I am working at some law firm, then. Some common, New York, two-named law firm. I work for a typical, smart-mouthed, New York, Jewish woman who wears flowing kaftan-type outfits to work, claiming that it keeps her from being one of “them.” Otherwise, of course, she is the epitome of “them,” whatever they are; she is heartless and insulting and critical, and her distaste for me is palpable. I am saved from her loathing, on most days however, because I have broken two disks in my neck. I do not know this through my agony yet, through my endless, ever-present physical torture. All I know is my arm hurts.
My arm huts more than I could ever put words to. My arm is the center of all worldly pain by the end. How it started is too unbearable. At that moment, in that office, I am forced to leave my desk (I am that woman’s secretary) and flea to a caucus room – forced from my desk by a combination of mind-numbing pain in my arm, and endless brutal criticism by this woman.
I am there, in the small caucus room, sitting in one of three chairs. There are no windows. It is maybe six square feet in size. My head is in my hands and I am weeping. I am weeping out loud (and yet, silently into my own hands so no one will hear) I cry so hard, for so long, that I fall from the chair to my knees. Folded up into my own knees, face pressed into my hands, I start to rock, as if a child in a crib.
“How does this serve You? How could this possibly serve You? I can’t sleep. I hurt every moment. I can’t breath. I am in so much pain, that I may kill myself – and I’m not even sad. I work in this terrible place. I am an awful wife. I can’t even be a good mom. My best friend is dead. I can’t even pray. How could this possibly serve You.” By then, I have stopped weeping, and cry quietly into my hands, beginning to calm.… “But You are not a merciless. This must serve You. How could this serve You? How? But if this serves You, I am willing. Maybe I suffer for someone else? Someone else who could not bear it? Whatever it is, if it is Your will, sign me up. I am so grateful for my beautiful , sober life. The life You have given me. So sign me up, but please, please help me to suffer with more grace. Help me to suffer with more grace. Help me, this moment, to just stop crying. Just that.”
It is later that I will write to my doctor, in perfect calmness amidst the agony, and say that I am running out of options. And somehow, as the earth spins and rotates, I will be moved through time. Days and nights will pass and I will sit in the car beside Tommy that next Wednesday, and I will notice that he is quiet. I will notice this, and then forget it until much later. I worry about being intibated awake, which is how they will begin my surgery. I will worry about that job. A million thoughts will flow by as we drive to Good Samaritan Hospital to have the broken disks in my neck removed.
And simultaneously, every single moment that passes, just as it has unfolded for days and weeks and months, every moment that blockage in Tommy’s artery, just outside his heart, will continue to grow, closing like an pursed mouth, allowing less and less blood into his heart.
It is later that he will stop what he is doing and consciously think, “I don’t feel well.” By then, I am in surgery. He will, thank God, leave where he is and go back to Good Sam. He will stop being quite so quiet, and he will say those words, “I don’t feel well,” and choose to stay with me.
Every moment – every, single moment of that agony of mine, was about Tommy. So we would be in that hospital with that doctor at that moment in time. Weeks and weeks of wanting to cut my arm off with a hacksaw, of sleeping on the couch for only a few moments at a time because of the pain, of vomiting after commuting to the city because I hurt so much. Every single second was about that freight train headed toward Tommy. So okay, You, Whoever You are, Whatever You are, sign me up. …and thanks.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
You Broke Your Neck
I can’t remember, before she went into Hospice, which hospital Theresa was in. She had been in and out of NYU, and then in and out of Rusk Rehab – the ancient wing next to NYU, where the hallways were literally lined with empty wheelchairs. Before it got so awful, I would pull one of those in to her room and sit close to her bed, rocking myself back and forth, sitting in the wheelchair, with my foot hooked on the bars under her bed. I would stop on my way there in the evening and buy two slices of pizza on 34th Street and 1st Avenue, and then I would stop again in the bodega on the corner, buying bananas and maybe a cookie. And we would sit there, in her room, and eat and laugh ourselves silly. One time, the lady next to her actually asked us to stop laughing. I think I offered to infect her with GBM4 in return for her comments. Sometime that week though, only a few days later, I brought that same old woman a package of underwear, having overheard that her daughter wasn’t coming, and she just needed her underwear. I wish I could remember what we were laughing at.
