Steve & the Reticence of Death

Death is a Gentlewoman
Who comes on slippered feet
Floating Like a Geisha
Surprisingly tender
For those who see her

She comes in answer to prayer
She comes despite prayer
She has her own time
She will not relent
But she will be soft

She touches a cheek
She is the final act of Love
This world offers
And the first act
Of the next

She is the only one
Positioned thus
Only she understands
And she neither needs you
Nor I to comprehend

It is all in a breath
Then it is clear:
A life happens in a breath
And she brings release
With the final respire

June 26, 2018
Sunbury, PA

I didn’t know it then, but Steve would die a mere 8 days later. So many things start and come to an end in our lives. Many of those things we may deem as a disappointment. Many, we commit to the “best of times”. Still others are unremembered: Unremarkable.

Steve’s death was all of those things, but none of them. How could we not term the death of a loved one a disappointment? Yet, his life and the time we were together were in no way a disappointment. At the time of his death, I had lived more of my life with Steven, than without him. How can I summarize that? How can I even wrap my head around it?

It’s been 4 years, and yet the grief comes in waves as I write this. I weep, I blubber, I cry. I stop to blow my nose and I go on. The last 4 years have been much the same way, with longer periods between episodes of grief, but when it comes, its power is the same.

Our grief brings us into the same intensity of that moment so long ago. In many ways it restores that moment to the present. How can that even be, and how can that be bad?

Remembrance may be a recollection of a past time, but emotion moves that time, wiping it around as if it were dirt or a smudge that we swipe away, but then redeposit somewhere else as the smudge moves in the stream of our existence. Grief is like that. It is neither created anew, nor destroyed.

I loved my husband-partner-in-crime-lover-best-friend more than anything or anyone else. Ever.

He died on July 4, 2018. Fireworks and The Fourth of July will forever be associated with his departure. He did that on purpose, I’m sure of it. He could be dramatic that way. He would want to be sure there was a reminder. That’s all absurd of course. Yet, there it is.

After Anna, our exchange student left to return to Germany, he took a fast turn for the worse. After the fact, everyone said he was just holding on until she left. That they were afraid he was doing that. Someone so close doesn’t have the luxury or the desire to have such thoughts. For some, such thoughts may cross their mind. Not for me.

Reticence

I had suspended and removed any hope some time ago. When did that happen? I had entered counseling with a sweet young woman who listened to me babble some weeks before Steve’s death. I wrote this poem during that period. I went into my counseling appointment a couple days after I wrote it. I talked to her a little. I read the poem. I cried. I got up and left. I never spoke to that counselor again. She never called me. They must know not to call. I had finished a certain amount of processing by then, hearing from her would have been regressive.

Reticence

The pastor of Zion Lutheran Church, where my employer’s agency resides came into my office to offer condolences for Steve’s passing. I thanked him and held my tears. I allowed them to come when he left my office.

Reticence. 

When we restrain the showing of emotion. When we restrain our own true selves. When we restrain our nature. We do so, because it embarrasses us. It embarrasses others. We are uncomfortable with it.

Steve was reticent to show his true nature and feelings many times throughout his life. He struggled to gain acceptance when he finally acquiesced to this true nature – expressed, in what I like to believe is the best way - with his love for me.

Steven was fiercely loyal, but independent, and he would give anything to anyone who asked – or acted without being asked – for those in whom he saw need. He knew pain, so he wanted to help ease the burden for all travelers with whom he crossed paths.

Even while he lay dying and I sat by his side weeping, he reached out to comfort me as I wept.

Reticence.

We don’t tell the stories of discomfort. We gloss over the ugly things. Memorial services are supposed to be uplifting and joyous, “They would want us to be happy, not sad,” resounds from church pulpits. “Let’s celebrate their lives!”

Or, I can tell you the story of Steve’s final moments. A story where all of us might learn something about this life – and the death that comes inevitably at the end.

Reticence.

And what if we put that reticence aside?

For some, there comes a final burst of energy in the end, and it is not always joyous.

Weak with constantly dropping phosphorous and hemoglobin levels, Steve was hospitalized for 5 days. He had to receive constant transfusion to survive. On the day Steven came home from the hospital to our house to enter hospice, it was 98 degrees. He bumped and jostled with 102 plus fever in an ambulance and arrived home to an inadequate, but somehow, the necessary setup for what was about to transpire. His bed had no lower rails. There was no bed alarm. He could no longer swallow his oral medication.

That evening, we gave him his medicines and he said he needed to go to the bathroom. We stood him, as we did in the hospital, so he could go into the hand-held urinal. With both his hands on the walker, I held the urinal, and my sister, there to help me in these final days, began to take down his sweatpants and underwear, also just as we did in the hospital. He suddenly went mad and pulled his pants back up, “I see what kind of a place this is!” he declared. “I’m going home!” “Robert,” he said, “You know I don’t like this kind of thing!” Then, with a sudden burst of energy he got out of the bed, took his walker, and moved around the house looking for a way out. We followed him. We pleaded with him that he was home. He was in the dining room. Look! There was Maddie, our beagle. He patted her head, then went back to finding the way out.

“This is home,” we pleaded.

“No it’s not!”

“Where do you live then?”

“Sunbury. This isn’t Sunbury.”

We blocked his way as he got near doors and tried to open them. He cursed us. He was furious. He told us he was going to drive home. The way he came. He scolded me. He demanded I let him go time and time again. I was now living the worst 24 hours of my life. I hope and pray that I will never experience anything like this again.

