I Can't Complain (12 page)

“Separate bedrooms” is an inaccurate and loaded phrase. Only royalty and the elderly can admit to it without drawing smirks. Accordingly, I am not recommending the formalization of any such thing. Your relatives would worry, your peers would gossip, and your spouse would look for outside gratification. When our son, now twenty-three, is visiting, I stay put lest he think there is something wrong with his parents’ love life.

“What time did you come down to the guest room?” my husband asks in the morning, always a little surprised, on his way to work. “Nine-ish,” I say. “I wanted to read. I didn’t want to keep you up.”

Such wifely thoughtfulness induces a smile. I tell him he looks good because it’s true. He slept well in that wide roomy bed, and it shows.

J
ULY
29, 2005,
WAS OUR
thirtieth wedding anniversary, a milestone I hesitate to announce due to the advanced age such marital longevity connotes. We did not throw a party or renew our vows; to do so would be out of character for a couple who barely threw a party the first time around. Our wedding was put together on short notice and was simplicity itself: four parents, one sister, her husband, who doubled as photographer, and eight friends. It took place on a Tuesday night in Brookline, Massachusetts. The rabbi officiating at Temple Ohabei Shalom had been a chaplain at UC Berkeley, which made him tolerant of a groom who requested “no religious mumbo jumbo.”

Our formal engagement was pragmatism itself. Bob was starting an internship on July 1 and had won the booby prize in the vacation lottery: his would begin three weeks into the job. We had talked obliquely of marriage, without using that noun and without a question being popped. Our understanding, as my mother liked to call it, was that at the end of his internship, that next June-ish, we’d . . . assemble the families.

Instead, in shotgun fashion, we made the necessary plans—date, time, rabbi, restaurant. In a less-said-the-better mode, we referred to the upcoming nuptials as “the party” and the honeymoon as “the trip.” I made my dress: off-white, knee-length, one lily on my shoulder strap. Bob wore a new suit, a new shirt, a new tie, which I kept for years. My parents sent out announcements, resulting in both gifts and angry phone calls from the uninvited. My mother explained rather grandly that Bob, her new son-in-law—you see, he was a doctor, an MD, an intern—had no time to plan a big wedding like my sister’s at La Sala de Puerto Rico, in the student center at MIT, of which her other son-in-law, they might recall, was a graduate.

Our honeymoon was a gift from Bob’s brother and sister-in-law: a car trip around California, with them as guides, we newlyweds in the back seat of their Vega, a Styrofoam food chest between us, some nights in a three-man tent but most at one Motel 6 or another, no reservations. But the Night to Remember was an ammonia-scented cabin on Lake Tahoe maintained by the Campus Crusade for Christ, which Mr. No Religious Mumbo Jumbo dubbed the Church of the Immaculate Accommodations.

Admitting to a marriage of many decades brings a new wrinkle. Strangers, upon hearing I have a grown son, often ask if Ben is our child jointly, or just mine. “From a first marriage?” the rude person persists. It’s not meant as a compliment, but I take it as one. They mean that hardly anyone they know has been married long enough both to conceive a child and attend his college graduation as an extant couple.

Can one talk about marital longevity without sounding smug? I’ll try. We don’t preen about this. And if I’m sounding overly of-the-people about Motel 6, let me confess that Bob claims my idea of roughing it now is a hotel room without a phone in the bathroom.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out to Bob that he had never proposed to me. He surprised me by asking, “Want me to propose now?” We were eating burgers at the Northampton Brewery; i.e., this was no bended knee, no gondola in Venice. It was 5:30 on a Wednesday night. “Nah,” I said, “That’s okay. I’m sure the guys who popped the question on electronic scoreboards are divorced by now.”

I wouldn’t dare theorize that cinematic romances and lavish weddings are inversely proportional to long marriages. But there are lots of us, the technically unproposed to, out there. My friends Patty and Chuck, for example. She laughed out loud when I asked how their marriage came about. “I was trying to get my first husband—we were separated—to buy me snow tires for my Gremlin,” she explained. “Chuck said, ‘Get rid of that guy, and I’ll buy you snow tires.’”

“Wow,” I said. “And that was it?”

