Main Squeeze Blues
Phyllis was my soul mate — a smart, sexy, vital woman who organized our lives and those of other people too. A brutal but mercifully short bout with cancer may have taken her from me, but I’ll always have the wonderful memories of our thirty years together. And I know I’ll be seeing her again.
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One of the nurses gave us a small booklet titled “Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience,” which explains what families can expect during the final weeks and hours. In the last month the body begins to slow down, preparing itself to die: Patients lose interest in food, and depression often overtakes them. I realized that Phyllis had passed through this stage and was about to move into what was called “the rally stage.” Terminal patients frequently rebound ten or twelve days before the end. Appetites suddenly return. They feel energized, alert, and alive. Then they crash and die. So it was that after two days of tender care from the Christopher House staff, and some adjustments to her meds, Phyllis was sitting up in bed, laughing and joking and telling me that what she really wanted right then was a big, fat hamburger, with extra mustard.
Those last two weeks, which we spent at home, are a blur. Somewhere in there she fell and fractured her ankle in two places. The days were long and often difficult, but for one brief interlude Phyllis seemed to be her old self again; though much weaker and less graceful, my peerless, unconquerable angel had returned. She read, sewed, wrote dozens of thank-you notes, and reorganized her files, all the while talking on the phone or visiting with old friends. She found chores to keep me occupied and out of trouble. One or two times each night, she woke in pain. I’d give her some morphine or triple mix, help her to the portable toilet, and then get her back to sleep again.
She woke up every morning just like she used to, at six-thirty. Half-asleep, I’d help her to her wheelchair and take her to the living room, dragging fifty yards of oxygen hose behind me. Lucy Mae would already have started making coffee. I’d return to the bedroom for her book and her sewing basket, and then Phyllis and her mom would spend the morning chatting and enjoying this last time together. In the evening, Phyllis and I would sit on the patio, drinking in the explosion of colors and textures of our newly refurbished backyard, listening to jazz, sipping wine, laughing at silly things the dogs did. One evening Doatsy brought her dog Sophie over and we celebrated Willie’s second birthday. Another evening, to my distress, Phyllis produced her trusty BB gun and began taking potshots at a marauding squirrel that had overturned a potted plant. However infirm, she was in her element; things were good.
There were times every day when she would despair and collapse into tears. I would hold her close and rub her shoulders, knowing that there were no words to describe what she was going through. One day she sobbed: “I just want this to be over.” So did I. So did everyone who loved her. I knew by now that a miracle wasn’t coming. I talked to God, but he never talked back. I began to wonder: Does he care? Is this just another tiny episode in his opus magnum? Are we too small to see? Is he too busy being God to worry about us poor mortals?
Her final 24 hours were pure hell, softened and made manageable by the soothing confines and unbelievably compassionate staff of Christopher House. The last chapter had caught me by surprise. It was Friday, June 23, and we had spent a pleasant evening on the patio. Phyllis seemed tired but otherwise comfortable when I put her to bed. But she woke up at about three-thirty Saturday morning, pain tearing at her left breast and side. It was far and away the worst pain yet. I gave her triple mix, then morphine, then more morphine, then some codeine. The drugs weren’t working. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. Phyllis cried out, “Wake my momma.” So I woke Lucy Mae and together we tried to comfort her, but she was crying and calling out, over and over, “Oh, God, please stop this pain. Please, God, stop it.” I telephoned the hospice, which sent out a nurse, who quickly assessed the situation and called for an ambulance to take her to Christopher House.
Lorraine met us at the door of the Willie Nelson suite and took charge. “It’s going to be okay,” she assured us. She kissed Phyllis, hugged me, and got busy. The doctor on duty that morning was Sarah Legett, a marvelous palliative care physician. She ordered a morphine drip and a battery of other painkillers and tranquilizers. Sarah hugged me and led me out into the hallway. “We’re going to take care of her,” she told me. “We’ll keep increasing the level of drugs until she’s out of pain. Making her comfortable is our primary consideration.” I nodded in agreement. Death was no longer the enemy.
