest—when I lifted my arm, when I laughed or coughed. Ray discovered the reddened splotches on his hands. “I’ve been burnt? How the hell have I been burnt?” He ran cold water on them. We took Bufferin, for the pain. By 2 A.M., we were in bed.

“I’ll go get us a new car. Tomorrow.” Calmly, Ray spoke in the dark. There was comfort in his words, which suggested routine, custom. Comfort in the knowledge that Ray would supervise the aftermath of the wreck.

Raymond—“wise protector.”

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year. Born on March 12, 1930. I was born on June 16, 1938. How long ago, these births. And how long we’d been married—since January 23, 1961! The crash happened just a few weeks before our forty-sixth wedding anniversary. And yet we’d consistently felt, through our long marriage, as if we’d only just met, as if we were somehow new to each other, still becoming acquainted. Often we were shy with each other, reluctant to share certain things, to risk offending or surprising.

Ray read little of my fiction. He did read my essays and my reviews—he was an excellent editor, sharp-eyed and informed, as countless writers who were published in Ontario Review, the journal he edited, said. But he did not read most of my novels and short stories, and, in this sense, it might be argued that Ray didn’t know me entirely.

Why was this? There are numerous reasons.

I regret it, I think. Maybe I do.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

In our marriage, it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, demoralizing, or tedious, unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer’s life can be distressing—negative reviews; rejections; difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers; disappointment with one’s own work, on a daily or hourly basis—it seemed to me a good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?

When I realized, the night of the car wreck, that if Ray died I would be utterly bereft—that it would be far better for me to die with him than to survive alone—I was not thinking of myself as a writer, primarily, or even as a writer at all, but as a wife. A wife who dreaded any thought of becoming a widow.

The next morning our lives were returned to us, but subtly altered. Then would have been the time to say, Look—we might have been killed last night! I love you. I’m so grateful that I am married to you. But the words didn’t quite come.

So much to say in a marriage, so much unsaid. You assume that there will be other times, other occasions. Years.

February 11, 2008. There is an hour, a minute—you will remember it forever—when you know instinctively, on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong.

The first wrong thing on this ordinary Monday morning in February is: Ray has got out of bed in the wintry dark before dawn.

By the time I discover him, in a far corner of the house, it’s only 6:15 A.M., but he has taken a shower, dressed, and fed the cats; he has brought in the New York Times; he has made himself a spare little breakfast of fruit and cottage cheese and is eating—trying to eat—at our long white Parsons table. Through our glass-walled gallery, I can see him across the courtyard, a lone figure haloed in light with the shadowy room behind him.

The sun hasn’t yet risen. The sky looks steely, opaque. Approaching my husband, I feel a tinge of unease, apprehension. Sitting at the table, Ray appears hunched over the newspaper, his shoulders slumped, as if he were very tired; when I ask him if something is wrong, he quickly says no—no!—except that he has been feeling “strange.” He woke before five and was unable to get back to sleep. He was having trouble breathing, lying down; now he’s uncomfortably warm, sweaty, and short of breath.

These symptoms he tells me in a matter-of-fact voice. In this way, the husband shifts to the wife the puzzle of what to make of such things, if anything; like certain emotions, too raw to be defined, this kind of information can be transferred only to another, the caring and hyper-vigilant spouse.

Most often, the wife is the custodian of such things, I think. The wife is the one elected to express alarm, fear, concern; the wife is the one to weep.

Shocking to see: the smooth white countertop, which is always kept spotless, is strewn now with used tissues. Something in the way these wet wadded tissues are scattered, the slovenliness of it, is not in Ray’s character.

Another wrong thing: Ray tells me that he has already called our family doctor, in Pennington, and left a message asking for an appointment today.

Now this is serious! For Ray is the kind of stubborn, stoic man who by nature resists seeing a doctor. The kind of person whose pain threshold is so high he often tells our dentist not to inject his gums with Novocain.

