CHAPTER 3

The Lump

The Lump

DEE

It was John who found it.

I want that on the record, because for a year afterward, all those years ago now, I lay awake doing the arithmetic of blame — how did I not notice, I who noticed everything, I who could find a misplaced apostrophe in a farmer’s calf ad at forty paces — and the truth that let me finally sleep was that there was nothing to notice from the outside. He found it himself, shaving, one ordinary Tuesday, his fingers going still against the side of his neck the way mine had gone still against a comb thirty years earlier when Lou first told me her marriage had its own weather. A small firmness under the jaw. Nothing. A swollen gland. We both said swollen gland out loud, in the bathroom, in the mirror, the way you say the safe word first and let it stand in the room a moment before the real one.

It was not a swollen gland.

I will not walk you through the testing. Anyone who has done it knows the geography — the first scan, the wait, the second scan, the wait, the biopsy, the wait, the appointment they move up which is the worst sign of all, because good news is never in a hurry. I sat in those waiting rooms with John doing the crossword in ink because he refused, on principle, to plan for being wrong, and I loved him so much in those rooms I could hardly breathe, and I was already, somewhere underneath, beginning the terrible work I did not yet have a name for: becoming the rock.

Stage four. Throat.

The word throat has a cruelty in it that the other cancers are spared, because the throat is where the voice lives, and John’s voice — that instrument that sang the wrong words into my hair on twenty-five dance floors, that saved strangers’ lives in church basements one honest sentence at a time — the throat is the thing it came for.

He did one round of chemotherapy.

One. He came home from it gray and hollowed and could not taste the coffee that had been his one remaining vice for thirty sober years, and he was sick in a way that frightened even him, and after that first cycle he sat me down at our kitchen table and told me he was finished with it. Not the fight — he was clear about that — just the chemo. He had run the numbers with the doctors, the honest numbers, the ones about months bought at the price of exactly how those months would be spent, and he had decided. I’d rather have less of the good than more of this, he said. I’ve been sober thirty years to be present for my own life. I’m not going to spend the end of it too poisoned to be here.

I could have fought him. Some part of me wanted to fight him, the caregiver part, the fixer, the woman who had built an entire self out of being the one who does what must be done. But I had married a man who believed to his marrow that there is a solution for every problem, and that the only real error is failing to decide, honestly, what you believe is right at the time. He had decided honestly. He was not afraid. And I understood, sitting at that table, that my job had just changed — that I was no longer trying to keep him alive, I was trying to help him live, which is a different and harder assignment, and the one I would be graded on for the rest of my life.

So we made a list.

Everyone calls it a bucket list now, which cheapens it, but that is what it was — a piece of legal-pad paper, John’s terrible handwriting, the places we hadn’t gone and the things we hadn’t done, and we crossed off nearly all of it in the time he had left, because he was right, as usual, that the ride is the thing and not the destination.

We went to Alaska.

Of all of it, that is the one I keep. A cruise — of course a cruise, we ended as we began — up the inside passage with the glaciers coming down to the water like the front of a cathedral falling very slowly into the sea. And then an excursion, a small plane, north, to the Arctic Circle, because John had decided he wanted to stand on the actual line, the imaginary one, the one that isn’t there. We stood on a spot in the tundra where a guide assured us the circle ran, and there was nothing to see, nothing at all, just low green going on forever and a cold clean wind, and John held my hand and looked at the nothing and said, “This is my favorite place we’ve ever been.”

“There’s nothing here,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Isn’t it something.”

That was John. He could stand on an invisible line at the top of the world and be more purely happy than most men are at their own celebrations, because he had trained himself — thirty years, one day at a time — to live in the moment he was actually in, to pay attention, to look for the good in a thing and find it. His Zen, he called it, a study I always thought was a bit much and never told him so, and which turned out to be the machinery that let a dying man stand in a freezing nowhere and call it his favorite place.

But I am ahead of myself, the way grief always runs ahead of the telling. Before that final stretch at home there was the day the word arrived, and I have to go back to it, because a reader who has not sat in that particular room cannot know what it takes out of you.

The clinic had floor-to-ceiling windows and still the room felt closed and dark, the light coming in without warming anything. John and I sat in old wooden chairs and waited for the doctor, and John, who could not stand a silence he had not personally approved, spun the doctor’s empty stool with one finger and made some small joke about the upholstery. It did not land. It only made the waiting louder. I had my hands clasped in my lap, both palms damp, and I kept stealing glances at the door the way you watch a pot you have decided not to watch.

The physician came in, looked directly at John, and said, “It’s metastatic cancer, and it has spread to your bones.” I am certain there were other words. I cannot recall a single one of them.

I heard myself ask, “What stage?”

He paused. He looked at the floor — which is its own answer, the floor — and said quietly, “Stage four.” Again I am sure he explained. Again I heard nothing after the number.

John asked it the way he asked everything, straight on. “So how long do I have?”

“If chemotherapy works, three to five years. If not, six months.” Those are the last words I remember hearing in that room.