That was earlier of course. Later, there wasn’t anything left to laugh at. Well, except Joy’s dogs. Two puffball lion cubs that she hid in her PURSE of all things, and smuggled in to see Theresa. Before she got sick, Terry used to dogsit for Joy and stay in their apartment in the city. Their apartment was beautiful. Once, before T died, I stayed there with Bobby and Joy, and the dogs, of course. Joy and I sat on the small veranda, twenty stories high, and drank tea out of beautiful mugs and looked out over the east river to Greenpoint and Astoria on the other side. We talked about everything, her and Bobby and his ex-wife; Theresa and why Joy thought she married Billy… just everything. I was glad for that, because Joy and I didn’t exactly hit it off at first. Who knows why. Perhaps, on some level, I was angry and jealous at the way she would crawl into bed with T and wrap herself around her like an afghan. In the end, the last two words Theresa could ever will out of her aphasic mouth were to Joy. That day Joy brought the dogs, and curled in her bed, and cracked joke after joke, leaving Theresa hunching her shoulder and laughing, she managed to somehow say, “thank you,” to Joy.
The last few days she ever spent “home” were at Elaine’s house in Mount Kisco. I had told Susan to please count on me to “relieve” them at some point – that I was more than a friend, I was family. I can remember when I got there, Susan was getting ready to leave, and Billy was there. He gave me the run down on things in his weird and dramatic way. “OK, NOW MAR, THIS IS THE 911,” he said, ripping open the short armoir doors, exposing the TV and entertainment center hidden inside. He squatted in his short, bull-dog frame and started turning knobs and pushing buttons like he was in air traffic control or something. I honestly did not have a fucking clue what he was talking about. [911? Am I supposed to contact 911 through the sterio?] “OK, NOW TERRRRY WILL PUSH THIS RED BUTTON IF SHE NEEDS YOU…] he pushed the button and the entire system screamed to attention, some unintelligible music pounding through the speakers and the air around us. I’m sure I just looked at him in wide-eyed terror. [What the hell?] Before I could even begin to try and say anything over the cacophony, he must have un-hit the red button, or hit some other STOP RED button. I looked at Terry, who nodded in some affirmative relief, but I was simply more confused. “NOW JUST DO NOT CLOSE THESE DOORS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAR,” Billy shouted as if the music was still on. “THAT’S WHAT WENT WRONG YESTERDAY, SUSAN CLOSED THE DOORS AND THEN SHE COULDN’T HEAR THE SYSTEM FROM UPSTAIRS WHEN TERRY NEEDED HER.” [oh. Okay, this is Terry’s 911 to us] I thought as I finally exhaled; I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. “Billy, why would I be upstairs?” “TO SLEEP, MAR,” he continued shouting. “OKAY, THERE ARE STRAWS OVER HERE. IF TERRY NEEDS A DRINK OF WATER, YOU HAVE TO HOLD THE GLASS FOR HER, LIKE THIS,” he demonstrated, offering Theresa a drink of lukewarm water on the card table next to the fold out couch. “AND YOU HAVE TO FIX HER PILLOWS LIKE THIS – ARE YOU WATCHING, MAR??? BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T FIX HER PILLOWS RIGHT, SHE CAN’T BREATH VERY WELL.” He walked around the other side of the bed, “HERE IS THE COMMODE. NOW WHEN TERRY NEEDS THE COMMODE, SHE’LL RING THIS BELL. YOU WILL HAVE TO HELP HER STAND UP, BUT DON’T FORGET DO NOT PUT YOUR HAND UNDER HER ARMPIT. YOU MUST WRAP YOURSELF AROUND THE OUTSIDE OF HER ARM, LIKE A HUG, AND THEN HELP HER TO PIVOT FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER.” He dragged Theresa from the bed, demonstrating this as if she were a rag doll in some drunken dance. “AND HERE IS HER PILLOWCASE. YOU PUT THIS IN HER LAP ONCE SHE IS SEATED ON THE COMMODE.” [oh God, what is this place? What is this? Is he leaving, God??? Please get Billy out of her, Heavenly Father. I am afraid of Billy. Please. Please. Please. What is all this? Why is he shouting? And how on earth could Susan have left me here alone with this lunatic?]
Finally, Billy must have stopped yelling. Magically, Theresa was back on the bed, and he was fluffing her pillows for the 100th time. “Billy, we’ll be okay, really. And don’t worry about some emergency 911 stereo system, I am not sleeping upstairs.” “You’re not?” Theresa said her first words since I got there, other than hello. “No, T. Why would I sleep upstairs?” “WELL, WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO SLEEP? YOU HAVE TO GET A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP.” I turned to answer Theresa, ignoring his loud insanity. “I’m going to sleep in the next room, Ter, on the black leather couch – I’m going to open the French doors between the two rooms, and I’ll be less than twenty feet away from you all night. If you need me, I’ll hear you. Okay?” Theresa seemed to relax then. As if she could stop trying to hold it together. Billy was still yelling about a good night’s sleep, but I just looked at Theresa and smiled. “Why would I sleep on a separate floor of the house? That doesn’t make any sense. If I simply came for a visit I wouldn’t sleep that far away. Besides, I want to be with you, Theresa. I want to sit here and shoot the breeze and watch TV or read to you. Whatever you need.” She looked at me with a deep love. We had been friends a very long time by then. Through sobriety and non-sobriety, through boyfriends and husbands and lovers and chaos and peace, through birthdays and holidays, we had cut an invisible path through every diner in New York State, leaving an invisible line of memories and love.
