The last thing Stephanie and I said most nights was, "I
love you" or "Good night," which meant the same thing.
"Good night, Doug. I love you." "I love you too, Steph. Sweet
dreams." It seems totally trite to type it, but spoken aloud between us,
it was a warm, reassuring way to end the day. It meant a lot to us. It meant
more than I understood while she was alive.
For the first month or so after Stephanie's death, I never
said good night. There was only the cat to say it to, and anyway, I was barely
and rarely sleeping. I'm sleeping better lately, sometimes even without pills.
There's still no-one to say good night to, and there never will be, and yet
I've started saying it again. "Good night, Stephanie. I love you."
It's sad and silly but soothing, saying such words as I click off the lights
and pull up the blanket.
* * * * * * * * * *
Not always or even frequently, but sometimes I still dream
that Stephanie is alive and well and at home.
In my dream last night, we were talking about what to have
for dinner, and I volunteered to cook, and she volunteered for me to not cook.
I'm a lousy cook, and she wanted something good to eat. But she settled
for cereal.
I was surprised that there was cereal on the shelf — I never
eat it, never buy it — but I wasn't surprised that Steph was in
the kitchen, walking around and hungry, and that she wanted some Rice Chex for
dinner. She often ate cereal, and sometimes had Rice Chex for dinner. It's
mild, which could be perfect when her belly wasn't going to be happy with
anything beefy or fishy or chickeny.
When I'm awake, I'm months past expecting Steph to be at
home with me, but in dreams like this she's so very, very much still my
wife, still Steph, still happy and stubborn and walking, and wanting to do
something fun this weekend. The dreams are never complicated; it's just Steph being Steph, and she or we are doing things we
routinely did — a picnic at the park, a drive to
nowhere in particular, or in my best and very favorite dreams, we're having a conversation.
Any of these dreams are delightful. It's waking up afterwards that sucks.
It never hits me like a sudden storm; no, it takes time before I understand. First, I reach out to her but she's not there, and
I wonder where she is. For so many years she's always been there, always,
whenever I wake up. So — huh? It just doesn't make sense; there's nowhere she
could be.
Did she work late? No, she sometimes worked overtime, but
never so late that I'd fallen asleep.
Did she take a trip without me? That happened exactly once,
and it only lasted a few days, so — no.
Did we have a fight and she'd stormed home to her mother?
That happened never, only in sit-coms on TV, so — no.
Then, as reality begins dripping in, I wonder if Steph might
be sick in the hospital, but even that doesn't make sense, because if she was
hospitalized, I'd be sleeping in a chair next to her hospital bed — so again,
like always, when one of us woke up the other would be there. But I just woke
up, and she's not here. It's a mystery, and I don't like it, and I'm not sure
where she could be. Why isn't she here?
It takes several minutes for my feeble mind to work its way
through these questions. Every time.
* * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes I ask the same question — Why isn't she here? —
when I'm wide awake. Did Stephanie, at least on some
level, die on purpose? The first time I asked that question, my immediate
response was NO! All caps, italics, with exclamation point. She loved
the heck out of me, and there's no way she would've left if she'd had a choice.
But there is more to it than that. With all of
Stephanie's health issues, we had discussed whether life was worth living, and
worst-case scenarios, and all that horrid stuff, in depth. Many times we talked about death, and sometimes about suicide. That's
how bad the hemodialysis was.
How can I convey the horror of it? Hemodialysis required
Steph to be at the kidney clinic early in the morning, every Monday, every
Wednesday, and every Friday. While she was there she was often treated coldly,
sometimes treated rudely, and always treated as a patient — and she hated being
a patient. She usually felt physically ill, beginning the moment she was hooked
up to the dialysis machine. The procedure regularly made her dizzy and
nauseous. She hated every minute of it, and it took four hours, and after every
treatment she was exhausted and had to sleep — so her day was over, even though
she'd only been awake for a few hours and those hours had been awful. In a very
real sense, then, dialysis swallowed three entire days, every week.
So yeah, several times she said, "I'm not sure life is
worth living," and on especially bad days — in pain, or in the hospital —
she occasionally said in so many words, "I wish I was dead."
