The Last Kiss

by Leslie Brody

  It was. Of course.

  “You need to go to Urgent Care at the main hospital,” the radiologist said. “Now.”

  Elliot rolled his eyes in disgust. He was so sick of this. Me too.

  On Third Avenue I waved my arms wildly to hail a cab. One swerved over and before I could stop him Elliot marched around to the far side of the taxi and opened the door into oncoming traffic. Another cab almost hit him. Our driver exploded in a venomous tirade in an unknown language and then switched to English.

  “You can’t get in that side,” he barked. “I could lose my license!”

  Please, I begged the driver, just take us to the hospital. Please, I begged Elliot, be careful. Between exhaustion, drugs and whatever new was going wrong inside, Elliot was too uncoordinated to venture into city streets on his own. He didn’t want to believe it.

  “You need to listen to me,” I snapped as we sped uptown. “You’re not exactly at the top of your game.”

  “Maybe that would be the best thing,” he shot back. “I’ll just get hit by a bus and get it over with.”

  He rarely talked about giving up. I kissed him hard to silence him.

  “We’ll get through this,” I insisted.

  So there we were back in the waiting room at Urgent Care yet again, our sixth time, smelling the odd mix of alcohol wipes, floor bleach and Chinese take-out. A television on the wall showed CNN reporters babbling breathlessly about the stock market. The Dow had plunged 800 points that day. It was the beginning of the economy’s downward spiral.

  “The public mood is grim,” the anchor declared soberly. We watched news of the nation’s financial panic for distraction from our real problems.

  We spent hours, as usual, waiting for a room to be ready upstairs. Finally, around 10:00 p.m. we got in the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Elliot’s forehead felt warm to my lips.

  By the time we got to his room, he was starting to sound out of it again, like the night before at dinner. I called in the nurse. Apparently he’d spiked a fever since leaving the ER downstairs. She called for the resident, stat.

  “What year is it, Mr. Pinsley?” the young doctor asked nervously.

  “What month is it?”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  Elliot wasn’t sure. He looked like a sad puppy, afraid he’d done something wrong. Sweat dripped from his temples. His fever had climbed above 102; anything more than 100.5 is a huge concern for a cancer patient.

  The resident ordered an emergency head scan. I didn’t dare ask why. A stroke? Bleeding in his brain? Had the cancer spread there too?

  “Does he have a Do Not Resuscitate order?” the resident asked apologetically.

  Oh please, you have to ask me that, again, now? I mumbled something about how Elliot would want him to do what he could if there was a chance he’d recover enough to have a meaningful life. A vague answer to an impossible question.

  At nearly midnight we went back down in the elevator to get the head scan. Waiting in the wheelchair, Elliot’s jaw grew slack, his eyes vacant. He said nothing. I warned the technician that Elliot panicked in closed MRI machines, but it didn’t matter this time. He was too dazed to notice.

  What if something irreversible had happened? What if we’d gotten to a new place of permanent dementia? I’d handled a lot—his crazy diet, oozy dressings, relentless stress—but this I couldn’t take: the prospect of nursing a husband who didn’t know me. I could cope if I was in the thick of it with Elliot. Please don’t make me go it alone. I need to be able to talk to my husband. He needs to talk to me too.

  Once he was wheeled to the room, a patient aide tried to get him to lie down. Elliot stood stubbornly facing the bed in his light blue hospital gown, his hands on the mattress, refusing to budge. The aide looked at me like I should be able to manage my husband. I looked at her, hoping she knew what to do with out-of-control men. Then came what he would have horrified Elliot most—and I hate to say it—but he peed on the floor. I pulled down his wet underwear. Suddenly there were three or four of us trying to cajole him into bed. It took us almost fifteen minutes to get him to turn around and bend his knees. He sat on the edge of the mattress like Rodin’s Thinker. We tried to get him to lie down so he wouldn’t fall.

  “Just give me a minute,” he complained suddenly, cranky and frayed. Thank God he was talking again. Tylenol had broken his fever and he drifted slowly back to reality. Eventually he lay down and slept.