After the words stage four my heart cracked down the middle, the breath went out of me, and my mind simply came unmoored. Like prisoners we were walked to a second waiting room to sit for the radiation oncologist and his menu of options, and we sat there shocked and speechless, two people who between us had a great many words and not one to spare. I looked across that room at my husband. He looked exactly as he had six months before, when he rode his bicycle seventy-two miles in a single day for no reason except that he could. He looked, if anything, better than he ever had. You would never have known there were killer cells loose and traveling in him. He had always been a man who looked ten years younger than the number on his license, active, lit from inside by his ridiculous love of being alive, and there was stress on his face now, yes, but underneath it he looked so unbearably healthy that the diagnosis felt like a clerical error, a chart mixed up with some other, sicker man’s.

In the days after, I lay awake and wondered whether we would ever take a cruise again. Whether we would dance again. Whether I could survive watching him die. In those first months insomnia did me the one mercy it knows: it numbed the grief. Sleep was the enemy, because sleep stripped the numbness off and let the reality back in, and I would wake at three with my heart breaking and the whole of it fresh again. But I needed to be strong. There were decisions to make and I intended to make them wisely, and so I taught myself early, to feel less so I could function more. I did not yet know I was practicing a thing I would not be able to stop.

There is no clean way to describe forty-two months of dying. It is not a straight road down. It takes an enormous, unglamorous amount of energy, and it never tells you when the next thing is coming.

The hardest of my private challenges were his rallies. I would spend a week mourning some new decline, some line he had crossed and would not cross back, and then, without warning, he would surge — a burst of the old John, color in his face, mischief in his voice — and my heart would leap up like a fool and believe, again, that death had been called off. One day he could not safely cross the living room. The next he wanted someone to walk him around the block. The gap between what I was watching and what he was performing, between the private failing body and the public man who could still light a room, made me feel half crazy, as though I were the unreliable one, the one making it up.

His biggest rally came two weeks before the end. I was supposed to make a quick trip — forty-eight hours, no more — to accept an award for a feature I had written on a baseball player, back when I still had a working life that produced such things. John had been sleeping most of every day and had gone two days without eating, and I had quietly decided not to go, and our nurse was quietly agreeing with me, both of us thinking the same thing we were too superstitious to say. And John caught me at it. The instant he understood I was staying home for him, he rallied out of what looked like nothing. He arranged for two of the children to move in and cover him while I was gone. He started eating again. He started drinking his little sips of water again. He insisted I go, insisted he wanted me to go and needed me to go, and he promised me — promised, the way you let a man promise a thing no one can promise — that he would not die while I was away.

He told our oldest daughter, “No one knows how hard I am working to make sure Dee is at that meeting.” That was the whole of him in a sentence. Dying, and treating my award like a job he had been given, a last small useful thing he could still do with his hands. With our son-in-law’s help he joined the banquet by video, because God forbid John miss a party, and he sat propped at home and took in every word and let all that far-away love wash over him. And then, as I got closer to home, he came apart at the seams with wanting me back — texting me over and over, where are you, where are you now, needing me through the door.

When I walked in and saw him after two days gone, the change in him stopped me in the hall. I understood, standing there, that living in the house with him I had grown blind to his decline, adjusting to each loss as it came so that I never saw the whole slope at once. Two days away and back was like taking my hand off my own eyes. Whatever the last forty-eight hours had cost him to perform, the truth underneath it was plain now, and the truth was that he was, as he liked to put it, heading toward the waterfall.

To watch that man — my extrovert, my life of every party, my gorgeous loudmouth — begin to fold inward, to stare past me into some middle distance, to go quiet, was a pain I had no preparation for. The silence of his unspoken words, when I knew for a fact the words were still in there and only the strength to say them was gone, the new far-off look in his eyes — those went into me like bullets.

I guessed he had a couple of weeks. We would have fifteen days.

Even where the rest of the world couldn’t yet see it, we both knew the last days had come. He began saying his goodbyes, and he chose — that is the part I still turn over — he chose some people and not others, and I never learned the logic of it. He said goodbye to a few close friends, to his sons, to our grandsons, the one twenty and the one two, to our middle daughter. This man I had known better than I knew myself was, in those days, at moments a stranger to me. Why these and not the other daughters? Why not his oldest friend? Why not, some nights I let myself wonder, me? Each goodbye came wrapped in a specific memory, what that person had been to him, and to sit near enough to hear those sincere and beautiful words was both a privilege and a small ongoing heartbreak. His words came fewer every day, and every one that came was deliberate, chosen, spent like the last coins they were. The man of a million words was being hushed by the sheer cost of speaking.

One evening I brought his medications and he made a face — a scowl, plain refusal. He was trying to stay alert. He was trying to keep some last handle on the controls. We had talked about this exact moment more times than I can count: the point past which fighting the pain was no longer worth what the fight took, the point at which he wanted to be free of it. The pain had settled into his head and it was obviously winning, and he had told me again and again that if it came to a choice he wanted sedation over agony. So I reminded him of his own choice. I asked him if it was time to stop chasing alertness and start chasing comfort. He nodded. He let out a long breath and I watched his whole body come down off some ledge it had been standing on, and he handed the decision to me, and I took it. I gave him the medication without one second of hesitation, because I knew precisely what it would and would not do. But I understood something in that moment that all my years of reading caregiver accounts had never quite delivered: I understood why so many of them describe a terror I had been spared. They are frightened the strong medicine will be the thing that kills the person they love. I was not frightened. I only wished I did not have to know the difference.