“That was it,” she confirmed. I thought back to their twenty-fifth-anniversary party. Chuck toasted Patty and made excellent jokes at his own expense. She and I might have collaborated on a response, a renewed vow of sorts: Here’s to the guys not on bended knee, not holding little velvet boxes. Here’s to things more durable than diamonds.

F
IVE YEARS AGO
, when all was well, a
Boston Globe
editor asked if I’d like to be one of several regular contributors to a proposed weekly column they planned to call Coupling. I would fill, unofficially, the long-married slot, and my age would appear in the italicized ID at the end of every piece—good stuff revealed, please. Perhaps I’d like to write about my grown son bringing women home?

“I’m not going to write about my son’s love life,” I said. “And if I’m airing any dirty laundry of my own, I’d better ask my husband.”

When I ran it by Bob, he said, “Okay, as long as you don’t write about me.”

Of course I wrote about nothing
but
him: Bob the overzealous foodie and restaurant critic at his own table. Bob the dispenser of unsolicited advice on how to dress, clean house, and swing a golf club. Bob the tired guy who was early to bed and first to leave any party.

As a tribute to his good nature and husbandly pride, it took exactly two essays for him to enjoy his starring role, whether it was that of hero, villain, or punch line. Looking back at the columns I wrote, I see traits, fondly described and enlarged, of what was already creeping unrecognized into our lives: exaggerated behaviors. Neat and punctual Bob; Bob the noodge; Bob the proud husband and father who bragged too much. Between my own lines I see the earliest hints of his slipping into the brain disorder that would first change and diminish him, and then, three years and eight months later, kill him.

Friends ask if I’d write about this siege, and I always said no. Memoirs about losing a loved one are pretty much the same: he or she is well, then something’s wrong, then it’s worse, and a lucky life changes. So it’s just going to be this, a final, unassigned Coupling column in honor of the husband who made “long married” a fresh and funny topic.

The cruel disease that felled him was frontotemporal dementia—rare, untreatable, and fatal—a disease that often turns its victims into violent and paranoid versions of their normal selves. Bob, however, just got more gregarious. Any form of inappropriateness in public consisted of his answering most greetings and questions such as “Two for dinner tonight?” with “My wife had a movie made.” Once brilliant, dignified, elegant, and cool, he regressed, becoming sweeter, easier, more childlike, stubborn in new but benign ways. He was fifty-seven when my son and I recognized that something was amiss. His wit was gone. His conversation and responses were a loop of what neurologists call stereotypies—persistent repetition of acts and words. (“I quit my job . . . My brother died . . . I went to Dartmouth.”)

Old habits (pacing, punctuality, prompt bill paying, neatness) became ritualistic and obsessive. Type A behavior became A plus. The former gourmet wanted only pizza, ice cream, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, and frozen turkey dinners that harked back to his working mother’s menu plan. No new restaurants, and the same dish ordered at the old familiar ones. If I cooked something from the old repertoire, once a favorite, he’d hover, worried and suspicious, unconvinced that he’d ever eaten this before or loved it.

On his fifty-ninth birthday, as we rode the subway to SoHo, I asked—in the way one would ask a child—“Isn’t it wonderful that we can go to your favorite restaurant on your birthday?” to which he answered, “It’s wonderful that we can go to my favorite restaurant on my birthday?”—the echolalia I’d been reading about but had failed to recognize until that moment.

Soon enough, he said only two things: “Do the stuff,” which could mean close the blinds or call Ben or pay the bill or put both hands on the steering wheel in the proper driver-ed position. Eventually four words became his motto and answer to every question. “I’m a happy guy!” he’d assert, no matter the topic, the setting, the listener. “I’m a happy guy.”

Still worse, nine months before he died, a doctor friend noticed the atrophying and twitching of muscles in Bob’s hands and arms. It meant he had the worst complication of the illness, whereby ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, appears in tandem. Nine months passed in what now feels like a minute. His appetite diminished, his limbs shrank, and his weight dropped. A physical therapist, at her sixth and last visit, said kindly, “He’s had enough. Let’s not put him through this.” His breathing became shallower and more labored. I called our doctor and then Hospice for the first time on a Friday afternoon in late September 2009. They came the next day, and the first visit turned out to be their last. Morphine was mentioned for the first time, but it was still for the weeks ahead. Did I need a volunteer? Someone could come on my birthday two weeks hence, so my son and I could go out . . . could celebrate. At 7:30 the next morning, I went upstairs to check on him. He was breathing irregularly and then he wasn’t. “Bobby?” I whispered, in case he was merely asleep. I touched his chest, a weakling’s poke. I put two fingers to his neck in search of his carotid pulse. There was something—a heart was beating. I ran for Ben, asleep downstairs. Back at Bob’s side, I knew that the pulse I’d felt wasn’t his at all, but mine.

