"...I only miss you
every now and then
like a soft breeze
blowin' up
from the Caribbean
most Novembers
I break down and cry
but I
can't remember
if we said goodbye..."
Steve Earle, "Goodbye"
Two years ago today, I heard my wife's voice for the last time.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Here is a link to previous diaries in the series: The Grieving Room
I awoke at exactly four in the morning on Friday, October 26th, 2007.
The day we had dreaded for two months had finally arrived: on this day, my wife would undergo surgery to remove a very large cerebellopontine angle meningioma from her brain.
A benign tumor.
I tiptoed across my bedroom, through the living room, and into the bathroom. Showered as quietly as possible, so as to avoid waking our three sleeping children: a boy, two months shy of his ninth birthday; a girl, a month shy of her third year; and another boy, two days shy of turning fourteen months old.
I let the warm water run over my shoulders.
A burst of optimism surged through me.
This is it, I thought to myself. D-day. Zero hour. Her doctors will get in there and get that thing out of there, today.
&&&&
I made it to her room in the neurological observation unit by a quarter to five.
I'd wanted to stay with her in there that night before the surgery; to comfort her if she got scared, and to comfort myself. I'd wanted to stay with her in there that night, just in case the unthinkable happened, just in case something went wrong during the surgery. I'd wanted to stay with her in that night, just in case, to tell her one more time how much I loved her, to tell her how much she meant to me, to tell her that the fifteen years I'd spent madly in love with her were by far the best years of my life.
I wanted to say goodbye. Just in case.
But she sent me home.
You need some rest, she said. I need some rest, she said.
I didn't press her on it. I sensed she wanted to be alone so that she could sleep as much as she could. I won't deny that her desire hurt me some, but I realized that I had to abide by her choice here: she faced twelve, eighteen, maybe even, they said, twenty four hours of brain surgery. It was her call.
So I left and went home.
&&&&
That morning, I parked the car in the closest lot to her wing. The lot was empty. A foggy early morning, the harvest moon slightly visible through the thick mist. I walked through the ground floor and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. Walked over to her unit, and then over to the desk. Asked if I could see her.
She's awake, they said. Go ahead.
I walked over to her.
"Hey."
"Hey dear," she said.
She seemed tired. They'd already started her on some of the surgical meds, setting her up for the anesthesia.
I reached out for her hand and put it in mine. We engaged in idle chit-chat. She asked about how the kids had gone to bed the night before. I told her the baby had another bout of constipation, but I'd gotten him through it.
Poor thing, she said.
Little did she know. Poor thing, indeed.
A couple of hours passed. We continued to talk in small talk. I tried to gauge her mood. She seemed tired, as I said, but less nervous than I, which figured. She'd shown much less fear about this tumor, about this surgery, than I had. Lauren possessed a seemingly bottomless well of optimism, and it had served us well time and time again during our years together. We came to the normal forks in the road, the ones that ordinary couples come to from time to time, and when we came to those points, I was the one who hesitated, the one who would stop in place for fear of taking the wrong road. Lauren always seemed to know which way to go, she always seemed to take those turns fearlessly.
Meanwhile, I felt almost overcome with fear and sadness as we talked, but I kept it to myself. Don't go there, I thought. Stay focused. As much as I wished I could have put myself in her shoes, I could not. She faced the surgery, not I, and she wanted small talk, and that's what I gave her.
&&&&
Around seven, an orderly came in. A friendly young guy. He looked at her chart.
"You ready?" he asked her with a smile.
"Yeah," she answered with a smile.
He looked at me.
"You nervous, ain't you big guy?"
"Ahhh. Yeah. Maybe. A little."
He unlocked the wheels to my wife's bed and started wheeling her out of the room and toward the elevator.
"It's alright, dude."
"I hope so."
"Yeah, it's gonna be alright."
He waved at some patients, and some nurses, he apparently knew as made our way out off the floor. He started to sing.
"Yeaahhh...we gonna party when you get back...we gonna party..."
We all laughed as we got into the elevator. I remember thinking that he was trying to tell us that he'd seen this scene played out before, and he'd seen the patients come back fine, and I felt comforted by that.
We got off the elevator and he wheeled Lauren into what I can only describe as a waiting area. He handed some paperwork to some other orderly and then looked at us.
"Remember what I said. When you get back..."
