February 14, 2012 update

February 14:  a Valentine's Day update

Do not read this blog entry if you have a hard time with excessive sentimentality.  I want to tell about a moment in this experience that seems to me to be of great importance, but one that could easily be lost because only Carol and I know about it.  It's a Valentine Day story, but it's personal, and I'm aware that it might cause you some discomfort.  So I am giving you a chance to back out.

We are back in the end of November, when I had the surgery to insert the feeding tube.  That all happened in the rush of emergency procedures.  I had been at the Clinic for a radiation treatment, but the radiation oncologist, upon learning that I had lost almost all my ability to swallow, determined that we could not put that surgery off any longer, and directed me to enter the hospital that night as an emergency patient and have the surgery as soon as it could be scheduled.  This was an ironic development, because the original plan was for me to have the surgery first and the radiation after, but for reasons that were never clear to me, the medical team chose to proceed with radiation first.  So on a Monday evening I went into Marymount Hospital, and the procedure had to be worked into the already full schedule of the surgeon, who was not very happy about the change.

I remained in the hospital Monday night and all day Tuesday, during which time I received continuous intravenous infusions of liquids, since I was so dehydrated.  I suspect they were saline and glucose, and they continued through Wednesday morning.  The surgery was booked for noon.

I guess I was pretty much in a daze that whole time, but I remember clearly being told that it was time to go downstairs to the operating room.  So the orderly got me onto the gurney and Carol came along as he wheeled me to the corridor of the surgery wing.  At a particular spot he said to her that she could not come any further, and she needed to return to the waiting room.  We said goodbye to each other, and I was brought further in.  The orderly took my glasses, without which all I see are huge dim fuzzballs, and told me that the doctor would be with me "in just a minute."

I had to wait about an hour for that "minute" to pass.  During that wait I had no one to talk to and nothing to look at--nothing to do in fact but think.  And for the first time, I believe, I began to think that I might actually die on the operating table.  It's not an unreasonable fear in the face of any serious surgery.  Even though I had no particular reason to think the worst, I thought the worst:  I might never see Carol again or, Melissa or Matthew or Dylan.  And once these thoughts found their way into my consciousness, they would not leave. 

So I concentrated on the question of what I wanted my final thoughts to be.  Here I was on the operating table, about to be wheeled into the operating room, and there she was in the waiting room, doing I had no idea what and thinking whatever thoughts visited her.  Maybe she was worried to the same degree I was.  And I remembered a poem that she and I had both taught to our American literature classes at Shaker, a poem both of us loved.  It's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" by the American poet Anne Bradstreet.  She lived in puritan New England in the 17th century, and I had always found this poem to be especially touching in its message and delivery.  I always thought that Mr. Bradstreet was a very lucky man to have a wife who loved him so much, one who was able to express that love so effectively and give that love immortality.  I also think that the poem is equally effective if the speaking voice is the husband's rather than the wife's.  It would take the rearrangement of only a few words to change it, but I remembered it as I had known it, and recited it to myself over and over, as Mrs. Bradstreet had written it.

            If ever two were one, then surely we.
            If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
            If ever wife were happy in a man,
            Compare with me ye women if ye can.
            I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
            Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
            My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
            Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.
            Thy love is such I can no way repay.
            The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
            Then while we live, in love let's so persever
            That when we live no more, we may live ever.

A full expression of love characterized by simplicity and sincerity--I said these lines to myself over and over.   The most intense lines, I think, the most beautiful, are 9 and 10.  After four lines ("I prize thy love ... recompense") of deliberate hyperbole she writes a line of absolutely literal and simple and sincere reality:  Thy love is such I can no way repay.  Nothing hyperbolic there.  And she follows it with an equally sincere and heartfelt prayer, significant in the context of her Puritan environment:  The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.  I decided I wanted those to be my final thoughts.  If the time had come, I wanted to acknowledge all that Carol had done for me--not only in this illness, of course, but throughout our 42-year marriage--and my hopeless indebtedness to her for all of that.  So I said those lines over and over until they wheeled me into the operating room and gave me the anesthetic that knocked me out.

The conclusion of the story avoids the most dramatic possible developments.  I came out of the surgery however many hours later--I really don't know--and there she was.  Someone returned my glasses to me and I could see her, her image distorted now not by myopia but by tears.  And of course, in the time since, the sum of what I owe her has only grown like the national debt.  Since I have no hope of ever paying it off, I recite those lines still.

Well, if you read this in spite of my warning, you got what you had coming.  It's a personal moment in my experience, I know, and I can appreciate the feelings of those who would prefer not to have private matters placed before them.  But it is too important to me to leave it a candidate for oblivion, and I decided that I wanted to share it with whichever of you chose to read it.