That night a heartbroken Ben said, “I want to speak at the funeral.” Within twenty-four hours I thought,
If he can do it, so can I.
We worked separately and independently down the hall from each other. We made no biographical or anecdotal assignments, yet the full and true Bob emerged, as if we had evenly divided the best and funniest between the two of us.
How could a son who’d been red-eyed for days write something that wouldn’t break everyone’s heart?
I worried. Yet he put everyone at ease, an opening laugh of recognition, with, “If this were a real and proper tribute to Dad, then this eulogy would have started about ten minutes ahead of schedule.”

It was the best funeral ever, I like to say. There was a big crowd and a tightly controlled program—no ramblings from an open mike, no surprises. A pianist played standards, a soprano sang Mahler, three speakers and a rabbi. People laughed and cried, and in honor of Bob the Bullet, as he’d been nicknamed thirty years before by a golfing buddy, we were done in an hour.

Ben ended by saying, “It can be crushing to think what must have been going through his head during the final months, when the disease took its worst toll. But I take solace in the fact that he had a family who loved him more than anything . . . And that makes me a happy guy.”

I went last, and I couldn’t end without a tribute to the man, at twenty-seven, whom Bob would have called his greatest accomplishment. I said, “Benjamin in Hebrew means ‘son of my right hand.’ And if ever there was an exemplar and spokesperson for that name, it is he. For about a year, people were hinting if not insisting that I bring in help, but what they didn’t understand was that
it
was hard, but Bob was easy. To borrow Thomas Friedman’s description of his late mother: she put the
mensch
in dementia. And then when I still thought I could manage, the best help of all arrived: Ben announced, ‘I’m coming home. It’s going to get worse. I can’t live with myself being so far away. And it’s the right thing to do.’”

The night before Ben returned to Los Angeles, I poured each of us a glass of wine, and we went into the living room for a task we’d been putting off. In front of the fireplace, we transferred Bob’s ashes from the black plastic crematory box to a beautiful wooden one, of bird’s-eye maple and bubinga. Engraved on the lid are the words, “Robert M. Austin, 1949–2009. Beloved by all.”

We’d known from the beginning that there would be no sprinkling or parting with the only thing we had left. Ashes are sadder than I ever could have imagined. We told these far-removed remains that we missed him. We put the box back on the mantel and raised our glasses. I said, “Let’s each tell a funny story about Dad.” And so we did.

W
HEN I WAS TWELVE
, my parents bought a Cape across the street from Mount Pleasant Golf Club in Lowell, Massachusetts, a private nine-hole course with a low membership fee. My father took up the game with secondhand clubs toted in a golf bag from Goodwill. Even his golf balls were previously owned, fished from the course’s brook by enterprising neighborhood kids. He played several times a week, late into the fall, weather permitting. Without a lesson, immune to the biomechanics of the game, unmoved by titanium and carbon graphite, he never improved.

I took up golf out of sheer proximity to the course and because members’ children under sixteen could play for free. Before I ventured onto the first green, I studied an illustrated how-to book by Sam Snead. My father took me out on the course for the first time, chanting all the way to the first tee, “Keep your head down. Keep your head down.” I did. I swung and made contact. With my eyes fixed on the ball, I didn’t follow its flight. The thwack was just right. Forty-five-plus years later, I still remember the look on my father’s face: not glee or pride, but amazement verging on scholarship dreams. The ball had flown a hundred yards. In my family, that was far.

My early promise did not earn me lessons, due to the family ennui about all things involving fees. I only dabbled, playing a half dozen holes after school a few times a week with an equally tepid player, my next-door neighbor, Patsy, whose live-in uncle was a perennial runner-up in the city golf championship. When I turned sixteen, the free play ended. A junior membership was not discussed.