One Day in the Life of the Cancer Patient and His Wife

A Forest in the Living Room

She does "deep image" photography, for people going through trauma, taking them into nature where they can mourn in the mud and dance their grief under the broad arms of oaks and in the grasses waving silver in the sun, so even though I very much wanted pictures of me with my husband at this moment in our lives, when he is so deeply wounded by his terminal cancer and will never rise from his bed again, I almost told her never mind because we weren't in nature, which has been the top and the bottom and the all and everything to us, all the hiking and skiing and times on the trail ever since we met six years ago, but now we're stuck in his house with its furniture, and curtains over the windows and rugs on a wooden floor, but she said oh, but yes, of course we will, don't worry, don't worry and came to the house with large bins of flowers and ferns and foliage, and unfurled two sod rolls of moss and la them on him, and I said, "Oh, but I don't want it to look like he is buried already!" and she said, "Don't worry; don't worry" and never stopped for a minute Burt moved like a tornado in Kansas creating an Oz, slicing farms into the moss and tiny fir twigs and sprigs of rosemary, attaching a multi-pronged madrone branch to the back of the hospital bed and slinging it with cherry blossoms and draping lilacs purple and white at the top of the bed and white madrone blossoms and yellow Oregon grape util the room smelled musty from the moss and perfumed from the flowers and I sat by my husband's side in all that wonderland and kissed him like Helena her Demetrius, there in that magical forest she had created, like a Puck pouring a love potion into our eyes.

When Death Is around the Corner

          My husband, whom I married eleven months ago, had a return of his cancer a few months ago. It is now terminal, and last week he entered hospice care in his home. As you know if you have been following my blog, we kept our separate homes even after we got married, he in his in Medford and I in mine on the mountain in the Applegate. Now I have moved into his house to be with him during these last days, weeks, or months. 

          The hospice people are wonderful, and the help of our 'round-the-clock caregivers invaluable. Mike is immobile in bed, but his head is clear. So far he is walking that thin edge between enough meds to keep his pain level tolerable but not so many he becomes fuzzy-headed. He uses that clear head to see to end-of-life matters. He has seen to it that his business, which he built up, will continue with the same strength it has today. He has made sure to see the important people in his life. He has been courageous in his decline, generous in his appreciation, and good-humored through it all. He is showing us all how to die well.

          Writing poetry has been one of the primary outlets to my own emotions. So today's post will be two of those poems.

Like a Novice Standing before the Convent Gate

April 15, 2020

Like a novice standing before the convent gate

who thinks, "When I enter that gate

my life will be forever changed,"

I stand at my husband's door

knowing that once I enter

my life will never be the same.

I am surrendering my life not to God

but to my husband

so his last days can be as good

as all the rest of

our short life together.

My plainsong will praise him.

My hymns will rejoice in our love.

Our God will be the holiness in each other.

We took our vows eleven months ago.

Now, like the novice walking through the convent gate

I take a deep breath, smile, and enter with strong steps

to await the hospital bed that will bring him home to die.

Journeys

April 18, 2020

Paul Revere dashed through the countryside

Warning the neighborhoods of danger

Whipping his horse into a lather of hurry

The Apollo astronauts floated 240,000 miles

for three days through the universe

to land on the glorious silver orb of the moon

The voyageurs paddled three thousand miles

portaging 200 pounds and more

for the profit of the Hudson's Bay Company

You and I walked up mountains and down

over pass after pass for thirteen days

and ninety-eight miles in the Dolomites

Now, immobilized and weakened by cancer,

you blast into our spheres of consciousness

with the heroism of ninety Paul Reveres

and the strength of a hundred voyageurs and Apollo astronauts,

as you embark on a journey far beyond

the glorious silver orb of the moon.

Getting through Coronavirus Isolation

          During these times of closures of public spaces, some people have been, for instance, taking virtual tours of museums, which Peter Schjeldahl, an art critic for the New Yorker, says "add insult to injury" because they are "a strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience." So many people have shifted to working at home that the computer store sold out of computer holding stands and other stores out of goose-neck lamps. One can read books, try new recipes, and I hear that Netflix and Zoom-type apps are making tons of money, so they sure better be donating tons of money to virus research or to small businesses or other places to help those who have been thrust to the bottom of the barrel through no fault of their own, just as the unexpected boon from the bad has come to those companies through no effort on their part. All luck.

          Might I suggest another way to deal with both the lag of time and the need for stimulation? Memorizing poetry is a wonderful distraction. I started with T. S. Eliot's brilliant 140-line poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The subject matter is maybe too close to this our own dismal time, but the poetry, the word usage, is so beautiful it carries through the existential ennui, as it's supposed to do. I walk the hills saying, "Shall we go, then, you and I,/ while the evening is spread out against the sky/ like a patient etherized upon a table?" and "There will be time, there will be time," even though I know full well that it isn't true. 

          Needing something both easier and shorter after memorizing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I picked up the gorgeous humor of Edward Hoagland and started in on "His Majesty," which begins, "What does his majesty, Mr. Boombox in my Jeep think/ as he drives down the beach every night at 2:00 a.m./ under the bleached shell of the summer moon/ assaulting all the houses with his rude tunes?" and containing the great suggestion that the "divine peaceful Florida night" might "inflict on the human condition a big flat tire" or "write it a ticket for two thousand years of disturbing the peace." I love saying those words again and again, as I learn the poem.