We gonna party, I thought to myself.
&&&&
The waiting room was crowded with close to two dozen patients on beds, all awaiting surgery, and all surrounded by family and friends and orderlies and nurses and administrative people. It reminded me of a train station waiting area, crowded and busy but without any obvious fear and sadness.
By this point, it took every ounce of energy I had to not break down and weep on the spot. We continued with the small talk. Lauren signed some more papers, answered some questions. I noticed my right hand felt sweaty, and then realized that I had not let go of Lauren's hand since I had arrived more than two and a half hours prior.
Her demeanor remained the same throughout: a bit tired, but calm. She joked about me betting some of the Breeder's Cup races the next day, she teased me about not spending every waking second at the hospital while she recovered.
"I'll be fine, dear," she said.
"I know," I lied.
Around five to eight, three or four people came in and stood next to her bed.
"Alright, time to go," one of them said.
They wheeled her out of the waiting area. I walked alongside the bed, still holding her hand.
We turned down a hallway. One of the people pushing her told me I couldn't go any further. They kept pushing her away from me. I wanted them to stop, I wanted to throw my arms around her one last time, just in case, but they kept going. My hand slipped out of hers.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you," I replied.
I wanted to say something else, I felt words, thousands of them, coming to the surface, but I couldn't make sense of them, couldn't say them.
And then I uttered, out of panic and confusion and desperation, two words that will haunt me for the rest of my life:
"Goodbye, Lauren."
&&&&
I'm drifting back to a Thursday night, December, 2003, I think. The two of us on the couch, reading, her laying with her legs stretched out on my lap, as she liked to do. Some sort of detective show on the television, a show about missing persons. We talked idly, read inattentively, and watched the detective show sporadically.
At the end of the show, a song played.
"Hey," I said. "I love this song. It's a Steve Earle song. It's called 'Goodbye.' It was on his comeback album. Train a Comin'."
"Do you have that one?"
She knew of my love of Earle's music, even shared it, to a degree, and she knew I owned several of his albums. But I didn't own this one. Not yet.
"Everytime I think to look for it in a record store, they never have it," I said. "You'd think someone would have it, it's not that obscure. I don't understand it."
&&&&
Maybe three weeks later, on Christmas morning, we - we at that stage consisting of me, Lauren, the five year old Bailey, and Lauren's parents, who came to visit us from her homeland in England several times a year - gathered around the tree to open presents.
I don't remember many of the gifts that year. I do remember buying Lauren some good drawing paper and pencils, as she had a knack for drawing (her art teachers encouraged her to major in art in college) and enjoyed it. I don't remember what I got her parents, or what they got me, and I don't really remember what we got Bailey. Lots of toys, and some clothes, surely.
But I remember one gift I received that Christmas. I remember opening a small package, wondering, what can this be?
"It's from me," she said with a smile.
I finished tearing the wrapping paper off. At the bottom of the box sat a CD. Steve Earle. Train a Comin'.
"You wouldn't believe how many stores I had to go to for this one," she said.
I held the jewel case in my hand and looked at it. Then I looked at her. Words could never do justice to the love and gratitude I felt at that moment. I could see her, in the days leading up to that Christmas, trekking in and out of local record shops, looking for that album; I could see that look of determination she sometimes got on her face, that look of hers that said to the world, I will not be denied. That determination would one day comfort me in the days leading up to her surgery. In December of 2003, she got it in her head that she would find Train a Comin' for me, and nothing was gonna stop her; in October of 2007, she got it in her head that she'd take care of the tumor in her head, and nothing was gonna stop her then, either.
&&&&
Me, my brother and sisters, and even some of the older nieces and nephews refer to that Christmas as "the best Christmas ever." We got two feet of snow that day. We all gathered at my sister's house for dinner that night. My dad had a few drinks in him and held us spellbound with crazy tales from his Dickensian childhood.
A few months later, all hell would start breaking loose in our family, and it didn't stop for years. Two kids diagnosed with autism, another almost died at three from type-one diabetes, another had a major spinal problem that required extremely dangerous surgery, another almost died from anorexia at ten. Lauren's dad got pancreatic cancer and died. And while all of this went down, a gigantic tumor sat, lying in wait, on Lauren's brain.
