Now I’m stuck here on this earth without him. Now, of all times. We were married for more than 43 years, and I would daydream about the possibility of having a 50th Anniversary party with the family and a few friends one day. Surely we would make it. We stomped bladder cancer once. Felt invincible.
Social parties were a thing I would mull over, the way I used to dream about how my wedding would be when I was a little girl. The occasional thought, that’s all. Pretty dresses, all that jazz. And Honey likes a nice party. He’s usually the life of any party. I could always tell where he was at family gatherings; I would just follow the delighted screams of, “Uncle Johnny!”
I would just like to note here that neither our wedding nor our subsequent life turned out to be anything like my vague, gauzy fantasies pre-marriage where your kids are happy all the time, and fighting words are seldom heard. You’re probably young if it’s your first marriage, and you have no clue what the word “sickness” can mean. The good times will roll. You’re young and healthy. Promises are easy then.
We had a church wedding, because it seemed important to Honey’s mother. I really didn’t want to get married at the country club, so we got married at the church Honey was confirmed in, and where his Mom was a deacon. I used to tease her about being in charge of Everything, and while she was still youngish, she was Very active. Sunday School Teacher, the whole 9 yards. She was Presbyterian. Coincidentally, Honey and I both attended Sunday School in our respective hometowns and churches as Presbyterians until we hit high school. We now belong to the Church of Nature. The warblers will convert you.
I tend to get weepy at inopportune moments; like during our wedding ceremony, while Honey held my hands in his and said his vows in his strong, clear voice, he made me go all squishy and sentimental, and I pretty much cried my way through my part of the vows. He was so handsome it hurt. My friends tease me about crying at my wedding to this day.
I am writing this diary tonight because sleep is laughing at me. My Beloved has left me and I am alone. He passed away at 1:36 am two days ago, and since he’s been gone, I seem to be having a great deal of trouble getting my head to turn off enough to get much more than a couple hours at a time. So many lists, so much to do….
This diary may well end up with other 122 things that I started to write and decided for one reason or another, not to publish. But I cannot sleep and am enjoying the memories riffing through my head.
As for many of those unseen drafts, you should all be grateful for my restraint.
We had a pretty good marriage mostly because Honey was easy going. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t try that man’s patience full sore. Regularly and often. I have made mistakes that make me want to cringe in shame even 20 years later. I am a difficult woman, at best, and gods help me, I have an evil temper. Sometimes my tongue gets ahead of my brain. And there’s my personality disorders, some PTSD, an alphabet soup of personality problems.
But that man loved me, faults and all, and you know how things go sometimes? The thing you think is some Giant Tragedy at one point in your lives becomes a touchstone for hilarity a few years down the road. I’m trying to drive this piece to funny, because I need to remember the smiles we had. Stuck in the mud, it looks like. For now.
I remember his first cancer, and the surgery went so wrong, Stitches came apart inside of him, and I did not tell him how washing out that stuff works, because he doesn’t need to hear it. Death only missed him by an hour then. That’s where I first saw Staff make that Collective Face, that Holy Carp, This Guy Is In Trouble face. And he was. For months. Post near death experience on his part, one day he told me that he really didn’t think I’d stick with him, sick as he was. He was sure I would run away and join the circus. Or something. I stuck. I learned wound vacs. I learned kidney flushes, I learned more nursing that I ever wanted to know about. But I stuck. And with the exception of a nurse a couple times a week it was just us alone for the 9 more months it took to heal his sepsis scarring. I would like to borrow a “no, no, no” to rehab facilities from Amy Winehouse.
I worked in so many of those places, and so no, we would go home, and it is not too much work for me, so plans to go home or dump him in the car on discharge; he will die in one of those places. He needs his therapy cats;
In the end, we won out, and we went home, and Honey was so happy to be with the cats in a normal place that he got better much sooner than if I listened to their advice. There might have been some shouting about going directly home at a weekly discharge planning meeting, because this was the 6th meeting, about the same thing. “ This is discharge planning? Good. Write up the discharge papers he is going home with me.I saw that list you gave me of “suggested facilities to tour," and I have worked for 95% of those owners in a financial capacity or on a more personal level inhouse, so quit it. I can kill him faster and more nicely. I got slightly loud, but just a firm sort of loud. I never left him alone at the hospital and if you think you’ll get him to allow me to leave because visiting hours are over, oh please he will fight you on that. He might not weigh much, but the man has a wicked tongue and he is relentless. Be reasonable, give me back my man who wants to go home.
Psh. Of course I stuck. I’m kind of on the fence about religion; promises to God are really just bargaining, mostly, but I stood in front of perhaps 100 people, many of them his family, and promised to love this man forever. God might not strike me dead (unless I’m on an electric fence and get zapped for doubting), but I did promise in front of his family and friends to take care of him. It would be dishonorable to renege.
