All These Souls
Not long ago, we lay in bed with a dog on each side of us, Stephen’s huge analogue book propped up on a pillow, grasped on either side in a ten and two grip, me holding my digital library lightly with one hand, leaving my other hand free to rest on his arm, as is often our way while reading in bed.
Mostly, we are each lost in our own private worlds — him in an elaborate historical or science fiction text that requires the checking of maps and charts so that he might keep his bearings; me in a dense or poetic spiritual text that requires the destroying of all maps and charts so that I might lose my bearings — but occasionally I pause and look over at him and wonder at who he is, at who we are, at how it is that out of all the billions of people in the world, he and I have spent our life together.
“How many nights have we done just this — lie here next to each other reading?” I ask. “I don’t know. A lot," he says. In the morning, when I wander into the kitchen to make my coffee, he looks up from the paper he is reading and says, “About 13,000”. Ten hours since my question, he'd done the calculation. While I snapped a pod into the machine and waited for the whir of hot water to force itself through the mechanism, I said, “I wonder how many more we will have?”
Starting on our wedding night, I have been asking Stephen who he thinks will die first. That night, and for all this time after, he refused to answer, saying it was a ridiculous question because it was impossible to answer, and why think about that stuff anyway? I wasn’t surprised by his response, but it never squashed my desire, my need, to ask the question, to think about it.
I’ve never understood why we all aren’t talking about death all the time. Most dismiss it as morbid, which seems backwards and upside down to me. It’s the very opposite of macabre to keep front and center the miraculous fragility and resurgence of life. I concede that it’s frightening to allow such vulnerability in, but it’s so much better — so much more alive! — than going about our days laboring under the delusion that there will most definitely be another. What a burden it is, to drag around that heavy blanket of denial.
A week ago today, I got a call from a man I will never meet. “Your husband is having a heart attack and we are sending him to Baystate right away. He needs cardiac intervention. Do you want to talk to him?”
“I’m having a heart attack,” Stephen says, his voice quivering, “Can you let Chris know where I’m going; he was following me here in the car?”
“Yes, I will. Don’t worry about any of that. No controlling. Just let everyone help you. That’s all you need to do. I’ll meet you there. I love you.”
“I love you.”
There were helpers all along the way. His brother, Chris, who caught him when he slumped over, joking that he was an out of shape old man. The two women, one of them pregnant, who saw what was happening and independently called 911. The EMTs who quickly sorted out that the fall Stephen had taken was not the cause, but a symptom, and so suspecting a heart attack, picked up a paramedic on the way to the hospital who could administer an EKG. The bag they handed him to vomit in. The four baby aspirins they gave him to chew. The nurses, doctor, and pharmacist who greeted him at the dock. The doctor who looked at the EKG and said you are having a heart attack. The nurse who pushed meds into his IV to maximize the amount of blood that might slip through the miniscule opening in his heart. The EMTs who whisked him to the new ambulance. The driver who turned on the siren and drove as fast and as safely as she could. The paramedic who sat with him for the one hour trip. The team that met him at the dock in Springfield, wheeling him straight into the operating room. The nurse who spoke with me on his phone to let me know where to wait for him because he wasn’t in the hospital system yet. The doctor who studied in medical school for four years, then did a three year internal medicine residency, followed by a three year general cardiac fellowship, followed by a two year interventional cardiac fellowship, who skillfully slipped a line through the radial artery in his wrist to balloon the right carotid artery open and then place a stent, restoring blood flow to the heart, that never ever sleeps.
All these souls saved his life.
He’s been sleeping, resting, and basking in the love and concern that so many have showered on him, those he knows well and those he will never see again. Today, hand in hand, we walked one miraculous lap around Look Park. The sun on our faces, I joked, "Let's imagine that the field of white snow is actually the Caribbean Ocean we were meant to be sitting by right now.” Afterward, we were going to shop together at River Valley Market, but when we arrived he said, “I think I’ll wait in the car.”
I find myself now, whenever I am alone — hiking the dogs, bringing the trash to the dump, walking through the grocery store — wondering what it would be like to be this way all the time: alone, without him to come back to. I think some of it I can know now, and some of it I will only know when the time comes.
But today, I grabbed bananas and apples, garlic and sweet potatoes, popcorn and yogurt, and bagged up my groceries while chatting with the cashier, before heading back to the car to find him, waiting there.
