The Last Chapter
Four months after the back surgery and the radiation I had pain in my left side, so they did another CAT scan and found tumors in my spleen. There was a sinking feeling. How can we do this so soon? Is it spreading faster and faster, what kind of time is there left? It was hard news, we felt that we had all been through a great deal and needed time. Time to rest, to heal, to deal with all of this. That wasn’t to be, I needed to have my spleen removed, and so they did.
I woke up in the hospital again, with a tube down my nose and drains everywhere, like before. My family came and stood around, trying to be calm but with questions in their eyes. What now? There were no more treatment options, Interferon had been tried and now surgery was all anyone could do. My mind kept going round and round like a gerbil in a cage, what now? What to do? Jack and I felt like we were in a room with no windows and no doors, and no way out.
My family kept looking at me, wondering how I would do with all this surgery so quickly, one after the other. I was weak and wobbly , but I must have looked pretty good because everyone commented on it.
“You look wonderful!” they said, and I wondered what they had expected. Anyway how wonderful can you look with a tube down your nose? I lived on ice chips and my brothers kidded around about Ice Chips Bourginon, and Ice Chip Tacos, and Curried Ice Chips, trying to be funny. They told me the news, how my nephew had passed his bar exams with very high scores after law school, how Judy was making me a poster to hang in my room, who had called to ask about me. I walked slowly down the hall with Jack or the nurse, whose name was also Jack. I ate more ice chips and smelled dinner trays and got irritated that the days seemed to be a month had long. I felt dirty and ragged and out of sorts. I had been too long in hospitals.
One of my last days in the hospital, Dr. Kazu came to visit, at the same time that my brother and Jack were there. We three sat in the room, looking at the sunshine, and Dr. Kazu quietly began to talk. He talked about illness and wellness and hope and feelings. He looked at my brother, two years younger than I, and stared deep into his eyes.
“When you see tears in Carolyn’s eyes, you must realize that the tears are for you, not for her. She knows how you feel, and she feels bad for all of this,” he waved his hand at the hospital room, the IV’s, all of it. Ted and Jack were silent, looking carefully and listening to Dr. Kazu.
“You need to talk to her, talk about what you remember of your past, all the good times, you need to communicate fully, and enjoy each other’s company. You shouldn’t be afraid to talk aout your fears, your feelings. None of you should carry all of the burden all alone, it makes it impossible to talk. She tends to be stoical, you know,” he looked at me and smiled. Ted nodded, and Jack closed his eyes. “But being a stoic can be too much too, being brave and silent covers up too many feelings. Let her talk to you, let her cry, even though it surprises you.”
I felt tears come and looked at the ceiling. There was a little silence in the room. Dr. Kazu stood up, and shook hands and smiled. “It’s not easy in our culture, we all learn to talk about ‘nice’ things, comfortable things. Don’t let that stop you, and you’ll find that whatever time you all have left is far deeper, more meaningful, and lots easier.”
And then Jack came to see me with some real news.
“I got the job, we can leave as soon as you’re out of the hospital!” He was excited and anxious to begin. It was a job with Microsoft in Seattle, Washington. We had a house to sell. All our relatives lived in New Mexico except for Lara and Mark and Cole, who lived in Seattle. I was lying in a hospital bed with a tube down my nose and recurrent metastatic melanoma. The answer was clear.
Of course we would move to Seattle! All I needed was to get the damn tube out of my nose and eat something besides ice chips, so let’s so it. Like a door opening in that closed and closeted room, a way out appeared. Dr. Kazu recommended some doctors at the University of Washington Cancer Center, and helped me get an appointment; we put the house on the market and left.
It all happened in a fog, I got out of the hospital on a Wednesday and we left to move on the following Sunday. Jack’s job as a contract writer for Microsoft was to start on the Monday after we arrived. I had an appointment at the University of Washington Cancer Center to see if they had any miracles left. There were no longer any options at the University of New Mexico; my friends there cared and mourned and tried to smile when we left but they had no more facilities for cases like mine.
In the midst of a meditation one day an old nun with a seamed, aged face told me to pray to St. Jude. Since St Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, it shattered my meditation and sent my mind reeling down another road. I did meditate to St. Jude later on, but it took time to come to that.