That was the last time we would really ever talk to each other. She simply wasn’t able to form words by the end of that weekend.
Billy left at some point. Relief is not a strong enough word. I remember waking up on that black leather couch in the room adjacent to Theresa that night. Some scratching every few minutes. I was afraid it was Billy breaking in to rape me. That was such a horrible fear, that he was outside the many-paned glass windows of that room, scratching around, and that he would come in and rape me, and Theresa would be unable to do anything to stop him. She would lay there, imprisoned and hear him rip off my clothes and fuck me. I think in my nightmare, he strangled me to death as he came.
It was the hamster, I realized many terrified hours later. Scratching around in its cage. If you knew Bill’s dynamic with me, you’d understand why I went that crazy route in my head. I lay there on the couch then, calming down as the hamster ran on his wheel, and listened to Theresa breath in the other room.
Later, she would call to me to help her to the commode. And I would wrap my arm around her, facing the same direction, in some weird synchronized ballet. I would slowly move her, pivoting her weight from side to side on her feet, left pivot, right pivot. And something outside the glass doors caught my attention, and as we pivoted, moving slowly to the right, her weight shifting, I turned my head to look out the window and felt an electric shock go through my body. I held Terry tighter as everything seemed to go white for a moment, like I’d been hit by lightning. [don’t drop Theresa, whatever you do, just do not drop Theresa.] [I think I’m hurt though, I seemed to answer myself from some other place, in some other voice. I think I really hurt my arm.]
In some weird 20/20 hindsight, in my daydreams, an angel slowly descends in that moment, and wraps me in her winged arms. She lowers our beloved Terry to the commode (which is what I did), gently lowering her pajama bottoms, and dropping the pillowcase into her lap (which is what I did next), but this angel then leans in and whispers the truth into my ear, the truth we wouldn’t find out until eleven weeks later, long after Theresa had died at 48 years old. The angel leans in and says in some breathy whisper, y o u b r o k e y o u r n e c k .
I broke my neck. I somehow, in that moment, smashed wide open two of the cushiony gelatin disks that keep your vertebrae from hitting each other, and in the process, I had slammed the fluid that should be inside those disks, all over my cervical spinal column.
Oh, and life? Well, life would never be the same for me.
That was earlier of course. Later, there wasn’t anything left to laugh at. Well, except Joy’s dogs. Two puffball lion cubs that she hid in her PURSE of all things, and smuggled in to see Theresa. Before she got sick, Terry used to dogsit for Joy and stay in their apartment in the city. Their apartment was beautiful. Once, before T died, I stayed there with Bobby and Joy, and the dogs, of course. Joy and I sat on the small veranda, twenty stories high, and drank tea out of beautiful mugs and looked out over the east river to Greenpoint and Astoria on the other side. We talked about everything, her and Bobby and his ex-wife; Theresa and why Joy thought she married Billy… just everything. I was glad for that, because Joy and I didn’t exactly hit it off at first. Who knows why. Perhaps, on some level, I was angry and jealous at the way she would crawl into bed with T and wrap herself around her like an afghan. In the end, the last two words Theresa could ever will out of her aphasic mouth were to Joy. That day Joy brought the dogs, and curled in her bed, and cracked joke after joke, leaving Theresa hunching her shoulder and laughing, she managed to somehow say, “thank you,” to Joy.