Ray flinches when I touch him. His forehead is both feverish and clammy. His breathing is hoarse. Close up, I see that his face is pale yet flushed; his eyes are finely bloodshot and don’t seem to be entirely in focus.

In a panic, I wonder, Has he had a stroke?

I tell him that I want to take him to the E.R. immediately. He tells me no—“That’s not necessary.”

I tell him yes, it is necessary.

Ray protests that he isn’t that sick, he has a lot of work to do this morning. But on his feet he moves unsteadily, as if the floor were tilting beneath him. I slip my arm around his waist and help him walk. His skin exudes a sickly heat. The previous evening he seemed fine; he even prepared a light dinner for us. But shortly afterward he began coughing fitfully; he became tired and went to bed early.

Yet another wrong thing: as I reason with my husband, in the kitchen now, he suddenly gives in and says yes, all right. “If you think so. If you want to drive me.”

“Of course I want to drive you! Let’s go.”

The cats stare after us as we leave the house. Something in our manner has made them wary, suspicious. But I am less anxious now, for we have made a good decision; I am in control, I think. The Princeton Medical Center is the closest E.R. by many miles; there Ray will be given immediate treatment, and he will be all right, I’m sure.

He takes nothing with him to suggest that he expects to stay even overnight.

Quickly, Ray is checked in and assigned a cubicle. Now he is partly disrobed. Now he is officially a patient. The essence of that word has to be patience. For the duty of the patient, like that of the patient’s wife, is to wait. How long we must wait, how many hours, isn’t clear in my memory. While Ray is being examined, interviewed, having his blood taken, reexamined, re-interviewed, having more blood taken, I am sometimes close by his side and sometimes not.

Waiting and waiting—for test results, for a specialist, for a real doctor, with authority—until at last the diagnosis is announced: “Pneumonia.”

The mystery is solved. The solution is a good one. Pneumonia is both commonplace and treatable—isn’t it?

But we’re both disappointed that Ray won’t be discharged today, after all. He’ll be transferred into the general hospital, where it’s expected that he will stay “at least overnight.”

Of this, I seem to hear just “overnight.”

When I speak to friends I will tell them, with an air of incredulity, as if this were entirely out of my husband’s character, “You’ll never guess where Ray is! In the medical center—with pneumonia—overnight.”

Why the diagnosis of pneumonia is so surprising to us, I have no idea. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem surprising at all.

“I love you! I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

What relief—at midafternoon—to leave the E.R. at last, to escape the unmistakable disinfectant smell, if only to step outside into a cold, cheerless February day!

A multitude of tasks await me—telephone calls, errands. At home, I sort Ray’s mail to take to him in the evening and I call the medical center—again, and again—to learn if Ray has yet been transferred to the general hospital, and always the answer is: “No. Not yet.”

At about 6:30 P.M., as I am about to leave, taking things for Ray—bathrobe, toiletries, books—the phone rings and I hurry to answer it, assuming that it’s the medical center, telling me what room Ray has been moved to. At first I can’t comprehend what I am being told: “Your husband’s heartbeat has accelerated—we haven’t been able to stabilize it. In the event that his heart stops, do you want extraordinary measures to be used to keep him alive?”

I am so stunned that I can’t reply. The stranger at the other end of the line repeats his astonishing words. I hear myself stammering, “Yes! Yes, of course!” I am gripped by disbelief, panic. “Yes, anything you can do! Save him! I will be right there.”

Now into my life—as into my vocabulary—there comes a new, harrowing term: telemetry. For, thanks to his accelerating heartbeat, Ray is moved not to the general hospital but into a unit adjacent to Intensive Care.

“Telemetry” means machines—machines processing data, machines monitoring a patient’s condition—and I am shocked to see my husband in a hospital bed, in an oxygen mask, I.V. fluids dripping into his arm, both his heartbeat and his breathing monitored through a device like a clothespin clipped to his forefinger, as a machine ingeniously translates his oxygen intake into numerals.