          And then what could be better than one of Robert Frost's delightful narrative poems? I memorized "Death of a Hired Man" many years ago, so now I decided on another one of my favorites, "Wild Grapes," in which a five-year-old girl is taken grape picking by her brother to a bunch of wild grapes growing in white birches. When he bends the tree down (you remember from "Birches," don't you? how flexible the white birch tree is?) for her to hold onto and pick the grapes out of, the tree "caught me up as if I were the fish/ and it the fish pole," and then she hangs on "with something of the baby grip/ acquired ancestrally in just such trees." It's a delightful tale, but the best thing is the quintessential Frost way of ending with something wise:

                    I had not learned to let go with the hands

                    as I still have not learned to with the heart

                    and have desires to with the heart — nor need

                    that I can see. The heart—is not the mind

                    I might yet live, as I know others live,

                    to wish to let go with the mind

                    of cares, at night, to sleep,

                    but nothing tells me I need learn

                    to let go with the heart.

            Now I'm onto Gerard Manley Hopkins because I love Hopkins, but most of his poetry is full of angst, and I don't want to be reciting angst right now. So I've chosen "Binsley Poplars," which contains the beautiful and wise lines, "Oh if we but knew what we do/ when we delve and hew/ hack and wrack the growing green."

             Where will I go from here? I'm looking at Wallace Stephens (pretty difficult), maybe Mary Oliver. I like the long poems because the memorization part lasts longer. In the meantime, I'll walk the hills with Eliot, Hoagland, Frost, and Hopkins.

                    

Sitting on a Sunny Porch in Medford, Oregon, during the Pandemic

          Warm in the morning sun, I sway gently in the swing on the porch of my husband's house in Medford. Deep yellow Oregon grape blossoms throw waves of perfume through the soft morning air. Sunshine pours down like yesterday's rain. Birds gurgle in the redwood tree planted a century ago in front of the house A man with earbuds walks by, a kerchief tied over his mouth and nose. A neighbor laughs on the phone from her porch. The woman across the street is sitting on her porch, talking with a friend on the steps, six feet away. It is spring in southern Oregon, and, coronavirus notwithstanding, the mood is upbeat.

          A young man glides down the middle of the street on a skateboard. Seeing me on the porch, in my mask, he calls to me, "I forgot my mask and gloves. I'm trying to figure out if I have time to go back for them." I was glad he at least knew he should be wearing them.

Masked

          The occasional car passes, going where? Only essential businesses are supposed to be open, but it amazes (and irritates) me to see how many businesses think themselves essential. The hardware store? Jacksonville didn't even have a hardware store until a few weeks ago, and now the store considers itself essential? Stove store? Auto parts? Bi-mart is a pharmacy and sells groceries, so it is legitimately open, but I could shop there for flower starts and toys, too, if I wanted. The Subaru service center is open; does that mean I could buy a car? The laundromat is open, and the copy shop.

          It seems like just about any business can justify itself as essential.

      I get it. At this point I'm thinking haircutters and massage therapists should be considered essential businesses, too.

See what I mean about the haircut?

         I am in the habit, now, of wearing my mask even if Mike and I are just walking around his neighborhood (staying six feet apart). Doing so makes a statement, reminds people that even though the weather is serene, the virus is still rampant. People tell me they like our masks, which I made from some South African fabric, green with tiny zebras on it. I agree. They are cute.

          People are, in general, patient. They encourage each other with cheerful words and a sense of our commonality of purpose. The pandemic may not be coming to an end yet, but the end is in sight. You can feel it in the spring of your step, the blossoming trees, and the eternal hope of spring itself.

April Is the Cruelest Month

          T. S. Eliot's opening line of "The Wasteland," "April is the cruelest month" comes to mind every April, but this time I've been rereading the poem. It's surprising how much of it is relevant to this particular April. So here's a poem:

To T. S. Eliot on the First Day of April, 2020

You're durn tootin', Mr. Eliot,
that April is the cruelest month—
this year, certainly, when
fear is in every handful of dust
and we latch onto the word of every Madame Sosostris whose
clairvoyance shows crowds of people walking round in a ring,
earring in restaurants, enjoying theater,
playing music in the same room where we can
hear each other without headphones
pleasures we miss this April
when we say, washing our hands, donning our masks,
restraining the urge to rub eyes and scratch noses,
waving to each other from a six-foot distance,
"One must be so careful these days";
when the unreal city is every city
with its ghost streets and its silences which,
in those unreal cities in Europe,
are broken every Wednesday night
with applause from balconies for nurses and doctors,
for grocery store clerks, postal carriers, and gas station attendants.

None of us had thought death would undo so many.

Our nerves are bad at night
frazzled from hours in front of the computer
reading books online, playing games
efforts to keep the kids occupied
our bodies aching for a walk in the parks that are closed
the rubber band of our psyches stretching thin as

April stretches before us
cruel in its unwillingness to promise a date
when we can leave behind the withered stumps of time, 
told upon the walls of our homes, in which we shelter,
longing to know when we can emerge with the lilacs out of the dead land
and regain spring in our step.

Hurry up, please, it's time.
Hurry up, please, it's time.

                                                                 by Diana Coogle