Make It Nice

by Dorinda Medley

  I left the basic structure of the house as it was, and on top of that, I added my own creative strokes. Living abroad for ten years had made my personal tastes more interesting and daring. I took inspiration from my visits to country houses in England and from my time traveling through Europe. While living abroad, I was exposed to new sensibilities, which included taking risks with color and with decorating. And so, Blue Stone Manor is designed with all this in mind. It’s a house filled with curiosities. Some people like it. Some people don’t. But either way, it’s always a fun conversation piece.

  I told Marshall and Phil that I wanted the vibe to be Frankenstein–meets–Marilyn Monroe. I covered the closets in silver foil wallpaper; I painted a hallway black; I even had the famous Douglas Little design this amazing chandelier made of animal skulls and diamonds and pearls to hang in the black hallway. My house is full of surprises, and it’s also completely utilitarian. The kitchen is designed after the old working kitchens of England. It’s not glamorous. It’s made for actual cooking. Every room at Blue Stone Manor gets used, and every room is distinct and original.

  Blue Stone Manor is not a house that is precious. It’s a house that’s designed to be lived in, and there are separate spaces for reading, playing games, cooking, eating, and lounging. Often, when guests come for the weekend, they have lots of outside plans, but what happens is they pull up the driveway on Friday and don’t leave the house until Sunday afternoon.

  Renovations took three years, and once they were done we finally moved back into Blue Stone Manor. I cooked big dinners. Richard wrote in his office. We had cocktails out on the patio overlooking the great lawn. We spent the first couple of years in that house just allowing ourselves to be awestruck by the environment we had created. Because I had designed it, the house naturally reflected me. But Richard’s presence was embedded into Blue Stone Manor, too. He was like the heartbeat of the house. Every time I think of parting with Blue Stone Manor—keeping it up is a job in and of itself and who needs all this space?—I stop myself because it is the place where I feel Richard’s presence most viscerally. Sometimes when I sit outside and watch the sunset, I get a bizarre impulse to open my palm up on the arm of my chair, as if the gesture would be met by the person who was meant to hold my hand.

  Though our days together were full, the years passed quickly. Sooner than I could have thought to expect it, Richard changed. His presence lost its gentle majesty, like a fading flame holding on to the last weave of a wick. He dulled, no longer answering my questions with the same keen sense of self or telling stories with his clever sharpness. His skin took on a yellow tinge. More frightening than anything else, though, was that he refused to go to the doctor, no matter how much I begged. It was as though he knew it was bad and wanted to hold on to the last pieces of our life together before they could be cast in the shadow of an ending. Our sun had begun to set, and my life became about watching the sky fade to black.

  When Richard started losing a lot of weight, I got so nervous that I developed a shake in my hand. I had a total meltdown, and Richard promised he would go to the hospital if I took him from New York to the Berkshires one last time. He was so weak that I had to call Richard’s barber, Steve Violet, who, at six feet seven and weighing 250 pounds, looks more like a bodyguard for the Hells Angels than a barber, to come over and carry Richard out of bed and onto the patio overlooking the property. We sat there quietly holding hands, at random moments looking at each other and shedding a tear or two. We didn’t say it, and up until the last possible moment I pretended like it was going to be okay, but we knew. This was the last seed of life Richard had to plant at my feet before our beautiful garden lost its green.

  We went to the hospital and they admitted him immediately. And then it became a domino effect of health issues. One thing went wrong; then another thing went wrong. If it wasn’t his kidneys, it was his blood pressure. If it wasn’t his blood pressure, it was his liver. All his vital organs were shutting down so fast that soon the details about what was wrong stopped mattering. The disintegration of a human is humiliating. No matter what accomplishments you have had, at the end of the day you are just a body. No one cares what your last name is or what parties you went to or who you know. It is isolating, heartbreaking, and horrifyingly impersonal.

  The sicker he got, the more Richard tried to distance himself from me, and even though I knew it wasn’t personal, it was still painful at times. I started to realize that he was no longer Richard and, more important, that with each day I was less and less his wife. I still needed to keep it together, though. Every time I felt like falling apart, I told myself, Be strong; you can do this. Hannah needs you. I kept up appearances for the kids, because I didn’t want them to know how far Richard had declined.

  Our existence became a chaotic concerto of life and death. Out of nowhere blood would start oozing out of Richard’s ears and eyes and mouth and they would have to take him to surgery. They would put a respirator down his throat, which he hated more than anything. Every time we thought it might be over, he would pull through again. Then he would bleed again. And pull through again. This went on for months. Hannah, who was eighteen, would go through periods where she would spend every waking moment with him in the ICU, literally writing her college applications by his side or asking her SAT tutor to do their sessions in the hospital cafeteria. Then she would disappear for a week and talk to me on the phone about regular life things as if nothing tragic were happening. I had no manual for how to handle Richard’s death. All I could do was my best. We were all just trying to survive.

  One night when I was taking a bath, a feeling of immense dread came over me. I got in bed, turned all the lights on, and pretended to watch television. When Hannah came to my bedroom, as she did every night, and asked me what was wrong, I told her that I was feeling strange. “I’m not sure why,” I said, “but I think we need to go to the hospital.”

