Saturday Night Widows (5 page)

“You must have felt that, too,” said Lesley, turning to me.

“Me? Yes.” I was caught off guard. I had expected to keep my distance in this conversation—I was the organizer, after all. But I could hardly avoid answering. “My husband’s illness”—did I want to do this?—“was very long. We made hundreds of choices along the way. Do we do radiation? Do we do surgery? Do we do another chemo? It’s hard not to beat yourself up. You don’t know what would have happened if you’d done something differently. And he suffered so much, maybe we shouldn’t have gone to such lengths.”

I hadn’t planned to volunteer this information, wasn’t prepared to revisit it. Five years later, it still unnerved me.

“You
can
beat yourself up about things where you have some control,” Dawn said gently. “But I don’t think that life and death fit into that category.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Lesley agreed. “My husband was the best thing I ever had. When I lost him, my life changed in an instant. But this has made me totally fearless. Because the worst thing that could happen has already happened.”

It was my turn to feel a jolt of recognition. That was my line! “Yes,” I said. “Anything less and you have to let it go.” I tried to steer the conversation toward the future. “That’s why we’re here. Now. Tonight. To let this go and head wherever we need to be next.”

The eyes of the others brightened with possibility. “It’s funny,” Lesley said. “We’ve all just met, but we’re already talking about things I don’t dare say to anyone else.”

We had polished off that bottle of champagne in less time than it took to pop the cork. I stepped into the kitchen to grab a new one from the fridge and held its cool weight for a moment against my overheated brain. A real rumpus was fulminating out there, the group jabbering away, talking all at once and laughing now, too. I was struck by the collective wallop of all that mortal experience assembled in one place, not sure whether what had happened so far was at all what I’d had in mind. I’d felt driven to convene this group to see if there was a better way, but I hadn’t intended to immerse myself so deeply. Already, I was beginning to comprehend that detachment wouldn’t be possible, that I’d be back in the soup. I’d be pressed to revive harrowing memories, to see them again in the light cast by the group.

Dawn’s remark—what was it? “The only cure for sadness is happiness”—was more the model I’d had in mind. I wanted us to
have fun. But, clearly, it wasn’t possible to ignore the memories, dark or light. I weighed the option of bolting out the back door. The others were probably as leery as I was of letting dark genies out of the bottle. Maybe they’d go their separate ways in an hour or so and spare everyone, me included, from further revelations. On the other hand, who was I kidding? I wouldn’t have set this in motion if I hadn’t felt the tug to explore more myself. And it was too late to lose heart now. I felt no choice but to push forward, through the end of dinner at least.

I put my shoulder to the swinging door, back to the group. They were all standing now, forming a tight circle, a near-tribal connection around the appetizers, neglected up to now. Tara looked up and called to me across the room, that room that had seemed so wrong before they all came in. She looked like a different person from the one who had shown up an hour ago. The tension in her face was gone. I swear I couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup. She had taken on some of Dawn’s glow, Denise’s poise, Marcia’s certainty, Lesley’s energy, maybe my confidence.

“Becky,” Tara said, beaming now, “this guacamole is delicious.”

chapter
THREE

y
ou could try looking in the Yellow Pages under
Funeral
.”

The nurse with the sugar-coated voice was back again. Clearly, she wanted to move me along.

My sister fixed her with a withering look, perfected over generations of bossy women in our family. “Do you
have
a copy of the Yellow Pages?” she asked.

“No, but maybe you could check around the phone booths? In the lobby?” The voice was taking on a synthetic edge, more Nutra-Sweet than honey. It was a couple of hours into the evening shift at the hospital. I had been a widow for only an hour or so, and already it was going badly. Now it seemed I was expected to do something, but my brain was scrambled, and I couldn’t grasp what that something might be. Every ten minutes or so, somebody would pop into the room, avoid looking at the bed, and kindly suggest that I go home, go get something to eat,
go
. My inability to move was starting to make the entire staff of the hospital uncomfortable.

