The Last Kiss

by Leslie Brody

  “Your husband woke up when they were starting with the tube. He said no, he didn’t want it. He wants to see you now.”

  “He said no?” I repeated dumbly. “Is he okay?”

  “Come see him,” she said.

  And there he was, looking at me. I thought I had lost him, but he was back, and I had never seen his eyes look into mine with such searching. I kissed him again, and again, and again.

  MY KIND OF FAITH

  Elliot stayed in intensive care, hooked up to oxygen and intravenous medicines, drifting in and out of a morphine haze. After several tense days, a nurse named Lisa pulled me aside.

  “The only way Elliot will find peace,” she said, “is through God.”

  That stung. I resented her assumption he needed to find faith if he was going to have comfort. We wanted to put our trust in doctors, not help from above. Surely she shouldn’t have said such a thing. Even in a Catholic hospital, staff was supposed to respect everyone’s point of view. I wondered if I should report Lisa’s transgression to her boss.

  Her prescription haunted me. We weren’t religious, and I couldn’t help thinking that if I had been, seeing Elliot suffer this way would have shattered my faith altogether. If there was a God, I told myself, he was doing a shitty job and I wanted nothing to do with him.

  Of course it wasn’t necessary to go through a personal medical crisis to see injustice on the alleged Almighty’s watch. Every day the newspaper displayed the slaughter of innocents through wars, fires and earthquakes, but seeing Elliot’s pain up close brought the issue to the forefront for me. I wanted to understand what support people got from religion, and how they could keep their convictions under such duress. It occurred to me I had never really talked with my friends about faith. Like sex lives and bank accounts, it was something personal that we just didn’t probe in detail.

  And so, for the first time in my life, I began to ask. Some people told me they found God an indispensable pillar during an illness. Some experienced a spiritual awakening. A few gave up on faith altogether, while others fought to keep it alive. I was a bit jealous of those who believed in heaven; the idea you could rejoin your soul mate in an eternal afterlife certainly made death seem less daunting. I didn’t believe I’d have that chance. In my view, we had only the here and now, and had to make the very best of it. Religion came into my life only as an excuse for warm family meals at Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashana and Passover.

  I contacted the pastoral care department at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, where Elliot was, as he put it, “incarcerated.” Sister Lois Jablonski said some patients became so furious at God that they kicked her out of the room. A few were tortured by the terrifying idea they got sick as retribution for their sins. She said God didn’t punish that way.

  “There’s no answer to the question, ‘Why did I get cancer?’” she said simply. “I just try to stay with the person and listen to him vent his feelings and not make any judgments.”

  To me that wasn’t a very satisfying response. I found myself bristling at the fact that some people gave God credit for the good in the world but didn’t hold him responsible for the bad. They said God didn’t micromanage. Then why pray for specifics, like recovery or a new job or a baby?

  The whole issue made me cranky. Once a priest on the pastoral care team stopped by Elliot’s room to see if there was anything he could do to help.

  “Sure,” I snapped. “Can you turn up the heat?”

  I knew I was being peevish and unfair. Yes, the perversion of religion had fueled terrorists and other crazies, but I had also witnessed its benevolence. As a reporter I had met dozens of foster parents. Most of the best ones were devout Christians whose faith inspired amazing self-sacrifice.

  One day, as Elliot and I were taking one of his first tentative strolls around the hallways of the Teaneck hospital to rebuild his strength, we heard a bunch of giggles in the stairwell. Out popped a half a dozen teenage boys in yarmulkes. They looked around a bit and came up to us.

  “Mr. Pinsley?” one asked timidly.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Good Shabbas!” they said in cheerful cacophony. Then they ran off.

  Elliot got a huge kick out of that. Apparently he was a stop on their “mitzvah” tour of good deeds. He must have checked off the Jewish box when he was admitted.

  “They knew who I was by my nose,” he said.

  I was grateful those boys gave Elliot a laugh, a welcome feeling of fellowship and a funny story to tell. I had deep respect for the community service mission of many faiths. Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand religious explanations for sufferings that are blatantly unfair.

  As I asked around, people kept telling me to check out a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Somehow everybody seemed to have read it.

  The author, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, wrote it to make sense of the devastating loss of his son, Aaron, who was only fourteen when he died of a rare genetic disorder. At first the rabbi expresses outrage at a God who allows terrible accidents and disease to strike the undeserving. He questions whether he can keep teaching that a merciful God watches over the world. Ultimately he concludes that God doesn’t cause tragedies, but can provide the tools people need to persevere.

  “The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world,” he writes.

  Well, okay, forgiveness and love were values I could subscribe to. I just didn’t need the God part.

  While I didn’t want anyone to tell me what to believe, it always touched me when friends told us we were in their prayers. I understood that was their way of expressing they cared. One thoughtful stranger who heard about Elliot’s condition even sent me a hand-crocheted “prayer shawl.” I never used it for worship, but her generosity moved me. There was so much compassion around us. That was something I could believe in. Human kindness helped me keep going.

