Travels in Vermeer (19 page)

Later, in the late 1980s, at her peak, Jackie got sick and never really got better. She felt cold and nauseated—as if with an endless flu—and lost weight she couldn't afford to lose. Her darkly exotic skin took on an almost jaundiced pallor. Meanwhile, her career was taking off, with endless roles, performances in avant-garde black box productions, as well as in mainstream plays and musicals. She even published a little: poems and plays and critical essays.

She had a summer fellowship in '89 to study at Stratford. She came back gaunt, her complexion positively anemic. This was serious, and she was frightened, but not especially open to advice. By December, it turned out that the fibroid lump in her breast—which had already been thoroughly checked and biopsied and declared benign the previous year—was not, in fact, benign. Back then, “the big C” still seemed the darkest curse of all, and it had taken precious months for her, for me, for everyone to see through the stigma, the secrecy, and the misinformation.

No one who knew her was surprised at how determinedly Jackie fought for her life, through the mastectomies, the latest chemo-cocktails, radiation, and the attempted bone marrow transplant. Every week there was some new, desperate battle to defend the vital centers against an enemy that seemed almost demonic. Which are the dangerous tumors, you wonder; which can you afford to ignore? You don't know, no one knows, but for every tumor she managed to beat back, a couple of new ones appeared, virtually overnight.

After the first round of chemo, the cancer went into remission, and Jackie landed a tenure-track job at the University of Texas. (She was virtually bald at her interview, but carried it off with Sinead O'Connor aplomb.) So we'd parted temporarily—she to Austin, I remaining in Salt Lake, to study for my doctoral exams. Six months later, she was still working her way through the hellish yet optimistic process of breast reconstruction—having her pectoral muscles expanded gradually, one side at a time, over implants filled with salt water—when, in what seemed a malicious irony, the cancer came back. I left Utah immediately, in a U-Haul truck; and though I continued to teach part-time in community colleges here and there, I essentially stayed at her side for the next two years.

The first year together in Austin was the trial of our lives, both of us making great efforts to keep up our careers. Meanwhile, we were trying not to panic, living in hospital wards, arranging trips to places like M.D. Anderson in Houston, and of course, continually convalescing, waiting for blood counts to rebound from the latest chemo or radiation. A fine balance is needed, we learned, as we tried to gauge how aggressively to attack, to try to overwhelm each tumor, while the cancer was aggressively attacking at the same time. And worse than the treatments were the side effects—the gauntlet of fevers, nausea, ulcers, and despair.

But there was happiness all along the way, too. One afternoon, lying in bed in her lovely penthouse apartment in downtown Austin, I asked if she remembered how we used to talk, in our first years, about getting married.
Why didn't we?
I wondered aloud. A moment later, surprising myself, I asked her, this time for real. Immediately, she said yes—and for a long time, we simply wept quietly and happily. It was our impossibly romantic gift to each other.

A couple of days later, we got dressed up—I wore my one blue suit; she wore a silk dress printed with orchids—and then slipped away to see the judge. We hadn't yet told her parents: we eloped! Jackie was very frail, already walking with a cane, and she had less than a year to live. The room was filled with the purest, most hallowed love imaginable. Our triumph wrested from despair, her hand trembling when I fitted the simple gold ring upon her finger.

Soon enough, it was time for her to resign, for us to go back to Missouri, so that she could be close to her family. We rented a townhouse just up the street from her parents. It wasn't that we had given up, we thought; we were circling our wagons for the real fight. But I remember bathing her one night, a few months before the end, and as I soaped her back, I could feel a bed of new tumors nestled among her ribs and shoulder blades, like walnuts pushing out from beneath her skin. I couldn't count them, and didn't try. I decided not to mention them; her spirits were not often high, and she enjoyed her baths.

