by Leslie Brody
“I have total confidence in you,” he said. I was glad to hear his voice, but didn’t stay on the phone for long. I was afraid to be out of Elliot’s room.
His breathing had become so quiet, so slow, it was hard to tell what was happening. He wasn’t on any kind of monitor. That was a blessing. I’ve heard of families so transfixed by the beeping dot on the screen they lose track of the person they love. We all watched Elliot. You could see a subtle little bump of pulse beating slowly on his neck. That seemed the only clue. I kept staring at that one spot. And then it was still.
Aaron looked at me.
“Is that it?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so.”
And we cried, and we looked at Elliot’s face, trying to savor this last chance. Aaron put his hands near his father’s eyes and gave me a questioning look.
“Should I?” he asked.
Yes, I guess so, I nodded. So Aaron passed his fingers down gently over his father’s eyelids. But they wouldn’t stay shut. Elliot had fought so hard, and it seemed like he still refused to leave us.
I didn’t know how I would leave him either. He hated to be alone. But already tiny red blotches were blooming on his jaundiced skin, and his cheeks were falling slacker into his bones, and I was afraid if we stayed too long we might see his body change in ways we would regret.
So I gave my husband those final, final, final last kisses, all over his forehead and cheeks and even his dry papery lips.
“I love you, Sweetie,” I whispered into his ear. “You saved my life.”
THE PERFECT THING
I sat in a stupor in the taxi going home. Elliot’s mother and Aaron came with me. We didn’t talk. I felt nauseous.
Devon and Alex got home from school. They could read what happened in my face. I took them into the TV room to sit on the couch with me.
“Elliot’s gone,” I said.
“I’m so sorry, Mommy,” Devon said through her tears.
We sat there, our arms around each other, crying. Then Aaron walked in.
“We’re still a family,” he said. “We love you guys.”
What a perfect thing to say.
We hugged.
Then we dispersed to recover. Aaron, Kate and Max went to their mom’s house. Elliot’s mother wanted to be in her apartment alone.
That night my children took care of me.
Alex built a fire. Devon drew me a hot bath. They unplugged the phone. They put on music. They ordered sesame chicken. They poured me a glass of wine.
Somehow they knew exactly what to do.
THE FIRST DAYS
“Cremation,” I told the man at the funeral home. It’s not what Elliot wanted but this was the one gift I allowed myself. I simply could not bear to picture him underground, cold, alone in the dark. This was cleaner, natural, ashes to ashes.
“What would you like us to do with his wedding ring?” the man asked.
“Will the gold melt?” I asked. “If it doesn’t melt and I sprinkle him in the wind, is there a chance the ring will fall into the mud?”
“It’s possible.”
“So how am I supposed to choose?” I wailed. I wanted his ring, our ring, to stay with him, to keep him company, but I didn’t want its molten remains to land in the dirt at my feet.
Okay, I said. I’ll keep it. Someone somewhere would have to ease it off his finger. I hated to think of such an intimate act being done by a stranger who didn’t even care. I didn’t even know where Elliot was at that very moment. I could not believe I would not be the last person to touch him. At least he was still wearing the embroidery thread bracelet that Devon made for him. He never took it off. That bracelet could be with him, could burn with him, for all of us.
I went through that first day in a blur, empty and numb and wondering what to do next. I emailed Elliot’s boss and mine but asked that people not call. I didn’t want to talk. I decided on a small family service on the weekend. That was all I could face. Elliot’s mother, sister and children left the planning up to me. That made it easier, there was nothing to negotiate. I asked my mother to put together a lunch at my house afterwards. She would be good at that.