  By the end of Elliot’s ten days in the hospital, I decided not to file a complaint about the nurse who sent me on these philosophical wanderings because she did such a great job with her professional duties. She was attentive and exacting.

  At one point she handed Elliot a clear plastic toy with a little blue ball inside. He was supposed to exercise his lungs by blowing into it to make the ball rise as high as possible. The sheer effort hurt so much he grimaced. He kept pressing the red button that dosed him with morphine.

  “Blow into the toy ten times every hour,” Lisa said. “And try to lay off the pain medicine. You’re using quite a lot.”

  She meant business. Elliot blew into that toy every few minutes. He never pushed that morphine button again. His discipline amazed me. He was putting himself through hell in hopes he could heal faster and come home.

  Watching him gave me more strength than a prayer ever could. If he could endure this torture, I thought, I could hang in there with him. He called me his “ER angel.”

  I kept that toy as a reminder of his determination to do everything in his power to do something as simple as breathe. Now the toy is dusty and cracked, but to me it is a symbol of grace.

  MY GUIDES TO THE WILDERNESS

  After Elliot came home we had a peaceful Thanksgiving, but I craved a clearer picture of what might come next. There had to be someone who could give me a clue, or at least help me handle the unexpected. I looked for guidance almost everywhere.

  I asked a social worker at Sloan-Kettering if she knew any counselors near me who helped families facing cancer. She handed me a long list of specialists. Two had offices in Montclair.

  The one named Lissa Parsonnet called me back first. She must have heard desperation in my voice because she shifted her schedule to squeeze me in.

  Lissa was stylish, petite and fit with a full head of curly blond hair. At fifty, she ran a marathon and went zip-lining in Costa Rica. Her radiant skin and enthusiasm struck me as the polar opposite of the disease she had devoted h
er career to discussing. I don’t know how she could listen to so many bleak stories, but she loved her job and it showed.

  Her cozy third-floor office had a soft couch and endless boxes of tissues.

  “I’m so damn tired,” I complained.

  At home I was trying to look calm, sure and strong, but in Lissa’s office I let myself blubber like a baby. I poured out my worries that my kids felt shunted aside when I bolted off to deal with Elliot’s emergencies. I whined that I never got a minute to relax. I demanded to know how this mess would unfold. How could I tell the difference between a temporary setback and the beginning of the end?

  “Everyone’s always talking about hope, how you have to have hope,” I wailed as I soaked yet another tissue in tears. “How am I supposed to be hopeful when I know he’s going to die?”

  “Hope can change,” Lissa said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “At first you hope he gets better. If there’s no cure you hope he lives for a long time. Then for a good quality of life. Then you hope for comfort. Then for a peaceful death.”

  “That’s awfully depressing.”

  It was a relief to admit that. With Lissa I could talk about death in a way I didn’t dare with Elliot. He just couldn’t face the subject and I would never force him to. I was too busy to see her more than once every month or two, but when I did go it was cathartic and liberating. I’d pull one Kleenex after another out of her tidy plastic box, mop my face, blow my nose, stuff each tissue into my clenched fist and then hurl the snotty wad into the wastebasket at my feet.

  “What are you doing to take care of yourself?” she always asked. “What are you doing for balance?”

  It was gratifying to hear somebody give me permission, even encouragement, to take a break. Her voice was low, soothing and sincere. Sometimes I felt like I was paying her just to tell me not to be so hard on myself. I would do anything to hear someone besides Elliot tell me I was doing a good job, that I had a right to feel this whole ordeal was unfair and that it was okay to worry about myself too. I had some good friends I could talk to, and I did sometimes, but I didn’t want all my conversations with them to be downers and I didn’t want to act self-centered. It’s okay to be self-absorbed in a counselor’s office. That’s the whole point.

  When I left Lissa’s office my upper lip would be sore from all those tissues and I’d be spent, yearning to sleep. Sometimes I did. Then I’d get up, make dinner and get back to the grind. By then my breathing was a little deeper, my shoulders a bit less tense, my path a little clearer.

  Books were another source of solace. I read The Human Side of Cancer by Dr. Jimmie C. Holland, who pioneered the study of the psychological issues faced by families affected by the disease. Her book helped me understand the existential trials confronting Elliot, but out of 344 pages, only eighteen focused on the caregiver’s experience—plus one grim final chapter on bereavement.

  What was most helpful was the way Holland explained the deeply human need to find meaning in our lives. She quoted Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist:

  “Even a man who finds himself in great distress. . . can still give his life a meaning by the way he faces his fate, his distress, by taking his unavoidable suffering upon himself. Life holds a meaning for each and every individual, and even more, it retains this meaning to his last breath. Life never ceases to have a meaning.”

  Frankl wrote this manuscript, The Doctor and the Soul, before being hauled off to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He rewrote it after World War II. That certainly got me thinking. At least Elliot’s suffering was not inflicted by another man’s evil.

  Still, where was the meaning in it?

