Let's Take the Long Way Home (14 page)

CAROLINE MARRIED MORELLI IN EARLY MAY, IN OUR
friend Marjorie’s backyard garden. If it was a wedding under fire, her friends turned it into something pastoral. The indomitable Sandy, Caroline’s close friend and former editor at the
Phoenix
, was a tall redhead who now lived in Philadelphia. She burned up the highway during the weeks of Caroline’s illness, arriving the week before the wedding with five pairs of red shoes for Caroline to
choose from, and a vat of homemade rice pudding. Caroline’s cousin Monique provided the knockout burgundy floor-length dress that she had been married in. The morning of the wedding, our friend Terry—who generally enlivened the neighborhood by keeping chickens in her backyard—lined the entire block leading to Marjorie’s house with satin ribbons and lilies. Morelli did double duty as a photographer, a brilliant maneuver that gave him a way to get through the day while capturing it for the rest of us. Lucille was the ring bearer (Caroline had found her a satin pillow harness), and I her humble handler. Caroline had asked me to find a poem to read, one about love and commitment that was true to circumstance. I had searched for days for something appropriate: Most love poems don’t assume storm clouds gathering overhead. But I understood what Caroline wanted; as much as she and I both longed for happy endings, we didn’t necessarily believe in them. Now life was proving to be rougher than that in every dimension. I finally found a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay that was both bearable and true, that spoke to Fate’s destruction of “destiny’s bright spinning.” Caroline called while I was reading it.

“I have one,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s too dark.” Then I read her the first few lines. “I pray you if you love me, bear my joy / A little while, or let me weep your tears.”

“That’s it,” she said abruptly, halfway through. “That’s the one. You have to read it.”

I have a photograph of the two of us that Morelli took that day: We are holding on to each other like a pair of saplings. The night after the wedding, she and Morelli and I were all flung on her sofa going over the details of the day. “How do you feel?” I said to Caroline, next to me on the couch, and she closed her eyes and smiled. “Consoled.”

THREE DAYS LATER
I flew to Austin for a four-day trip; I had been scheduled for months to appear at a university commencement. I called Caroline from my gate at the airport and made her laugh with a story about the security guards of a post-9/11 world, who had absconded briefly with my cowboy boots. Then my flight was called and my voice caught. “I don’t want to leave you,” I told her. “Go,” she said. “Nothing is going to happen to me while you’re gone.” It was the last spoken conversation we would have. She called my home phone in Cambridge that night to leave a message, and said the doctors wanted her to come to the hospital the next day—they were worried about a couple of new neurological tics that they assumed were transient, a result of the radiation.

I had to be onstage for a two-hour ceremony at eight o’clock Friday morning; when I left the stage and checked my cell phone, I had three new messages. Caroline had been taken by ambulance to the emergency room in the middle of the night with what turned out to be a series of
bleeds in the brain. She had lost the ability to speak; it wasn’t yet clear what she could comprehend. I was standing on the University of Texas campus while I learned this, hearing it first from Caroline’s cousin Suzanne, a physician, and then from Marjorie, who knew enough to tell me to come home. I found a flight routed through Chicago that left Austin that afternoon. I’d been given an honorary award that morning and, rushing to the car, I dropped the plaque I’d received on the street and chipped its frame. I almost left it lying there. It was an awful split second, as though all the little tokens of life were being swept away by the undertow of some darker truth. I got back to Cambridge after midnight.

Part of the abrupt horror of the next few days, for those of us who loved her, lay in not knowing precisely what had happened and what her experience of it was. Caroline’s eyes were wild with fear when I walked into the hospital room. When someone told her I was there, she gave a cry of distress that meant two things to me. One was the simple voice of recognition. The other was that she knew what my presence meant, and how bad it must be if I had flown back across the country.

