The last morning

And on August twelfth it was of course a month. Time to get this done.

***

I remember lots of things, more than I will write.

I remember that Susan brought us raspberries from her garden that were amazing, the best raspberries that we had ever tasted.

I remember Gwen looking up at the nurses around her bed in the ICU room under the bright lights, when she had just been brought in and no one knew yet that there was no hope, her face big-eyed, pale, and trusting. (Oh, how I remember!) She had been in the hospital a lot when she was a small child, for very severe asthma, and so this was nothing new to her.

I remember the first night her mom and I slept in the family waiting room in the ICU, and I turned on the TV and turned the channels and found a strange channel where a surreal short film was playing, that was called Help, My Snowman’s Burning Down. Later I told Gwen about it and she said she had seen it, in class in high school maybe, or middle school.

I remember walking a couple of days later on heavy wobbly legs with Gwen’s dad, maybe going to the car for something, maybe to the cafeteria – it was as if Gwen’s weak legs had been contagious – and saying to him, “This playing to lose is one strange art.” Because that’s what the hospital vigil was.

I remember stroking her arm, a day or so before the end, and saying to her that I didn’t even know if this hurt now or if it still felt good, and Gwen, who had very few words left, smiled and said, “I like it…”

I remember lots of things, more than I will write, but not for long – it has been a month, and they are beginning to leak out of my ears. You know how life is – you don’t keep film. And what difference would keeping all of that make? But it is funny forgetting, because little bits keep leaping back in. This is strange vampire forgetting.

The other thing I learned about crying is that the big silent thing comes easily, you don’t have to do anything or will it, your lips stretch wide until all your teeth are bared and your eyes gush water and your breath comes out of your throat in a tiny, tiny hiss…

If you added consonants to that almost silent hiss, it would say pleeeeeeeeeeeeease.

There is no please.

***

(Do you know, my dear eighteen-year-old cat Ziffles, who in addition to getting more and more lost in her perceptual distortion where she always turns counterclockwise, has been losing her bathroom habits more and more, and, now that she has finally lost her good litterbox habits about urine as well as about poop, so that the scent of my room is more and more a fine mist of pee and she is starting to randomly do it in the rest of the house as well, my mom says we are going to have her put to sleep.

There’s really no alternative.

Last night’s news.

2012 is a hellish year. I will be glad when it is gone. Except that there will now be so little point to all the other years.)

***

So. After we had had our strange little mini-party for a bit, Gwen had some brief breathing problems that sobered us up, and then we were all really tired. I showed Christy the cafeteria, and as soon as there was something in my belly it was as if all my strings had been cut. We all wandered around and found places. Christy went and found a little bed-room in a family lounge area up the hall; I semiconsciously settled in a chair and put something (someone else put something?) under my legs…

I suppose I slept all right.

When I woke up it was a bright and sunny morning again, like all the mornings through this summer passage. The window wall glowed, with sun on the far end of the room. Somewhere in there a nurse came in and was speaking to us. She was talking to us about the signs we would see when Gwen started to go, and then she said with great pleasing confidence: but that won’t be for a long time; Gwen is strong; she’s nowhere near that yet; she’s going to last a good long while, she’s got a long way to go yet.

(I was aware of not having the slightest idea of which side I was rooting for. If Gwen was in pain – but no, I guess I did have an idea, I wanted her to show them all. I wanted her to go for weeks. I was proud of her.)

I think the thing was that they were unused to seeing a cancer like this in someone so young. 65 and older would have been much more familiar to them, from what the doctors were saying. But 34? I think they were in unfamiliar waters.

The jaundice was strong on her, by that morning. Her eyes… The yellow tint in the corners – it had gone away down in the ICU when they had been putting blood back in her. Now that for these last days they had not been doing that, the jaundice had been coming back, and now the whites of her eyes were awful, the corners were the hard yellow of fool’s gold.

I went and took a shower in the little bathroom off the room… I cannot remember whether it was before or after the quick shower that Gwen’s mom, the geriatric and hospice nurse, told me that she was beginning to see some signs that might mean it was close to the end. Would I still have taken the quick shower? I can’t remember. I did call my mom and say Grace had said she was seeing signs and that my mom might want to be here. My mom wouldn’t make it in time.

Whether before or after, I went in and took the shower, and dried myself off, and came out quickly, and that is how, I found out later, I watched my girlfriend die with my fly open.