Let me clarify this: Steph didn't bring up suicide often.
She mentioned it exactly three times during the year and a half she was on
hemodialysis. "I wish I was dead" was a line she used only at her
bleakest, most miserable points — perhaps half a dozen times over the course of
several years. She certainly never attempted suicide; she was just blowing off
steam. And I tried to talk her away from even saying such things, tried my best
to make something worthwhile out of the four days a week of life she was
allowed.
I responded with optimistic words, but I very much understood her frustrations. She wasn't just miserable
and barely present those three days a week; dialysis left her so exhausted that
she needed to sleep late the following day, leaving her with short days even on
days without dialysis. You'd have to be an especially empty-headed Mary Poppins
to live that life and not think at least once in a while about ending it.
After almost a year of asking to be switched to home
dialysis, when the change was finally approved it was like manna from Heaven,
and we were both very happy. Home dialysis was awful too, and it left
her exhausted, and she described it as "a new and improved form of
Hell," but it was an improvement. She felt like she had seven days
a week instead of four. And one afternoon, shortly after she had started home dialysis,
we were driving along West Washington Avenue, and we had a brief conversation
that I'll never forget.
"Remember," she said, "when I said I was
thinking about giving up?"
"I remember."
"Well, I want you to know, just in case the home
dialysis doesn't work out, that I've decided to stay. Even if staying means
going back on hemo and going to that awful clinic and having my life reduced to
four days a week, I'd want to stay. Because of you, I'd want to stay."
I had to pull the car over to the side of the road, because
my eyes were too watery to see. "Steph," I said, "that's
terrific to hear, and it's a big relief." Then a long pause, while I
gathered the words I wanted to say. "It's also the sweetest thing anyone's
ever said to me."
She kissed me in the car, illegally stopped in a bus zone
beside Brittingham Park, where we then waited a few minutes for my vision to
clear, before continuing home. In all the time we lived in Madison, we only
went to that park once or twice. That afternoon, we didn't even get out of the
car. Still, it's a memory and a conversation that replays in my mind every time
I drive that stretch of West Wash, and often when I'm nowhere near that part of
town.
So did Stephanie exit the world on purpose? Nope. Absolutely
not. But she was so weary of the doctors and doctoring, she was willing to
gamble a bit with her health, if it meant she wouldn't have to have yet another medical
appointment. That's what she did on purpose, by choice. That's why she didn't
make an appointment, when she was feeling poorly and not eating well last
summer — a few weeks before she died.
There are days when I can't shake my regret, my
unending regret, that I didn't demand that she see a doctor. I suggested
it, several times, but as always, we agreed that it was her decision, and she
wanted to wait and see if she'd feel better. She waited too long, and she
didn't see a doctor about it, until I found her crumpled beside the bed and
called an ambulance, when I came home from work one afternoon.
I'm always going to regret not demanding
that she see a doctor, but I can also hear what Stephanie said so many times.
"It's my body, my health, my choice. If you nag me too much to make a
doctor's appointment, I'll dig in my heels and never make an
appointment."
If I could go back in time and warn her when she
started feeling poorly, "This time it will literally kill you,"
I'm certain she would've made an appointment pronto. But without the fantasy of
time travel, all I said was, "You ought to see a doctor," and "I
wish you'd see a doctor," and "It would be a good idea to see a
doctor." I suppose the most powerful way I could've phrased it was,
"It might kill you," but I know what she would've said to that.
"If it kills me it kills me. I'll take that chance, because if it's not my
choice then I might as well be dead anyway."
In not seeing a doctor, she was taking a chance,
and she knew it. We were both too stupid to understand that the stakes were
life and death, not just sickness and hospitalization, but Stephanie knew she
was taking a chance. And I knew that she knew. So there's no-one to blame but
me and her.
But I also know that she wasn't choosing to die.
She was only choosing not to see a doctor, not yet. And that's not just a
rationalization, to make me feel better. Know how I know it's not? Because it
doesn't make me feel better. Not even a fraction of an iota.