The last few days she ever spent “home” were at Elaine’s house in Mount Kisco. I had told Susan to please count on me to “relieve” them at some point – that I was more than a friend, I was family. I can remember when I got there, Susan was getting ready to leave, and Billy was there. He gave me the run down on things in his weird and dramatic way. “OK, NOW MAR, THIS IS THE 911,” he said, ripping open the short armoir doors, exposing the TV and entertainment center hidden inside. He squatted in his short, bull-dog frame and started turning knobs and pushing buttons like he was in air traffic control or something. I honestly did not have a fucking clue what he was talking about. [911? Am I supposed to contact 911 through the sterio?] “OK, NOW TERRRRY WILL PUSH THIS RED BUTTON IF SHE NEEDS YOU…] he pushed the button and the entire system screamed to attention, some unintelligible music pounding through the speakers and the air around us. I’m sure I just looked at him in wide-eyed terror. [What the hell?] Before I could even begin to try and say anything over the cacophony, he must have un-hit the red button, or hit some other STOP RED button. I looked at Terry, who nodded in some affirmative relief, but I was simply more confused. “NOW JUST DO NOT CLOSE THESE DOORS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAR,” Billy shouted as if the music was still on. “THAT’S WHAT WENT WRONG YESTERDAY, SUSAN CLOSED THE DOORS AND THEN SHE COULDN’T HEAR THE SYSTEM FROM UPSTAIRS WHEN TERRY NEEDED HER.” [oh. Okay, this is Terry’s 911 to us] I thought as I finally exhaled; I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. “Billy, why would I be upstairs?” “TO SLEEP, MAR,” he continued shouting. “OKAY, THERE ARE STRAWS OVER HERE. IF TERRY NEEDS A DRINK OF WATER, YOU HAVE TO HOLD THE GLASS FOR HER, LIKE THIS,” he demonstrated, offering Theresa a drink of lukewarm water on the card table next to the fold out couch. “AND YOU HAVE TO FIX HER PILLOWS LIKE THIS – ARE YOU WATCHING, MAR??? BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T FIX HER PILLOWS RIGHT, SHE CAN’T BREATH VERY WELL.” He walked around the other side of the bed, “HERE IS THE COMMODE. NOW WHEN TERRY NEEDS THE COMMODE, SHE’LL RING THIS BELL. YOU WILL HAVE TO HELP HER STAND UP, BUT DON’T FORGET DO NOT PUT YOUR HAND UNDER HER ARMPIT. YOU MUST WRAP YOURSELF AROUND THE OUTSIDE OF HER ARM, LIKE A HUG, AND THEN HELP HER TO PIVOT FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER.” He dragged Theresa from the bed, demonstrating this as if she were a rag doll in some drunken dance. “AND HERE IS HER PILLOWCASE. YOU PUT THIS IN HER LAP ONCE SHE IS SEATED ON THE COMMODE.” [oh God, what is this place? What is this? Is he leaving, God??? Please get Billy out of her, Heavenly Father. I am afraid of Billy. Please. Please. Please. What is all this? Why is he shouting? And how on earth could Susan have left me here alone with this lunatic?]
Finally, Billy must have stopped yelling. Magically, Theresa was back on the bed, and he was fluffing her pillows for the 100th time. “Billy, we’ll be okay, really. And don’t worry about some emergency 911 stereo system, I am not sleeping upstairs.” “You’re not?” Theresa said her first words since I got there, other than hello. “No, T. Why would I sleep upstairs?” “WELL, WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO SLEEP? YOU HAVE TO GET A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP.” I turned to answer Theresa, ignoring his loud insanity. “I’m going to sleep in the next room, Ter, on the black leather couch – I’m going to open the French doors between the two rooms, and I’ll be less than twenty feet away from you all night. If you need me, I’ll hear you. Okay?” Theresa seemed to relax then. As if she could stop trying to hold it together. Billy was still yelling about a good night’s sleep, but I just looked at Theresa and smiled. “Why would I sleep on a separate floor of the house? That doesn’t make any sense. If I simply came for a visit I wouldn’t sleep that far away. Besides, I want to be with you, Theresa. I want to sit here and shoot the breeze and watch TV or read to you. Whatever you need.” She looked at me with a deep love. We had been friends a very long time by then. Through sobriety and non-sobriety, through boyfriends and husbands and lovers and chaos and peace, through birthdays and holidays, we had cut an invisible path through every diner in New York State, leaving an invisible line of memories and love.
That was the last time we would really ever talk to each other. She simply wasn’t able to form words by the end of that weekend.
Billy left at some point. Relief is not a strong enough word. I remember waking up on that black leather couch in the room adjacent to Theresa that night. Some scratching every few minutes. I was afraid it was Billy breaking in to rape me. That was such a horrible fear, that he was outside the many-paned glass windows of that room, scratching around, and that he would come in and rape me, and Theresa would be unable to do anything to stop him. She would lay there, imprisoned and hear him rip off my clothes and fuck me. I think in my nightmare, he strangled me to death as he came.
It was the hamster, I realized many terrified hours later. Scratching around in its cage. If you knew Bill’s dynamic with me, you’d understand why I went that crazy route in my head. I lay there on the couch then, calming down as the hamster ran on his wheel, and listened to Theresa breath in the other room.
Later, she would call to me to help her to the commode. And I would wrap my arm around her, facing the same direction, in some weird synchronized ballet. I would slowly move her, pivoting her weight from side to side on her feet, left pivot, right pivot. And something outside the glass doors caught my attention, and as we pivoted, moving slowly to the right, her weight shifting, I turned my head to look out the window and felt an electric shock go through my body. I held Terry tighter as everything seemed to go white for a moment, like I’d been hit by lightning. [don’t drop Theresa, whatever you do, just do not drop Theresa.] [I think I’m hurt though, I seemed to answer myself from some other place, in some other voice. I think I really hurt my arm.]
