I Can't Save You

A woman mourns the loss of her wife.

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I ate a girl scout today. Well, I ate 5 boxes of Samoas and 3 boxes of thin mints. There are 3 boxes of thin mints left in the freezer. I showed some restraint. The Samoas were her favorite; perhaps that was why I couldn't stop eating. I couldn't wait for her to wake out of sedation. The truth is I didn't want to wait. I was tired of life being on hold. I was hungry. I was starving for the parts of life that make you feel alive like eating cookies, walking the dog, and dancing. Aspects of a normal life, the little things that constitute living. Instead, we were stuck in a holding pattern, death hovering around, always, like a fly. It buzzed and moved in maddening circles over our heads. I tried striking out with a rolled up magazine. But death is no ordinary fly, and it was twice as stubborn. I could chase it to a corner of the room where it rested watchful and out of reach.  

Her illness was terminal, Diabetic Cardiomyopathy (DCM). I knew I couldn't fight it. Hell, I could hardly chew on words so big. Only she could fight it. Fighting and losing was our current destination. I had taken a leave of absence that left me itching to return to my job. My career was the only thing that could eclipse the reality of my wife's pending death. The long, drawn-out process of saying good-bye was her lifeline, but it was killing me.  

The marble kitchen counter was littered with little toasted flakes of coconut. I liberated them with the tip of my pointer finger and placed them on my tongue. They were lost to the prior coconut, chocolate, and caramel that lingered on my tongue from before. I was trying to steal back the lost moments the never had moments, but the incessant buzzing returned in the wake of memories. Then I was purging in the sink to punish myself and assuage my guilt for living. In the silence of our Cul de sac, I could hear the distant rush and bustle of suburbia. The sound of motion tapping on my windows. We needed new windows, but it would have to wait. The cough and rattle of rush hour mimicked the sound of Katrina's lungs. I needed a draught of Scotch to block the sound out of my ears. I put on my sound-canceling headphones, risking missing a call for help from Katrina, and I poured myself a drink. Shutting out what could be the last cries of her life. But I knew she wouldn't die like that, leaving me in peace. Katrina would grasp and clutch at me in the final throes of death, like a drowning victim taking her rescuer with her. The thought frightened me. I was afraid of death: hers and mine. I was scared of the invisible reach of a specter that would harvest my soul. I could not say any of this to Katrina, but I knew she could read it on my face.

Our wedding dresses hung at the back of our bedroom closet. Her's was heavy from the intricately beaded torso, and it had a long trail of buttons down the back. It took me forever to get her out of it while my simple white dress puddled around my feet on the floor. It had been an intimate wedding in our home, but still, she splurged on a gown that she never thought she'd get a chance to wear. We were in our early 40s when gay marriage was finally legal. There was enough space in the closet now to shuffle things about easily. My side had always been Spartan in comparison. Her side was always packed tight. Once the closet bar collapsed under the weight of her winter wardrobe, but now it was sparse. She'd instructed me to give away all the clothes for the summer season she wouldn't see and all the clothes that were now too big for her shrinking body. Katrina couldn't bear to look on them. Her fashion-forward days were over. She was not much more than a skeletal frame hung about with wasting flesh.

"What's wrong, Lulu?" she said.

I had stood in the doorway, watching her sleep, armed with my fly swatter. Now, she was awake. Katrina extended her arm and beckoned me. I stood at the foot of the bed with my head bowed like a shamed dog.

"I can't save you, and it's eating me up. There is nothing I can give or do to change our fate," I said.

"No one can. I was diabetic when we met. It wasn't a big deal. We ate healthily, and I took my insulin injections. There was nothing more to be done," Katrina said.

"I should have seen it coming," I said. "Gradually, you were tired all the time. Doing the laundry left you short of breath. Then on that Sunday morning, you fainted in the kitchen. Hitting your head on the marble counter, the frying pan fell to the floor and burned your thigh. I raced in at the sound of the sizzle and clatter. There was bacon everywhere. It was scattered on you and the floor. Your brow was bleeding profusely. You left your nightgown on the kitchen floor, and I helped you get dressed in your sweats; we went to the emergency room. We were so focused on the stitches, so stupid," I said.

