by Leslie Brody
The Last Kiss
A true story of love, joy and loss
Leslie Brody
The Last Kiss
A true story of love, joy and loss
Leslie Brody
The Last Kiss
A true story of love, joy and loss
Copyright ©2012 Leslie Brody
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, except for passages excerpted for the purposes of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, or to order additional copies, please contact:
TitleTown Publishing, LLC
P.O. Box 12093 Green Bay, WI 54307-12093
920.737.8051 | titletownpublishing.com
Editor: Amanda Bindel
Front cover photo and design: Susie McKeown, susiemckeownphotography.com
Back cover and interior layout and design: Erika L. Block
Author photo: David Adornato
PUBLISHER’S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Brody, Leslie, 1961-
The last kiss : a true story of love, joy and loss / Leslie Brody. -- 1st ed. --Green Bay, WI : TitleTown Publishing, 2012.
p. ; cm.
ISBN: 978-0-9852478-6-7
Summary: Six years after their wedding, Elliot was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Told with heart, humor and compelling immediacy, this is a love story about a passionate marriage, the importance of loyal friends, and the resilience of children coping with the illness and death of a father.--Publisher.
1. Pinsley, Elliot Alan, 1951-2008--Death. 2. Cancer--Patients--United States--Biography. 3. Terminally ill--Family relationships. 4. Spouses--Death. 5. Children of cancer patients--Psychological aspects. 6. Bereavement--Psychological aspects. I. Title.
RC265.6.P5 B76 2012
362.19699/40092--dc23 1210
Printed in the USA
first edition printed on recycled paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Two Weddings
The Things He Carried
Italy, June 2006
Be a Gladiator, July 2006
Win This For My Boys, August 2006
What to Say
The Things I Carried
Last Kisses, October 2006
My Kind of Faith
My Guides to the Wilderness
Adventures in Weed, December 2007
Insta-Nurse, January 2007
Belonging
Waiting, April 2007
What About the Rest of Us? April 2007
Why I Began to Write, May 2007
Wisps of Worry, Summer 2007
Dumb Things People Say
Escape, October 2007
War and Peace and Pancakes
Dolphins, January 2008
When it Rains... Later in January 2008
A Letter from Elliot
How to Sleep With Yoour Husband in a Hospital Bed, May 2008
The Peach, Summer 2008
Celebration, September 2008
Where’s Roger? October 2008
Looking Over the Abyss, November 2008
Home
Thanksgiving, 2008
9-1-1
Drifting Away, December 13, 14 & 15
The Perfect Thing
The First Days
And Then
Why a Widow Needs a Puppy
Jiminy Cricket, Summer 2009
Gratitude, Thanksgiving 2009
Even Now, December 2009
Letting Go, October 2010
EPILOGUE 2012
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
READING GROUP GUIDE
to Elliot
and Alex, Devon, Max, Kate and Aaron
with love and gratitude
Elliot in Captiva, Winter 2008
PROLOGUE
“That place where you are is the best place I’ve ever been.”
—Letter from Elliot
I never bought a video camera when my kids were little for fear it would be a curse. It was my one and only superstition. As a newspaper reporter I had met too many anguished couples who peered desperately into home movies of their children as if sheer desire could make their lost babies spring back to life. Those heartbroken parents gave me the vague premonition that if I started shooting videos myself, a day would come when I would pore over them in grief.
Then I decided I was being silly and we were missing out on all the giggly oohs and aahs of revisiting our holidays on the screen. A house like mine and Elliot’s, with five kids from two first marriages, could be complicated. I thought filming our good times together would give us proof that we had finally become a family.
My first impulse turned out to be right. I was just wrong about who would be taken from me. Almost as soon as I started making home movies, we learned my husband was going to die. There was an inoperable tumor in his pancreas, an organ I couldn’t even locate. Doctors said if we were lucky, Elliot would live for a year or two.
Of course I can’t blame the damn camera. The timing simply turned out to be one of those cruel ironies: At the height of our happiest days, we were forced to learn how to live in the face of unbearable loss.
That quiet grey video camera quickly became my ally, my tool for saving tender little scraps of the life I wished I could save for real. Still photos would never do justice to Elliot, whose face is—was—constantly in motion, expressive, animated with warmth and love and humor. His dark brown eyes were infinitely deep.
I saved all his emails too. Fortunately he ignored my cautious warnings not to send personal messages from his desk at Bloomberg News.
“HEY YOU,” he wrote me a few months before he died, when pain searing down one thigh signaled the cancer was spreading. “I just want you to know I’m thoroughly consumed with amorous thoughts.”
Determined to remember as many details as possible, I saved love notes, my endless to-do lists, the kids’ handmade get-well cards and instructions for administering antibiotics through a home IV. That sheet has crinkled spots from drops of saline. Another page has ink blurred by tears. I also scribbled down funny moments that made me smile, hoarding them like a squirrel that would depend on them later for sustenance.
“Honey, I’m on the way to the store,” I said over my shoulder one day as I hunted for my car keys. “Do you need anything besides methadone?”