Take away the words and you find all the adornments that surround them. Body language, gestures, the story of the eyes. Morelli and Caroline’s brother and sister were supposed to have full medical proxy, but the papers, drawn up that week, were not yet signed. We were trying
to see if she could grasp the situation and hold a pen. I took her hand and said, “Caroline, it’s me. If you can understand what I’m saying, squeeze my hand.” She answered with an immediate, strong grip. “Okay,” I said. “We need to get your signature on the proxy. If you think you can—” Her response interrupted me; she almost broke my hand. It was an entire sentence of meaning, full of impatience and efficiency. I held on to her while she scrawled her name on the forms.

Her arms became her eloquence from that day on. One night when I was sitting next to her bed, I laid my head down on the mattress beside her, and Morelli saw my weariness and got up to place a towel underneath my neck. It was one of countless acts of grace he provided in the next few weeks, when nothing much mattered but the light in the room and the number of breaths taken. Then Caroline flung out her arm and ran her hand through my hair, enough to comfort me for days, and we stayed that way until we both dropped into sleep.

We had spent years talking—talking when other people would have given up, teasing apart feelings and conversations and the intricacies of daily life. Now she couldn’t talk anymore and so I didn’t either; our narrative became a choreography of silence. I would spend hours at the end of her bed, not knowing much of the time if she even knew I was there. But Caroline and I had begun our friendship with a bond devoted to the elegant truths
of nonverbal language: the physicality and hand signals and eye contact that dialogue with an animal entailed. When she had first fallen ill, I had brought to the hospital a T-shirt that she loved, from the Barking Dog Luncheonette in New York, with
SIT! STAY!
written on the back. I knew all about sit-stay, and how straightforward and essential it was, and so that was what I did. I sat and I stayed.

THAT GREAT HEART—OF COURSE IT TOOK HER A
long time to die. They had put in a central line of morphine within the first few days after the bleed, and so I want to believe that her pain was contained enough by the drug to let her float somewhere insouciant and free. I cannot know this, any more than we can ever comprehend the next-door universe of the dying. But the question was what haunted me most, then and for months after she was gone. I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter. Suffering is what changes the endgame, changes death’s mantle from black to white. It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crushing weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death.

Caroline lived for eighteen days from the night she had the bleed. Morelli had all but moved into her hospital
room, bringing Lucille with him. (One night, to our battle-worn delight, a new attendant walked out into the hall and said, with a grin on his face, “There’s a goddamn dog in there!”) I had an unnerving amount of energy during those weeks; I knew that grief was somewhere down the line and I staved it off as long as I could. I would take dinner to Morelli in the hospital, or talk to Herzog on the phone with my forehead in my hand. One afternoon I stayed on the phone for an hour with Louise in Minnesota while we both read poetry; the phone call was mostly silence, punctuated with “Aah!” and “Oh.” I reached out in ways that were transient and intense, wept with no warning or not at all, was exceedingly polite to strangers. I called my friend Matthew from my cell phone while walking at Fresh Pond, and when I got his voice mail I left a long, rambling message with a halting question that seemed to me profound, a child’s effort to understand the universe. “What if …?” I cried. “I mean, I know this sounds stupid, but what if death … weren’t a bad thing?”

However ingenuous the question, I know now that I was staggering toward the terrain of the other side of loss. Accepting a death sentence is like falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion. You take it in one bruise at a time—a blow, a landing, another short descent. I was on the verge of exhaustion, but I kept moving with a sense of frenzied purpose, as if I could outrun the fact of what was happening. I had found Herzog’s home phone
number the night after I got back from Texas, and called him that evening from the hospital. He came into the room carrying a handful of lilies of the valley—he knew that whatever else had happened, Caroline would be able to smell—and walked over to her and held them under her nose. It was a gesture that took my breath away with its exacting kindness, and in the next few weeks I spoke to him with a distress that I held in check around most everyone else who loved her. Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, “Tell her everything you haven’t said,” and I smiled with relief. “There’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve already told her everything.” The next day they took her off fluids, which was her wish, and when Morelli called to tell me it was done I let out a wail in my kitchen that was an animal’s lament.