  We got dressed, hailed a cab, and went to the hospital. When we arrived, Richard was awake and alert—much more than usual. For months it had been like he was in a conscious coma. Even hearing him talk about some delusion was enough to make us hopeful. But that night, he wasn’t delusional. He was himself. We laughed and talked about what we were going to do when we got out of the hospital. After a couple hours, Hannah and I left. I can remember her saying to me, “You just knew it, Mom. Aren’t you glad we went?”

  The next morning, Richard had his last bleed. I called the family in. Hannah was there, and Paige, Aidan, Bob (Richard’s brother), my friend Anne, and Ralph. The doctors took me into a small room with yellow walls and a picture of a waterfall. They told me, “This is as bad as it gets.”

  I was then told that I had two options. Either I could choose to operate on Richard again to try to stop the internal bleeding, with no real hope of long-term success, or I could choose to put him into a morphine-induced coma.

  What?

  Because I had power of attorney, I was left to make these decisions. There were no good choices left anymore, because either way it was probably going to be the end. The doctors informed me that any measure would prolong his life by no more than a couple of days and likely be traumatic. I didn’t want that for Richard. I didn’t want him to die on a surgery table or in another massive bleed, so as his conservator I made the incredibly difficult decision to reject further invasive surgery.

  For the next couple of hours, Richard’s breathing faded to a raspy gurgle. This is a sound that’s commonly known as the “death rattle.” It’s what happens when a person can no longer swallow and the saliva pools at the back of their throat. As we sat there with Richard, this sound got quieter and quieter, and the world became more and more still.

  And then, out of nowhere, I heard this voice whoosh up my body like a wind: I’m out of here.

  I turned to everyone and said, “He’s gone.”

  The fight was over. What had been the longest three months of my life ended like the flash of a camera. It was shockingly unev
entful. One second Richard was there, and the next second he wasn’t. I walked out of the room in a bizarre state. Was it grief? Or was it something else? It was as if someone had handed me a massive boulder to hold and then walked away and there I was asking, What do I do with this? Where do I even put it?

  You don’t feel what you think you’re going to feel in those first hours. As horrible as this may sound and as guilty as it may make me feel, on some level I think I was relieved. I’d dropped to 106 pounds; my hair was falling out; I hadn’t slept for months. Hannah had spent the past few months pretending on and off like everything was fine, which somehow felt heavier than the weight I had lost. There was no hope left. But there was also nothing left to fear. All that was left was, well, nothing.

  That night, Hannah and I ordered a pizza and fell into a deep sleep in my bed. At some point, I was jostled out of my sleep by the sound of her crying. Her back was turned to me, so I inched over and wrapped my arm around her waist, allowing the sudden pulse of her breath to expand and contract against my chest. We had loved and lived so much, and now we had lost so much. Somewhere in between guilt and grief, it all hit me at once, and I started to cry, too.

  In life, you have to accept that all things happen for a reason, both good and sometimes bad.

  Chapter Seven NOW WHAT?—AGAIN

  Richard hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was sick, so I had to keep it a secret, which was horrible. Every once in a while I would go to some event to keep up appearances. Coming up with reasons for why Richard wasn’t there with me was such a painful performance that it sometimes made me sick. The secret of his dying was like a small creature that I had swallowed live.

  And then, the morning after his death, I opened up the Wall Street Journal and the Times and many other publications both in print and online, and there it was: “Richard Medley, dead at age 60.”

  I was now a forty-six-year-old widow.

  Everyone called, wanting to know what had happened. The condolences poured in. “Oh my God, Dorinda, I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

  I knew that everyone was coming from a good place and that they were processing the shock of his death, too. But to be honest I wanted to punch them in the face. What do you mean: “What happened?” He died. He’s dead.

  I was angry. Richard’s illness had been like a bull let loose in the china shop of our life. His inability to reconcile himself with the imminence of his death made it impossible for me to prepare for it. There was no opportunity to prolong his life because the hope of something more was less palatable than the fantasy of what was. I knew how frightened he was of death and my impulse was to console him rather than spark up a discussion about wills and funerals. So there I was at the end, reckoning with all the details on my own.

  For all the decisions you are forced to make, none of them give you any sense of control. In fact, the chaos is in the questions: Do I donate his eyes? Do I donate his kidneys? What casket should I get? Do I let people look at his body? Who’s going to carry the casket down the aisle? Where will the reception be afterwards? What’s everyone going to eat? What am I going to do without him? What now?

  I decided against a wake because I didn’t want people to see how much he’d deteriorated. The decision was a vestige of my protective impulse and my desire to keep him alive by honoring what I assumed would have been his wish. I decided to bury the evidence of who he had become because it was a freckle on the face of who he was.

  We had the funeral at the same place we’d been married: the Brick Church. As I was walking down the aisle behind the pallbearers, all I could think was, The last time I did this I was in a wedding dress. That’s really the worst part of the funeral, when you have to walk behind your husband’s casket and watch everyone watching you. You want people to be there, but at the same time you don’t, because the only thing worse than bearing the burden of your own grief is bearing the burden of everyone else’s. I smiled and tried to look as many people in the eye as I could, but the truth is that I wasn’t really there. I was with Richard; I was at our wedding.