Elliot burst out laughing. It sounded like I was just running out to pick up some milk, not heavy duty painkillers. There were months when living with terminal illness began to feel almost routine.
More often, though, it was wildly emotional—when we raced to the emergency room yet again or kissed one last time before nurses wheeled Elliot off on a gurney through thick operating room doors for yet another risky procedure—and I wondered, ashamed, if my days felt richer and more fascinating because of all this drama. When this ordeal was over, would normal life seem flat? Like when Dorothy comes home at the end of The Wizard of Oz and the movie switches from color to black and white?
Maybe, but I had bigger things to worry about. I had to memorize our marriage.
The camera captured the ordinary moments: Elliot relaxing on the couch to watch a Mets game, ranting about something outrageous in The New York Times, or regaling the kids with tales of a gigantic food fight back when he was a troublemaker at Hebrew school (“Matzoh balls were flying!”). I was careful not to train the lens solely on Elliot for long. I didn’t want him to know I was engaged in such a morbid project as recording his life for a future without him.
But documenting what matters is what we did for a living—we’d even met in a newsroom—and I wanted to keep him with me this way. There was no real hope he’d get better. Two specialists at the
top of their field gave him the same prognosis and a quick check of statistics showed why. Only six percent of pancreatic cancer patients lived five years. Most didn’t last nine months. The best chance for survival was catching the disease early enough for surgery. In Elliot’s case, it was too late.
So we didn’t waste precious time shopping for another doctor who would say what we wanted to hear, or scouring the Internet for a cure, or buying into the quack who argued for an enema made out of coffee. Elliot hunkered down to endure whatever his doctor advised so he could stay with us as long as he could. And I tried to figure out how to do my best for the first man I truly loved, the first to truly love me.
Here was the knife. I didn’t know how to deal with my conviction that by leaning on each other through this unwanted odyssey we would get to know each other even better, and come to love each other even more, and then his death would be even harder to bear. Should I protect myself by backing away?
“I finally found the right man and now I’m going to lose him,” I cried on a social worker’s couch about a week after Elliot’s diagnosis. I’d gone there in search of a guide to keep me from collapsing. “How am I supposed to take care of him knowing we’re going to get ripped apart?”
“Don’t be afraid to get closer,” she said. “The people who recover best after a loss are often the ones with the strongest bonds. The people who have a harder time are usually the ones with conflicts or regrets.”
“But we’ve been married only six years,” I went on. My children had finally grown close to Elliot. All our kids had adjusted. “How am I supposed to stay positive when I know this is going to end badly?”
“Don’t focus on staying positive,” she said, handing me yet another tissue. “Focus on staying in the present. He’s here now. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody knows what will happen to any of us.”
I am so grateful for that advice. “Don’t be afraid to get closer” became my mantra, one I’d repeat to myself when we were teetering on the edge of the abyss. We held on to each other tight, with a desperate determination, and that made us stronger still. We were braver together than either of us could be alone. Even now, I believe with all my heart that the depth of our connection has given me the strength to survive his loss.
Now I find I like to watch our home movies and wish I’d taken lots more. In most scenes you can’t even tell Elliot was sick. He never lost his hair, light brown with lots of gray.
Here he is at the beach in Cape May, playing catch on the sand with the boys. He jumps to grab a ball out of the air.
“Did you get that one?” he shouts to me. “That was my best catch!”
Here he is a year later at the ocean in the Outer Banks, laughing as he runs out of the water to escape a monster wave. He’s thinner now, and if you know where to look you can see the bump of the port implanted under his skin near his collarbone where an IV tube attached for chemotherapy. He looks lean and fit, handsome and exuberant because all our kids are out there splashing.
And here he is showing off a dinner table he’s set for two in our backyard on a summer night. The kids are away, and to surprise me he balanced dozens of tiny votive candles in the crevices of our rock wall. They flicker like diamonds in the dark. “Welcome,” he says with a mischievous grin, “to my little love grotto.”
Some people say they don’t want to remember a man when he was sick—they want to think back on the better days. But those two years and four months of trying to stave off the inevitable were, in truth, a beautiful time. We focused on living, not dying, and I don’t want to forget a minute of it. Writing this book is my way of keeping those days safe, protected from the fickle distortions of a fragile memory. I yearn to have my husband back, I long for his jokes and his passion and his body, but I am at least grateful that we didn’t squander the gift we had for loving each other.
“He’s here now,” I kept telling myself.
Leslie and Elliot
TWO WEDDINGS
In my experience, the quality of the wedding bears little relation to the quality of the marriage. My first was all tuxedos, white tulips and elegance but didn’t work out in the end. My second was slapdash but gave me the world.
Elliot Alan Pinsley (changed from Pinsky by a relative after Ellis Island) was my second husband, and to some people—especially my parents—he seemed like Mr. Wrong. They had been much more gung ho about my first husband, Emile Camille Geyelin III, whose affluent upbringing matched my own.