There was a bubbling or foam sound in Gwen’s breathing. It was light. You couldn’t tell how serious it was. She might have tried to cough a little, but real coughing was effort out of her reach.

The thing with the morphine is that it takes away the panic feeling of not enough oxygen.

How do you recollect the pace of something that we didn’t quite know was happening, even though we did? (Or, we didn’t know it was then. Her mom was just another nurse guessing. Another experienced nurse guessing…) Christy was back in the room, someone had gotten her. We were gathered around the bed, Gwen’s parents, Christy, Liz, and me, and a nurse was there.

The last few things did not take long at all. You see, the nurse said that we could take the oxygen tube out of her nose, that with her mouth-breathing it was probably only drying her nostrils. (And I thought at the time what I have since confirmed with reading: Nurse, you have known that for days.)

So her dad and I gently took the oxygen tube with its two nostril nozzles away from from her nose. I think she was aware for that. I more than think. I have a movie in my head of her point of view, of her seeing out through her half-open eyes as we removed the oxygen feed. The finality of that… I think she took it as an indication, as the signal, as a… dismissal. I am sure she was fully conscious of it as that. We were taking off the oxygen. (Oh, God, what is that like?)

I am sure of that because – and also I think I told her, we all told her, right in there, that it was okay to go (liars, liars us all) – because I think it was not even sixty seconds later that she breathed out, and, watching, I knew just which breath it was.

It went all the way out, hard, the effort ending as if someone had set a weight down on the floor. There was another random ghost breath maybe twenty seconds later, but none of us thought it was connected to anything.

And, as I watched, the rosy pinkfaded out of her face, very fast, like magic, and left only the flat yellow-gray-green of the jaundice, because her heart was no longer beating.

I sat with her… a while…

I kissed her. I stroked her hair. I stroked her arm. She had liked it before, I liked doing it before, why would anything be different now? Even if I couldn’t know she could feel it; even if I knew she couldn’t. It is something, it is an amazing something, to understand how you can love a dead body so absolutely, and there be nothing strange about it, at all. She was my beloved.

I would never have done it, but I can now understand the wackiest end of taxidermy. Completely. And if the zombie apocalypse were to come I know that my reaction to seeing Gwen tottering along, in her present state, would be simple absolute joy.

After a while the bottom of her arm began to be mottled black and blue with the blood settling.

There is not much to say about the rest. There were more phone calls, I was tracking down the girl who worked at the funeral home. At least now when we slipped into talking of Gwen in the past tense it was accurate. Liz left for the airport. Mom arrived; a couple of visitors came; a couple of nurses spoke to us; both chaplains came. Christy went with one of the chaplains and picked out two quilts sewn by volunteers, one that would go with me and Mom – such a quilt! it is Gwen all over! – and another with cats that would go with Bill and Grace. I took a picture of the quilt spread over Gwen. Gwen’s mom was briefly appalled, but, no, I wasn’t taking a picture of Gwen’s yellow very dead face, eyes dully open, mouth open.

I had a last joke with Gwen, quietly.

We had picked up a joke habit from the webcomic xkcd where, after something completely innocuous, you say, “So. It has come to this.”

“I think we’re out of milk.” “So. It has come to this.”

So… at the end, her lying there, gone… I had to say it again.

And then somewhere in there it was time to take all our stuff and load it, and go back to the house, with the appointment at Rose City a little while later. And I said see you later to Gwen on the bed, and that I would see her soon. (Though never again her face.) And I walked out of her physical presence, and left her there to the professionals, and to refrigeration.

***

Listen to me, listen to me, I will show you something:

Mid June. The night after the night when I had looked at the growth on Gwen’s vagina and said, yes, that is something, I do think you need to have a doctor look at it. Gwen was starting the process of figuring out who she could go see; she was conflicted about Planned Parenthood, because of the abortion thing. We were in bed, and I had my laptop and was trying to Google pictures of … possibilities. Well, of vaginal cancer. There are no good databases where you simply just look through thousands and thousands of labelled medical pictures! There should be.

One of the photographs that came up under “vaginal cancer” – but not from a reliable source, from rather an odd source, so you couldn’t know what to make of the image … looked very like – very like indeed. I kept looking at other photos – but kept coming back to that one. Gwen watched me do this. She hadn’t seen it herself, remember. Only I had seen it. She watched me keep coming back to that photograph.

There was a moment, nose to nose, Gwen’s eyes full of terror.

She whispered: “Don’t leave me.”

Silly girl.

Silly girl.