All day Saturday, our core friends and family arrived: Doatsy, Bud, Jan, Dorothy, Michelle, Lucy Mae. Late that night Phyllis’s brother, Jim McCallie, and his wife, Melinda, drove in from Oklahoma. Because of the drugs she’d been taking to manage the pain, Phyllis was deeply sedated. We took turns sitting beside her, holding her hand, talking to her, not really sure she could hear us. We talked among ourselves, laughing at things we’d done or said over the years. “Remember that time you guys were coming home from a late party and you stopped on a country road to pee and Phyllis woke up, not realizing you weren’t there, and drove off without you?” Hours crept by. We sent out for food. We played a Dave Brubeck album. We paced the pathway to the garden and back dozens of times and sometimes sat on a bench by the fountain, listening to the songbirds. Lorraine was right: This was a happy place where sad things happened.
The others left before midnight—all except me and Lucy Mae. I moved the heavy lounge chair next to the bed so that Lucy Mae could be close to Phyllis. She sat there the remainder of the night, sometimes dozing but always clutching her daughter’s hand. I unfolded the couch into a bed for myself, but I didn’t sleep much either. In the dark, we could hear Phyllis breathing. As the night wore on, her breathing got more labored and slowed, at times stopping completely for a few seconds before chugging on.
Around three that Sunday morning, the night nurse came to check on her. The nurse said something that I didn’t understand, but Lucy Mae and I both knew that the end was here. We positioned ourselves on either side of the bed, each stroking one of her hands. Her eyes were half-open, but I knew she didn’t see us. A small rattling sound escaped from her mouth, and an instant later I felt her spirit lift and float away. I kissed her and said, “Now you’re at peace, my angel.” Lucy Mae repeated, “Now she’s at peace.” In all those weeks that Phyllis was dying, that was the only time I saw Lucy Mae break down. She cried for a long time, me sitting with my arm around her. An hour later, when the crew from the funeral home had arrived to take her away, I went back to the Willie Nelson suite to say one last good-bye. I kissed her forehead and stood over the body, realizing that Phyllis wasn’t there anymore.
AT HER MEMORIAL, Bud spoke these lines: “In my life there are a few very special people that I refuse to let death have. Instead of thinking of them as what we call dead, I prefer to believe they have moved to France to some beautiful small town way up in the Alps where the phones don’t work very well and there’s no Internet. So that way I’ll be seeing them again somewhere down the road. Phyllis is one of those special people … She’s probably wearing ski boots by Chanel this afternoon in her chalet in the mountains in France. So I am saying, ‘Au revoir, Phyllis. I love you. I’ll see you in Paris in the spring.’”
People ask me how I endure each day without her, how I can stand to live in that house with all those terrible memories. Well, I say, the house has been here for nearly eighteen years, and only recently has it been host to very bad things. Phyllis is everywhere I look. She’s there in her huge walk-in closet of stylish, in-your-face clothes, heavy on black, leopard, and zebra print, every rack coordinated, every shoe box carefully labeled. She’s puttering in her office, old photographs of me and her kids and our grandkids pasted to the wall, next to a priceless newspaper photo of Phyllis herself as a Wetumka high-kicker.
The carnival masks that we bought in Venice mock us from atop a bookshelf. The framed photograph of a 1909 Estonian street after an early morning rain, the one we discovered together in that gallery in Moscow, looks down from the wall above the mantel. That photo of Phyllis and Doatsy in front of Les Deux Magots last November in Paris (God, both of them are so beautiful). Every drawer and closet and crawl space has her fresh prints. Every painting, plant, lamp, and piece of furniture is where she willed it, in its perfect place. Every time I step inside our kitchen, a rhapsody of silence fills my heart and sings her name. When I turn out the lights at night, I hear her whisper. And, when sadness threatens to swallow me, I feel her kiss.
Sometimes I feel as if I’m coming apart. But then I catch myself and realize that our dogs are staging a vicious fight at my feet, hoping to amuse me. The dogs know. They give me funny glances, as though I’m hiding her somewhere in plain sight. I laugh and reassure them: “She’s here. Can’t you feel her?” And they begin to romp and frolic and tug on a section of knotted red cloth that she sewed for them. I don’t know if she’s in Paris or up there with God’s first rank of angels. I don’t care. I just hope she knows that I want to be there with her.
My Library