Devon wanted to go to school that day, Alex didn’t. I let him stay home and watch TV. I started to throw out that medical crap that made it almost impossible to walk through my room. I lugged the forty-pound oxygen machine down the stairs—but lost my balance, hurt my shoulder and gouged a black scrape into the wall. Dragged it outside the front door. Shoved the shower chair out there. And the walker. And that godawful commode he used only once, such an indignity. Called the agency to pick up all that stuff, now. I wanted it gone. Tore through his drawers grabbing pills, vials, syringes. Hurled them into in a white garbage bag. The morphine “emergency kit” I never used, the Haldol, the OxyContin, the amphetamines, all that shit. Started moving faster and faster, like a wild woman, raging through the medicine cabinet, his nightstand, his knapsack, filling up the bag, bigger and bigger, until it was fatter than Santa’s sack. I couldn’t throw it in the trash because somebody might grab it and get high. I couldn’t flush it down the drain because it would poison the water. I could sell it on the street to pay for a college education. But I called a friend married to a doctor to haul it all away.
Maybe Alex should have gone to school so he couldn’t see me in such a frenzy.
At night I couldn’t sleep. I obsessively tried to figure out if Elliot was suffering at the end. He seemed so distraught, confused, restless. His whimpering echoed in my ear. I cursed that godawful hospice, wished I’d found a better one. I tried to forgive myself. For the first time in my life I took Tylenol PM to knock myself out.
“Oh, Leslie, don’t be haunted by this,” the oncologist’s nurse wrote back when I emailed her what happened. “You gave him the best care, love and attention that you could. And it is enough. He knew.”
I tried to believe that doing my best was good enough.
I was alone when the man from the funeral home knocked at the door. He was carrying a translucent white shopping bag. It held a brass box. I carried it up the stairs in one hand. It—he—was heavy. But so much easier than the last time we went up the stairs, when I lifted each impossibly leaden foot onto one step after another, and then had to call 9-1-1.
I didn’t know where to put him. The closet seemed disrespectful. The bookshelf was too public. I settled on his bottom dresser drawer with his favorite sweatshirts, the ones from Ithaca and NYU and Michigan, the ones his children gave him when they went off to college. He loved them so much. It seemed weirdly informal, but that’s where I thought he would be most at home.
I kissed my fingers and touched them to the dresser drawer, even though it felt silly.
I sat down to write a speech for his service and found that it gave me some peace. It felt good to spend time with him that way. It felt good to cry as I typed.
One morning, my friend Mary Jo came to our door with three bags of groceries from Whole Foods. Soups, salads, bread, fruit. She whirled around my kitchen, putting things away, finding a vase for flowers, setting them on the dining room table. She smiled, hugged me and left. Somehow some people know how to help.
I went to see Lissa, the counselor.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m here and I’m showered,” I said. “That’s enough.”
There was a snowstorm right before the Saturday morning service, but our friends and family made it. Just two dozen people, like our wedding, but some of the friends had changed.
I cried through my speech. Our friends told beautiful stories. They cried for him, and they cried for us. I never expected to be an object of pity.
I stayed on my side of the bed. Took more Tylenol PM.
It was Christmastime. The kids and I trimmed a tree, decorated sugar cookies with red sprinkles and M&Ms even though our hearts were nowhere in it. When we opened presents, I pictured Elliot watching from the far side of a glass windo
w, pounding madly on the glass to break through. He looked desperate to join us.
Devon and Alex left for a holiday trip planned long ago with their dad. I had an empty house, with three days free, for the first time in forever. Friends invited me over, but I wanted to be alone. I spent the silent hours sorting through emails, arranging photos and making a binder of condolence notes, obituaries and mementos for Elliot’s mother. She turned that white book into an obsession, memorizing every word and weeping over it every day.
I had time to do what I had longed to do for years. I read over all of Elliot’s love letters—a decade full of them—and put them in order. I luxuriated in them like a hot bath. They had his voice.
There was one card that he bought from a store, maybe because it spoke of a future he couldn’t bear to frame the words for himself.
“Everything will be okay in the end,” it read. “If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
“That sounds about right to me,” he’d written inside. “Love, E.”
AND THEN
I knew I was loved. That gave me a backbone. I had children. They gave me a purpose.
