Lost Before Dying

After Stephan's surgery for pancreatic cancer, for a year and a half, he was constantly, visibly, trying not to die.  Thick shakes with weird ingredients became the focus of his day, twice a day.  He tried to pick up his three-mile fast walk routine where he left it off, but ironically, removing the tumor didn't remove the pain of walking, but only changed it.  But he tried, daily.

He gave up his beloved cigars the day of the surgery, and when his doctor finally gave him the kiss of death by telling him he could go ahead and smoke again, he wasn't even tempted.

Our lives together centered around food, home cooking, Greek and Italian, food from the amazing garden we worked together.  He loved food, and lost his taste for it.  He would find something that at best tasted good and at worst didn't make him nauseated, and try to eat it on a regular basis, like a certain sliced turkey breast from Costco, and then take a couple of bites and put it aside.

After his surgery, he was no longer able to read.  When he visited Charleston in the past, it gave me great pleasure to bring a stack of books home from the library that I thought he would enjoy, and he would spend three weeks sitting on the porch, smoking cigars and reading.  During his last visit, he only read one book, a Discworld book that he found on my shelf that he thought he had missed.  I was so happy he found it and enjoyed it, but his desire and ability to focus never extended beyond that.

He tried to stay on top of politics, but damn, in his place I can't see him giving a shit what was going on.  He continued till near the end to try to be there for me when I needed to vent about problems, but his attention wavered, and I felt awful bothering him, so our telephone conversations were mostly about his health, and they were short and unhappy.  When I had lost his attention, he ended the call.

He lived with his daughter, and she cared for him in a way few could have done.  But she would send us all emails filled with really personal medical details, which angered me because they seemed to suck away his independence, his adulthood.  In the last couple of weeks, she answered his phone and spoke for him.  For all I know, he may well have been sitting there, shaking his head "no" when I asked to speak to him.  Or he may have been barely conscious.  Or she may have just wanted to take over the whole thing.

That was four years ago.  Less than a year ago, someone I had only just begun to know was diagnosed with cancer, and days after a successful surgery died from a massive heart failure.  We were stunned that a woman who had been so vibrant could so quickly be gone.

And then a woman who I had recently begun playing tennis with told me this story:

She had been at the courts the weekend before, watching a match, and a woman who was playing dropped onto the court and died instantly of a heart attack.  She was in her fifties.  When I reacted with shock, she said, "No, no, no, that's the way I want to go.  She was doing what she loved, and she never had any pain."

I remembered this when my sister died suddenly last month.  Jennie had just taken early retirement and as soon as the weather permitted, she began to do what she has always -- ALWAYS -- done: sit in the sun.  I imagine six or eight hours a day, minimum, she sat in the sun.  She didn't drink alcohol and assured us that she stayed hydrated.  We didn't know why, but we knew she was loving it.  Until one day she came into the house, went to bed, and never woke up.

Yesterday, my good friend Penny died.  She had been fighting for her life for two years and through three hospitalizations.  She was obstinately private about her health, so all we could do as she became more frail and obviously unwell was worry among ourselves.  We only knew things were bad when she would not show up at a luncheon she had scheduled and we learned she was in the hospital.  This last time, she instructed her son not to tell us which hospital she was in, although I don't believe a one of us would have showed up without an express invitation.

Anyway, it is a tremendous loss.  It is for another day to write about all the things Penny did to support me in her own brusque way, and how she brought so many of us together.  I will say that, after the awful 2016 election, Penny was determined to make a difference, and formed another group, which we ended up calling SWAT -- Smart Women Against Tyranny.  At one of the first formative meetings, I recall her barely being able to attend to what was being said.  This group was so important to her, and she had to work so hard to stay with it that day.  And then she had the first of the hospitalizations.

Over the next two years, my heart broke as my good friend became more confused, lost more weight, worried and suffered her health problems, and tried so hard to stay with us.

With Penny in the hospital, I organized the bi-weekly luncheon for yesterday.  None of us knew what was going on with her, so as we ate, one of us texted her son.  He replied immediately, that Penny had died that morning.  As we talked about what she meant to us, I realized that we were sitting in the restaurant where we had met, when I joined the group she was leading, Reading Liberally.  I pointed to the table we sat at, and remembered that I was the second one there that night, walking in to see her tiny figure sitting at that round table.

I have been mourning Penny for awhile now.  While I have been hoping for her to find that magic cure, I have missed the Penny that, when she was my age (67) went to Afghanistan to teach and wrote about it, and later went to Jordan, and rode a camel.  She continued to write and as far as I know was working on a novel.  She continued to organize our group, and donate her time to her favorite political candidate.  She continued to passionately hate what was happening to our country.

So as time passes, I will remember the Penny who had the health and the energy to do things that were daring, and to get us all involved.  I will miss the times we met for drinks and dinners, and the confidences about our past that we shared.

As I ruminate with others that are wrestling with our mortality, we have talked about going suddenly or lingering with an illness.   I am hoping that I have the courage -- and the choice -- to not linger before I am more of a worry than a companion.  At this point, with only one sister left and my first granddaughter on the way, I just want to shout STOP.  I don't want to do this.  But the other part of me that has been working on death and dying since I watched my husband do it four years ago says that I need to just live for the day, to appreciate what I have now.  I remind myself that everybody dies, and in the end, in the context of all the universes there are, my dying is truly no big deal.

But meanwhile, because we have the gift/curse of consciousness, we will experience the loss of friends and family as losing part of ourselves.  So cry today, and keep the memory, not of how they died, but how they lived.