The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic (5 page)

As I walked in the door that night, our house had a forlorn, uninhabited feeling. Even in the state I was in, I could feel it. It had, without my knowing it, turned into a way station.

My diaries of that winter show an abrupt transition, or no transition at all. September through late October show lists of to-do’s: Figure out how to pay taxes. Sermon: Ordinary Time. Prepare for reading. Patagonia campaigns, a meeting on wolverines, an essay on the Canadian lynx. A
field report assigned to a young man who, I note now, died in an avalanche when he was skiing in the backcountry last Christmas. That diary ends with a brief notation regarding travel for a Patagonia conference: Truckee 41 degrees, 24 degrees, snow.

Then the pages are blank.

The next book starts with: “How much is the immune system ‘knocked back’?” and “Vascular?” and (naïvely), “A conference call, all docs?” Lists—apricots, eggs, red peppers—healthy, “anti-inflammatory” vegetables and fruit.

Appointments written in weeks before are crossed out:
Jodie, breakfast
—crossed out.
Yoga, 10:30
—line through it. And added in:
Sansum Pharmacy, Dr. Burks, Dr. Lowe
.

I glanced at the Day-Timer lying on a chair where I had left it to go see Dr. Lowe. It was Tuesday, December 1. I still had the feeling that I should be at the reading. I should try to pull myself together.

Vincent went out to buy dinner. I lay down on our bed and felt relief to be here, in the familiar, rather than in the hospital. When you have crossed over the line that we are all safe and that everything will remain the same, normal is all you want.

Our cat, a black and gray tabby, Junior, sniffed at the bandage on my right wrist where they had put in the IV.

What fell on me was
before
and
after
. My body, which carried me around, hauled suitcases, stretched, ate, made love—its astonishing intricacies never pondered—was no longer possible to ignore. It was in the
before
. Now I was in
after
, a country that I could do nothing to leave, for which I was completely unprepared, for which I had no map. I got up and called Mark Asman, my parish priest. He told me the church had called all the people who had signed up for
the reading, and he was waiting there to meet anyone who had not “heard,” as he put it. Then he said he would come over. He did not make that an option.

Vincent and I ate cold salmon and asparagus, the beginning of meals from supermarkets and fast food that after a while all tasted the same but kept us going. Oz, the land of prepared food. And where the most everyday thing—the preparing of a meal—becomes too hard to accomplish.

We talked in a kind of businesslike code. He asked me what I had to do tomorrow, and I told him I had to go to Dr. Burks’s office to have a second “infusion.” I could walk, I said—it was only a few blocks away. He said he would still take Freya (our old Volvo) down to Patagonia.

“You might need the Prius,” he said.

I did not tell him that I knew I should not drive.

In my mind was the fear of losing the remaining sight I had in my right eye, certainly. But the other fear was that this
thing
had fallen on me out of the blue, and I, and they, the doctors, did not know what it was. How had it happened? What was it? Would it strike again, in the other eye?

And then there was a third fear. Vincent’s mother, Rachel, had been diagnosed with MS at nineteen. She had been sick off and on throughout his childhood. He had had to look after her, as the eldest child, or was sent to live with relatives when she was hospitalized. I could not allow myself to think about whether he might leave me, but I feared the loss of his tenderness, his attraction, our deep, mutual world. I would be a burden. As we sat at the table, I felt about a foot of distance between us, as if he had placed a ruler on the table. And the glass wall. He was not on my side of it.

I heard Mark’s car on the street and went out onto the
porch to wait for him. He unfolded himself from his car and brushed his hand along his shoulders. He was wearing his collar and black priest clothes. Our neighbor opened her gate as he walked by and practically curtsied. She looked up the street at me and waved, a concerned look on her face, then turned away.

I tried to light a fire, again, in a desire to be a host to a guest, not knowing, yet, not wanting to know that I was not a host, I was a patient. The fire would not light.

