5. A Menu of Death

My boyfriend, Peter, who is what you would call my first love, called me while I was going to school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. As a young actor going to that prestigious school was a dream come true. He called to tell me that the cancer he had had when he was younger was back and it was terminal and he had about a year to live. He was 24. I was 21. I went into school the next day and dropped out and went home to Tucson to be with him. The first few weeks he did chemo treatments even though they weren’t going to cure the cancer but possibly prolong his days on this earth and he was so sick and miserable that he decided to stop them and just let the cancer take its course. He asked me to marry him. As a boyfriend, he was terrible. He cheated on me every chance he got. We were on again, off again, and all I wanted to do at that young age was please him. I think his proposal was a way of apologizing to me and letting me know that I was the one. He gave me a ring. We announced our engagement to his very large Irish family. My parents were concerned. His mother asked me if I actually wanted to get married. I thought about it long and hard and then I decided that to be a 21 year old widow was probably not the best choice for me so we just stayed engaged.  As the days dwindled closer to the end, he asked me one day to take a knife and stab him and put him out of this horrific pain. I was so traumatized. I was so young. I didn’t know how to help him. Towards the end when we would flip him over so that he wouldn’t get bedsores my touch would leave the impression of my hand on his skin, like a memory foam pillow.  I can still see it more than 35 years later. The night he died I was at his house but had gone home because I had a paper due for school told him I loved him and went home. His mother called me about 10 o’clock to let me know. I was half grateful not to have been there and half devastated not to have been there. I went into my parents room in the dark to tell them that he had died. They both woke up, turned on the light and offered to give me some solace, but I replied I had a paper I had to finish and went back to my room and did just that. The next day I went into school to turn in my paper and sharply announce to the teacher that I wasn’t going to stay because my fiancé had died last night of cancer. The shock in his eyes gave me the smallest bit of comfort and so I used that phrase over and over again to hurt people to help myself feel better again. I was 21. I did not know what to do with this grief, or how to handle this trauma, so I just lashed out at people.  My mother and friend schedulded a secret intervention with a counsleor to try and help me. Eventually over the years I just buried it. It became part of my story and I “moved on”.

Brian and I had unofficially separated when Ian was young but we didn’t do anything legal about our separation or ever talk about divorce. In the summer of Ian’s 15th year I had taken a month off from work and on the first day of my “vacation” Brian called me and asked me if I could pick him up from the car repair place because he thought it might take all day. Begrudgingly I told him I would, even though I was lounging around doing absolutely nothing. He said never mind he’d figure it out and then he called me later to tell me that the car was fixed and he was on his way to his home. Later that night I got a message through Facebook from his HR Manager. Brian still had our old home phone as his emergency number, and his HR manager was desperately trying to get a hold of me. Brian had had some kind of accident and been rushed to the hospital. He hit his head and it was serious and they wanted to let me know. Ian and I jumped in the car and went down to the hospital to the Neuro ICU where Brian was technically in a coma. He had been rushed there after falling in the parking lot of his apartment building and hit his head. There was extensive bleeding and it had jostled his brain. The emergency neurosurgeon told me to not hold out much hope that they were pretty sure he would die, but the next few days would be critical. What do you do with this kind of information? We weren’t really together but I loved him and I obviously cared about him and his life. As his wife I was in charge of making all the medical decisions and so Ian and I stayed for a while and then went home. For the next few days every day we went to the hospital for a few hours, and sat with him. He was still in a medically induced coma, and the swelling didn’t seem to be getting better. They would wake him up periodically to tickle his toes ask him to raise his arms and any other medical tests they could do to see if he was getting better. I spoke to him in those moments where he was kind of awake, I said his name in and I told him I loved him and we were there. Miraculously on Saturday, he seem to be slightly better. They took him out of the medically induced coma, but he was very confused and desperately trying to pull out all the tubes and needles and get out of bed. He kept telling me he had to get out of here… I asked them if they thought our being there was making him more agitated but they said no. I asked him if he knew who I was. I asked him who Ian was and he said my name out loud one time. The next day is he was in physical therapy. He seem to suffer some kind of stroke or something, they’re not really sure, and that was it. The swelling continued, and after 10 days of being in the hospital, they let me know that it didn’t look like he was going to recover. I told him to stop everything that they were doing and just let him go. It was the hardest decision I ever had to make. Can you imagine? I had a friend pick up Ian from summer school to bring him to the hospital so that I could tell him his father had died. Later that night I got a call from the corner letting me know that Brian was considered brain dead so apparently, in the end, I had not had to make the decision at all…The Coroner said it so matter of factly, thinking I had already been told. Brian was an organ donor and so they wouldn’t turn off the machines until they could organize surgeries to harvest his organs, but that’s another story…  We sat in the hospital for those two days with him even though he was dead because it was important to Ian to spend that time with him.  And I needed to do what was best for Ian and to be there and support Brian to the end. They called us at 2 o’clock in the morning to tell us to come down if we wanted to say our last goodbyes as the surgery was now set for 4. A priest came and gave him last rites because he was born and raised Catholic and Ian felt it was important….and Ian and I walked him to the door of the surgery and told him we loved him for the last time. For two days I just sat on the couch and I was numb and Ian handled it much better than I did. He knew his father loved him and we had told him we loved him 100 times over those last days.

Bret and I were together over 12 years, almost all of that time I was still technically married to Brian. Bret wanted to get married and he would ask me weekly, if not daily, but I, in the end, didn’t really want to upset the apple cart with Brian and he was Ian‘s father after all.  After Brian died, Bret intensified with his request that we get married but I really felt like I wanted to own and wear the badge of widow. I felt I had earned it with everything I had had to go through with Brian’s death and I owed it to Brian and our life together and I kept putting Bret off.  Bret had come up to help me with some projects, but wasn’t feeling well and so I snapped at him that his being ill wasn’t beneficial or helping me at all and in the end I had to go to a volunteer project and leave him at home, and I hastily yelled out at him “Love you, bye”. I don’t know if he replied, I don’t remember. When Ian and I came home several hours later, we found Bret dead on the couch. Just like that he was gone. When the paramedics came and told me there was nothing that they could do. They threw a blanket over him as he lay on my floor. His feet were sticking out haphazardly from the bottom. He was off center in the position that Ian and I had pulled him off the couch to start CPR. Because he died unexpected the coroner had to be called and they didn’t want me to touch him. So I was just in my house, looking at him, covered in a blanket. Later they loaded him up in a white body bag and they took him away. They gave me a chance to say goodbye to him and I leaned in and I told him I was so sorry that I hadn’t taken better care of him and that I loved him so very much. It was three years to the day that Brian died. The same day.

So I have encountered all different kinds of death, long lingering… short traumatic… unexpected quick.

I don’t know that I would recommend one way over another.

And I never said goodbye….It’s not that I didn’t say goodbye because I believe in some sort of afterlife or that I believe they’re in a place where they’re still with me. I didn’t say goodbye because I didn’t think that that would be helpful to me or to them, that it was much more important to tell them how much I loved them… and still do