People

Death, Be Not Proud

JULIET ROSENFELD

 
Fifteen months ago I was on an evening flight from JFK in New York, bound for London. Very unexpectedly, I was seated alone, although I had bought two tickets a week before.

As the plane raced up the east coast towards Newfoundland, the screen map briefly alerted me to New Haven. In that instant I was confronted with the inconceivably complex fact of having left my husband behind, somewhere below me.

I love you so, so much he had said, only last night. That morning, he was alive. Now he was pulseless, no longer breathing, unseen, cold and unlit somewhere thousands of feet down there.

A vicious, land-grabber of a cancer, latterly imperceptible to his expert oncologists, and even scans, killed my husband, on 8 February 2015. He died in a hospital in Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, having bludgeoned his way on to a drug trial. He believed it might cure him. I suspect it may even have hastened his death.

Neither of us was remotely prepared for this outcome. We never believed it would happen. Our weakness was that we were not capable of living with the spectre of his death imposing itself on our life. Thus, as with several recent high-profile deaths caused by cancer, whose victims did not reveal their illnesses, we said nothing, stayed eerily calm and carried on as usual, with work, love and hope.

Ours was a second marriage: we met when I was 42 and he was 49. We were profoundly happy. Andrew was very fit, apparently in perfect health. The words lung cancer landed from outer space one afternoon in a locum GP’s consulting room. Andrew had never smoked a cigarette.

Even if we had known how little time we had, we would not have done much differently. I am so lucky to have you, he would say to me, before he was diagnosed – and daily after. We had 14 months left after that, mostly symptom-free, with the illness a secret from the outside world.

Our children, both his and mine, our families, and those few friends we told complied with his wish to keep the news private, as if to disown the possibility of the disease taking him from us. For some, and we were in that number, denial is the only way.

Of course, without him, I now wonder whether it makes the unsayable, death, even more of a shock, when it suddenly presents itself. When he was alive I was protected from this possible intruder into my life, by Andrew, its primary target. Now I am alone with the break-in complete.

The night before he died he was quiet, but himself. His adult children had arrived in New Haven by now, anxious to help him rally. They left the hospital saying they would visit in the morning, knowing I would remain and call with updates. It had been a long day of interviews with doctors and numerous tests. He needed to sleep. Late that night, he winked at me and mouthed I love you so so much when I kissed his forehead.

At 5 am he woke up, asked me to get the nurse and, after a violent, brutal struggle to breathe, he died. The children rushed from their hotel but would not see their father again. We left the hospital some 20 minutes later, with his small, wheeled overnight bag. He had not thought he would be in hospital long.

I went back to our hotel room, and packed his suitcase in a daze. Within 14 hours of his death I was flying home with an empty seat behind me. Our pair of seats had been given to a grinning couple who sat toasting themselves with glasses of wine, their hands interlinked. I sat upright, speechless, void of appetite, thirst, tears or anything but a void, greater, vaster than I had or have ever known.

My clothes, thin jersey and T-shirt, jeans and trainers were the same clothes I had been wearing when he was still alive. For six hours, I stared blankly down at my legs and it all seemed improbable. Impossible. My jersey was his Christmas present to me. My denimed bottom he had patted the day before. He had stroked the grey wool on my forearm. These clothes were part of another world that he and I lived in together. That no longer existed because he no longer did.

How would I ever make sense of this?

Neither of us had been ready in any way for this sudden fatal outcome, which is not to blame anyone but ourselves. The disease was serious; cancer always is. Yet his death was a profound shock.

The truth is that when Andrew was alive he did not, could not, bear to ask the question. I would not have asked it on his behalf. I respected him too much and it was his disease, not mine. Perhaps therefore, no one dared to tell us that death might be on its way.

Over the following year, with the help of a close group of friends, and family, I have become more used to life without him. It is hard going, painful, solitary, grinding, but there is no choice, no other option. My sons, my work and routine chores are balms, but I mourn and miss him every bloody minute.

I will eventually reach the other side, of something, of what I don’t yet know. Most of us bereaved will come to terms with the loss eventually, because we have to. Your life goes on, the one left behind, in a miserable and deformed way. You adapt – to a half life. Your expectations lower dramatically.

I remain nonplussed, however, by one aspect of this loss. Perhaps it is the reason for committing to paper the facts. What confounds me is the actual death, the event of death. We use euphemisms such as passing, passing on, passing away, because it is a struggle to understand how a person goes in a split second. It reads idiotic, written down. Yet it is so strange, preposterous, unbelievable, that a human being should go in seconds from being alive – to dead.

Andrew and I could not bear to contemplate his death from this illness when he was alive, though the situation was grave from the beginning. He submitted to extensive radio and chemotherapy which unfortunately, one year in, we realised, had not worked. Yet what this meant to us was only, at the time, that we had to find another option.

The problem is that the admission of something so alien, so anti-life into life is extremely hard to incorporate. It seemed to him and to me an impossible balance to strike – especially with the unpredictable and miraculous remissions and recoveries that are now, happily, so often part of a cancer diagnosis.