Much of Jackie's last year was fogged. She wore a portable morphine pump that delivered doses of morphine through a central line straight into her heart. This contained her pain, but the side effects were grave, and—endlessly generous and brilliant and vivacious as she naturally was—it took everything I had to negotiate the disorientation, paranoia, and hallucinatory rages that so often consumed her now. Even so, we were never closer, never more selflessly, light-heartedly in love than we were in those last six months. We'd been together eight years then—we knew how to comfort each other, crack each other up—but now there was an edge of ecstasy, of urgency to every thought and joke and touch we shared. We often spoke of how lucky we were, how we'd finally found what mattered. The truth of our relationship was clear, really clear, for the first time, and though we were sorry that it took what it took for to us appreciate what we had … well, finally we knew.

We talked and talked. We'd joke our way through each day's appointments—the doctors and nurses loved us—and almost seemed to grow giddier the sicker Jackie became. She had time to think about all the details of her death, including the gravesite in her family's plot. We took an afternoon to visit it—me pushing her chair, with oxygen tank, her father close by. It was her decision, whether to be buried there or not. At first, we were both under-whelmed by the nondescript, suburban style of the cemetery, its stones set flush with the ground, for easier mowing. But when she noticed the heavy-headed catalpa tree almost directly above her plot, a sense of peace came over her, and she smiled. It had always been her favorite kind of tree.

And when, just a few weeks before her death, I was able to tell her that my first poetry book,
The Island
, had been accepted by one of our most distinguished presses, I believe she was even more deeply thrilled than I—clasping my hand, pulling off her oxygen mask to tell me, “Of course.” By then we were in each other's skin and felt each other's pain and joy as one.

All that year, we had beaten back dozens of tumors in her brain, her liver, everywhere. But the one that ended her life was the size of a pea, so small it barely showed up on the x-ray. It perforated her lung lining, and wasn't discovered until her lungs were nearly filled with fluid. Once, twice—out of her mind with oxygen deprivation—Jackie's lungs were drained through an outsized needle inserted between her ribs. She said this was the most excruciating procedure of all. But when her lungs began to fill for the third time, she didn't have the strength or will to continue. She said no. The doctor agreed: her lungs were not “viable.” We made her comfortable in the master suite of her mother's house, a hospice nurse on duty round the clock, as she drifted into a deep, Ativan-and-morphine-managed coma. The countertops were full of covered dishes; her mother and sister kept busy tending to lavish bouquets left on the porch.

Jackie was only forty-one. She'd lost more than fifty pounds, but still had the heart of a lion. So dying wasn't easy. She was in the deepest sort of coma for nearly two weeks—all her vital functions dramatically suppressed, only three or four reflex breaths per minute—though it seemed unimaginable that she could hang on at all. It's easy to tell when someone's lungs are full: anyone with a stethoscope can hear it. It's a hard thing to say, but when someone you love spends a week or two in a coma without being able to draw air into her lungs, you don't want her to wake up. When all you can hope for is to spare her some pain and terror, that's what you try to do.

A new, elderly hospice nurse showed up one day and introduced herself, projecting confidence and experience as she assumed her place beside the bed and took up her knitting. Within the first hour, I had a talk with her about meds, the timed schedule of supplementary boluses we'd been administering through Jackie's catheter. She riled at this, in what seemed an old-fashioned, common sense way: shaking her head, telling me that at the levels Jackie was receiving, they were unnecessary, she couldn't feel any pain. She declared, “I won't snow a patient.” I reminded her that Jackie had been on morphine for over a year, and had built up extraordinary tolerances. “We'll see,” was the answer. I bit my lip.

Within a few hours, Jackie's hands, then her entire frame began to tremble, and her temperature crept up to 104. Her pulse, too, began to rise, eventually holding at 120 beats per minute. Jackie's parents, Jack and Neila, seemed inclined to respect the nurse's judgment. I tried to do the same, but kept shooting nervous glances toward her. She merely nodded kindly. These symptoms were normal at “end stage,” she said. An hour passed, an anxious, fluttery hour when some of us—Neila and I—might have wondered whether the nurse was right. Then, almost unfathomably, Jackie's right hand rose to her mouth; she seemed to be trying to feel her lips. I moved in quickly beside her, half sitting on the bed, and began dampening her lips with a washcloth. The nurse, in those moments, smiled: she seemed to expect a comeback. Looking up from her knitting, she said, “Well, hello there. How are you?”

