In the hospital afterward, my mother staid nights, my lover days. I remember writhing and weeping, ice chips on my lips, wet washcloths. My voice was shot. Not permanently (blessedly), but as part of the temporary tug and tear. The narcotics came in staggered six hour rotations; timed right I could get an injection every three hours; but I had to ask for it. How? As I remember it, my mom woke in the night at my barest intention toward her. ”Breathe Darling, 1, 2, 3, 4, that’s right, on to 12. I know it hurts. Keep on. I’ve ordered the pain meds, but it’ll be seventeen minutes before we get them. Seventeen minutes, love, we’re almost there. Yes, here’s the washcloth. You’re going to be sick? I’ll call for the pan. Hold on, Sweetgirl, 6, 7, 8, 9.” All the while, my lips barely closing, the mere pucker and suck of some high-tide-hung sea thing; her comprehension total and perfect, immaculate.
It was like that with my lover, less desperate if only for the light flooding the room. He has always called me Babe, but now he cooed, “Sweetheart,” “Sh, sh, I hear you,” buzzing for the nurse, reaching for the pan, though I had failed to make a sound. The nurse would speak and I would flare my fingers, grind my teeth, flash my eyes, he translated. In the worst of the pain he wrenched his whole body ’round me to set his forehead against mine. We cried together.
I wanted the catheter out. And the fluid drip and the drain. But the catheter first. He understood and called for the nurse. She came: “Look, I can take it out, but that means she’s got to pee in the toilet on her own by six o’clock, okay? In the toilet, on her own two feet, with her eyes wide open by six, or it goes back in.” He looked to me; I blinked, “Okay.” She took it out. I winced, and fell asleep. My love slept in the chair beside me. The nurse woke us up at 5:45, asking, “Has she gone?” ”Hmph,” she remarked, peeking in on the washroom and it’s still-empty trap marked “LOWE.” My love wiped the sleep from his eyes, the sleep from my eyes. I tried to ask, “Will you help me?” He set about turning down the bedsides and swinging my legs down. I got there neither on my own two feet, nor with my eyes open, but I did pee in the toilet, ungovernably, pathetically, my head low, my breath shallow. My love squatted before me, folding a long sheet of toilet paper in a thick quilted star, offering it to me. ”Whenever you’re ready, babe.” I batted at it, looking up at him finally. He smiled, nodded.
When at last we made it back to the bed, the chair, I pursed my lips and tapped his wrist. He bent towards me, listening. ”In sickness and in health?” I nodded. ”In sickness and in health,” he said kissing my hand.
C.
Dear Catlin,
As you know, I have a firm belief in Blake’s “grain of sand”: that a single act can reveal the whole of a person, the entirety of a life. So I was–what’s the word?–touched, moved, unseated by your lover’s lines–”Whenever you’re ready, babe” and “In sickness and in health?”–by the infinite sweetness of each word and utterance.
Now I want to copy and paste what I wrote above while replacing lover with mother and “Breathe darling” with “sickness and health.” But I gather that would be redundant, as redundant as these my words.
A
. . . But then as you (and your man, Hadot) know full well: wisdom and courage and beauty and kind words are always redundant. (Redundant: from redundare: redounding, abounding, surging up–a marvelous word!) It’s so nice to run into you here, A. Friendly enthusiasm has turned my apartment, garden: Now it’s not so much book on book, but fern on frond, and lily on rose. We laughed about the bookcases as necrophilic, now eros triumphs over death, blooming spring from every wintry shelf. I’m so looking forward to your next story-post. And to conversations–further turns. C.
Someday we will get rid of all our books but the few we hold dear, leaving us all the time in the world to turn our necks and noses toward our dearest friends. These we will have and hold but not like keepsakes or clippings, rather like ferns and fronds and Japanese maples.
beautiful.
Jeanne, Thank you. Coming from you (your golden pen) the affirmation means so much.
Words sing in your veins and cross to ours, unspeakably happy, lamenting, consoling, sad, familial, fiercely alive and delightedly you.
And Ed, I’m late in my follow-up (confounded as ever by technology), but thank you (the words are so small) for your concern, your care: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning . . . ” my mourning is turned into dancing; the sackcloth put off, I am clothed in gladness–thank you for sharing my joy. C.