It’s upsetting to see Ray so pale and so tired. So groggy. As if already he’d been on a long journey. As if already I’d begun to lose him.

Seeing me, he smiles wanly. “Hi, honey.” The mask gives his slender face an inappropriately jaunty air, as if he were wearing a costume. I hold his hand, stroke his forehead, which doesn’t seem over-warm, though I’ve been told that he still has a temperature.

“How are you feeling, honey?”

Honey. This is our mutual name for each other—the only name I call Ray, as it is the only name Ray calls me. When we first met, as graduate students in English, in Madison, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1960—Ray, an “older” man, completing his Ph.D. dissertation on Jonathan Swift; I, newly graduated from Syracuse University—we must have called each other by our names, of course, but quickly shifted.

Unfortunately, Room 543 is at the far end of the Telemetry corridor, and to get to it one must pass by rooms with partly opened doors into which it’s not a good idea to glance—mostly elderly patients seem to be here, diminutive in their beds, connected to humming machines. I want to protest: Ray is nothing like these patients. Though seventy-seven, he is not old. He’s lean, hard-muscled, and works out three times a week. He hasn’t smoked in more than thirty years and he eats well and drinks sparingly.

Ray tells me that he feels much better. He’s sure he’ll be discharged in a few days. He asks me to bring work for him in the morning. He doesn’t want to “fall behind.”

He clasps my hand tightly. How like my protective husband, at such a crucial time, to wish to comfort me.

A young doctor comes into the room, introduces himself with a brisk handshake; he’s an I.D. man—“infectious diseases.” He tells us that a culture has been taken from my husband’s left lung and is being tested to determine the exact strain of bacteria that has infected the lung.

In a warm, rapid, liquid voice, the doctor speaks to us. Formally, he addresses us as Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith. Some of what he says I comprehend, and some of it I don’t. But I am so grateful for his very existence, I could kiss his hand. I think, Here is a man who knows! Here is an expert.

February 13, 2008. The bacterial infection in Ray’s left lung has been identified: E. coli.

“E. coli! But isn’t that associated with—”

“Gastrointestinal infections? Not always.”

So we learn from the doctor. Again we’re astonished—there is something naive about astonishment in such circumstances. Even as, invisibly, a colony of rapacious E. coli bacteria is struggling to prevail in Ray’s left lung, we are learning, we are being forced to learn, that many of our assumptions about medical issues are inadequate, like the notions of children.

Now that the exact strain of bacteria has been identified, a more precise antibiotic is being used. This is good news. Impossible not to think of the antibiotic treatment as a kind of war—warfare—as in a medieval allegory of good and evil. But in nature there is no “good,” no “evil.” Only life warring against life.

February 14-16, 2008. Those days—nights—a Mobius strip continuously winding, unwinding.

This nightmare week of my life—and yet during this week Ray is still alive.

“Don’t worry about that, honey! I’ll take care of it when I get home.” And: “Just put it on my desk. Next week will be soon enough—I should be home by then.”

Days, nights in giddy succession at the hospital, at home, at the hospital, at home. This week—the final week of our lives together, our life—the overcast mornings are suffused with a strange sourceless sunshine. A mysterious radiance from within.

Forever after, you will recognize those places—previously invisible, indiscernible—where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid. The stairwells, the elevators, the corridors, and the rest rooms you have memorized without knowing it. The hospital gift shop, the newsstand, where you linger, staring at headlines already passing into oblivion, while upstairs, in your husband’s room, an attendant is changing bedclothes or sponge-bathing the patient behind a gauze screen, unless he has been taken to Radiology for further X-rays, awaiting his turn in another corridor, on another floor. Memory pools accumulate beneath chairs in the waiting areas adjacent to Telemetry. It may be that actual tears have stained the tile or soaked into the carpets of such places. Everywhere, the odor of melancholy that is the very center of memory.

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without wandering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge. You do not wish to hear the echoes of their whispered exchanges: But he was looking so well yesterday! What has happened to him overnight? You do not wish to blunder into another’s sorrow. You will have all that you can do to resist your own.