In some weird 20/20 hindsight, in my daydreams, an angel slowly descends in that moment, and wraps me in her winged arms. She lowers our beloved Terry to the commode (which is what I did), gently lowering her pajama bottoms, and dropping the pillowcase into her lap (which is what I did next), but this angel then leans in and whispers the truth into my ear, the truth we wouldn’t find out until eleven weeks later, long after Theresa had died at 48 years old. The angel leans in and says in some breathy whisper, y o u b r o k e y o u r n e c k .
I broke my neck. I somehow, in that moment, smashed wide open two of the cushiony gelatin disks that keep your vertebrae from hitting each other, and in the process, I had slammed the fluid that should be inside those disks, all over my cervical spinal column.
Oh, and life? Well, life would never be the same for me.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Losing Theresa
Terry’s apartment in the city was, of course, small. You would enter the foyer of the building at 81st and 3rd Avenue, and if the small elevator was not working, you would make your way up the four flights of narrow, ceramic tiled stairs, ringed with a rout iron banister. We moved Theresa into that apartment that way. I remember being in that small elevator, crammed next to the vertical futon and some guy who was helping – it may have been one of her brothers-in-law. Once you went inside, there was a small kitchen area on the left, a smaller bathroom straight ahead, and a larger room that served as her bedroom / living space. It was small, but I loved it. The exposed brick on one side of the apartment was cut by a long, narrow window and a painting, similar in size. There was a bookcase in the corner and another one on the adjacent wall. Her futon would be there, usually open and decorated with scattered books, and there was a round table in the other corner, always dressed beautifully with a tablecloth, a vase of flowers, and more books. I can remember her saying that she hadn’t read a novel in years; they simply did not interest her. She read every spiritual and self-help book there was, not because she was in dire need of help, but it seemed to be part of her quest for God.
That was, in a way, the core of our friendship too. We met, the first time, in the catacomb-like basement of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. They were having a lecture series on young adults in the Catholic church. At some point, either during an intermission or at the end, in the long anteroom, packed with people from the lecture, I walked over to a large coffee pot. She was kind of standing there in a way that I would come to know was common for her, not awkward, but not needing to be conversing. She was simply watching everyone and half smiling at them. We must have exchanged some small talk about the lecture or the speaker for a while, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that it turned out we were both in 12-step programs. It was a great conversation, as they would almost all be for a very long time, and at the end, we exchanged phone numbers and said we should grab a coffee some time.
I can remember having her number on my desk at work for a few days, uncomfortable to call. I’m not really sure why I did. I think something difficult happened with a guy or my job… who knows; but I called her to talk. She was just magical to talk to. She was somehow fully engaged in listening. Many years later, I remember being on a long car ride and sharing some very difficult story from my marriage. The story seemed endless, with many loops and nuances, and it took a long time to tell. When we arrived at whatever our destination was, finally, I pulled the car in, and finishing the story at that exact moment, I said, crying, “That’s it. That’s the whole horrible thing,” and Theresa looked at me with such great love, and tilting her head slightly to the left said, “Yes….yes…” I remember kind of waking up in that moment, and from some omniscient place beyond the hurt of that moment, realizing that those were the first words she had said the whole time. That she had listened and listened and listened, and that her understanding was profound and visible, but she had not offered any feedback or commentary whatsoever. She had simply listened. And I remember consciously thinking, “Oh my God, that … is … so …. big – to simply listen. How did she do that?” And I remember wondering if I could learn to hear that way – if it were an acquirable skill.
Everyone would talk about that, you know, after she died. How she would listen to people. And that none of us had ever known anyone like that.
She was, in many ways, like her apartment. She didn’t like to cook, and so that small kitchen without even a table spoke volumes. She was petite and beautiful in a very peaceful way. Her hair was varying shades of strawberry red, and it was baby fine. She would worry that it was so fine it was almost thin looking, but of course, at the end, she probably would have given anything for that hair. The television was so small in that apartment, that I wondered for years if she had one – I think it even had an antenna, but the books were ever present, bookmarked, or open to various pages. She seemed to always look effortlessly beautiful.
She had a large family, two sisters and a brother, all of whom were married with children of their own, and her mom, Claire. Her father had passed away when she was only twenty or twenty-one, having died, of all things, of brain cancer. I always wondered if there were some strange karmic tie between them.
One time, Tommy and I brought our friend Brannin to New York, and we all had lunch at her apartment, around that round table. We went to the movies after that, and saw Analyze This with Billy Crystal. We laughed out loud so hard in some places that we honestly missed entire segments of dialogue. My stomach muscles hurt for a week, and to this day, my husband and I have an inside joke, “Hey, Jelly, you wanna fresh one?” and one of us will play slap the other’s face. Tommy would repeat, “They call me the Fuckin’ Doctor,” in his Greek accent literally for years.
