Innocent Spouse (4 page)

We’d been there only a week ago for New Year’s. It was a continuation of the good times we shared in the Caribbean. Except Howard had a cough. Not a bad cough but a nagging cough. “I feel like shit,” he’d say.

“Have the hotel call a doctor,” I advised. But no, too much fuss.

“I’ll see Goldstein when we get home,” he promised. Kenneth Goldstein was his hematologist. Howard had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia several years earlier. There was no cure for CLL, though many people live long normal lives with the disease. Howard’s was stage zero. Though I had a meltdown when he was first diagnosed, he was stoic, and we both learned it was just something that had to be minded.

Howard’s cough persisted and was not better when I had to turn around and head back to New York with Larry King immediately after
the holiday. Howard assured me he would see his doctor. I phoned Dr. Goldstein from Washington’s Union Station and left a message for him to call Howard. The rest of the week I called home often. The conversation that haunts me still was from one of the wooden phone booths at the 21 Club, where Larry, the executive producer Wendy, and I had lunch with the publisher of John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s magazine,
George
. We were in the center of the front room at the A-est of A-list tables with every boldface name in the place doing a drop-by to greet Larry. But my mind was on Howard. I slipped away to the phone.

The anger in his voice was shocking and confusing. “I feel horrible. I can’t believe you’re there and not here taking care of me.”

“C’mon, Howard, we discussed this trip. You said I should do it, that you would go to the doctor. I asked Dr. Goldstein to call you. Can’t you get yourself to the doctor?”

“That’s not the point. You don’t care about me. You just want to be in New York.”

“Howard, seriously. I’ll come home right now if that’s what it takes, but please go to the doctor.”

He didn’t back down. “I can’t believe you are doing this to me,” he said. “You should be here taking care of me.” When we hung up I was gutted.

That evening I called from the hotel. His spirits were much brighter. “I went to see Goldstein,” he said. “He put me on antibiotics, an IV in my arm just like when I had Lyme disease.”

“Thank God. Do you want me to come back in the morning?”

“No, no. Stay up there. Do your work. I’ll be fine. Much better already. The drugs are working. I can feel it.”

After a pretape of the show, Larry and I were on familiar ground, the back of a town car on our way to a movie premiere, this one a new Woody Allen movie. “How ya doin’?” he asked. “We’ve had quite a week. Dinner with Al Pacino, now a party with Woody Allen. Are you having fun?” I loved my work, but I was not having fun. I was guilt-ridden about not being with my husband.

Friday morning my work was done and I was on an early train back to Washington. I would pick up some groceries on the way home and take care of my husband all weekend.

Dismay
is not a strong enough word to describe how I felt when I
walked into our bedroom. Howard was flat on his back, gasping for air, and very pale. I called Dr. Goldstein’s office and lit into the receptionist. “How could you let Howard leave your office like this?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“He’s sick as a dog. The antibiotics obviously aren’t working.”

“What antibiotics?”

“The ones Dr. Goldstein gave him. The IV.”

“You better talk to the doctor,” she said.

“I haven’t seen your husband since November,” Dr. Goldstein said. “I got your message and called him but he never called back.”

So there it was. No doctor. No IV. No antibiotics. At that point, I was more angry than anything else.

I looked across the bed at Howard. “Howard! You didn’t go to the doctor. Why did you tell me that?” He looked back in resignation.

Goldstein said, “Please put him on the phone.” I held the receiver to Howard’s ear. He said only a few words and gestured for me to get back on.

“His breathing sounds terrible,” Dr. Goldstein said. “Get him to the Sibley emergency room immediately. I’ll call them.”

So now the wee hours of Saturday morning had turned from afternoon to evening, Howard had been in Sibley’s intensive care unit for more than twenty-five hours, and his condition was “grave.” The ICU doctors had run out of tricks. They’d shopped him around to a few hospitals and the only one that would take him was the Washington Hospital Center. “It’s your best hope,” a doctor said. “They have a breathing device there that can feed oxygen to both lungs, giving him what he needs. We don’t have one here.”

“Let’s do it. What’s the holdup?” I asked.