But we didn't know any of this on that Christmas morning. As the morning turned to early afternoon, the snow started to fly, thick and heavy. Lauren and her parents all wanted a turn in the shower. I told Lauren I wanted to go out for a walk. I put Train a Comin' into my portable CD player and headed out into the snow. Walked down Euclid Avenue and over toward the pond, which had just frozen over. No one around, no cars travelling the streets. I put "Goodbye" on repeat and listened to it over and over again as I made countless circuits around that pond. God, I love this song, I thought. God, I love my wife, I love this life, how could I have been born so lucky, I thought.
&&&&
"Goodbye, Lauren."
The words seemed to hang in the air of that hallway. I felt sick to my stomach. What did she think when she heard me say that? Why did I say that? Did hearing me say that scare her? Upset her? I regretted saying it. And finally, free from the need to act strong for her sake, I broke down.
I thought of the song, thought of that Christmas, of that walk through the snow, around the pond.
"Goodbye, Lauren."
A kindly older woman came up to me and patted my shoulder.
"The waiting room is right out here," she said. "You need to go over to the front desk there and tell them where you're going to wait. Tell them your name and all. They will be providing you with updates during your loved one's surgery."
"I'm sorry." I said, trying to regain my composure. "I just...I...my wife's going in there for brain surgery, ya know? If it was like a torn ACL in her knee I think I'd be a little calmer, ya know?"
I'd stopped crying. We both laughed.
"I know you're worried. But I'm sure everything'll be fine. Just make sure you go check in with the desk and tell them where you'll be and give them you're cell phone number and all, so they can stay in touch with you. OK?"
&&&&
Throughout the day, my brother, my sister, and my buddy Brian kept me company and took care of sending out updates to the waiting world of folks sitting with crossed fingers, worried about our Lauren.
For hours on end, all we heard was good news. The surgeon who cut her head open came out around noon and told me and Brian that while the tumor was "enormous, just enormous for a woman of this age, she must have been walking around with this thing for years," he'd given the neurosurgeon "really good" access to it.
"You know she's probably never gonna hear out of her left ear again, right?" he asked.
"Yeah, they told us that."
"Well, look, there's a lot we can do these days to help with that. Here's my card. In three or four weeks, when she's feeling a little better, give me a call, and we'll bring her in and start looking at options."
I felt some comfort in his matter-of-fact manner. Bring her in, three or four weeks. That meant, of course, that he was confident that she'd be ready for a doctor's appointment in three or four weeks. That's good, I thought.
The neurosurgeon came out at four, and again around seven that evening, both times with good news. Removal of the tumor was going smoothly. Preliminary pathology indicated that it was in fact a benign meningioma. The critical cranial nerves in that area had no significant involvement with the tumor, and the nerves were responding to electrical stimulation. All good signs. Very good.
Around nine, Brian left and my sister Deb came back for what were by now calling "the next shift." A few minutes later one of the front desk people came over with an update.
"The neurosurgeon says everything continues to go well, and that he thinks he'll be done in about two hours. Some of the other doctors in there think it might be a bit longer, but the man in charge says two hours, so..."
I turned to my sister and said, "hey, if Dr. says two hours, that's what we're going with."
I called my mom, who was staying at home with the babies; our oldest was at my sister's house. Mom didn't pick up, so I left a message with the good news: all's well. Surgery should end soon-ish. I'll touch base in the morning.
&&&&
Many of us do not get to choose the terms of the goodbyes we get to say to our loved ones. Life, and death, have their own plans. Sometimes the circumstances prevent us from saying goodbye at all.
Despite knowing this, I had my goodbye to Lauren figured out very early on in our relationship. Or so I thought. Early on, while we lived an ocean apart (her in England, me in upstate New York), I told her during a late night phone call that I planned on loving her for a very long time.
How long, she asked.
Seventy years, I said.
I don't know why I said seventy; I don't know why I didn't say forver, as I often did. I said seventy years. I was twenty six at the time, and I figured I'd be doing pretty damn well to make it to ninety six. I figured seventy should cover it.
And I figured that someday, in the far distant future, after a long life together, Lauren and our children would gather around me while I laid on my deathbed, and we'd say our goodbyes then, sad and tearful, perhaps, at impending death doing us part, but grateful for a long and happy life together.