We asked if we could see a cosmetic surgeon, but the medical staff was more interested in the mysterious fainting spell. We had chalked it up to a bad episode of diabetes. The ER doctor wanted to run some tests. When he returned, it was the first time I heard the term Diabetic Cardiomyopathy. Katrina was less surprised. Her father had died of heart failure due to DCM before we met. I was alarmed. I took Katrina home with her Frankenstein brow, and I got on the internet. I went straight to WebMD, and as always, that was a mistake. I now had enough information to scare the hell out of me, but not enough to build a battle plan against.

After our first visit with the heart doctor, I felt worse. She felt worse. He'd said it was terminal. It was irreversible. He gave us a five-year sentence. I vowed to Katrina to be there for everything, and for the first two years, I was. Then the illness stretched its legs and moved about Katrina's body, causing manageable pain but dire circumstances. The things we had control of, like her weight and quitting smoking, were not enough to reign in DCM. The disease wanted more. It thinned the walls of her heart, which in turn enlarged the chambers. She was hopped up on pills: beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors. I was getting a crash course in pharmacology. She took drugs to ease the edema and drugs to help her sleep. I was given a script for Prozac. I thought about taking the whole bottle with a fifth of Jack. But I couldn't leave her. I returned to work part-time from home. Then I got a network of friends to babysit Katrina so I could go back to the office. It started off at 16 hours a week, and it quickly progressed to 40 hours in the office and more from home. Hope came into our lives with a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) implanted to help her heart pump blood to the body. It was a stopgap while we sweat it out for a heart transplant. It never happened.

The harder I pushed away from Katrina's prolonged dance with death, the more difficult it was to return to her. I had expected I'd be holding her hand when the time came, but I wasn't. I was working on a new logo for a long-time client. A man that would come to Katrina's funeral to pay his respects. Respect I couldn't afford her in her passing. I renewed the script for the Prozac. The little orange bottle sat alone on the kitchen counter. I eyed it warily with the shadow of a mound of pills inside. The pills were supposed to subdue the rage inside. They were supposed to help me build a ladder out of the pit of despair and guilt. I wondered how many it would take to heavily sedate me or maybe numb me out of existence. But even in my pain, I could not commit to ending my life. Death hurt, and I didn't want any more of it. I failed Katrina. She died in a hospital bed in the spare bedroom, alone. I was in the hall clutching a file to my chest, listening to the rattle of her breath. I imagined how her enlarged heart beating erratically must have caused her agony. I know listening to her life's exit caused me torment, but it didn't match the pain of my cowardice.

I stopped working. I started and stopped therapy. I never left the house. I got my scant groceries from Instacart. The hospital bed had been returned to a medical supply company. I sat in the empty space it left behind, my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking myself. I did not reassemble the full-sized four-poster bed that had been there. It was piled on the floor by the window like a shipwreck, a shambles. I slept in my office on the brown leather Chesterfield sofa. I could not go to our bed. I had not changed the sheets since she left them to take up residence in the spare bedroom. It was too much bed for me, alone. The wrinkled linens and divots still in place from her body haunted me. I felt sick to my stomach that I held on to her so tightly after she was gone, but I was scarce to be found when she needed me most.

At first, and for a while, I thought my depression was a tribute to her life. It was not. It was more cowardice. And like a reflection in a pond, the ripples shook my self-image. I was not the wife I'd thought I'd be. I could not face her dying, her death, nor my life. I was in limbo. I kept the Prozac filled, which meant I had to return to therapy. I lost my job. I had no insurance, so once again, I was without treatment and Prozac. I started cleaning. Dusting, sweeping, mopping, and finally, I removed the sheets from our bed and put them in the trash. I retrieved the red vacuum cleaner from the corner of the dining room. I hadn't vacuumed ever. She did that. I ran my hand over the handle. Katrina had taken one look at the shiny red Dyson vacuum when she unboxed it.

"I feel like the Mario Andretti of housewives," she said.

"You're not a housewife. You're an accountant," I said.

"I can pretend, can't I?"

"You can be anything you want to be," I told her.

I heard myself. I whispered it back. "You can be anything. I can be anything." I didn't have to be in pain. I could miss her and love her and move on in baby steps. I couldn't save her, but maybe, just maybe, I could save myself.

By Leah Holbrook Sackett

From: United States

Website: http://www.leaholbrooksackett.website

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