He could not sleep in the hospital bed anymore. The anxiety and the shortness of breath were with him constantly, and his only real rest was upright in his recliner, so that is where he stayed, and I moved a mattress onto the living-room floor beside him and slept there. Somehow I woke every time he needed me, even when he made no sound at all — some animal part of me tuned to him in the dark. His humor did not leave when everything else did. He fought a running battle with the urinal, that undignified little device, and our daughters learned to step quietly out of the room to give him back some privacy, negotiating his dignity inch by inch. The frustration on his face as the two of us wrestled that thing together — this was a man who had once been stuck in traffic and made do with a paper cup, and this was another matter entirely. Finally I looked at him and said, “I know you’ve got some choice words in there. You want to say them, or should I say them for you?” That was all the permission he needed. Out came a magnificent, low-volume, full-passion string of profanity, every ounce of the old fury with none of the old lung behind it, and the stress broke like a fever, and our daughters laughed from the next room, and it pulled a smile up onto his face. A quieter clown now — but there he was, one last time, our clown.

You do not expect intimacy in the weeks before a death. There isn’t room for it; there is only savoring what you can, surviving the demands of the day, managing the endless small crises in rotation. And yet it was the urinal, of all the indignities on God’s earth, that gave me one of the most intimate moments of our entire life together. One of the last times he used it, he laid his hand over mine and looked at me, and then he leaned his forehead against mine and held it there. No words. He had almost none left and he did not need one. I knew exactly what he was saying. I will know it as long as I live. Unforgettable love.

When he could no longer swallow the Jell-O or the crushed-up pills, all of his hated medications became suddenly, mercifully beside the point. I called our physician and we stripped the toolkit down to patches and liquids and the tablets that melt on the tongue. Our oldest daughter brought Oliver, our two-year-old grandson, to say goodbye, and John reached out and took that tiny hand and gave the boy one last smile, the pride coming up through the exhaustion like light through a shade. We caught it on film. I have watched it more times than I will admit.

The final twenty-four hours were their own strange country — grief and effort and small mercies and smaller victories, all braided together. By then every exchange was one-sided. There were not even the small non-verbal signs left to us; the man who had expressed himself so fiercely for seventy years was silenced now in every channel he had ever used. Everything was gone but the going itself.

So I sat beside him and held his hand and said goodbye. I stroked his arm. I gave him a few of our private things, memories that belong only to the two of us and always will. I thanked him for loving me and for changing the entire course of my life. And I told him it was time — that he could let go, that although it would be hard I would manage, that we would manage, because he had prepared us for exactly this and prepared us well. He quieted under my hand. I felt his body let go of the last of its holding. And within a half-hour the noises stopped, the terrible labored breathing stopped, and he went — the way he had told me a hundred times he intended to go — straight over the waterfall.

His final year was mostly at home.

I went to part-time at the paper — they were kind about it, kinder than I expected — and I took care of him, and here is the thing I have never said cleanly to anyone: I was good at it. That is not a boast; it is closer to a confession. I was good at the medications and the appointments and the insurance calls and the turning of a body that hurt and the finding of the one food he could still swallow on a given day. I was good at being the rock. And somewhere in that good year I made a quiet, catastrophic bargain with myself that I would not fully understand until Gary asked me, five years later, when I had last done something purely because I wanted to — I decided that this, this, the doing-for, the being-needed, the rock, was what I was for now. That love was a thing you performed with your hands and your calendar. That my worth was measured in usefulness.

John saw it. Of course he saw it; he saw everything, right to the end, when he could barely speak.

Near the end he took my hand one night — his hand so light by then, all the John-weight gone out of it — and he pressed my palm twice, our old dance-floor code, I’m here, I’ve got you, except he was the one going and he was still, somehow, reassuring me. And he wrote on the little pad we kept by then, because talking cost him too much: You are more than a nurse. Don’t forget after.

I did not know what he meant. I thought I did — I thought it was thank you, dressed up — and I folded it away with the other things I could not look at yet.

He meant it as a warning. He knew me. He knew exactly the bargain I’d made and exactly what it would cost me, and he was trying, with a golf pencil and the last of his strength, to reach forward five years and stop me.

I didn’t listen. You never do, with the warnings; that’s what makes them warnings and not just advice.

The ship breathes around me. Lou sleeps. And I lie here understanding, the way you only understand at three in the morning on a cruise you didn’t want to take, that the tiny dancer in the red dress undid me tonight not because she reminded me that I lost John, but because she is doing the one thing his whole life was spent teaching me and his whole death was spent warning me not to forget: she is standing in the moment she is actually in, on an invisible line, in the middle of nowhere, calling it something.