Honey’s much more mellow, minor personality tics ran in saner territory than mine; he didn’t drink and he didn’t do drugs (medical marijuana does not count), and he didn’t chase women, even when they occasionally chased him. He was not perfect, and he did have a mania for collecting comic books, sports cards, action figures, pops…..oh, how he loved his “little things.” We still have the Christmas ornament that he made in 1968, things, things, things...a lifetime of accumulation.
Part of me realized that his constant collecting was compensation for being the 7th out of 8 children in his family. A Schwinn Pea Picker wasn’t ever going to be within his childhood reach; I think he had a knock off Huffy. So I tolerated a lot of his Stuff Accumulation, and let him “decorate” the house. My entire dining room consists of Pops on 3 sides….you see, he’s a bit obsessive about his toys. Fine. I surrendered years ago. My own decorating ideas have long been steamrolled by toy clutter; it was easier to give in.
Here is the best example of his determination to compensate as an adult for not having “things” when he was a child. We went to Park City, Utah for a wedding, and were spending the afternoon window shopping. Looking is free, and I am cheap,
Wouldn’t you know that in the window of one of those stores, there was a teeny replica of a Schwinn Pea Picker. Gear shift, the whole thing. It seemed pricey to me, but I let him buy it. Right now, it is still on our mantle in the living room. He loved that silly toy.
People who have read some of thing things I’ve written are already aware that bladder cancer and sepsis came for Honey in 2016, nearly killed him, and 3 years later, a totally different cancer, sarcoma, reared its’ ugly head. Unrelated. By now, we have been trying to stave off the inevitable demise of Honey for the last 3 years. Honey is 6’5” and I am 5’3” and for me push him and his oxygen the mile and a bit we have to traverse between port draws and chemotherapy at the very large hospital is a long slog sometimes. Neither of us is getting younger.
Chemotherapy wasn’t helping him much after a few trial rounds, and the open sores on his leg led them to suggest immunotherapy.
Maybe immunotherapy works better for people who aren’t Honey. But I’m whining about the inevitable, oh, woe is me it didn’t work for him. It doesn’t for everyone. For Honey, some of the side effects were hard for him to deal with. For instance, when I die and go to the bad place, my eternal punishment will be to be stuck in a library without my reading glasses.
The therapy affected his eyesight and ability to read quite a bit. It upset him. Like my own personal hell; I can relate. The newspaper began to annoy him. Fortunately, there is preseason baseball and sportsball or talking about sportsball on TV every day. As the days went on, he cared less and less what was on TV, he just liked the noise. Baseball soothed him, and I could still see him mentally unmooring his leaky little rowboat self from the pier, setting himself apart, drifting. Letting go.
Honey won’t be meeting me at my library in hell; he will be in the happy section of the collective consciousness, and his best cat, Roger will, no doubt, be right there to greet him. Roger the Best Boy (Neutered) Cat that worshipped Honey, passed away while I held him one recent night, and I knew that after Roger left, Honey wouldn’t be far behind him. Roger passed a week and a half before Honey.
Sometimes being right sucks.
The same week that Roger started showing signs of slowing down, so did Honey. Man and Cat have always had this bond that tied them together in some mystical way. Roger didn’t come and live with us until he was 2, but whenever Honey visited Roger’s old home, Roger would just be all over him. But Roger the Cat had slowed, then quit eating. Then drinking. And he left peacefully, or so it appeared as I held him. Within a day or two, Honey mostly withdrew from food as well. Another side effect of the medication was that as he said, “it feels like I smoked 10 gallons of pot, and now I’m so cottonmouth-feeling, that the food won’t break up in my mouth.”
A couple times he had a hard time swallowing anything, nearly choking, and I settled for just offering him snacks often. And a supplement. Within a week, we were on a 3 popsicle a day diet, and he was starting to lose his mind. Confusion started to be the norm. “No, Honey, you are not 28 years old, I’m sorry,” He would become irate when that horrible phone wouldn’t turn on the TV, and I couldn’t leave the room for longer than 5 minutes, before he’d be calling me to come and sit with him. Sure. I can clean house later. Honey was Now. Dirt is forever.
We were doing so well at home for a few weeks. If he wasn’t going to eat, I wasn’t going to make him, and he told me he had enough of his life like this while he was still lucid. Sure an 85” TV is great, but not for what amounted to about 3 full years of sitting in his chair, dropping weight the way I’d drop pennies in a wishing well, listening for things to hit bottom.