February 17, 2008. This morning at seven-fifty, when I arrive at the hospital, breathless, eager to see my husband (always the first glimpse of a hospital patient, in his room unobserved, is fraught with meaning), carrying the hefty Sunday Times for us to read together, at the far end of the now familiar corridor, past the nurses’ station, there is Room 543, there is Ray’s bed, empty—just the stripped, bare mattress.

“Mrs. Smith? Your husband is in Room 541. Just this morning he was moved. We tried to call you but you must have already left home.”

And so, entering this room—which I passed a moment ago without glancing inside—I am shaking so visibly that Ray wonders what is wrong with me. The blood has drained from my face. I am trembling in the aftermath of a shock as profound as any I’ve ever experienced, or am I trembling in the aftermath of relief? For here is Ray in the new bed, in the new room—a room identical to the previous one, with the same bedside table and on this table the same vase of flowers from friends. He is no longer wearing the oxygen mask, since his oxygen intake has improved, and there is the possibility of his being discharged this Tuesday. He smiles and greets me, but when I lean to kiss him a faintness sweeps over me, and suddenly I begin to cry—uncontrollably—for the first time since bringing Ray to the hospital. My face is contorted, like a child’s. “I’m not crying for any reason, but only because I love you,” I manage to stammer, “because I love you so much.” And Ray’s eyes well with tears, too.

Like drowning swimmers, we clutch each other. Someone passing in the corridor sees us and looks quickly away. Never have I cried so hard, so helplessly. Never in my adult life.

An attendant arrives, to take Ray to Radiology for X-rays.

It seems that a “secondary infection,” “of mysterious origin”—“nothing to worry about”—has appeared in Ray’s right lung, his (previously) uninfected lung.

“But—is this bacterial, too?” How matter-of-factly this adjective rolls off my tongue—bacterial.

The young attendant—female, dark-skinned, cheery, and sturdy-bodied—says, with the bright smile she lavishes on all patients and patients’ relatives who ask such questions of her, “Ma’am, I don’t know. The doctor will tell you.”

“Mr. Smith, can you tilt your head this way? That’s great.”

One of the nurses is shaving Ray’s jaws, which have grown stubbly.

“Your husband is very handsome, Mrs. Smith. But you know that.”

Without his glasses, eyes closed, Ray does look handsome: his cheeks are lean and remarkably unlined for a man of his age; his forehead is marred by the faintest frown lines, scarcely visible in this light. As the nurse deftly shaves him and wipes away lather, I feel a sense of unease that Ray is adjusting to the hospital setting, ever more comfortable with the eerie passivity that such a setting evokes—as in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” in which the young Hans Castorp arrives as a visitor at the tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and, as if in a fairy-tale enchantment, remains for seven years.

After Ray is shaved, he returns to the Times scattered across his bed. And how does the remainder of this Sunday pass? Languidly reading, talking, listening to choral music played on a Sunday arts channel on TV. By coincidence, this is the identical Sunday-afternoon program that is broadcast on the radio, to which we often listen at home.

Once, years ago, listening to a recording of Mozart’s Requiem Mass, Ray remarked, in that bravado way in which the young speak of dying, “Promise me you’ll play that at my funeral.”

“But you said the same thing about Verdi’s Requiem Mass.”

“I did? I did?”

That was another lifetime. On Sherbourne Road in Detroit, Michigan. We were living there in the aftermath of the so-called Detroit riot of July, 1967—gunshots and looting only two blocks away, on Livernois Avenue, a nightmare cacophony of fire engines, police sirens, random shouts and cries, National Guardsmen with rifles, the acrid smell of smoke, smoldering fires that lingered for days—this “racial tinderbox” of an American city, which was also our home.

In the hospital, in Princeton, decades later, I don’t want to think of this. Of our innocence, ignorance. We were very happy in that house on Sherbourne Road, where in an upstairs room—a former child’s room, pink-walled and unfurnished, except for a desk, a straight-backed chair, and a single bookcase—I wrote my novel “them,” while Ray commuted to the University of Windsor, across the Detroit River, in Ontario.

