Tuesday, December 24th…Sitting with Bill in Dominican Hospital, Santa Cruz.
We arose at 4:45 this morning because we had to report to the hospital at 6:15 a.m.
Bill was scheduled to have a pacemaker installed…his ninety-five year-old heart was showing signs of aging.
Naturally we were worried about surgery but wouldn’t admit it to one another. Still the procedure was to be under local anesthetic by a surgeon who ONLY does pacemakers, has done so for thirty years. Figures he’s embedded hundreds. What’s to worry about?
Just to mention that I’m sitting beside my husband while he listens to his book (Bill’s preparing a lecture series for spring on the mystery novelist Michael Connelly, by now has listened to most of Connelly’s forty-one novels). I’ve brought my knitting—I’ve been working on a merino wool blanket for granddaughter Sarah-Leah’s new baby, Zoe Naomi…I intended Zoe to come home from the hospital snuggled in it but she is now nearly two months old and l have six inches to go.
One of my shortcomings is that, in exuberance, I can impulsively plunge ahead on a project, don’t always stop to think through the whole damn thing…I could have finished in time for Zoe’s first drive home if I’d chosen larger size needles, thicker yarn, a simpler stitch. But if I live long enough and there are enough more great-grandbabies, it’s a fine lesson learned. Upsetting but fine. And Sarah-Leah is wonderfully patient.
Now I should mention that an element of our sitting together amid the oppressive hush of a hospital’s surgical pavilion is that not long ago Bill and I were sitting stonily in a room of another hospital–St. John’s in Santa Monica–watching my son David slowly dying.
Too many hospitals.
I have no antipathy for hospitals. On the contrary, I have a deeply warm feeling for them.
This began when my nine year-old son Benjamin fell out of a friend’s tree onto a stick that pierced a vein in his thigh and he was bleeding internally but we didn’t know it, circumstances in the E.R. of Santa Monica Hospital plucked a young vascular surgeon from his free Saturday afternoon and saved Benjamin’s life. As a consequence, I asked Benje’s nurse how I could give back to the hospital. Matter-of-factly she said, “Volunteer.”
After that every Friday afternoon I was The Juice Cart Lady. Went all over the hospital. Loved it. Learned worlds. Principally I learned that I never knew what I’d face when I entered a room with my cheery, “Would you like a nice glass of apple or orange or tomato juice?” I’d lived a sheltered life and became proud of myself for situations I wouldn’t have thought I could handle but got through. Occasionally–rarely, but enough that it distressed me—usually on the cancer floor I’d realize I couldn’t cope with a patient’s condition. After a few months I made myself ask the Director of Volunteers if it was okay if I didn’t go on the cancer floor (Floor Five, as I recall). Instead I could—and did–spend the equivalent time helping in the kitchen. Big moral failure, I was ashamed of myself. But at least I’d faced it, been honest.
Time came when we moved to the San Jacinto mountains and there was no hospital for tooling around with a juice cart. But a new friend, Jo-Carroll Dennison, former Miss America and now Public Relations Director for the new Hemet Hospice, one day said, “Sylvia, you’d make a good Hospice volunteer. We need you.” Hospice was a new term—by coincidence I’d recently read it in a letter from an aging friend in the east whose husband was mortally ill. Glenna wrote, “I don’t know that I could survive with Mac without Hospice.” Gulp. The Juice Cart had not prepared me for talking to people I knew were dying.
But I made myself commit to it. My then husband Gene went with me (“I’m not letting you drive down to Hemet and back at night by yourself”). Every Monday night for seven weeks we learned how to cope with death. Gene took the course, too, and his comedy writer’s contribution to the class: when we were graduating, the instructor asked for suggestions for bumper stickers, and Gene murmured, “How about, Honk if you’re dying!” Came the great balm, laughter.
My assignments were to relieve the patient’s caregiver once a week, do whatever was wanted over a morning or afternoon.
I had several patients and it was a marvelous experience for me to leave my typewriter, drive down the mountain, pass quiet hours with someone I likely would not have met in my cloistered life… A wise-cracking redhead who’d worked thirty-five years in a paint factory and I played Hearts (she always won, no cheating). A lumberjack and I enjoyed latch-hooking rugs (his was marvelously geometric). A beautician who met her boyfriend of a Sunday morning at Denny’s…her grown daughter did not like him and tried to make me promise I’d never drive her mother to the Denny’s on Florida Avenue but I didn’t and did…the daughter had me removed from the case…I was stunned but kept tabs on my friend and when she went into the hospital, one night I stole into her room and gently gave her a hug…the pleasant surprise made her laugh. Now I can count on one hand the times in my life I’ve done something I really wasn’t supposed to and I grinned like a Cheshire Cat all the drive home…
So I’d made friends with Death. Wasn’t crazy about it, of course, but its fearsomeness had dropped away. Gene died in my arms. My mother died in my arms. My beloved German Shepherd, Lady, died in my arms. And a few weeks ago when I was with my firstborn child David I was fully able to embrace his bony gray head, kiss his skeletal face, sit beside him till literally he took his last breath. I was okay. That is, I was not frightened. I was accepting. Major.
Back to today with Bill. Thank heaven the surgery went by the book, and just now the surgeon stopped by, quipping, “Well, Bill, you’re good for at least another five years…”
Time to go home. How wonderful.
But there’s more to learn.
I have not yet figured out how to come to terms with Grief.
Stars from Ukrainian photographer Mariia Vasileva, Dreamstime.com