We bumbled along, one popsicle at a time while I watched the pounds melt off him. I’d check his skin often, because bedsores hurt, and I could about see his tailbone by now. I got complacent. I figured that we’d go another week or so, and then he just wouldn’t wake up one morning. I hoped. I wanted so badly for him to be able to stay home and leave the world in peace without having to make an emergency run to a local hospital. He really doesn’t like hospitals.
It was going so smoothly that I thought giving him a (name brand supplement) might give him a little more energy, a bit more time. Big mistake. His swallowing difficulty returned mid-swallow of that thick stuff, and he aspirated a good deal of the drink. I think 10 seconds passed before he could drool what he could out of his lungs. I could hear it, sloshing around in the wrong place. He tried to settle down from almost choking to death, but he couldn’t. And he couldn’t get comfortable, or breathe well, no matter what position I put him in, what chair, I tried a lot of things.
Aspiration pneumonia is painful and not a joke, and I started to think 911 was my only answer. Honey wheezed a refusal for an ambulance.
I was really starting to be afraid, as Honey then asked if any of the kids were around, he thought he might like to go to the hospital. We have no car, and are dependent on our adult children to help us. Works well 90% of the time. One adult child works, and the other was out running errands, so when Honey’s friend with a big truck said he was going to stop by with comics any moment, he agreed to help me get Honey to the hospital, said he’d be there in about 10 minutes.
We poured poor semi-conscious Honey into the front seat of the Too Tall Truck, and we took off for the hospital. I was holding Honey by the shoulders from the rear seat so he wouldn’t hit his head on the dashboard, or worse, slide onto the front floor mats.
I hit the ER entrance, assured the guard that I had no weapons and some people bundled Honey along behind me. He looked at Honey and practically escorted ne to Intajem while Staff tried to bring Honey’s O2sat up. I finished papers in record time, saying “Here is his insurance card, here is his driver’s license, and here are the lawyer drawn up Healthcare Rules that Honey requests you abide by.” Basically it was lawyerese for “don’t touch me unless you’re going to make me comfortable.” It just sounds fancier on the document.
They had him in bed immediately, ran some saline and an antibiotic, some fentanyl might have been mentioned, but Honey never liked that stuff, and he always said he wasn’t in any actual pain. I watched the people who set him up in the bed hook him up to the beepy machines, and noticed when they looked at eachother they gave eachother that kiij that says, “this will go badly.” V tach, much? I have spent enough time around nurses that I know when a look is A Look.
I explained to them when we came in that this was probably IT and I am not going to scream and carry on, this is what he wants, and I’m just the Enforcer. They smiled. Said they understood. Also, “what a big document you have, my dear,”
Everyone that came into Honey’s private cubicle to do something, adjust a machine, or hand me another form, offer us water;every single person in the ER that night was so kind. One of the kids(sorry, but I’m old and think the cops often don’t look old enough to drink made a “so we’re not cracking his chest then, eh?” joke which earned him a “Not unless you want me to crack yours, thanks.” Black humor. The last hour he was alive, the ER doc started stopping by every 10 minutes, and then every 5, because he wanted to do things right for Honey. Such a nice man.
Some people get really loud and colorful in the ER, and we heard some of them. Because they were really loud for a little bit. I had no idea there were that many ways to put m****rf****r in one sentence. I’m not sure, but I think that if you are respectful to Staff, you are more likely to get what you ask for rather than cursing Staff out because they didn’t anticipate that you’d want a blanket.
Despite how busy they were, several people asked if we’d like to move to a room where he’d have a more comfortable bed, and maybe rest easier. By that time one of Honey’s eyes was rolling one way, the other opposite, so I just pointed to the state he was in, thanked them, but said that if they could just close the door Honey didn’t care one bit about what bed he was in. And according to the doctor, who was straight up and honest with me, he wasn’t going to be anywhere much longer anyway. So we stayed, and I talked and talked and told him how I was looking forward to his annoyance with me when he woke up and had been forced to to listen to me telling him it was okay to go, it’s been hard, I love you, I love you, please be at peace. Was looking forward to his derision in a week, but I knew I was lying to myself.
So I put my hand in his, leaned my head onto the bedrail, and a few minutes later he squeezed my hand and I felt him Leaving (sounds loony, but I did). I checked his carotid pulse (not my thumb) and nothing was there, so I tried his wrist and I knew he was gone then. A minute or two later, Doc came back in and confirmed what I already knew.
The entire incident took about 6 hours. Oh, dang, I’m going to miss that man. Silly things just pop into my head like, “Oh, there’s a Cooper’s Hawk in the back yard, I should go tell…...” and then I remember he’s not there.
This is going to take some time to process. It’s like I saw some truck barreling down the road toward us, and we didn’t move because we thought we had more time. Slow moving truck. Wrong.
Speaking of time, I believe I’ve take up enough of you kind people’s time with this note. Thank you.
