Six Years

Linda B. Hughes, 1944-2012. (Long-ago photo by BobbaLew.)

Six years ago, two and a half days before this date, I took my beloved wife of 44+ years to HosPeace House near Naples, NY, at the behest of a social-worker.
It ended up being our last ride together. She had to be in a wheelchair. On the way I told her she had what mattered: namely what was between the ears.
My wife and I had been wrastling with cancer one and a half years. Chemo, radiation, hospitalizations, oncologist appointments. Cancer was winning.
HosPeace is a hospice, and my wife’s brain was wasting away. My test at that time was lucidity. She remained lucid until the week before.
My wife was a fighter; always researching stuff on her computer.
We’d go to nearby Thompson Hospital, and “theatrics,” I’d say. “Ya gotta go in there in a wheelchair.” Nothing doing! She was goin’ in there on her own two feet.
I remember her fainting once after climbing stairs in a Rochester hospital. No elevator for her. She just had a treatment of some kind.

Her legs are starting to swell again; poor circulation due to cancerous lymph-node blockage. (Photo by Debbie Bell.)

She became weak and gaunt, but I wasn’t seeing it. That lede picture of her in her 20s was still in my head.
Up-and-down it went. Sometimes at death’s door, then incredible triumph = walking our lunging dog at a nearby park. Thompson was blood transfusions, and she felt guilty about it. Transfusions pumped her up, as did steroids. I brought her home so many times I figgered HosPeace was just another stop.
Her mother flew up from FL, and was devastated. I got angrily blamed for committing my wife to “a dump” (her mother’s words), even though HosPeace was that social-worker’s doing.
Her mother wouldn’t leave HosPeace; she stayed overnight, sleeping on the floor. I was afraid I might hafta do a grandstand — I had before.
Finally her mother left; her guilt-ridden entreaties to find religion having crashed mightily in flames. I was able to visit on my own, April 17th, 2012. I took along our dog.
What I found was depressing. My wife was so drugged with morphine I’m not sure she knew I was in her room. Her eyes were closed. I was told she’d soon awake.
Finally I said “So long,” but not “So long for now.” I wouldn’t be taking her home. HosPeace called about 9 p.m. My wife had “passed.” The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on.
Six years have gone by since that sorry day. I’m no longer the person I was back then. I find myself regretting I never was to my wife what I am now — more sociable and tolerant.
If I run out of carrots it’s because I forgot to buy carrots; the “keeper of the grocery-list” is me. Similarly, if the electric-blanket is still plugged in, it’s my fault, not hers.
I wonder how she put up with me 44+ years. Perhaps it was because she felt she couldn’t do any better, a legacy of her upbringing — mainly her mother.
“I look like my mother,” she’d wail. “I don’t wanna be my mother!”
“Ya haven’t growled at me yet,” I’d say.
I’m half insane, but I could make her laugh. She also liked the way I thought.
“I have wonderful news,” I once said. “Of all the places on this vast planet Santa could visit, he’s coming to tiny West Bloomfield.”
“Words like that are why I married you,” she’d tell me.
Now she’s gone, and six years have passed. I still miss her immensely.
Her death begs the question “Why am I still here?”
“Yer here to entertain us,” a lady told me.

• “The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on” is from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyám, dubbed “the Astronomer-Poet of Persia” — translated by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.