  Hannah gave the most beautiful speech at the funeral service, and I want to share a part of it with you:

  Losing Richard broke me. An awful irreparable crack split me in two. At eighteen I realized that I had experienced the best and the worst moment of my life. I was given a world when I stood next to my mom and Richard at the altar of the Brick Church, and that same world was ripped away from me when we stood at the same altar feet away from his coffin. People say time heals all wounds, but it doesn’t. I’ll always feel like something is missing. Everything good I achieve is colored by his absence. That sounds very sad and feels very sad to say, but isn’t it also kind of beautiful? That you can love someone so much they change you forever? That I can stand here today and say that I am who I am because of who he was. Death is painful, death is difficult, but death gives you boundaries to life. It gives love a shape and a form. It gives meaning to our experiences. I always say if a song didn’t have an ending, it would just be noise. And ending gives a moment a meaning. So today, in the words of Dr. Seuss, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

  We buried Richard at St. Peter’s Cemetery, in the plot that my parents had bought for themselves. I didn’t tell many people about the burial. In the end, it was just my mom and dad; my sister; the kids; our housekeeper, Len; our dogs, Lucy and Evie; a priest; and a couple of local people. Quite frankly, Richard would have approved. We had the big funeral in New York with tons of people, and then the quiet burial in Great Barrington. He would have thought it was perfect.

  There was evidence of Richard scattered all over the house. His colorful cashmere socks, his many pairs of Stubbs & Wootton loafers—they all had fun sayings on them—his coffee mugs, and, most devastatingly, his signature collection of wacky reading glasses, all of them colorful, some of them covered in bling. Richard never wanted to be more than an arm’s length away from his reading glasses, so they were everywhere. (To this day, I will open a drawer and find a pair.) Going back to the house was like seeing a portrait of a now-past life. I canceled the credit cards and then I put them in a box, along with his passports and his driver’s license and the other things I couldn’t bear to throw away yet. I took all his clothes out of the closet right away and put them up in the attic. I worried that if I left his things out, it would make me too sad.

  It was bizarre to become a widow, and the term didn’t feel right to me. When I thought of widows, I imagined very old ladies dressed in black. I was only forty-six years old. After all the ceremony and after all the shock of his death wore off, I realized that a big part of my identity had been completely wrapped up in my role as Richard’s wife. Who was I without that? I felt lost. So I did the only thing I knew to do. I just kept moving forward. I gave this movement a name, too: Operation Normalize.

  Just two weeks after the funeral, I had my entire family up to the Berkshires for Thanksgiving. It would have been a shame to skip it. In fact, Richard would have been highly disappointed. He loved a good gathering, and he knew how happy it made me to be surrounded by friends and family.

  During this time, I drank, and too heavily, to self-medicate. I was in so much pain. But still, I was taking care of business. I had to. Operation Normalize also meant that I would execute the wishes in Richard’s will and shut down his business as quickly as possible. I went into overdrive, needing to put this chapter of my life behind me. I felt judged for not crying all the time, which is what we expect widows to do. People want you to be sad and mournful. They take pity on you. My basic reaction to pity at the time was, “Aw, thank you, I’m fine!” Approaching the topic of death is awkward, and maybe in a way I wanted to make people feel better about how awkward it was.

  Richard had made me the executor of the estate. I understood why he’d done that, but it was also daunting and scary and something I was not fully prepared for. It was a big responsibility, and I had to be extremely dedicated to handling it carefu
lly, because it also included his children.

  Executing Richard’s wishes meant that for months I was surrounded by lawyers and estate people. They were mostly men, and it was business as usual for them. There was little room for gentleness around Richard’s death and my grief. A lot of these men treated me like I was helpless, which made things more difficult. I wasn’t helpless. I was willing to do whatever I needed to do to get things done.

  Even if I wasn’t prepared emotionally, I was overly prepared from an accounting angle. I had every check we’d ever written, in shoe boxes, filed by month. Since it was business as usual for the lawyers and the estate people, I treated it like a business, too. I interacted with no emotions, because that’s what I needed to do to get through it. It wasn’t that I didn’t have emotions. I did. I was straightforward and professional and slightly cold during every meeting I went to concerning Richard’s estate—and then sometimes I’d get into my Uber and just burst into tears, not so much out of fear but more because of extreme grief and exhaustion. During this time, I was taking care of the tasks I could take care of, but inside, I felt consumed by grief. My world had been turned upside down. I was grasping for anything that felt familiar.

  When Richard was admitted to the hospital, I moved out of the town house and back into my apartment on the Upper East Side. I think on some level, I knew he would never be coming back. In one way, it was reassuring. In another way, I felt like I was moving backwards. I was alone again, and while the old walls of that apartment were a comfort to me, my life had changed so drastically that everything felt unrecognizable, including myself. Who was I now? And what was I going to do next?