Post chemo and radiotherapy we were given a tentative but joy-filling all clear. Sheer elation, a holiday, and a big new work project for him. Months later, however, new news. The cancer was on the march, fast. He managed to get to the US, where a 40% chance of arresting the disease on a new immunotherapy drug trial seemed great odds. But a few days after his first dose of the drug he started to feel very unwell. After a week, he was desperately uncomfortable. Over the ensuing days he became extremely weak, then unable to eat. Then he had excruciating back pain.

Somehow, we lived through that month. There was still no conscious acknowledgement from anyone dealing with him that he might die. We returned to Yale for the second round of the trial. Andrew was admitted, but not given another dose of the immunotherapy drug. Six days later he was dead.

In his last days, scattered, micro-tumours hidden deep throughout his organs and skeleton provoked a dramatic systems breakdown. In his last hours, a carat-sized clot of blood ran through his veins to block an artery. In his last minutes, he suffocated in front of me as the frantic crash team ran in, but too late.

I stood and watched him die. In those moments, time at once stood both perfectly still and yet seemed to be moving at some hyper-speed. I knew what was about to happen and that he could not be saved. I stood frozen next to him and wordlessly stepped outside as a dozen people I had never met rushed into his hi-tech bedroom.

So, I know he is dead.

Writing this I realised it reminded me of something else – equally shocking, although predicted, albeit roughly: giving birth, when life pulsed into the room as my two sons were expelled out of me as hot, wet small humans moving constantly, sucking in breath, struggling into life. Their beginning, in contrast with Andrew’s end. His death, the contradiction of birth but sharing a dreadful synergy. A giant, powerful struggle against something much vaster than him, back to something still, quiet, not there. Not alive.

And just as I could not imagine having a baby before I had one, so I could not imagine Andrew dead when he was alive.

The physical absence of the dead does not mean psychological invisibility, which further confuses the issue. I have not found him “to be with me”, “guiding me”, “watching me”, “proud of me”, or any of the well-meant phrases directed my way. He is definitely not here and yet he is blindingly, deafeningly, omnipresent in my days and my nights.

He is in my dreams and our home; his DNA is probably on the cups I drink tea from, the toaster he endlessly stood by, his suits that press against my dresses.

Too easily, we presume the fact of death can be digested, accepted and yet my experience has not been the case. I saw a coffin I have every reason to believe contained him, and saw it buried. I know he will not return, but his loss perplexes me still.

In the seconds after he died, the scene I saw was imaginable, had I dared to. Four strangers in scrubs now stood around his bed, while I was expected to say goodbye to the still warm body of my husband in front of them. Body temperature, but dead now. Of this I had no doubt, and the crude intubation, his strange position, but, most disconcertingly, the fact that he ignored me as I came in was proof of this.

He did not move as I kissed his arm, his chest, stroked his head – in seconds gathering disturbing evidence of his new, final status. I recall saying: “Love. Love? My love?”, stopping when I realised I was talking to a corpse in front of people I had never met. They looked uncomfortable, tired and resigned as they waited for me to say goodbye.

I knew right away I had to leave him. Logic had not deserted me. With a dead body on the bed there is not much to do. I did not say a long goodbye or stand weeping next to his body. I was incredulous I could still breathe because I was immediately no longer in the world I had been in.

I collected up his belongings in minutes, all the while berating myself for not packing as neatly as he always did. I stuffed every familiar possession into his brown leather carry-on, then wheeled it smartly down the ICU corridor.

I then went down to the hospital reception, marvelling at the fact that I could walk, that I could press the lift button. I waited in the reception for a taxi, to begin the long journey home. Death mingles the epic and the banal, the momentous and the ephemeral. Here I was, waiting for a cab, but Andrew would not be getting in. He no longer existed.

A death can still startle when it comes unexpectedly. These days, when people talk of preparing for a good death what prospects for those of us who could not achieve this? Some people can prepare for death through some constitutional strength that Andrew and I simply did not possess. We loved with absolute confidence and trust, so how could we say goodbye to each other? We could never bring ourselves to do so, and so we never did. Our little human hearts.

For us, to envisage what might happen was not possible. We could not live with his hypothetical death, we did not admit it into our lives and this, perhaps, is why the death haunts and confounds me still.

Fifteen months on, there are daily, acute ambushes of sadness. However, there is little to do, other than to wait it out, oscillate between remembering my old world and the reality of the new one. This is what the bereaved do, carry on as before – except not, until recollections soften and wane and the dead person becomes a beloved memory. Most of us will grapple our way through the icy, biting loneliness and absence that seems neverending. There isn’t a great deal of choice.

In time, his sudden and dreadful death will be subsumed into everything else. I will see it not as the defining event, but in the context of a long life. Perhaps. Meanwhile, his absence remains the presence that contradicts the impossible, unbelievable fact of his death.


[Courtesy: The Guardian]
May 27, 2016
 

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