But, Steven was going home soon. And, the way he came. We just didn’t know it yet.

Exhausted after an hour he sat in a chair. Ya, about an hour! We took the opportunity to get him into the wheelchair and take him back to his hospital bed in the dining room. For the next 45 minutes he tried to jump the raised threshold between the dining room and kitchen by pushing the chair’s wheels against it. He couldn’t. All the while he cursed us.

Our friend Megan said in a message, “Put on his favorite musical”. I went in and put on the production of The Wizard of Oz recorded from Little Theatre in Jamestown New York in which he played the Tinman. He watched it intently. “That’s you!” we declared as the Tinman appeared.

“No,” he said. “I was in a production of this, but that's not me.” Steve was already between worlds. He was already becoming the immortal soul he is. He was right. It wasn’t him.

We watched for 45 minutes and eventually he tired, “Let’s go to bed.” I said. “Are you tired?”

“Yes,” he said.

After an ordeal with a wheelchair and a walker in getting him to the toilet in the rear of the house, and closing the door so he could have dignity and be in the restroom, We were able to put him, finally, to bed.

At 4:30 in the morning, I went to his bed to give him his medicine. He slept as I put the dropper in his mouth, but I dare not sit him up to swallow pain pills. At 4:45 I fell asleep again, but at 5:30, I looked, but his bed was now empty. Frantic, I ran to find him. He had gotten up, quite clearly, to use the bathroom, but didn’t find it. Instead he found many alternate places to “rest”, and clearly, had opened the door to the back porch to finish the job.

I found him fallen on the back porch lying on his side. His head lolled, his eyes open. I fell to my knees and cried, “You can’t do this! You can’t do this! You’re not strong enough!”

“It’s OK,” He said. “I got it done.” Indeed, he had gone to the bathroom on his own AND gotten out of the house. Something we had prevented the night before.

I then pulled a pillow off the outdoor furniture and put it under his head. He smiled, “Thank you,” he said. He seemed somehow satisfied.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked him.

“Of course I do, Robert,” he said. I wept, and true to the Steve we all know and love, he comforted me with a hand on my arm. Staying my own shaking. I vowed these would not be his last words to me.

I went to work that day. In the afternoon, the proper bed rails and a bed alarm were brought. I had to return home to help him move 

once again to a chair, so the bed rails could be put on the bed. I was livid by the number of things that were wrong and went wrong by that time. After all, we thought Hospice was the opportunity to return home to die peacefully. It was especially hard to move him yet again with all the pain he was suffering.

In the afternoon, hospice returned to upgrade his medication to a narcotic pump placed into the heart port that had been installed for his chemo treatments. Before he went under the influence of the drug I told him I loved him. “I love you too,” he said. These were the last words he would ever speak to me.

For 4 more hours he would sleep and breathe peacefully. Then, he began to moan and call out again. At one point, he said, “It won’t be long now,” just out of the blue… We continued his medication and went to bed at about 10:00 pm. We had put him on his side. My sister set her alarm to come down at 2:00 a.m. to administer more medication. At 1:00 a.m. I awoke and saw that he had rolled over onto his back, and that he was not moving. “I should go down and check to see if he has passed,” I thought. But then, once again. I fell asleep.

At 2:00 a.m. I awoke to the bedroom door opening and Steven entering. “How did you get up here?” I started crying again. He hugged me.

“It’s not Steven,” my sister said, “Steve passed away sometime last night,”

I went downstairs. He was indeed gone from us. I kissed the mouth that was once his. It was cold and bitter from the narcotic. I wept yet again.

I believe he waited until we had gone to bed, so he could go alone, and not feel he had to hold on to comfort me.

Since then, Steve has hugged me in my dream. “Hugs” is a way he often signed-off while texting and chatting online, as many of you know.

Because that’s the way Steve was. Love was his true nature.

The next day I went about wailing. My sister was kind enough to stay and just listen to it. “I loved him so much! I loved him so much!” I lamented while making my bed. Yes. I made my bed the next day. It was my rituals of cleaning and the opening and closing of the blinds that kept my sanity.

For weeks I looked at his shoes in the closet as I came and went to work. I had to throw them all away. I couldn’t stand to look at his shoes anymore. I gave his clothes to the goodwill. I saved a few shirts that I still wear. I have one on, right now. It has pink flamingos on it.

The thought of losing my sexual partner was harder than I thought it would be. I had an intense sexual response when I put his clothes on. It surprised me. We had made love just 2 weeks before his death. It was very hard and painful for him. But, we both really wanted to.

After almost 30 years, any fool who says that our love had not the value or depth of an opposite sex couple is just that: a fool. We may not have had children, but what we did together in the world gave back to it just as much as any couple.

The Anniversary of You (a year and a month after your death, on your birthday)

Time catches me
Like a seed cast on cement
Instead of fertile earth
No way to grow
Instead trod by feet
Splintered on hard concrete

Emotion catches me
Off guard
It wasn’t supposed to stay this intense
But the power of cyclic time
Anniversary
Birthday
Stays with me

Bringing the raw reality of loneliness back to me
Like a typhoon that doesn’t blow over
But intensifies with Climate Change
Brought to my knees
Gasping
Not able to get up

August 7, 2019
Sunbury PA

Reticence delays healing; prevents moving on. Yet, it is somehow part of the process. A cultural part? I could maybe answer this, but I don’t have the energy after that recollection. 

I am exhausted.

Updated: July 4, 2022 Buffalo NY