&&&&
Around nine thirty I told my sister to go home. She'd been there on and off since about eight thirty that morning. She looked tired. Everything was going well, and in less than two hours, maybe, the surgeon would come out and tell me that he had removed all, or enough of, the tumor, and that Lauren was in the recovery room, in stable condition.
My sister thought about it and looked at me and said, "you know what? I've been here this long, I'm gonna stay here with you and see it out until the end."
The waiting room had slowly grown less crowded over the course of the day, and by ten-thirty at night there were only two other families still there. I decided I wanted to move; we'd been sat in the same spot so long. We got up and moved over near the front desk.
A couple of minutes later, a sudden feeling of sheer and utter panic and terror came over me. I stood up, put my head in my hands, and started pacing frantically.
"What are you doing?" my sister asked.
"Something's wrong, Deb. Oh shit, shit, shit. Something's gone wrong. I know it. I know it. Something's wrong."
My sister tried to calm me down.
"Maybe we shouldn't have moved, maybe it threw you off somehow."
"Something's gone wrong. I know it."
"Well, we haven't heard anything but good news. Look, you're exhausted, you're crazy with worry, which is to be expected. Let's go back to where we were sitting, I'll get you some water."
We went back to the old spot. I drank some water, tried some "yoga breaths." I calmed down some, but I just had this very sick feeling in my stomach.
&&&&
Eleven o'clock came and went with no update.
Midnight came and went.
One a.m. came and went.
My wife had now been in the operating room for seventeen hours, with no end in sight.
Sometime after one a.m., I walked past the now-unmanned front desk and over to a hallway. A long hallway. I guessed that the operating rooms were down that long hallway. I decided to wait there.
I paced. I stared down the hallway. Every time I heard the slightest sound I looked around me, looking for the sight of the surgeon.
At close to two, I saw a figure emerge from one of the doors in that hallway.
Is that him? I thought. Is it over?
The figure was so far away that at first I couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman.
The figure slowly walked down that hallway. As it approached, I first saw it was the figure of a man. Then I could it was the surgeon. He had his head down.
Probably just tired, I thought. Long day for him, on his feet all that time.
My sister stood next to me.
The surgeon finally stood in front of us.
"All done?" I asked hopefully.
He pointed at my sister.
"Is she family?"
My heart sank.
"She's my sister."
"Let's go sit down."
We went into a nearby small conference room. He sat across a small table from us. My sister sat to my right. He put his arms on the table, looked at me, exhaled, and began to speak.
"As I was removing the last bits of the tumor...
I felt the life drain out of me. If I hadn't been sitting, I would have collapsed onto the floor.
...she suffered significant brain swelling...
I gasped. My sister put her hand on my back. I thought the next words out of his mouth were going to be something along the lines of "we tried our best to save her, but..."
...I had to remove a piece of her cerebellum to relieve the swelling...
&&&&
Lauren did not die that night. Somehow, she survived countless major complications for twenty-five days. She spent most of that time in a coma, but in her last few days, she started "waking up." But on November 20th, 2007, she finally succumbed.
I said a much different goodbye that night. One I never, ever expected to say. I said what needed to be said, and gave her one last foot massage. Held her hand as died at the age of thirty-eight. Given her condition, I have no idea if she heard anything I said, or sensed my presence.
I hope so.
And even if the dying do not hear us in their waning moments, I know that we need to say our goodbyes anyway; they are as much for those left behind, I suppose.
&&&&
Tonight, I'm not thinking about that last goodbye; I am thinking of the one in the hallway, as they wheeled her away from me, as they literally pulled us apart. I am thinking of how I for some reason said, "Goodbye, Lauren." I am thinking of an unanswerable question: what did she think when she heard me say that?
I am thinking of that horrible day two years ago, the day that set in motion an almost unbelievable chain of events that ultimately took her life. I am thinking of the eighteen excruciating hours in the waiting area, and of the terror in the pit of my stomach when I had the feeling something had gone wrong. I am thinking of the words, "as I was removing the last bits of the tumor..."
But I am thinking of something else, as well. I am thinking of the song "Goodbye." Most Novembers, hell, probably every November the rest of my life, I'll "break down and cry" as the song says, as I think back to the goodbyes I had to say in October and November of 2007. But I will also think of what it felt like to listen to this song, alone, walking through a Christmas Day snowstorm, my heart alight with love and gratitude.