Being Theresa’s friend was liberating. You were one hundred percent confident in her acceptance of you, frailties and all. We would talk about things like the eternal soul and Hinduism and God’s love and heaven. After she got sick she wondered if there were a God at all. I assured her that she had to feel that way, it was almost necessary. And I told her to rest in the arms of my belief and to not worry. It was all okay.
And when it was, decidedly not okay, we would do this thing my Aunt Barbara taught us. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Take another. Let it out slowly. Take another. Hold it. Exhale. Take one more and hold it. Hold it. Right there. That is your center. That is what you are. You are the infinite space between breaths. Be in this moment completely, and love this life. Just for this moment, for today, you are alive.
Toward the very end, one of those moments when everyone was in the hospital room, being cheerful and ludicrous, I remember asking her if she were afraid. She would always shake her head no. But she was waiting by then, waiting and wondering when it would end. And I horrified all around us by saying, “Theresa, it isn’t today.” All conversation and pleasantries stopped and eyes began to turn toward me, and I thought that maybe Joy would have a heart attack. “It’s soon, Terry. But it isn’t today. And it isn’t tomorrow. So rest. Just for this moment, you are alive. Love this. Love the people around you. Rest in us.”
Can I do that now? Can I simply rest in her? Can I take that deep breath and hold it, knowing that I am that infinite space between heartbeats. And that somewhere in that eternity is my friend, unscathed, unmarred, alive, loving me? That I am not, as Christ described, “orphaned” by her absence? If this is the goal, I am far from there. I wander my memories and thoughts, hoping to find some thread back to her.
I am, it seems, undeniably spinning, every day, losing Theresa.
That was, in a way, the core of our friendship too. We met, the first time, in the catacomb-like basement of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. They were having a lecture series on young adults in the Catholic church. At some point, either during an intermission or at the end, in the long anteroom, packed with people from the lecture, I walked over to a large coffee pot. She was kind of standing there in a way that I would come to know was common for her, not awkward, but not needing to be conversing. She was simply watching everyone and half smiling at them. We must have exchanged some small talk about the lecture or the speaker for a while, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that it turned out we were both in 12-step programs. It was a great conversation, as they would almost all be for a very long time, and at the end, we exchanged phone numbers and said we should grab a coffee some time.
I can remember having her number on my desk at work for a few days, uncomfortable to call. I’m not really sure why I did. I think something difficult happened with a guy or my job… who knows; but I called her to talk. She was just magical to talk to. She was somehow fully engaged in listening. Many years later, I remember being on a long car ride and sharing some very difficult story from my marriage. The story seemed endless, with many loops and nuances, and it took a long time to tell. When we arrived at whatever our destination was, finally, I pulled the car in, and finishing the story at that exact moment, I said, crying, “That’s it. That’s the whole horrible thing,” and Theresa looked at me with such great love, and tilting her head slightly to the left said, “Yes….yes…” I remember kind of waking up in that moment, and from some omniscient place beyond the hurt of that moment, realizing that those were the first words she had said the whole time. That she had listened and listened and listened, and that her understanding was profound and visible, but she had not offered any feedback or commentary whatsoever. She had simply listened. And I remember consciously thinking, “Oh my God, that … is … so …. big – to simply listen. How did she do that?” And I remember wondering if I could learn to hear that way – if it were an acquirable skill.
Everyone would talk about that, you know, after she died. How she would listen to people. And that none of us had ever known anyone like that.
She was, in many ways, like her apartment. She didn’t like to cook, and so that small kitchen without even a table spoke volumes. She was petite and beautiful in a very peaceful way. Her hair was varying shades of strawberry red, and it was baby fine. She would worry that it was so fine it was almost thin looking, but of course, at the end, she probably would have given anything for that hair. The television was so small in that apartment, that I wondered for years if she had one – I think it even had an antenna, but the books were ever present, bookmarked, or open to various pages. She seemed to always look effortlessly beautiful.
She had a large family, two sisters and a brother, all of whom were married with children of their own, and her mom, Claire. Her father had passed away when she was only twenty or twenty-one, having died, of all things, of brain cancer. I always wondered if there were some strange karmic tie between them.
One time, Tommy and I brought our friend Brannin to New York, and we all had lunch at her apartment, around that round table. We went to the movies after that, and saw Analyze This with Billy Crystal. We laughed out loud so hard in some places that we honestly missed entire segments of dialogue. My stomach muscles hurt for a week, and to this day, my husband and I have an inside joke, “Hey, Jelly, you wanna fresh one?” and one of us will play slap the other’s face. Tommy would repeat, “They call me the Fuckin’ Doctor,” in his Greek accent literally for years.