  The next morning Elliot had no memory of this entire episode. His thinking was as clear as ever. He was hungry and wanted The Times.

  I told him vaguely what happened, but I didn’t confess my fear he’d lost his mind forever. We had always told each other pretty much everything. Now I was piling up secrets because I didn’t want to give him even more to worry about.

  When the cluster of doctors and students crowded into the room on their daily rounds, I asked about the brain scan.

  “It’s negative,” the resident announced.

  “Brain scan’s negative?” Elliot replied. “Guess nothing’s there. No brain.”

  I burst out laughing with giddy relief. He was back.

  LOOKING OVER THE ABYSS

  November 2008

  After five days in the hospital, we went home. Then Elliot spiked another fever and we bounced back to the hospital for a few more.

  The weekend after his discharge we snuck off to Lambertville, pretending that he’d beaten back these raging infections for good. We napped all afternoon in a bed and breakfast so that he could handle a night out at one of our favorite restaurants. I put on a black leather skirt and black high heels. Obama had just won the election—I had wondered if Elliot would live to see that remarkable day—and everyone at Hamilton’s Grill was abuzz with the news. Elliot fell asleep at the table after two bites of steak. The waiters must have thought me a very boring date.

  After waffles the next morning, we stayed in bed until 2:00 p.m. What a luxury. We took a slow stroll through town, ending up back at the Phoenix bookstore, where I’d first thumbed through that 50 Essential Things to Do… book on cancer. This was the only time we went to Lambertville without seeing the river. It was just too far to walk.

  Three days later I was racing Elliot back to the hospital with another fever and another three days stuck on the sixteenth floor.

  “Back again?” the nurses asked. Their eyes were full of sympathy and a sense of where we were headed. We knew all their names by now. Hope we get Daniella, we’d say grimly on the way in.

  We had developed a routine at Sloan-Kettering – we’d stayed there for weeks if you totaled up the trips. I would call Elliot’s mother and kids to update them. After the doctors made their morning rounds and Elliot started to nap, I’d check my laptop for work emails, tell my wonderfully flexible boss that I needed more time off, and then arrange carpools for Devon and Alex. I tried to treat the hospital like an alternate reality cruise ship. I had learned where to sneak off for a yoga class at the integrative medicine center or even a massage. I’d import minestrone and pasta with pesto from the Italian restaurant down the block, and sometimes invite friends to join us. Kate was great about visiting after work.

  My favorite place in the hospital was the arts and recreation room. It was large and sunny with panoramic views of the vast city outside. It had a library, a piano, a pool table and closets full of games, puzzles and craft supplies. Elliot, his mother and I took a flower arranging class and made mosaics. I sewed a veritable zoo of stuffed animals made of felt. I came to know the weekly schedule for special projects by heart. Once when a doctor scheduled a procedure for 10:30 Tuesday morning, I couldn’t help thinking “Oh no, we’ll miss copper enameling.”

  Of course we had another chance on another trip. Elliot made me a seagull pendant in ocean greens. He was so drugged up, it was excruciating to watch him struggle to sprinkle the enamel powders onto the small piece of copper. He moved in slow motion and almost always missed the target. His whole body swayed
with the effort. I treasure that necklace.

  Elliot was discharged on Saturday, November 15. Not for long. At 4:30 Sunday morning, I woke up and felt his skin broil. No matter how much I pleaded, Elliot refused to get in the car.

  “I will not go to that hospital,” he insisted.

  “He won’t come with me,” I cried to the on-call doctor. “Can we wait until it’s light out?”

  The doctor said okay but warned me to keep a close eye on him. Tylenol brought down his fever by 7:00 a.m., so Elliot felt vindicated. The next on-call doctor gave him permission to stay home and see how the day went. I wasn’t so sure but felt outvoted.

