There is no easy way to say this: Kitsap River has passed.
Over a decade ago I wrote this diary about my beloved’s bravery in enduring the pain of dialysis, five nights a week. Since then we’ve known joy and grief, highs and lows. We argued, as couples do, but never wavered in our love for each other.
She has been ill for a few years, suffering from a systemic blood infection, diabetic keto-acidosis, a painfully broken foot. It seemed as though we were in the hospital every six months, for one thing or another. Yet she always rallied, always spat one more time it the Reaper’s eye. But this past Sunday was different.
It started with another bout of gastric distress, vomiting six or eight or a dozen times a day until there was nothing left but bile to bring up. Last night, though — Tuesday, January 26 — she started becoming incoherent and moving jerkily, spastically. In the wee hours of this morning — January 27 — I finally got her to lie down next to me on our bed and held her close, but then she sat up abruptly and toppled onto the floor.
I no longer have the strength in my back and arms as once I possessed, and I couldn’t lift her back onto the bed. So I called the paramedics, who judged it best to take her to a nearby hospital. But while we were waiting to turn around at the end of my driveway, one of the paramedics came to tell me she was showing signs of a stroke and so we’d be going to a hospital in Tacoma with better facilities.
The ambulance sped ahead of me, unencumbered by red lights and traffic, so when I finally arrived at the Emergency Room I was told to have a seat in the waiting area, and a doctor would be out shortly. Time passed, and eventually a physician let me know that River, my darling indomitable River, had had a major brain bleed involving both hemispheres and too many areas.
The attending neurosurgeon said that an operation to relieve the swelling and drain the blood wasn’t survivable, that she would most likely die on the table — and if by some chance she lived through the procedure (how can I put this?) her quality of life would be nil.
I called her mother in California, and my daughter Miriam who lives nearby. The whole family — her sister in New Jersey, her brother who lives near Shanghai — met via Zoom to cry together, reminisce, and realize that releasing River from her mortal shell was the kindest course. After all, she wasn’t there any more.
They removed her from the respirator shortly after noon today, and moments later she breathed her last.
It was so swift, so sudden; hell, on the 26th she was still reading and recommending diaries here. She’d even phoned her mother just last night. And now she’s gone.
My beloved is gone, I am bereft and numb and overwhelmed with sorrow. Our seventeenth wedding anniversary will be next Sunday, January 31.
River Anne Curtis-Stanley, December 10, 1959 — January 27, 2021.
Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again, my love.