Mark sat down on the couch. I sat down next to him. I had known him for fourteen years; we had been through his coming out to the parish as a gay man, the ups and downs of a soup kitchen housed in the church parish hall, the deaths of my brother and parents. He was not a paragon—he was a person. He lost his temper when the tablecloths for a dinner/liturgy for Maundy Thursday were not perfectly ironed; his office was a mess; he drove volunteers too hard. But there was something about him that I knew I could count on, that was what a
priest
should be. The pain of being closeted in his youth could have led to anger, resentment, desire for retaliation. But in Mark, it made him listen. He had an ear for submerged pain. He took care of his flock; he went looking if any one of us was lost.

I told him the story. He asked me what I usually did when this kind of thing happened. I said this kind of thing had not happened to me. He asked me how I prayed when—he was careful here—something like this happened. I examined what was in my prayer repertoire. I said I went straight back to childhood, some version of “Help me.” What a friend called the 911 prayer. I added that even eight hours into this, I had figured out that this version of prayer was not going to get me through this new country. I
didn’t tell him about the glass wall. I realized I didn’t really know what prayer was. I had no practice; I had not been taught any.

A remnant of the Episcopal Great Litany went through my head:
From sin and death. Good Lord, deliver us
.

And then:
A sheep of your own flock, a lamb of your own.…

And a piece of the wedding vows written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the sixteenth century, that Vincent and I had spoken on a hot day in September:
With my body, I thee worship. In sickness and in health, for better or for worse
.

Parts of the large map of prayer had stuck in me, and I was glad they did, for the beauty of the prayers and what they were trying to say. For the writers who had written them. But I had no
derrotero
for Oz, nothing I could claim as my own.

Finally Mark said, “What I try to do in this kind of situation, not that this kind of thing has happened to me either, is ask myself what is real now.”

I used to climb rocks, small cliffs in the mountains to the east of Santa Barbara and south in the desert at Joshua Tree. The women I climbed with called themselves the Honettes, because we were “honed women.” The Honettes’ idea of a biathlon was climbing and then shopping. I was once stuck in Joshua Tree in what is called an off-width crack, a crack too small to fit yourself completely into and too large to use as a handhold. I hated off-width cracks. One was invariably off balance in them, the last thing you want when you are halfway up a cliff. My right thigh was stuffed into this crack to keep me on the face while I tried to find a hold over my head and encountered only bat guano, which slowly fell into my hair.

“I can’t do this!” I yelled up to my belay.

“Shut up and climb,” she said helpfully.

Having no recourse, I gripped the edge of the crack with my right hand and, hoping my thigh would hold inside it, tapped my left foot along the face as if it were a blind man’s cane. It encountered a small bump. I realized that if I could stick to that bump long enough, I could shift my thigh up the crack a few inches and be a little farther along, but I would have to put the weight of my left leg on the bump, and then my full weight. I would have to, in climbers’ parlance,
commit
.

I looked around my living room. I was in the medical version of an off-width crack. And what was real was that I was sitting in my living room rather than in the hospital. Vincent was in the next room, reading. Mark was sitting next to me on the couch holding my hand. I could still see.

M
ARK LEFT
, and I went to bed. Junior, the cat, curled himself at my knees. Vincent snored lightly. Two bodies beside me. I tried to find words that might be a prayer. In my head were the jumbled pile of words from medicine that day that the part of me trained as a journalist was trying to get completely, accurately straight in a nonsensical exercise:
Polymyalgia rheumatoid? No, rheumatica. Optical neuritis. Solu-Medrol, which causes some patients to experience—bliss? No, euphoria. How much is one gram?

Late in his life, my father, a lawyer and a judge, confessed to me that he didn’t understand exactly what I did all day. Despite his experience writing briefs and speeches for the New Mexico Bar Association, he was not sure, he said, what a person did who had only writing to do.

We were sitting in my parents’ house in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in front of a glass door that looked out on a bare lawn, the gray branches of a Russian olive tree, and a long blue sky. My mother was in Santa Barbara temporarily, living in a hotel apartment three blocks from our house. She had found a lump on her jaw, and when it didn’t go away, I suggested she come out to UCLA. There a surgeon diagnosed lymphoma in about ten minutes. We brought her up to the Cancer Center in Santa Barbara, where she was undergoing chemotherapy. She was living near me; he
was living in Las Cruces. He was lonely, so I went out a week before Christmas to be with him.