I’m sure the picture I presented to them was odd. I imagined a
proper widow might have been weeping softly, tenderly clutching her husband’s hand. But there was so much equipment at that end of the bed—oxygen paraphernalia, a pole with an IV drip, a bedside table that held a telephone and my husband’s reading glasses, and all sorts of monitors that suddenly had stopped beeping—that there was no place for a chair. I was too drained to stand, so I’d planted myself near the bottom of the bed, dry-eyed, holding on to his foot.

Meanwhile, the nurses clearly wanted the room, the way waiters at Babbo want a table on a Saturday night. At first they assured me with big sympathetic eyes, “Take as much time as you want.” But now a different nurse stopped by every few minutes to give me a nudge.

“If you call a funeral home, they will arrange to come pick up your husband,” one of them offered.

Leave him here? To be picked up? Like the dry cleaning or the recyclables? I couldn’t do that. “I don’t know what to do,” I answered.

My mother, my sister, and three or four friends had gathered in the hallway outside. Someone asked if the hospital had a social worker who could speak to me. The hospital employed such people for situations like this, situations when the family had Failed to Plan Ahead. I liked the idea. The social worker would know what to do. I could sit there surrounded by the all-too-familiar fluorescent lighting and waxy linoleum floors and inert machinery until one appeared, but it was Friday night, and no one was answering the page.

On some level, I grasped what they were all saying to me. I needed to leave. My husband was gone. I knew that. And yet I couldn’t leave him just like that, without a plan in place, and my brain couldn’t form a plan. Whatever anyone said to me—“I’m so
sorry.” “Would you like some hot tea?” “Would you like to go home now?”—I could come up with only one response: “I don’t know what to do.”

It felt as if someone with a remote control were changing channels in my brain every few seconds, before any thought could reach a logical conclusion. The loop ran something like this:

“Bernie is gone. There is no point in staying here.”

“I can’t leave him here. He hates the hospital.”

“Let’s face it, Becky, he’s not really in the hospital now.”

“I should start planning a funeral. The nurses think I should be planning a funeral.”

“I have no idea how to plan a funeral.”

“Everybody is waiting for me. They must be hungry.”

“I should eat, too. I need my strength.”

“Wait—I don’t need my strength anymore. I can finally sleep.”

“I should have made plans for a funeral.”

“What kind of person doesn’t plan for a funeral when her husband has had cancer for four and a half years?”

“A person who has been Staying Positive. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I need to talk to Bernie.”

Ah, that was it. I needed to talk to Bernie. Somewhere in my head I knew that that could never happen again. Not even once. Not ever. My head was refusing to process that information. It was like a pinball machine that someone had bumped too hard, and it was going
Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!
I’m as independent as the next person, but I had talked to Bernie about everything, big or small, for twenty years. Everything from what article I should write to what sweater
goes with what skirt. The idea that it wouldn’t happen again was simply too big to grasp. My brain was shutting down rather than taking it in.

Still, somehow, the brief thought that I couldn’t talk to Bernie gave me a wedge in, a way to start functioning, however feebly. No, I couldn’t talk to him now. But I could try to put together what he would have said if he’d had a chance.

I thought back to the day, four and a half years ago, when we first learned that Bernie had cancer. And not just any cancer, but a softball-sized tumor so perilous that even the most hardened oncologists, armored with emotional defenses as secure as maximum-security prisons, patted us on our shoulders and looked at us with open pity. A cancer so rare—they called it thymic carcinoma—that no one knew a protocol for treating it, only a prognosis that, in essence, came down to this: There was no use making long-term plans. A cancer in a part of the chest so obscure (the thymus? I’d never even heard of it) that scarcely anyone had a clue what purpose it served, let alone what to do with a sick one.

My assignment as the supportive spouse got off to an undignified start. Somehow, the doctor who was supposed to break the news to us was under the impression that somebody else already had. We walked into an appointment that we thought was about a persistent but routine respiratory infection, and his first words were, “The tumor is very large. It has to come out.”

