CHAPTER 11

Dee's Truth

Dee’s Truth

DEE

He arranges the deck chair for me  — moves it out of the wind, adjusts the back, and, when I sit, slips my shoes off my feet without being asked. He does it the way a man does a thing he has decided not to make a production of, and sets my shoes side by side under the chair, toes pointing out, ready for me to step back into. I notice. I am noticing everything today.

“Catch me up on your life.”

“How do I summarize five years of grief?”

“Just start. I’ll keep up.”

So I start.

“After we last talked, my mother’s dementia became something I could no longer manage from a distance. My brother is in California; I was all she had. I moved. Within months I moved her to independent living, then to a facility in Kansas City, then to a hospice house.”

He doesn’t say anything, which is exactly right.

“I sat vigil twelve days. Alone. She had the worst form of it. She threw things at me. She said things that were not her and hurt anyway. I held her hand and explained my brother’s absence every time she asked, and watched them sedate her because we couldn’t get ahead of her anxiety. I was alone when she died. Alone when I kissed her forehead.”

“Dee. I’m so sorry. Losing my mother is the hardest thing that ever happened to me, and I wasn’t alone for it.”

“Two days after I scattered her ashes — two days, when I had just started to think my life might be mine again — my father had a stroke.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Stroke and dementia both. Personality gone. My stepmother was eighty-seven and frail and trying to care for him. I moved them out of a house they’d been in for thirty years. I watched my brilliant father fail to find the bathroom in his own apartment. I watched a stranger occupy his face and say vicious things to me.”

Gary’s hand tightens around mine.

“And I have a more-than-full-time job. So I did all of that and then worked until one in the morning. Every night. For a year and a half.”

I mean to stop there — I always stop there, that’s the tidy end of the story, the sentence that lets the other person off the hook and lets me off it too. But he’s holding my hand and looking at the water and not filling the silence, and something about not being rushed makes me want to give him the real thing instead of the summary.

“Do you want to know what a day of it actually looked like?”

“Yes.”

“Last fall my stepmother went into the hospital — they thought pneumonia. They put her on steroids and the steroids gave her delusions, so now I’ve got a frail eighty-seven-year-old woman who thinks there are people in the room and can’t be left alone. Same week — the same week, Gary — my father goes into a different hospital across town with his heart. Congestive heart failure. Forty miles between the two buildings.”

“Forty miles.”

“Forty miles, twice a day, sometimes three times, and still working, because the work doesn’t stop just because the people you love are dying in two different zip codes.” I can feel the day coming back up through me, the taste of gas-station coffee and hospital air. “And you cannot get a doctor on your schedule. You know this. Nobody can tell you when the doctor is coming — they round when they round, and if you’re not standing in the room when they walk through, you’ve missed them, and you’ll get a nurse’s version secondhand at nine at night. So I couldn’t sit and wait, because if I sat and waited at Dad’s I was failing Mom, and if I sat and waited at Mom’s I was failing Dad.”

“So what did you do?”

“I got them both at once.” I laugh, and it isn’t really a laugh. “I finally caught my father’s doctor doing his rounds while I was standing at my stepmother’s bedside forty miles away. So I put Dad’s doctor on speaker on the phone in one hand, and my mother’s doctor had just walked into her room, so I’ve got him standing in front of me — and I ran the two conversations at the same time. Out loud. In that little room. Because neither of them could come back another time, and I was not going to be the daughter who missed the doctor twice in one day.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me.

“I stood there taking notes on two parents in two hospitals with one pen. And the thing I remember — the thing I will never forget — is that some detached little part of my brain was almost proud of it. Look at her go. Look how she manages. As if the goal of a human life were to become the kind of person who can do that.”

“Nobody should have to do that.”

“No. But somebody did, and it was me, and here’s what I’ve learned about being the one who does it: everyone is so relieved you’ve got it handled that no one ever asks whether you’re all right. Why would they? You’re clearly fine. You’re running two hospitals with one pen.”

“When did he die?”

“A week after Thanksgiving. My second death vigil in two years. My third in ten.” I look out at the water. “And it isn’t over. My stepmother is still here. Fifty-four years married to my father. She’s lost twenty percent of her body weight since he died, and I’m watching that too.”

“Nobody should have carried that alone.”

“I’m exhausted, Gary. I haven’t grieved either of my parents. I’ve been surviving.” I laugh, and it doesn’t come out right. “I met you at what was probably the best moment of my life since John died. And then it all began.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“Can I say something that isn’t comfortable?”

“You promised you would.”

“When you told me about all that loss — the first thing I felt wasn’t sympathy. It was relief.” He makes himself hold my eyes. “Relief that maybe you’d been too busy to notice I was gone. That’s who I was five years ago, and I’d rather you know it than think better of me than I’ve earned.”

I don’t have an answer for that. What I have instead is the odd, unfamiliar sensation of being handed an unflattering truth by a man who had every opportunity to skip it. And I think, unwillingly: he’s right. I was too busy to notice. The two-hospital autumn was the year after he vanished, and the terrible truth is that I barely had a spare minute in there to miss him. My grief over Gary got in line behind two dying parents and waited its turn, and by the time there was room for it I had trained myself so thoroughly not to feel things that I almost didn’t recognize it when it finally surfaced.

“There’s something you should understand about me,” I say. “After John died, I learned never to need anyone too much. Dad’s death confirmed it. So I’ve become committed to leaving first.”

He looks confused.

“If I leave first, it might hurt less. Walking away has to be easier than being left behind.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while.

“Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer.”

“That’s generally been the pattern.”

“When’s the last time you did something purely because you wanted to?”

I open my mouth and nothing arrives.

“This cruise,” I say finally.

“Whose idea was the cruise?”

“…Lou’s.”

“Right.” He says it without any triumph in it, which somehow makes it worse. “Dee, in the last twenty minutes you’ve told me about three people you took care of and one job you did at one in the morning. You haven’t told me one single thing you like.”

“I like plenty of things.”

“Name one.”

And I sit on the back of a ship in the sun and cannot immediately produce one, and it is the most frightening thing that has happened to me all day — more frightening than seeing him at that table, because at least that fear was about him.

“That isn’t fair,” I say. “You don’t get to do that.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” And he means it; I can see he means it. “I’ll drop it.”

“No.” I put a hand up. “Don’t drop it. Just don’t be clever about it.”

Then his watch buzzes. He glances at it, and something crosses his face.

“Dee — I have to go. There’s something at four.”

And he stands and leaves, and I sit alone at the back of a ship watching the wake, and every alarm in my body goes off at once.

Of course, I think. Of course.