Hospital vigils inspire such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time, during which the mind floats free, like a frail balloon drifting into the sky.

In the late afternoon, we decide that I will go home early and return first thing in the morning. How exhausted I am suddenly, though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.

Discharged to the rehab clinic on Tuesday. A few days in rehab and then home. By next Friday? Next weekend?

I kiss my husband good night. My very nice husband, with his smooth-shaven cheeks. It is not an extraordinary leave-taking, for it feels so very temporary. I will be returning to this room so soon.

February 18, 2008. The call comes at 12:38 A.M. Waking me from sleep—a phone ringing at the wrong time.

When my parents were alive and elderly, their health crises escalating, there was, for years, the dread of the phone ringing late—at the wrong time. We all know this dread. There is no escape from it.

But tonight, finally, I was able to sleep. And now this feels like punishment—my punishment for being complacent, unguarded, for leaving the hospital early. Dry-mouthed, I stumble from bed into Ray’s darkened study, where the phone is ringing. But when I lift the receiver—“Hello? Hello?”—the caller has hung up.

A wrong number? Desperately I want to think so. But almost immediately the phone rings again. When I pick it up, it’s to hear the words that I have been dreading since the nightmare began: “Your husband, Raymond Smith, is in critical condition. His blood pressure has plummeted. His heartbeat has accelerated.” The voice is asking if I want “extraordinary measures” to be taken, in the event that my husband’s heart stops. I am crying, “Yes! I’ve told you! I’ve said yes! Save him! Do anything you can!”

The voice instructs me to come quickly to the hospital.

“Is he still alive?” I ask. “Is my husband still alive?”

“Yes. Your husband is still alive.”

And now I am driving into Princeton in the dark of night. The country roads are deserted; there are no street lights, no oncoming headlights. Though I am desperate to get to the hospital, I force myself to drive at the speed limit, for it would be ironic, it would be disastrous, if I had an accident at such a time, when Ray is waiting for me. Through a roaring in my ears, the telephone voice has acquired a more urgent, almost chiding tone: Still alive. Your husband is still alive. Aloud I say, “He is still alive. My husband is still alive,” in a voice of wonder, defiance. Such pathos in that provisional “still.” This past week I’ve fallen into the habit of talking to myself, instructing myself, encouraging myself, as one might a stumbling child: You can do it. You will be all right. You can do it. You will be all right! When I was throwing on clothes in the bedroom, to prepare for this frantic journey, this admonishing voice lifted in a semblance of bemused calm: Be careful what you wear—you may be wearing it for a long time.

I am not able to acknowledge the terror I feel, or the helplessness—such frustration as I enter Princeton Borough and the speed limit drops to twenty-five miles an hour. Here, I must wait for a very long time—how long, how long! a nightmare of lost time!—for the light to change at the intersection of Hodge Road and Route 206. At last the light changes and I drive the several blocks to the hospital, past darkened houses. I run to the front door of the hospital, which, of course, is locked, the interior semi-darkened. I run to the E.R. entrance, around the corner. I plead with a security guard to let me in. I identify myself as the wife of a man “in critical condition” in the Telemetry Unit. The guard listens to me politely but can’t let me inside before making a call. This takes some time—precious seconds, minutes. Like butterflies with frayed wings, thoughts fly at me in random and rapid succession. He is still alive. It’s all right. He is waiting for me. I will see him. He is still alive. Finally, I can enter. My panicked heart clenches like a fist as I take the elevator to the fifth floor. In Telemetry, there is no one around except at the nurses’ station. In my distraction I don’t see any nurses I know. By the way these women regard me, with impassive faces, they must know why I am here, at this time of night, when no visitors are allowed. And now, at the far end of the corridor, outside my husband’s room, I see something that terrifies me—five or six figures, medical workers, standing quietly outside the open door. As I approach, one of them steps forward—a very young-looking woman, who is a stranger to me. Silently she points into the room and, in that instant, I know—I know that, for all my frantic rush, I have come too late; for all my waiting like a programmed robot for the light to change, I have come too late. In a trance I enter the room—the room I left only a few hours before in utter naivete, kissing my husband good night.