Jackie's jaw sawed this way and that, attempting to speak; I kept dampening her parched lips again and again, then her forehead and cheeks. Finally, clearing her throat and gathering herself, she said: “I feel terrible. I really need a shot.”

“It's coming, love,” I said. “It's on the way.”I glared at the nurse, who had roused to action and was already breaking the wrapper of a syringe.

I could see Jackie's eyes moving this way and that beneath her eyelids. Her hand came up to try to clear her eyes of some imagined obstruction. I said, “Wait,” and held the washcloth gently but directly on her eyes, for I could see that she was struggling to open them to look at me one last time. But her eyelids were stuck fast and would not open. “Don't worry about it, sweetie, it's okay,” I said, as I watched the nurse's thumb push down the plunger. “It's okay, it doesn't make any difference, just relax.” Then, on the bed with her, clasping and stroking her hand, I watched as her eyes seemed to calm; at least, they weren't flicking back and forth so much. She held my hand very tightly in her own, and her grip was not the grip of an emaciated, dying woman. It was the grip of the dazzling star I'd seen on the stage at the Kennedy Center; the grip of the woman who believed in me more than I'd ever thought to believe in myself, who'd always taken such joy in my writing, she made me feel—because she felt it herself—it was Christmas when I wrote. Then, knowing that she was slipping under fast, very fast, she pronounced clearly, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I answered, and then, “But you don't have to say it. You don't have to say anything. I know.”

What I don't know, and can't imagine, is how she'd done it. Perhaps in the recesses of one last bronchiole, she was still able to take infinitesimal sips of air, or imaginary sips of air; or perhaps in the underworld where she had gone, no oxygen was required. Maybe, I thought, her metabolism was so depressed, that the slightest traces of oxygen and water—absorbed through the skin or nostrils—could suffice for a while. I took it as pure will, though, her soul ceding nothing except on its own terms.

Some might think it was simply pain that woke her. But I didn't think so then, and I don't think so now. She was aware of everything in that room, what we felt and thought, exactly what had been happening. She came back to take her leave—and, satisfied with what she'd found, she let go. There was a slim passageway, just wide enough for her to slip through. I held her hand as a lifetime of minutes slid by, like all those nights in graduate school—looking up in the fullness of all we had, as we'd drift away on the afterglow, the ceiling fan spinning slowly toward oblivion—long after her hand went soft, and I tucked it in at her side again.

At five a.m. on November 18, 1991, her body still trying to do its job—still trying, blindly, to take a breath—she passed.

Jackie had many friends, and hers was an elite, pillar-of-the-community Boone County family, so the funeral was swamped. I met well-wishers by the hundreds, many for the first time. Amidst tearful hugs and condolences, I think I startled some (though of course they were inclined to a charitable view) by often remarking how blessed I was, how our love had come “just in time.” And of course I would go through a process of grieving over the next couple of years. But the overwhelming emotion of the moment, of that entire period of my life, was gratitude.

For the warmth, the silken feel, of her hand in my hand—it was still softly burning there. There was a hallowed silence in the townhouse, which I simply wouldn't disturb. For two months I worked in her study, polishing
The Island
for publication. I looked out the window of the study, over the tops of the once-so-lovely hills, where I had wandered as a child—now landscaped, sub-divided, crowned with sodden golf courses. But I always felt her presence: in the next room perhaps, or out on an errand, and I felt the sense of a shared mission, the ongoing work that was neither mine, nor hers, but ours.

Her light step somewhere; her unselfconscious hum somewhere; the ornamental birches brushing the window.

2. Afterward

Still, by spring, I wondered if I should seek some other sort of help. I wasn't sure which world I was living in. Finally deciding it was a spiritual matter, I dialed Sacred Heart Church one afternoon. It couldn't hurt, I thought. I had gone there myself as a child for a couple of years, at my recently divorced mother's somewhat puzzling insistence (no one in my family was Catholic, or had even been baptized). It was still the only church where I'd even remotely felt at home. Sister Margaret answered. I said I was recently widowed and needed to talk with someone. She said, “Yes, of course,” asked no questions and, two days later, I walked into the diocese offices behind the church on Walnut Street.