And so I managed. I took a month off of work, took long walks and dealt with the endless paperwork of tying up a life—will, bank accounts, insurance. I buried myself in the distractions of minutia in hopes that by the time I surfaced, my raw wounds would have scabbed over, at least a little. I assigned myself strange, unnecessary chores born of fear, like hiring a man to put locks on our windows.
I checked the mailbox constantly for condolence cards. There were usually quite a few, full of kind words and other people’s recollections, tidbits I’d never heard. When I wrote such cards in the past I’d always thought them trifling, wholly inadequate to the task. Now that I was on the receiving end, I was hooked. They were warm touches of concern. One Record reader sent me wise advice and even made me laugh: “Take things one day at a time, focus on your kids and stay away from country music.”
Elliot’s last night haunted me. I ordered his medical records from the hospice and showed them to a psychiatrist friend to see if they treated him right.
“He had such a bad cancer,” I cried. “He deserved a good death.”
“Why don’t you think he had a good death?” the man asked gently. “He had perhaps some hours when he might have been medicated a little more optimally, but he was probably not aware. A merciful confusion sets in.”
A bad death, he said, was dying alone in a hospital after languishing for months with nobody left who cares enough to visit.
“Elliot embraced his life fully,” he went on. “I saw you two playing tennis not long ago. And he was with his family in the end.”
That made me feel better. I had to cling to the hope that bit by bit, the passage of time would give me more perspective.
I began to say yes to every invitation. I even went to Elliot’s book club. The men were meeting at our favorite cheap Thai restaurant. They had read Philip Roth’s Indignation. It had been Elliot’s suggestion. He would have loved it. It traced a young man, who, like him, was a straight-A student fleeing fiercely protective parents by going to a Midwestern college, desperate to find love and sex and romance. I felt proud, and glad, and grateful that we found that in each other.
“You do what you have to do to,” Roth wrote.
And I did what I had to do. It was that simple.
Sometimes sorrow came down like an anvil. One morning my son came to the breakfast table wearing one of Elliot’s ties. My heart stopped. I had asked Alex, Aaron and Max if they wanted to pick out a few. I didn’t expect to see Alex wearing them to school. It was nice, though, to have those ties back in our lives, hanging on a doorknob at the end of the day.
Out of habit I still tore recipes out of The Times that I wanted to make for him.
It was hard to go to the A & P. I cringed when I passed by all those things I bought in bulk when Elliot could eat nothing else—Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, Nestle strawberry milk, Cranberry Almond Crunch cereal.
One day the paper had a photo of the demolition of Shea Stadium. Elliot was gone, and so was the stadium where he had felt so much excitement, disappointment and wild optimism as a boy and as a father. All that was over.
Yet there were unexpected pleasures. Once, I Googled Elliot’s name. An old Record colleague I’d never met, Robin, had written about him for a blog called The Perfect Moment Project.
“The memory of one afternoon came back sharp and clear,” she wrote. “I was at my desk, Elliot at his, juggling phone calls and people stopping by. The phone rang again and it was Max, Elliot’s young son. Elliot was a little impatient at first but then I could just feel his body relax as he sat back. Elliot had decided to shut out everything else right then and give Max his full attention. I could tell from hearing one side of the conversation that Max had lost his Velociraptor and was pretty upset. Elliot, who took this loss as seriously as Max, talked his son through looking in his room, checking the kitchen and then pulling up the couch cushions where he found the toy. Emergency over. Max was back to playing, Elliot back to work…As sad as I am that Elliot has died, I am also comforted by the memory of that afternoon, happy that I witnessed that pure moment when he decided to cut out the clutter and help his boy, took the time to be a good dad.”
That story was so Elliot. It was heartening to find that there was still more to learn about his life, and that he meant so much to so many.