Ray is not sitting up in his bed awaiting me. He is not awaiting me at all, but lying on his back, beneath a sheet in the hospital bed, which has been lowered. His eyes are closed; his ashen face is slack. The I.V. tube has been removed from the crook of his bruised right arm. There is no oxygen monitor; there is no cardiac monitor. The room is utterly still. Numbly, I approach the bed. I am speaking his name. I am pleading with him as a child might—“Oh, honey, what has happened to you! What has happened to you! Honey? Honey?” For Ray seems so very lifelike. There is no anguish or even strain in his face; his hair is not dishevelled. It is true that he has lost weight this week—his cheeks are thinner, there are hollows beneath his eyes, which are beautiful eyes, gray blue, slate blue. I hold him, kissing him. “This is me—this is Joyce—this is your wife.” I plead with him to wake up. Ray is one who is easily coaxed, persuaded—he is not an inflexible man. If he could, he would open his eyes and greet me, I know; he would murmur something amusing and ironic. I hold him for as long as I can. His skin is still warm but beginning to cool. I am tempted to shake Ray, to laugh at him—This is not possible! Wake up! Stop this! For never in our lives has anything so extraordinary happened between us; never has anything so divided us.

Now the young woman doctor has quietly entered the room; the others remain in the hall, looking in. In a lowered voice, in which each word is enunciated with precision, the doctor, whose name has flown past me, whose name I will never know, explains that “everything possible” was done to save my husband, who died just minutes ago. He had gone into “unexpected cardiac arrest.” It was the “secondary infection,” and not the original E. coli infection, that drove up his fever. Within the past few hours, his right lung was invaded; his bloodstream was invaded. Though they had tried very hard, there was “nothing more to be done.”

It is very difficult to hear the woman’s voice through the roaring in my ears. I must look distraught, crazed. The blood has drained from my face. My eyes are leaking tears, but I am not crying; not in any normal way am I crying. With what remains of my sense of social decorum, I am trying to determine the proper response in this situation—what it is that I must say or do. Not until later—days later—do I realize that Ray died among strangers. It is 1:08 A.M. None of the senior staff is on duty at such an hour. Not one of these medical workers, including the doctor, is more than thirty years old.

“Mrs. Smith?” The doctor touches my arm. She is telling me that, if I want to stay longer with my husband, she will leave me.

In the corridor, the others have dispersed. I am staring at Ray, who has not moved. Not even his eyelids have fluttered since I’ve entered the room. The doctor repeats what she said to me, and from a long distance I manage to hear her, and to reply, “Thank you. I will. Thank you so much.”

Please gather and take away your husband’s belongings before you leave.

It is my task—my first task as a widow—to clear the hospital room of my husband’s things.

The wristwatch on the table beside my husband’s bed, an Aqua Quartz digital watch of no special distinction, probably purchased at the Pennington drug store, which pronounces the time 1:21 A.M.—and, as I stare at it, turns to 1:22 A.M.—has no identity and no significance except that it is Ray’s wristwatch. Because it is his, I will take it with me. That is my responsibility.

In this very early stage of widowhood—you might almost call it “pre-widowhood,” for the widow hasn’t yet “got it,” what it will be like to inhabit this free-fall world from which the meaning has been drained—the widow takes comfort in such small tasks, the rituals of the death protocol, through which more experienced others will guide her, as one might guide a doomed animal out of a pen and into a chute by the use of a ten-foot pole.

“Mrs. Smith? Do you have someone to call?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like any assistance in calling?”

“No.”

These seem to be correct answers. It is not a correct answer to reply, “But I don’t want to call anyone. I want to go home now, and die.”