Being Theresa’s friend was liberating. You were one hundred percent confident in her acceptance of you, frailties and all. We would talk about things like the eternal soul and Hinduism and God’s love and heaven. After she got sick she wondered if there were a God at all. I assured her that she had to feel that way, it was almost necessary. And I told her to rest in the arms of my belief and to not worry. It was all okay.
And when it was, decidedly not okay, we would do this thing my Aunt Barbara taught us. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Take another. Let it out slowly. Take another. Hold it. Exhale. Take one more and hold it. Hold it. Right there. That is your center. That is what you are. You are the infinite space between breaths. Be in this moment completely, and love this life. Just for this moment, for today, you are alive.
Toward the very end, one of those moments when everyone was in the hospital room, being cheerful and ludicrous, I remember asking her if she were afraid. She would always shake her head no. But she was waiting by then, waiting and wondering when it would end. And I horrified all around us by saying, “Theresa, it isn’t today.” All conversation and pleasantries stopped and eyes began to turn toward me, and I thought that maybe Joy would have a heart attack. “It’s soon, Terry. But it isn’t today. And it isn’t tomorrow. So rest. Just for this moment, you are alive. Love this. Love the people around you. Rest in us.”
Can I do that now? Can I simply rest in her? Can I take that deep breath and hold it, knowing that I am that infinite space between heartbeats. And that somewhere in that eternity is my friend, unscathed, unmarred, alive, loving me? That I am not, as Christ described, “orphaned” by her absence? If this is the goal, I am far from there. I wander my memories and thoughts, hoping to find some thread back to her.
I am, it seems, undeniably spinning, every day, losing Theresa.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Billy
Theresa is at Billy’s … well, by then she was outside Billy’s. She said, through hysteria and sobbing, that the chemo had made her constipated, horribly constipated. And the toilet had clogged. It was the middle of the night, and she had to ask Billy to help her. He had hidden the plunger. Plunging the toilet was on the seemingly endless list of things Theresa was not allowed to do. Her world was growing smaller by the day, married to Billy. He had convinced her that she was incapable of even the simplest tasks. She was not allowed to mow the lawn (he was afraid she would break the lawn mower). She was not allowed to light the oven. (He explained that it was very old, and perhaps, dangerous.) She was not allowed to drive most places, he took her and then brought her home again. He cooked the meals, well, she would say, I don’t really like to cook, anyway. He bought the groceries. Since she had stopped working, he had forced her to drop her health insurance – I mean, why pay for two health insurance policies, right? And he had her cash out her life insurance when the company offered. For a crazy man, he was quite sly. And slowly, very slowly, he was isolating her from those who loved her. He was failing, of course, but only because brain cancer demands an audience. Does that make sense? It is simply to loud to be ignored or denied or isolated. And so, in the end, Billy failed, even at his worst efforts.
Anyway, she woke him that night and asked him to help her in the bathroom with the overflowing, backed-up toilet. I imagine she had soaked up what she could with paper towels and tissues, heavy with exhaustion, trying in vain to fix it herself. She said he followed her into the small bathroom and flew into a rage. A horrible, brutal rage. He stood there, shaking, and then threw the plunger at her screaming at her that she was an animal. “Why don’t you dig a hole in the yard and shit in it like a DOG???” She said the argument, if you could call it that, never seemed to end. Finally, he had thrown her out the heavy metal screen door and shoved her down the winding steep cement steps, then he threw her chemotherapy medications out after her, pausing to open the bottles first, so that the pills flew all over the lawn, and finally, with her crawling around the lawn in her nightgown, trying to pluck the various colored pills out of the dirt and grass, he threw out her wig.
I can see her there, in my minds eye, sobbing silently, trying to gather as much of her medicine as she could. Maybe putting it into the shell of her wig, since her nightgown would have no pockets. I know that she has no underwear on, because she called me from her car when she left there, weeping, and after narrating it all, she said, “I don’t even have underwear on.”
Theresa was a person of enormous dignity. More than that, really. She was graceful. She was almost holy, if any of us can really approach holiness. She had a sweetness that was otherworldly, and a humanity that was breathtaking. To imagine her, doggy-style on their front lawn, stripped of her hair and her safety, of her health and her strength… to hear her explain that he then stood inside the house, and through the open old-fashioned slatted windows on the porch, started screaming in acrimonious insanity, “Yew don’t live here. This is myyyyyy house. Get out. Yew are NOTHING. Yew are disgusting. Get out. This is my house.” Over and over and over. Well, I guess words can’t really say how I felt about what that did to her.