A month after his death we held a big memorial service at the Montclair Art Museum. Almost two hundred people showed up, despite the snow, a truly lovely snow, gentle and soft. Aaron described their trip to Italy, Max talked about Elliot’s encouragement for his writing. Kate was too shy to speak in front of the crowd but asked Max to read what she wrote about their childhood ritual of packing the Roadmaster for trips out West and detours to find blueberry pie.
Devon recalled how Elliot used to kiss her goodbye on the top of her head. “He gave me the stepbrothers and stepsister and steppeople—though I don’t know technically what to call them now—that I will need to get through his loss.”
You could barely see Alex’s face over the podium. He stood on tiptoes. “Elliot gave me my first baseball glove,” Alex said. “He took me to my first baseball game. He taught me the value of humor and happiness.”
I wished that Elliot could hear them say these things. I wished we could all just be together now, with him, and move on as family from here, feeling so close.
I wished I could find him waiting for me in our bed.
WHY A WIDOW NEEDS A PUPPY
When President Obama told his daughters on election night that “You have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House,” my first thought was of my kids. They were the ones who deserved a dog. They had begged for years, but I kept saying no, I’m sorry, I can’t take on responsibility for another living creature while Elliot is sick.
I couldn’t say no anymore.
I thought I got our puppy for Devon and Alex. It turned that out Sadie, a blond Cockapoo born the day after Obama’s inauguration, was the best medicine in the world for me.
1. She gets me up and out every morning for a walk.
2. Her enthusiasm is infectious. “Look! A blade of GRASS!” she seems to say as she bounces around in pure wonder. “Look! A LEAF!”
3. Never in my life have I talked so much to my neighbors. She forces me to connect with new people when my inclination might be to withdraw.
4. She licks our faces, crawls into our laps, and gives us the simple pleasure of her warmth.
5. The house never feels empty.
6. She lives in the moment. When Sadie pricks up her ears to hear a bird sing or rests her chin on my foot while I read the paper, I can’t help surrendering to the here and now.
7. She lures my children to play together. She gives me the chance to watch their joy. She lets a boy express affection without worrying about being judged.
8. Kate, Max and Aaron get
a kick out of her. She is family glue.
9. She doesn’t hold a grudge.
10. She drags me outside in every kind of weather, in every season, reminding me that nature is change, spring will come, and there is always a promise of renewal.
“Elliot would have loved Sadie,” Alex said as we walked her in the woods one day.
“Yes, he would have,” I replied. “And he would love that we have her now.”
Sadie as a puppy, spring 2009.
JIMINY CRICKET
Summer 2009
One day when the puppy was about six months old she leapt onto on my bed. That was quite a feat—it’s a high mattress—and I had to make a snap judgment about whether to let her stay. I could hear the vet’s stern voice in my ear.
“Don’t let a puppy do anything you don’t want her to do later,” she warned.
I was probably supposed to nip this in the bud. I could picture Elliot’s eyes rolling with dismay, especially when Sadie’s wiggly butt settled on his pillow.
But I had come to like her grassy Milk Bone smell and the carefree way she flopped down wherever she felt like it. Who knew if there would ever be a man in my life who might object and so what if he did? I was tired of subjugating my desires to a husband’s or a child’s. This new stage of life seemed to be a rare time when I had leeway to indulge myself. If I had to put up with the hardships of being a widow at forty-eight, I should at least get to savor its small freedoms too. And so some nights I crawled into bed so exhausted I didn’t bother to take off my work clothes. I made a whole meal out of corn on the cob. I relished eating dinner early with the kids instead of waiting, stomach gurgling, for Elliot’s 7:40 train.
I tried to extend this sense of liberation to the bigger issues too. There were moments when I felt a kind of wonder that for the first time in a very long while I felt no pressure to meet a man or make one happy. Since high school it seemed I was always trying to find a boyfriend or keep him interested. I tried to please my first husband and succeeded in pleasing my second. So, by my count, for more than thirty years I worried, to one degree or another, about what a man wanted. Now, for better or worse, I could focus on pleasing only me.