These thoughts rush through my head and I make no effort to deflect them, still less to examine them. It is strange to be assailed by rushing thoughts when I am moving and speaking so slowly—like one who has been hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

Already the time on Ray’s watch is 1:24 A.M.

In the medicine cabinet in the small windowless bathroom, my fingers close numbly on a toothbrush, a twisted tube of toothpaste, mouthwash, a man’s roll-on deodorant—clear-glide invisible-solid powder-soft scentless anti-perspirant deodorant for men—and shaving cream, in a small aerosol container. I am moving as if undersea, gathering my husband’s belongings to take home.

Someone must have instructed me to perform this task. I would not have thought of it myself. The word “belongings” is not my word. It is a curious word that sticks to me like a burr.

“Home,” too, is a curious word.

One of the reasons I am moving so slowly—perhaps it has nothing to do with being struck on the head by a sledgehammer—is that, with these belongings, I have nowhere to go except home. This home—without my husband—is not possible for me to consider.

The tile floor seems to be shifting beneath my feet. I dressed in a hurry before leaving the house. I am not even sure what shoes I am wearing—my vision is blurred. Could be I have on two left shoes—or have switched my right and left. I recall that, in the history of civilization, the designation of right and left shoes is relatively recent. Not so very long ago, people counted themselves fortunate just to have shoes to wear. This is the sort of random and yet intriguing information that Ray used to tell me or read out to me from a magazine. Did you know this? Not so very long ago . . .

This past week, I’ve become astonishingly clumsy. I should have brought a bag into the bathroom to hold Ray’s things, but I didn’t. Awkwardly, I am gathering them in my hands, my arms. One of the objects slips and falls—the shaving cream, which clatters loudly on the floor. As I stoop to retrieve it, blood rushes into my head and there is a tearing sensation in my chest. Shaving cream! In this terrible place!

This would be a time to cry. Ray’s shaving cream in his widow’s sweaty hand.

The vanity of shaving cream, mouthwash, powder-soft scentless deodorant for men.

The vanity of our love for each other, of our marriage.

The vanity of our lives. The vanity of believing that somehow we owned our lives.

Lines from a Scottish ballad—“The Golden Vanity”—come into my mind. My brain is unnervingly porous. I have no defense against such invasions:

There was a ship

That sailed upon the lowland sea.

And the name of our ship was

The Golden Vanity.

There is something faintly taunting, even mocking about these words. I am transfixed, listening to them as if under a spell. The words are familiar to me, though I have not heard them—or thought of them—in a very long time.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, in 1961, I wrote a paper on English and Scottish traditional ballads for a medieval seminar taught by the marvellous Helen White, one of only two female professors of English in that largely Harvard-educated, highly conservative department. Subsequently, for years of our married life, Ray and I listened to records of ballads, in particular those sung by Richard Dyer-Bennet. It is this singer’s voice that I hear now. Never has it occurred to me—until this moment, clutching a can of shaving cream in my hand—that this plainspoken, plaintive Scots ballad was the very poetry of our lives.

When I return to the room—to Ray’s bedside—I am relieved to see that no one else is there. We are alone.

Outside, in the hospital corridor, there is no one. The five or six medical workers have vanished. Were these individuals united in their effort—a failed, futile effort—to save my husband’s life? Is there a term for what they are, or were? Not a Death Team—though, in this case, their effort ended in death. A Life-Rescue Team?

Though there is no one in the hall, I am still conscious of being observed. Very likely, the nurses on the floor have been alerted: There is a woman in 541. Mr. Smith’s wife. He died, and the wife has come to take away his belongings.

I am watching Ray. I am staring at Ray. I am memorizing Ray as he lies on his back beneath the thin sheet, his eyes shut, his face smooth and handsome. And I am thinking—the thought comes to me—that Ray is, in fact, breathing, but very faintly, or he is about to breathe; his eyelids are quivering, or about to quiver. It seems to me that Ray’s eyeballs are moving, beneath the lids, that he is dreaming something and I shouldn’t wake him.