When I first said “I do” I was twenty-eight, unsophisticated about love and sex and what it took to be a real partner. Growing up at Brearley, a prestigious all-girl prep school, I had never experienced boys as real people. I had a big sister but no brothers. Men seemed foreign, something glamorous to catch. My mother’s only romantic advice was simple: “If you talk about him all night, he’ll have a wonderful time.” That worked for getting a second date but proved a great way to end up with a narcissist, too. I had a string of dashing short-term boyfriends (in my twenties I even went on a date with Warren Beatty but didn’t kiss him because he was almost twice my age). My favorite beau was a Portuguese fencer who greeted me after a match by lunging to tap his epee against my cheek. I almost swooned. These guys had looks, charm and accomplishments, but they didn’t care a whit about me.
I met my first husband when we were both reporters in the hopping Tampa bureau of The St. Petersburg Times. He was athletic and wiry with fine-boned features, and I was drawn to his simmering, mysterious intensity. Known by the nickname Milo, he was an intrepid investigative newshound, a fierce mix of intellect and self-reliance. His elite background was impressive too. His father, once the head of The Washington Post’s editorial page, won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays against the Vietnam War. Milo’s mother, descended from the family of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, was a fixture in Washington society, constantly entertaining diplomats, journalists and political luminaries. Once Vogue ran a photo spread chronicling how she whipped up a fancy dinner for twelve on twenty-four hours’ notice.
When Milo got a plum job at The Wall Street Journal in Philadelphia, we dated long-distance for months. Then I grew weary of plane trips back and forth.
“We should settle down or break up,” I announced one day. Milo gave in.
And so I did the thoroughly un-modern thing and quit my great job to get married. It was a puzzling move for someone who had been so determined to get the best grades in school, to get into the Ivy League, to get one hot assignment after another. I was always looking ahead, pushing toward the next step—mostly because deep down I was shy and driven to rack up a resume to prove that I was worth loving.
Back then it was a source of pride that in seven years, I’d had five jobs and eleven apartments in two hemispheres. After Yale I’d flown off to Japan to teach English and ended up at The Associated Press in Tokyo, covering earthquakes, jet crashes and trade disputes. Using my overtime pay to zip around from Bali and Bangkok to Burma, I felt like quite the jet-setter. When I was ready to come home, I got a job at Fortune Magazine in New York, but really wanted to work at Time. I asked an editor there what it would take to get hired.
“Go to a newspaper and show me you can write,” he said.
And so I’d landed in Florida. But my glowing resume papered over the truth that all my moving around had left me lonely. College friends were getting married and I felt left behind, like there was a race to check off that milestone too.
My wedding to Milo was gorgeous. It was in my parents’ elegant townhouse off Park Avenue, a home so stylish it was once featured in Elle Décor magazine. With contemporary art on stark white walls, black wood floors, tall ceilings and minimalist modern furniture, it was as airy and pristine as an art gallery. A burglar broke in once and when the cops came they gasped. They thought the thief wiped the whole place out. Actually, my dad told them, it’s always like this. The intruder found nothing to take.
The townhouse had plenty of spa
ce for 150 guests in black tie. The second floor living room where we exchanged vows on a Saturday night in January 1990 was lined with extravagant quince flowers and long tapered candles. It was decorated by an A-list florist, a man mentioned with reverence in the pages of New York Magazine. The pheasant pie came from a caterer whose clients included Jacqueline Onassis. There was a jazz band for dancing on the third floor, a classical string duo during dinner on the fourth and a magician for Milo’s young nieces and nephew on the fifth. All under eight years old, they were dolled up in forest green velvet dresses and shorts, custom-made by my mother’s tailor.
I felt oddly detached as the night flew by in a festive blur of champagne and congratulatory air kisses. My mother, the editor of a niche art publication, was a perfectionist about parties, and she set the whole thing up. I didn’t get too involved. Maybe that was a bad sign. The only thing I chose was my dress, a long white Mary McFadden with narrow crinkly pleats like the gown of a Greek goddess.
Milo and I bought a house high on a hill in Montclair, New Jersey, about twelve miles west of New York City. It was simple but had a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline. (The view from the dining table and my bedroom window has kept me sane for almost two decades. The glorious sunrises, the hypnotic clouds and the pink reflections of sunsets on skyscrapers always make me stop and look. Even on my most hectic days, its sheer beauty brings me back to the broader, lasting world outside my antsy head.)
Milo was a good man, the kind I thought I was supposed to marry, but what we shared—camaraderie, privileged upbringings and aspirations in journalism—was not enough to sustain us. As the years went by, what I once respected as independence I began to resent as withdrawal, especially when I was struggling to take care of two young children and working part-time at The Record, a suburban New Jersey daily. I craved support and affection, and the gap between us grew deeper. That was my fault too. Always averse to conflict, I didn’t express what I needed. In time it became impossible to keep going in a relationship that lacked warmth, connection and desire. As Lynn Redgrave once said, “Loneliness within a marriage can drive you mad.”