“What tumor?”
Bernie and I cried in unison, like the Two Stooges.

The doctor slapped some film onto a backlit board and pointed to what looked like a massive ink stain, blotting out everything that mattered in the middle of Bernie’s chest.

Speechless, I dropped like a rock into the nearest chair. The
room went momentarily black, and everyone from Bernie to a posse of interns rushed to my side to tend to me—me, the well one.

“Put your head between your legs,” the doctor advised. I struggled to absorb the blow from this inelegant angle.

Bernie took my hand. “I’m so sorry, Beck,” he said.

Afterward, I stood next to him outside the hospital, dizzy and devastated. I was forty-four years old, and I knew that whatever happened next, nothing would be the same. Bernie looked shaken, too, but he took my arm, and his demeanor took on an upbeat energy, common to him whenever he undertook a new project.

“Beck,” he said with resolution, “we just have to put our heads down and go.”

And so we did. Like the journalists we both were, we hopped into a cab, headed home to Brooklyn, and started doing research, reading anything we could about the disease, calling any expert we could find, working the story, the story of how to save his life, for as long as we could, anyway. We didn’t think about the future. We didn’t think about the larger implications. We didn’t think about death. We applied ourselves to the concrete task at hand. We succeeded, I suppose, in that he lived far longer than anyone predicted. The approach became a model for us throughout his illness. Every time we got bad news—the tumor was growing, the chemo wasn’t working, the surgery didn’t remove the whole thing, it was spreading through the chest, it had spread to the brain—we put our heads down and figured out something to do about it, a new specialist to see, a new procedure to try.

Now in the hospital once again, Bernie’s body inert beside me, I was dizzy, devastated, again. And once again, I realized, the only way to keep going was not to think too deeply right now, not that
the channel clicker in my brain would let me anyway. I needed to figure out something to
do
. I couldn’t think about loss. I couldn’t think about how profoundly alone I would be, stretching years into the future. I couldn’t think, except in the most practical way, about death. I suppose that’s one of the handy realities about funerals. They provide the bereaved with a task that’s tangible but not too profound—Danish or bagels afterward?—for the first day or so, holding the enormity of what has happened at bay, if only for a time. I’d have something to do for now.

It was shocking how ill-prepared I was to accomplish even that. Planning a funeral—
This is a job for grown-ups!
I told myself in disbelief, feeling like I was twelve. Nobody else in my circle seemed any better equipped. My mother had helped arrange funerals before, but she had come from out of town and didn’t know the ropes in New York. My friends were all too young to have firsthand experience. And the nurses … well, the phone book idea was their go-to suggestion. One of my friends said to me a week later, “Gee, a cancer hospital—you’d think no one had ever died there before.” The ultimate certainty in life may be mortality, but most of us, me most of all, are caught flat-footed when confronted with it for real. Even as it was overtaking Bernie and me like a tidal wave, we had refused to look out to sea, pushing all thoughts of death aside. For our generation, in our culture, in our lives, death was the one unmentionable.

We weren’t alone. The doctors had started retreating already in the preceding week. As Bernie grew sicker and sicker, his vast team fell away, avoiding eye contact, standing on the far side of the examining room, leaving bedside visits to skittish interns. I couldn’t blame any of them. Many had become fond of Bernie, and fond of me, too, I suppose. They had been proud of his unexpected perseverance. For his most devoted physicians, this would be a sad defeat.
Our usual oncologist wasn’t doing rounds that week, so one of the hospital’s leading specialists had spent the last several days alternately avoiding me and patronizing me while Bernie lay unconscious in a haze of narcotics. Whenever I asked a question, this doctor would advance into my personal space, back me into a corner in some sort of alpha male display, and speak to me loudly and slowly, as if I were mentally challenged. “Your husband has sepsis. It’s an infection in the bloodstream. Almost nobody survives sepsis, even healthy people, and your husband isn’t healthy.”