It’s an instinct that you quickly acquire during a hospital vigil—not to disturb a sleeping patient. For, in such a place, sleep is precious.

I shouldn’t disturb Ray, of course. Yet I have to tell him that I’m sorry. I can’t leave this room without trying to explain why I came too late. Though there is no explanation.

“Honey, I’m so sorry. I was just—at home. I could have been with you. I—don’t know why. I was asleep. It was a mistake. I don’t understand how—it happened.”

How faltering my words are, how banal and inane. As I’ve become physically clumsy this past week, so, too, I can’t seem to speak without faltering, or losing the thread of my thought. With Ray, I’ve talked about his work, his mail, household matters of the most ordinary sort. Nothing that I’ve said to him has expressed what I wanted to express. And now I can barely remember, though it was only a few hours ago, why I went to bed hours earlier than usual, why I imagined that tonight was a “safe” time to sleep.

That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought that I can’t confront it.

The murderer who swears that he doesn’t remember what he did, that he blacked out, that he had no reason, no motive—such behavior makes sense to me now. What is becoming rapidly mysterious is orderly life, coherence. Knowing what must be done, and doing it.

This hospital room is so cold that I’m shivering, though I have not removed my coat. It is the same red quilted coat I was wearing when the speeding driver slammed into our car and the air bags exploded, pinning us in our seats.

Soon it will seem to me that Ray died in that car crash. Ray died, and I survived. The two crashes will conflate in my mind. The crash at the intersection of Rosedale and Elm Roads, the crash at the Princeton Medical Center.

After the first one, we walked away giddy with relief. In our relief, we kissed and clutched at each other, for the pain hadn’t yet started.

In this room, Ray had complained of the cold, especially at night. Despite the fever he was running, he’d felt cold. Yet I can remember when Ray went outdoors in winter without a coat, in Windsor, Ontario. Frigid wind blowing from the Detroit River and the massive lake beyond—Lake Michigan. Younger then, less susceptible to colds.

My instinct now is to find a blanket, to pull a blanket up to Ray’s chin. He has only the thin white cotton sheet.

I know—I know!—my husband doesn’t require a blanket, or even a sheet. I know this and yet—I am not able to understand that he is dead.

Which is why I seem to be waiting for some sign from him, some private signal, for we’ve always been so close that a single thought can pass between us, like a glance. I am waiting for Ray to forgive me.

Just yesterday, in this room, at this bedside, leaning over my husband, I was able to cry, but now I am not. My mouth is as dry as sandpaper. For the first time, I notice that Ray isn’t wearing his glasses. They are lying on the bedside table, a wire-rimmed and rather stylish pair, to which he clips dark lenses in bright sunshine. Very slowly, I pick up these glasses, though I have nothing to put them in, for safekeeping; and here is Ray’s wristwatch again. The time is now 1:29 A.M.

In the closet are Ray’s clothes, shoes. There is his jacket, the one he wore on Monday morning. There, the striped blue flannel shirt and the trousers. I am fumbling to remove these clothes from the hangers; the shirt falls to the floor. In a panic, I am thinking, I will have to make two trips to the car. I will have to make two trips to the car.

If I leave this room, I will never be able to return. I will never be able to force myself to return.

A plastic bag has been provided for me, into which I can put my husband’s things. I am determined to carry everything in one trip and, somehow, I will manage this.

The books Ray has been reading, which he asked me to bring from home, and his shoes: in the plastic bag, these objects are strangely heavy and unwieldy.

“Honey? I think they want me to go now.”

My voice is thin, wavering. Perhaps it isn’t a voice but a faintly articulated thought.

Helplessly, I am standing here, thinking—the thought comes to me—There will never be a right time.

Meaning, a time to leave the hospital room.

Meaning, a time to turn my back, and walk away.

The last week of a long marriage.

From New Yorker, Dec 13, 2010.

Author

Peter

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