“They can take him, but it’s Saturday night and no one is on duty who can authorize a medevac helicopter and we don’t want to send him by ambulance.”

I played the only power card I had and called Larry King. Earlier he’d said, “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.” Now there was something he could do. “Will you please call the Washington Hospital Center and get us a helicopter for Howard?”

Ten minutes later he called back. “I reached the head of the hospital. A helicopter should be on its way.” Sure enough, in fifteen minutes
we could hear the
whup whup whup
of the chopper blades outside the ICU windows.

A team of faceless people in helmets and jumpsuits rushed in with a gurney. They lifted Howard’s seemingly lifeless body onto it, hooked up the life-support system, the IVs, and the myriad other tubes and bags, and—sweetly—covered him with a blanket and tucked him in. He was under there somewhere but I couldn’t see him apart from a little tuft of his hair. He’d hate that. He’d want me to smooth it down. They rolled him out with military precision. My brother Robert, Martha, and I stood side by side, our backs against the wall. In the time it takes to stop, take a breath, and move on, one of the crew, a woman, lifted the visor of her helmet, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of him.” And they were gone.

Now it was midnight on Saturday. I’d been awake since four o’clock that morning. Martha hadn’t slept at all. It didn’t matter. The hours were a blur. All of us were functioning on adrenaline. Robert and I headed to his car, stepping carefully over the small piles of freshly plowed snow and ice in the mostly empty parking lot. The air was frigid; we could see our breath. The night sky was clear and sharp, with little stars twinkling above. We shivered inside the car and silently looked through the windshield across the lot to the brightly lit MedSTAR helicopter preparing to lift off, its blades a blur. Up, up it went, its beacon lights flashing in the dark clear night, then heeling a little, speeding up, and heading across the city.

This will work out, I told myself. It will get better now. My brother nodded, turned the ignition, and said only, “So like Howard to be in grave condition but still traveling in style.”

At the Washington Hospital Center a vigil began. My other brother, David, arrived from Seattle. Martha, Robert, David, and assorted friends camped with me in a small waiting room with a pay phone on the wall outside the hospital’s second-floor medical intensive care unit, steps away from the cramped, cluttered high-tech bay where Howard continued to struggle on life support. We lived there with pillows, blankets, food, and a TV from home. I taped family photos on the wall of Howard’s bay. I wanted his dedicated medical team to see the healthy, handsome, happy Howard.

One week stretched into two, then three. Day turned to night turned to day turned to night. Time lost all boundaries. I returned home only to hug Spencer, clean up, change clothes, and occasionally sleep—or, more correctly, pass out. In a bizarre contrast, as I drove through the city, I passed the preparations for Bill Clinton’s upcoming second inauguration, an event in which as a network news producer I would ordinarily have been deeply engaged. Instead I existed in another universe of grief and pain, good news, bad news, good news, bad news. Up, down, up, down. My language was medical jargon. My most intimate conversations were with doctors. My husband was as still and silent as a stone, his body animated only by a respirator. Sometimes I would walk to the end of the hall to a large picture window with a view of the city. Hope ebbing, I would press my cheek against the glass and sob.

On day nineteen, Howard’s good, kind, and hard-working doctors, Michael Hockstein and Peter Levit, closed the door of the small waiting room and sat down with Martha and me. It was empty but for us. They could only be honest. “He’s not going to make it. We can keep him on life support, but that won’t change anything.” Martha and I had more or less expected the news. We didn’t break down. We didn’t fall apart. Instead, we dealt with the moment. “No, no,” I said, about continuing life support. “He wouldn’t want it that way. We have to let him go.”

Dr. Levit said, “I’ll sign the order.”

Spencer returned from preschool that day in his usual bubbly mood. He was such a happy little boy. Three weeks without his daddy and he was still in high spirits, though aware that our routine was jarringly different. Now I had to rob him of his joy, let him know that something irreversible and terribly, terribly sad was about to happen.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said, “out along the canal.”