  I couldn’t find any purpose in hunting for a miracle cure. That project seemed doomed to fail. I wanted to focus on something achievable, and, after chewing on this for a while, realized I could invest meaning in anything I wanted. It was my personal meaning, my value, my choice. What I wanted was as deep a connection to my husband as I could get. Nothing could stop me from finding meaning in our marriage, in how we treated each other and how we shaped memories for our family. If we did our best to show our children how to face life’s greatest hardships with courage and devotion, that would matter. Even his death could not take that away.

  Although at times it was hard to focus on something so abstract—when car repairs or laundry or work deadlines devoured a day—this mission was something clear that I could keep coming back to. Its power was bolstered every time we said “I love you,” and we said that all the time.

  What Remains was another eye-opener. It was Carole Radziwill’s memoir of taking care of her husband, Anthony, as he underwent a relentless series of surgeries for cancer that spread to his lungs. They were young, in love and working in journalism, and with that I could certainly relate. I turned the pages with admiration as she described how her indefatigable husband bounced back from one medical crisis after another. It was a star-studded story: Anthony was great friends with his glamorous cousin, John F. Kennedy Jr., who had made the whole country weep as he saluted his father’s funeral procession. John’s gorgeous wife, Carolyn Bessette, was Carole’s closest friend.

  The four of them dined together, went on luxurious vacations and celebrated milestones with bottomless champagne. As Anthony got sicker and treatments stopped working, Carole tried to cherish their final days up in Martha’s Vineyard. John and Carolyn were on their way to visit when their plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. This fairy tale prince from Camelot, who apparently made a grave mistake as a pilot, vanished into the water along with his wife and her sister.

  Just when Carole was focusing all her might on keeping her husband alive, death hit their closest friends. Tragedy struck when she was looking the other way.

  What a cautionary tale. It made me think again about the urgency of tending to my children. What if, while I was busy pouring all my energy into Elliot, something happened to them? I couldn’t live with that. Such an agonizing prospect added a new world of pressure to the struggle to give everyone in my house enough attention, but I was glad for the warning.

  I didn’t want to look only at cancer books for wisdom. Any example of resilience would do.

  Among the best was Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She must be one of the bravest women on the planet. Raised in a strict Muslim family in Somalia, she survived female mutilation, beatings and civil war. She ran away from an arranged marriage by escaping to the Netherlands, where she put herself through college, became a Parliament member and fought for the rights of Muslim women. Religious extremists threatened to kill her so she fled again, this time to America. Her courage was truly amazing, and she was so alone. At least I could take comfort in my family and friends. If she could overcome the incredible adversities in her life, I figured, I could handle mine.

  As time went on, I soaked up inspiration from a wider range of sources. Anything could apply—Chinese fortune cookies, letters to the editor and song lyrics. One blues singer, Vivian Greene, had a great and famous line: “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass,” she sang. “It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

  One of my favorites came from the tag on a Celestial Seasonings teabag.

  “Choose well,” it advised. “Your choice is brief, and yet endless.”

  “Who said that?” I quizzed Elliot.

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Yoda?”

  “No, Goethe.”

  We laughed. I still carry that teabag tag in my wallet. The memory of that goofy banter always makes me smile. A sense of humor can be key to survival.

  ADVENTURES IN WEED

  December 2007

  Elliot was shedding weight at an alarming pace. He’d lost forty pounds since flying to Italy nearly six months earlier. One day his doctors quietly advised him to try an unofficial route to an appetite.

  Medical marijuana.

  It was illegal in New Jersey, but Elliot liked the idea. He thought it might ease the anxieties that
had begun to plague him. It’s hard to relax when every week you’re confronted with your mortality up close at the chemo clinic.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever feel carefree again,” he told me.

  And so I added “get pot” to my growing to-do list.

  That was definitely new territory. I grew up a complete goodie-goodie. Cigarettes never had any appeal. I’d tried a joint once in college but the smoke burned my throat and I had zero interest in ever trying again.

  That’s why I found it amusing that it became my job to procure the cannabis. Somehow Elliot’s buddies, who came of age on college campuses rocking with sex, drugs and the anti-war protests of the early 1970s, didn’t come through. They’d cut their hippie ponytails long ago.

  My women friends, masters at juggling jobs, carpools and book clubs, were much more efficient. As soon as I dropped a hint, three of them stepped right up.

  The first was a tennis player who seemed quite well connected. A few nights after she learned what I needed we stood in her kitchen, where a huge blackboard was covered with color-coded block letters in pink and green chalk detailing her children’s afterschool activities. She handed me a white legal envelope embossed with a Merrill Lynch logo.

  “How much does it cost?” I asked in wonder.

  “It’s a gift,” she said. “There’s more where that came from if you need it.”

  I tucked it in my purse and drove the ten blocks home slowly, peering cautiously over the steering wheel, afraid to attract the slightest attention lest I get pulled over with my cache. I felt like an undercover operator, a bad girl, a spy. It was actually a bit of a thrill. Amazing, what we do for love.

  I thought of saving the package for Elliot’s Christmas present but was too excited to wait. He was taking a shower when I got home. I burst into the bathroom and pulled open the curtain.

  “You’ll never guess what I have,” I exclaimed.