THE DETAILS OF
dying are sad and grinding: breathing and waiting and breathing and waiting. The body, brilliant machine, knows how and when to close up shop. But Caroline was so strong, and so determined, that even in this final task she moved toward the end with bracing force. I had watched her on the water for years; now she was in the midst of what Anne Sexton had called “the awful rowing toward God.”

And God, for me, was proving an elusive taskmaster. For most of my adult life I had been a lapsed Protestant
or foxhole believer; I was always surprised by people who seemed certain about the answer in either direction. But my belief in something larger and more unknowable than human consciousness had never been held to the fire at such an intimate level. Sometimes I would go into the small hospital chapel and sit there in the dark, wearing its silence like a shawl, and then shrug and go back upstairs to Caroline’s room. One especially bad night I remember staring at the light in the outside hallway and feeling the horrendous finality of this road—it seemed for that moment that the end was simply the end, like driving a car into a brick wall with nothing on the other side. It was one of the most desolate moments of my life, I think, and I felt as if the only God in the room that night was a morphine drip. And it came to me with cold comprehension that
this
was what it was to stare into nothing—a universe in which everything was pointless except the hardwired instinct to survive and endure and then die. What I was witnessing was as ordinary as morning, and now it was Caroline’s time to fall, and I found the lack of light and meaning in that picture intolerable. No wonder we came up with the resurrection myth, I thought. It offered a crack in the blackness, the only way to tolerate this end.

Trying to recapture that bleary insight, I find that most of the power of it eludes me; we are wired to forget. We have to keep on: build bridges, learn language, have babies, beat a stick against a rock and find rhythm. When
death shows up, the fragility of all this is revealed. But not for long. Remembering the suck and force of death is like trying to hold water in your hand. What I took away from that dark alleyway was that, when it came to God, I needed not to know—needed the humble ignorance as to whether anything existed outside that grim tableau. In the months that followed, I kept thinking of the phrase “requisite mystery,” as though that could capture my necessary position in the universe now, poised on the line between Knowing and Not Knowing, between what seemed to me the arrogance of religious certainty and the despair of a godless world.

I MET A DEADLINE
the day of the night she died. Not because I was acting tough, but because I knew she would die in the next twenty-four hours and that afterward I would collapse, and for now writing would buy me three or four hours in a relatively pain-free zone. I wrote that day because it was the only thing I knew to do, and I suspect it’s what she would have wanted, and would have done herself.

I had been at the hospital until late the night before, a Sunday, and left her brother and sister and Morelli there and come back home and slept a frighteningly deep sleep for ten hours. Caroline had lost consciousness three days earlier. I had sat by her side counting breaths until the numbers themselves stopped making sense. When I last
held on to her, she was burning up with fever and seemed to be working with furious energy, even in her stillness. She had left us all days before.

Monday night my phone rang a few minutes after midnight. I sat in bed staring at it while the machine picked up, and when I heard her brother’s voice I thought for a split second,
If I don’t pick up the phone she won’t be dead
. Then I grabbed the phone and said, “Andrew?” and I heard his gentle voice telling me what I already knew. After we hung up I turned out the light and lay in the dark for a little while, and then I got up and called Sandy, Caroline’s friend in Philadelphia, who answered on the first ring. We stayed on the phone for a long time, and we lit candles together at the same moment, like children capturing fireflies in a jar.

I stayed composed over the next few days in a way that alarmed me. Caroline knew concentric circles of people in and around Cambridge—dog people, writers, rowers, people in AA—and by now her illness was public enough that people often stopped me in the neighborhood to ask how she was. The afternoon after her death, I walked over to Fresh Pond with Clementine, and two or three people stopped me, and one older man broke down in tears when I told him. I had the unnerving calm of a chaplain. “I’m so sorry,” I said, my hand on his arm. “She died last night at midnight.”