  Kate and Anthony were supposed to come to dinner. I asked her to bring some clothes just in case I needed her to spend the night with the kids. I made one of our favorites, penne with sautéed shrimp, sun-dried tomatoes and arugula. Just before dinner I felt Elliot’s forehead. Hot again. 102.5.

  As soon as Kate walked in the front door I told her I had to take Elliot to the city, right away. I gave him Tylenol to prevent delirium, kissed the kids goodnight and started another NASCAR dash over the George Washington Bridge.

  In the car I fumed. I kicked myself I didn’t force Elliot to come in earlier because whatever was wrong probably got worse during the day, though I suspected by this point it didn’t matter anymore. Things seemed to be going inexorably downhill.

  Back in the emergency room, Elliot sat on a gurney in the corner, staring miserably into space, elbow on his knee, chin on his hand, that damn paper ID bracelet back on his wrist. The admitting process always took forever. We were hungry but the hospital cafeteria was closed. I marched off to get cranberry juice from a free dispenser, getting more and more worked up as I filled the Styrofoam cup at the machine I’d been to a hundred times. He should have listened to me when I wanted to come in twelve hours ago. I stomped back down the hallway and sank down on top of a chair piled with our coats that was right next to Elliot’s gurney.

  “Tell me you’re sorry and you love me,” I demanded. “If I’m going to be responsible for taking care of you, you have to trust my judgment. This isn’t fair to me.”

  “I’m sorry and I love you,” he said obediently. Fat tears rolled down his face. He tried to wipe his eyes without taking off his glasses. He was too weary to move them. He looked unforgettably forlorn, his face wet and his body crumpled. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him cry—except once before we were married when he thought we might break up.

  “Don’t you realize if I come in here again I’m not coming back out?”

  That hit my gut like an iron mallet. At one of his lowest moments I’d gotten mad and made him feel worse. I jumped over to sit next to him, put both my arms around him and kissed his lips and face and neck.

  “Oh Sweetie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” I said. I was crying too. “I love you so much.”

  As heart-wrenching as it was to see him so hopeless, in such utter anguish, it also felt real. We sat there, my arms around him, our own island on the edge of a bustling emergency room, and together we mourned what our life had become. We were grieving, abandoning the let’s-make-the-best-of-it stoicism, and if I could be glad for anything, it was for that feeling of truth between us. We could not have felt closer, and for that I was grateful. It would be too hard to peer over this abyss alone.

  The next day, Monday, we were sitting on Elliot’s bed. I was trying to finish something for work on my laptop. He looked at me, his deep brown eyes so wistful.

  “It means so much to me to be married to you,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about our wedding vows, in sickness and in health. I try to live by them. I wish we’d had a ceremony that was more solemn. We’ve had such great times, I want more of them. I want to make love to you, take you to Paris, the south of France, Greece. I just don’t know what is reasonable to hope for any more.”

  “I love you, Sweetie,” I said. “Do you want to take a walk?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll go. You do your work.”

  And he hobbled off with his IV pole to try to build up his strength. And I wrote down what he had just said. I wanted to keep his words safe.

  Elliot was dozing on Tuesday afternoon. I was sitting at his feet on his bed, knitting another scarf that would never be worn. Helen was reading in a chair by the door. Dr. Kelsen walked in. As usual, his thin face looked formal, sober and inscrutable behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “So what’s really happening here?” I asked on an impulse, grabbing a rare chance to talk to the doctor who knew Elliot best. We had heard only details about blood tests and antibiotics from the others. We hadn’t heard anything about the big picture. I usually didn’t ask for the grand view, because I was reluctant to elicit more information than Elliot wanted. At this point, though, I needed to know.

  “What should we expect?”

  “Let’s step outside,” Dr. Kelsen said.

  I turned to my mother-in-law. “Helen, do you want to hear this? Or maybe not?”

  She pushed herself out of the chair. We went into the hallway, a public space for the most private of conversations. I leaned against the wall and held Helen close to my side with my hand against her back, rubbing it slowly up and down, to catch her if she fainted.

  “He’s very ill,” the doctor said. “Very, very ill. He’s been very ill for three months.”