She came to us that day. To Tommy and I. I suppose she was too ashamed to tell her family what was happening with Billy. Theresa, I would say on the phone, …Theresa, Billy is a spousal abuser. Do you understand that? He simply isn’t hitting you yet. But make no mistake, this is escalating. If you choose to stay with Billy, you need to have an escape plan, now. And you need to leave BEFORE things reach this pitch. You need to get out way before the rage begins. The minute you sense it happening. Do you understand? She didn’t answer at first, except to say that she knew he had a problem before they were married. That she shouldn’t have married him, knowing he had a drinking problem. Terry, knowing intellectually that someone has a drinking problem and LIVING with that insanity are such different things. You simply could not KNOW this until you lived with him. Where ARE you? Tell me where you are, and we will come and get you. But she drove to us. I suppose she needed to have her car, to have some sense of control.
Billy. It’s funny, all this time later. I only miss Billy. We have no anger toward him; we never really did. We simply understood that he was insane. We also sensed his true love for Theresa. How did we reconcile that to what he did? I don’t know. Somehow, both Tommy and I just didn’t judge him.
What does it matter, anyway. She is gone. She is probably as gone to Billy as she is to us. I wonder if he sits, in his empty, empty house, and rails at the loneliness. I wonder if he has ever, in a drunken stupor, sat in that porch room, on her furniture, and looked at her artwork, and opened the heavy screen door of the small foyer and thrown himself down those cement steps, clutching at the grass and dirt, remembering that scene, vomiting in drunken despair into the grass, perhaps looking at it and seeing the faded, empty casings of one or two pills that she didn’t collect that day.
Anyway, she woke him that night and asked him to help her in the bathroom with the overflowing, backed-up toilet. I imagine she had soaked up what she could with paper towels and tissues, heavy with exhaustion, trying in vain to fix it herself. She said he followed her into the small bathroom and flew into a rage. A horrible, brutal rage. He stood there, shaking, and then threw the plunger at her screaming at her that she was an animal. “Why don’t you dig a hole in the yard and shit in it like a DOG???” She said the argument, if you could call it that, never seemed to end. Finally, he had thrown her out the heavy metal screen door and shoved her down the winding steep cement steps, then he threw her chemotherapy medications out after her, pausing to open the bottles first, so that the pills flew all over the lawn, and finally, with her crawling around the lawn in her nightgown, trying to pluck the various colored pills out of the dirt and grass, he threw out her wig.
I can see her there, in my minds eye, sobbing silently, trying to gather as much of her medicine as she could. Maybe putting it into the shell of her wig, since her nightgown would have no pockets. I know that she has no underwear on, because she called me from her car when she left there, weeping, and after narrating it all, she said, “I don’t even have underwear on.”
Theresa was a person of enormous dignity. More than that, really. She was graceful. She was almost holy, if any of us can really approach holiness. She had a sweetness that was otherworldly, and a humanity that was breathtaking. To imagine her, doggy-style on their front lawn, stripped of her hair and her safety, of her health and her strength… to hear her explain that he then stood inside the house, and through the open old-fashioned slatted windows on the porch, started screaming in acrimonious insanity, “Yew don’t live here. This is myyyyyy house. Get out. Yew are NOTHING. Yew are disgusting. Get out. This is my house.” Over and over and over. Well, I guess words can’t really say how I felt about what that did to her.
She came to us that day. To Tommy and I. I suppose she was too ashamed to tell her family what was happening with Billy. Theresa, I would say on the phone, …Theresa, Billy is a spousal abuser. Do you understand that? He simply isn’t hitting you yet. But make no mistake, this is escalating. If you choose to stay with Billy, you need to have an escape plan, now. And you need to leave BEFORE things reach this pitch. You need to get out way before the rage begins. The minute you sense it happening. Do you understand? She didn’t answer at first, except to say that she knew he had a problem before they were married. That she shouldn’t have married him, knowing he had a drinking problem. Terry, knowing intellectually that someone has a drinking problem and LIVING with that insanity are such different things. You simply could not KNOW this until you lived with him. Where ARE you? Tell me where you are, and we will come and get you. But she drove to us. I suppose she needed to have her car, to have some sense of control.
Billy. It’s funny, all this time later. I only miss Billy. We have no anger toward him; we never really did. We simply understood that he was insane. We also sensed his true love for Theresa. How did we reconcile that to what he did? I don’t know. Somehow, both Tommy and I just didn’t judge him.
What does it matter, anyway. She is gone. She is probably as gone to Billy as she is to us. I wonder if he sits, in his empty, empty house, and rails at the loneliness. I wonder if he has ever, in a drunken stupor, sat in that porch room, on her furniture, and looked at her artwork, and opened the heavy screen door of the small foyer and thrown himself down those cement steps, clutching at the grass and dirt, remembering that scene, vomiting in drunken despair into the grass, perhaps looking at it and seeing the faded, empty casings of one or two pills that she didn’t collect that day.
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