He was instantly agreeable. I bundled him up—puffy jacket, hat, mittens, scarf. We leashed up the dog, too. I didn’t know how I could inflict such incomprehensible pain upon him—almost an act of violence. But he had to know. I wanted him to understand as best he could what was happening to his father, that he didn’t just disappear into thin air. Even a five-year-old needs to say good-bye.

The grass along the towpath was covered with patches of snow; the sun was breaking through the mottled gray clouds. We stopped at a pretty spot where we were alone. “I need to talk to you about Daddy,” I said, holding his hand in mine.

His head was down, and I heard the little voice. “I know. He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, my heart sinking.

Spencer grimaced and held his eyes shut. He plowed his head into my stomach and grabbed onto me with both arms and stayed like that, his head buried in my winter coat, his fists and arms tight on my hips. He tried to stop the tears. He wiped them away with his mittens as they spilled from his eyes. I kneeled, stroked his head and his back, and wrapped my arms around him as tightly as I could. His heartbreak tore through me.

“Do you want to say good-bye to him?” I asked.

His head was pressed against me but I could feel his nod.

“I think it would be a good idea,” I said, holding him, “and I will be there with you.”

The next morning Spencer got dressed in his blue blazer and gray trousers, looking every bit his father’s son. But he was not our happy little boy of the morning before. He didn’t cry. Something that had been there yesterday was not there today.

“Daddy will be sleeping,” I told him as we drove to the hospital. “But even so, he’ll be able to hear you.”

Spencer and I walked into the ICU holding hands. The staff stood practically at attention. It was as quiet as it had ever been. We made small talk with the nurses. They pulled a chair up to Howard’s bed and hoisted Spencer onto it so he could see his father. The nurse had given Howard a shave and combed his hair and cleaned him up, and tried to make the room look as normal as possible.

“Can I be alone with Daddy?” he asked.

“Of course, angel,” I said, and walked out of the bay with the others. A nurse pulled the curtains.

From inside we heard Spencer’s young, tentative voice begin to sing:

Typically, at school or at home, when anyone sang that song Spencer ran from the room in tears. “The song is too sad,” he said, “because it’s about the sun going away.”

Now, as it came softly from his lips, I cried. The nurses cried, too. And then the singing stopped.

Spencer pulled back the curtains and walked out of Howard’s room with red, bruised eyes. “I said good-bye,” he said, taking my hand. “Can we go home?” We walked down the long empty corridor in silence.

Through that long night, at Howard’s bedside, I said my own good-byes. The next day, at ten-sixteen on the morning of Saturday, February 1, 1997, three weeks and a day after I had driven him to the hospital, with Martha and my brothers and our medical team at his side and his hand in mine, Howard Joynt died. He was fifty-seven years old.

T
HIS IS THE
thing about grief: If you allow it to, it will protect you. It’s an organic drug for the broken soul. Mine was an all-encompassing fog, and I welcomed it. This doesn’t mean I didn’t ache or feel shattered, but each time I reached the breaking point, the fog would roll in and I could function. With a grieving little boy, I had to function. But here’s the other thing about grief: There’s no road map.

In the first hours after Howard’s death we escaped to our house on the Chesapeake Bay. Even though it was primarily a weekend retreat, it felt like home and was where we as a family had been our happiest. Now with Howard gone, it echoed with memories like an empty shell echoes the sea.

Spencer knew something momentous and irreversible had happened. He knew his father was gone and not coming back. By his logic, Daddy was in heaven, whatever
that
was. Distractions worked for only a little while. Spencer couldn’t understand why his toys didn’t keep him happy. He’d go from playing with Legos to playing with toy tools to playing outside. He’d be into it for a while and then quickly lose interest. He’d retreat to his room to fondle his cuddle toy, “Baby,” and suck his thumb. Or, he’d veer to the other extreme. One day as I was toweling him dry after a bath he cried and begged, “Please stab me, Mommy, kill me. I want to be with Daddy in heaven.”

On another afternoon, as I washed dishes by the kitchen window, Spencer walked down to the water’s edge and looked out. I dried my hands and joined him. I gave him a squeeze and a kiss and plopped down on the grass beside him, on my back, resting on my elbows, looking out to where his gaze was fixed. “What are you thinking?” I asked.