  I tried to think straight, tried to figure out what I really needed to ask.

  “So are you telling me I should call his kids to come?”

  “If you absolutely want to guarantee that they see him again, yes.”

  Perhaps his urgent tone shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But the other doctors seemed to be treating this—Elliot’s fourth hospital stay in a month—as just another infection. Nobody had let on that deep inside his body, things had gotten so much worse. Or maybe I just wasn’t hearing them.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked.

  “It could be any day, or any hour”

  I sucked in my breath.

  “Or it could be a week or two. We really don’t know.”

  “What do I tell them?”

  “They know he has cancer, don’t they?”

  “Of course. But he was doing so well for so long.”

  “You can tell them I think it’s a good idea for them to come see him.”

  Helen, who had been trying to absorb all this in stricken silence, spoke now.

  “This is such a crime,” she said, shaking her head in dismay at a world that would do this to her son. “He was just telling me he loves his life. He loves his wife. He loves his job.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said somberly. “It’s a very difficult disease.”

  “I don’t think Elliot understands what’s happening,” I said. “I think he’s in denial. Should we tell him?”

  “I would never strip a man of his defenses.”

  I couldn’t let myself feel what all this really meant. I couldn’t afford to collapse. I had to take care of everybody. I had to manage the kids. But if we had come to some kind of endpoint, it seemed to me that we should tell Dr. Kelsen that we didn’t blame him. Elliot’s trust in his doctor helped him stay strong, and Elliot would want to show his appreciation. I thought I should speak for him.

  “Thank you.” My voice cracked. “We know you did your best.”

  That didn’t seem sufficient. So I looked at this reserved and formidable doctor, a man so exacting that he routinely made med students quake, and threw my arms around him in a tight hug. He was taken aback but submitted. Despite his waste-no-time, intimidating demeanor, this man was deeply humane.

  So I made those dreaded urgent phone calls, and Kate came right up on the subway from Soho. Her face was wet, red and puffy. I had never seen her cry before, just that knuckle to the corner of her eye at our wedding. Elliot was dozing, and I got up from my spot at his side and asked if she wanted a turn there for a while. When she lay down on that rumpled bed alongside he
r father, I thought her grandmother’s heart would crack open.

  Max jumped on a bus from Ithaca. Aaron flew in from Chicago. Their mother, eager to help, brought them to the hospital. They arrived at 1:30 in the morning.

  Elliot was awake and heard their voices outside in the hall. He turned to me. “I thought you’d pull off a stunt like this,” he said with a big smile.

  He thought it was some kind of surprise party to cheer him up. He didn’t seem to realize it was all about guaranteeing a chance to say goodbye.

  I heard him tell friends about it later, how Max and Aaron snuck into the hospital in the middle of the night, like it was some kind of whimsical caper. He described it with a certain glee.

  The next morning, Devon and Alex skipped school to visit. Their dad kindly brought them in. When I met my kids in the lobby and they saw my face, their eyes grew wide. I told them Elliot might come home, but he might not, and if there was anything they wanted to tell him, this would be a good time. We all cried, and we hugged, and then we got ourselves together to march to the elevator and head upstairs.

  After a lunch of take-out sandwiches and the welcome diversion of a pet therapy visit from a giant bull mastiff named Lily, all the kids sat with Elliot and his mother and me at a big round table making things in the sunny art room. Alex made him a mosaic that said “Let’s Go Mets.” Devon wove him a bracelet out of embroidery thread. Kate sewed him a stuffed dragon. Max and Aaron made jokes. I marveled that we could actually be having a good time together when Elliot was so terribly sick. Even then, his ability to find pleasure in things, especially in our family, was a life-giving force.

  HOME

  To my surprise—actually, alarm—a day after all the kids came to visit Sloan-Kettering, Elliot was discharged. His chart said his condition was “poor.” So why send him away? The only treatment they could give him was a mix of high-octane antibiotics, and that could be done at home. By me.