This Is My Husband

“…for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”—Oliver Sacks

Small red marks like infected mosquito bites cover my chest in surprising fury, their rash-like presence upsets and surprises me, just as it did the last time I discovered them. When was that? The night after my 10 hour vigil in the hospital’s ‘Urgent Care’ facility—long and exhausting but not as bad as the 15 hour one that came two weeks before, and just after my husband’s brain surgery. In my state of escalating tension, predictably ever-present during those emergency episodes, the finger nail that always splits on my left hand had apparently been used to worry the skin on my chest just below my neck, causing many minute digs I was unaware of until I saw the bloody marks in the mirror; anguish the toll demanded of all present, including of course the patient himself, my husband.

Is this the man I married fifty years ago? Lying on his side in the mummy’s semi-circle we’ve come to expect from an ancient artifact in a grave, hip and leg bones tracing sharp angles beneath the shroud of sheets; he who was my handsome young husband once, reminds me now of an Egyptian pharaoh buried in 2500 B.C. and just recently unearthed. What a miracle he should look as if he’s only sleeping when he’s been dead so long; but he’s neither sleeping nor dead.  He’s my husband still alive; but barely; smelling of the sickly-sweet tang of homelessness, his refusal to wash since returning from the hospital to die at home another one of his decisions to perish on his own terms; so he certainly isn’t homeless. The sight of his wasted body reminds me of pictures of prisoners in concentration camps during WWII. Even his eyes are sunken in dark sockets, cheeks sunken, breath sunken, voice lost in some starved hollow it can’t climb out of. But he’s not dead, not homeless, not starved by any but his own hand; yet this cadaver is my husband of fifty years. Instead of crying in deluges to clear the air, a cloudburst assuring it will be over in minutes, many short little teary moments suddenly appear and finish all day long; impossible to predict and suspiciously ubiquitous even when my mood seems sunny.

Fighting his personal war already lost against brain cancer, felled by a sneak attack neither he nor anyone else expected until the headache behind his right eye made it all too clear the enemy had breached his citadel, this stranger to us all is still my husband. I know his enemy wins battles every day, but not in my home with my husband or anyone I’ve known, for that matter. They told him there was no hope at all of victory right from the start. Why would he resist and fight then? We still don’t have an answer. Shock undoubtedly rendered us senseless, and my husband who loves good combat mistakenly judged this one that way, too. He knows now, after four months of cascading catastrophes, horrific pain and loss of everything he holds dear, that it was not a good fight; or at least not a fair one.

And so, all of us on this side of death feel we’ve been cheated. No one told us it would be this way and he wouldn’t have even one precious day to enjoy life again in the four months of what the doctors laughingly called living. And he, close to the other side of death, is still mad—never accepting but mad—and the only recourse he feels he has is to finish off the tumor after he dies. Trick the enemy; let it think it’s won; and then burn it up so there’s nothing left of it, either. What he can’t do in life he’ll do in death. He’ll strike back and have the last word after all. Acceptance will never be one of the stages he passes through in this war. He is a very sore loser. I had hoped he’d reach some kind of peace before death, probably for the sake of all of us who love him and have to watch him suffer. But this isn’t about our ends. It’s about his. And therein lies his private peace.

So now I see, yes, this is my husband.