When I walked in the door, I breathed in the smell of Donegal tobacco. I got myself a cup of tea. My father’s wispy white hair brushed his shirt collar, giving him a bohemian air. He was dressed in a tweed coat and a clean shirt and old corduroy trousers, his country gentleman’s weekend clothes.

He once settled a legal case on the porch of a store in Hillsboro, a mountain village near Las Cruces, with his pants rolled up, his shoes and socks off, his feet cooling in a stream.

I’ll never know whether he had it planned out—he was a careful man and a lawyer—or whether the story of his life just came up out of him, in the way a fairy tale figure who I remember swallowed the whole world and then it gushed out again, fish swimming with bugged eyes, whole towns, trains full of people, a circus tent.

He talked about the man who had brought him to AA in Union Grove in 1955. The guy had told him stories while holding his hand through the shakes.

“There was a man in a hole,” the guy had told my dad. “A priest walked by and said, ‘I will pray for you.’ A doctor walked by and said, ‘I’ll try to find someone to help you.’ A third man came by and jumped down into the hole with him.

“ ‘What are you doing?’ asked the man in the hole.

“ ‘I’ve been here,’ said the man, ‘and I know the way out.’ ”

He talked about how he met my mother in 1936, when he was a student at Oxford, and she was on a tour of Europe with her mother. Among her papers after she died
was a little red traveler’s diary of that trip. “Met David Gallagher,” she noted. “He was wearing ‘Oxford bags’ and a striped scarf.” She was engaged to marry a young doctor who used to walk on his hands down the hallway of her father’s house in Winnetka. When she got home, she broke the engagement.

They married in 1940. His best man was his best friend, who later died on a prison ship bombed accidentally by U.S. planes off the coast of Japan. They honeymooned in Jamaica, and then he joined his army unit in Tennessee. To be near him, she drove from camp to camp in a convertible they named Daisy, with Carla, the Saint Bernard, in the backseat. It was glamour all around.

The army tossed him out of the infantry because of his flat feet, and he ended up in the Judge Advocates Corps in San Antonio, Texas, and then in Dallas, where my brother, Kit, was born. After the war, they moved briefly back to Hubbard Woods, near Winnetka, and then to New Mexico.

Every now and then, while my dad and I talked, my nephew Sean would walk in from the guesthouse, and my father would lower his voice. Sean would say hi, then make himself some coffee. My dad put Sean’s meds out on the counter every night and hoped he actually took them.

Sean had been the one to carry the torch of brilliance after my brother, Kit, refused to pick it up and I tried to but was, after all, a girl. Sean carried it well. He had one of the fastest minds I’ve ever encountered. He helped me understand IQ. His was high. And he was sweet and incredibly funny and independent, and his mind worked with tremendous speed and clarity until it hit a train wreck called methamphetamines,
LSD, a love affair gone wrong, and late adolescence. One of his psychiatric nurses once explained to me that just before you’re twenty, the brain is still developing, the cells sorting themselves out. Certain “filters” are in place in childhood, she said. That was the best way to describe it. And gradually those filters are lifted, one by one, as you grow into early adolescence and then late adolescence and then your twenties. If all goes well, the filters are all up and everything’s fine, and you’ve got a working adult brain. And if it doesn’t? You get a boy who at nineteen started talking to me on the phone from Santa Cruz, where he was a student in psychology at the university, about how the cat at the bar he was working in was telling him about its life.

I rescued a little pocket calendar from his possessions after he spent an ill-fated sojourn in Santa Barbara. Notations in it stopped, precisely, in August 1985, a few months after that first disturbing phone conversation and at the point he completely lost his mind. Or rather, most of it. His memory is locked in that year, or before it, but not after. The friends then are still fresh in his mind, the books he was reading (Fromm, Erickson, Hume) as if on his current shelf, the car he wanted and the one he drove. And everything after that, which is now everything over twenty-seven years, is scrambled, hazy, delusional, things having taken place in the half-light of another planet that he knows is not as real as the one he left that year, but one he can’t quite leave, can’t quite find the right rocket to send him back.