At that point I was trying to be positive and hopeful, which was difficult; logic and the medical problems I had kept telling me that I was going to die; hope kept telling me to fight and pray and not give up. I didn’t give up, but I got very tired.
But fight we did, we left the house and all our belongings with Becky, our niece who kindly said she would house sit and help sell it, and keep things tidy. We said goodbye to all of our stunned relatives,
“You’re moving? To Seattle? NOW?”
Yes, we are, and we did.
We packed up some suitcases and left. I was wan and wobbly, Jack was full of resolve and did all the work. It took us six days to go from Los Lunas to Seattle; driving a few hours a day, we wound our slow way north and west. The doctors agreed that a slow drive would be better than the plane; several airline changes and an exhausting day right out of the hospital would be my undoing.
So we left, on an actual journey that would take us to new jobs and new places and hope for some miracles; we also left on an inner journey, to growth and knowledge and some kind of acceptance of whatever future there was.
We left Los Lunas around noon on that Sunday in a driving torrential rain; the skies wept as we left, wept all the way to Grants. Then the sun came out, resolved to weep no more.
Winslow, Arizona was to be our first stop. We went past Acoma, the Sky City, the longest inhabited place in the country, now with its own casino. We went past Gallup, and the high red bluffs; past Joseph City and Second Mesa, near the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. In the true Navajo way, there is no indication of a First or Third Mesa, just the weather beaten sign by the side of the dusty road: Second Mesa. The people who live here know what directions and names are all about, and the rest of us just drive by, wondering where the first mesa is, and look west toward Flagstaff’s great mountain.
From Winslow we went to Laughlin and then Mesquite, in Nevada, which goes on and on in its empty way. There’s a highway out here called ‘the loneliest highway in the world’ but we were on the second loneliest. Few cars, no people, no towns, just Nevada.
As the miles slipped by on the trip, I found myself thinking about guardian angels. There must be a fleet of them around us, following as we leap into the unknown. Most of our life at this point is fractured, we have a house and all its belongings in Los Lunas, New Mexico, a future with a new job for Jack and hope for me, traveling like inchworms to Seattle. We needed the silence of the car on the road, listening to the tires sing; we needed the stillness to reconnect and regroup and let the angels find us on this lonely, dusty road in the middle of Nevada.
Las Vegas rose out of the dust of gila monsters and Joshua trees, out of silence and gray green desert. Suddenly there were cars and people and buildings and glitz and shabbiness and activity all around us in one big splash, and then, as quickly as it was there, it’s gone. We were back to the hardscrabble desert with no water, no people, no noise except the wind. Twenty minutes outside of Las Vegas it’s hard to believe that it was really there, casinos and wedding chapels and all, there in the rear view mirror. The city is growing all around, expanding right and left, but just outside, not very far outside, the desert waits in silence.
From Mesquite we went to Jackpot, way up at the top of Nevada. The air there is thin and in my post-hospital wobblies, I could feel it. I strained for air, and coughed a lot. Up at 6000 feet in a town that consists of four hotel casinos, five bars and a landing strip for airplanes, it’s good to talk and be together. I don’t sleep well; this move has jarred me from my moorings and I am more vulnerable now. Jack is a good nurse; he knows we just have to keep going, on both our journeys, so we talk a lot about the future and fears and hopes. It’s good to talk.
Two more days, now, to reach our destination. The inner journey has reached the beginnings of a destination also, in a way. Jack and I can talk about the future, no matter what happens, in a way that we could never have done before the trip. All the fear and the wish that things had been different, all the knowledge of leaving behind people who matter so much, hoping for miracles, knowing that staying in New Mexico would have meant a certain end. We are still in both places at once, hoping and fighting on the one hand, trying to accept on the other.
How can both emotions feel so right? How can I fight and still accept the outcome of death? I’m not fighting the cancer, that’s a part of me, my own cells that have got out of control. I haven’t fallen into the metaphor of ‘arsenal of drugs against cancer’ that so many patients do. Fighting myself would make it worse, what I need is balance. What I’m fighting for is time, time to love Jack, to finish a book, to see my grandchildren grow. While we drive all the long way from New Mexico to Washington, while the miles to the future slip by, I close my eyes and think of guardian angels. We need them, all of them.
(9/30/97: the rest of this chapter is unknown at this point, I’ll write a bit more later but it won’t be complete, and the story needs to end here, with maybe another book in the wings?