by Gail Sheehy
Gail and Clay’s little “castle”—the old farmhouse in East Hampton. (Counterclockwise:) Clay, Catherine O’Neill, Mohm, Maura, David Aaron, Richard Reeves, Chloe Aaron.
The birth of a new century could not hold a candle to the birth of a first grandchild, which took place seven months into the new millennium. Maura chose to deliver naturally in a homey room at Roosevelt Hospital’s birthing center. Her serenity through the whole process was remarkable. Moments later, it seemed, Maura was holding her son, blue-eyed like his mother, to her breast and talking about being hungry. It was the most natural of passages. I found myself out on Amsterdam Avenue at one in the morning with Clay, scavenging for cold cuts. Delirious with my assignment, I brought back bagels and lox and chocolate chip cookies for everyone. More than anything in the world, I wanted to be a good grandmother. This was my year to give back, to Maura as a new mother, to my grandbaby as he reached out like a tendril seeking attachment.
The year’s rental on the apartment Clay and I shared with Dr. Pat and her husband was up. I had found a charming loft near Lincoln Center. It was a miniature version of Clay’s old bachelor pad, with a high ceiling and tall windows and a near replica of his great fireplace. The loft was badly in need of renovation. And as everybody knows, the contractor always takes twice as long as he contracts to take. You wait, and pay, and wait. Clay went back to Berkeley in the fall. I stayed in New York to do battle with the contractor. But the truth was, I welcomed the excuse so I could stay close to Brooklyn and see my new boyfriend.
Declan would greet me at the door in his mother’s arms with a full pumpkin-head grin. “Hi, darling,” I’d coo. He’d duck his head shyly behind his mother. Then we’d be off on our giggly scales—I trilled, he trilled, I gurgled, he gurgled, delighted by the mirroring. I bathed him, singing “Rain in Spain” while dribbling water from his washcloth and watching him try to catch it. I couldn’t get enough until Maura had to discipline her mother to mellow out and move on to a lullaby, time for bed.
Grandma Gail (called “Nonnie”) with Declan at eighteen months, 2001.
When Declan was six months old, I was entrusted with babysitting privilege while his parents went to a movie. I gave him a soft terry rabbit. He laid it over his eyes and dropped right off. Maura gave me clear instructions before leaving her apartment: “If he wakes and cries, lean down and croon to him, just for a moment, then kiss him and let him pacify himself again. Sure enough, when the baby stirred, I sang to him. He rubbed his hand over the silky square that was always nearby and dropped back into a deep sleep.
I curled up on the sofa to daydream. The phone rang.
“Mo?”
“No, she’s out at the movies.”
“Who’s this?” Rather alarmed.
“Gail.”
“Gail Sheehy—I know Gail Sheehy. Gail Sheehy is someone I know.”
“Albert?”
“You’ll laugh, but I just called to see what Declan did today.”
“That’s exactly why I’m here—to see for myself.”
We giggled together. The encounter of two foolish first-time grandparents, both of us were hungry to catch the day’s droppings from this delicious creature whose every new sound and movement seemed utterly miraculous.
I described for him watching Maura take Declan to a body movement class.
“What’s that?”
“Something like baby aerobics. He reaches for balloons and learns to roll over.”
“And gets to play with his mother for an hour. Isn’t Maura a spectacular mother?”
“Isn’t she?” I said. “Nurturing comes so naturally to her. She seems to know exactly what to do and how to do it.”
He mocked himself for being a stupid gooey grandparent.
“It’s one of the few things that’s great about getting old,” I said.
“How about only?” Albert was sixty-nine. “The only other good thing is getting a senior discount on dog biscuits.” We laughed again.
“Maura has turned out to be an extraordinary young woman,” Albert said with great depth of feeling.
“A most extraordinary young woman,” I quelled.
“Being a mother becomes her absolutely.”
“So does being a psychotherapist,” I said. “And she’ll be able to balance it all because she’s married to a supportive husband.”
“Right!” He said we should shake hands, phonetically, on how well Maura had turned out.
“Yes, let’s shake.”
Suddenly, Albert said, “I’m so pleased we had this talk.”
“I cherish it.”
CHAPTER 39
Losing Clay
“YOUR HUSBAND HAS ENTERED the cycle of slow dying.”
An intensivist they called him. He was a pulmonologist with critical care training who saw patients when they were wheeled straight up to the intensive care unit. The intensivist had taken Clay into the bronchoscopy unit at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York three or four times and tried to dredge the sludge out of his lungs. It was 2006 and a fourth and final cancer was arrested. Recurring lung infections were the only problem. Seemed simple enough. But surgery had removed the part of the tongue that pushes secretions into the right pipe. And after chemotherapy, Clay did not have the strength to cough up the secretions that kept reinfecting him.
“How long does slow dying take?”
“He could live another year like this,” the intensivist said. “Maybe two.”
This sounded to me worse than a death sentence. Would this be like the polar bears who are slowly dying from global warming? As their icy habitat melts away earlier every spring and their swim from shore through rougher seas becomes longer and more treacherous, they lose so much weight and strength, they drown. Where does one go to do the work of slow dying? I asked the intensivist.
“The next time he gets a lung infection, don’t send him back to the hospital.”
Give up? Quit? Surrender? I was the bird who flies into the glass window. I hadn’t seen this coming. Clay was not actively dying, but he was beyond curing. This is what they call serious chronic illness. Our health-care system has no affordable solution for serious chronic illness. We were medical refugees.
Clay made the decision: “No more hospitals!”
I covered Clay with my coat and exchanged a decisive look with our Senegalese aide, aptly named Safoura Tall—six foot one and fearless. Safoura and I wheeled Clay into the elevator and past the protesting security guard and out the hospital’s front door with the IV needles still stuck in his wrists. Just taking back that little bit of power felt like a triumph. We danced him into a taxi. Clay was smiling.
BY THE SUMMER OF 2007, Clay was recuperating from another pneumonia and had to be moved to a nursing home for rehabilitation. I was relieved when he was accepted at the Jewish Home Life Care facility on the edge of Harlem. It was a safe place for him to gain strength while I sorted out our future. I was having trouble making the mortgage payments on my house in the Hamptons. The IRS was breathing down my neck for back taxes. For too long I had been paying for private aides for Clay and copays for his many hospital admissions, while trying to maintain a semblance of our old lifestyle. With each of his medical emergencies, I had to cancel a speech or forgo a story assignment. My income was stagnant. Meanwhile, the housing market kept overheating, and my upkeep expenses kept climbing. I was not alone in using the perceived golden value of a resort property along with low interest rates to turn my home into a virtual ATM.
At Lally Weymouth’s Fourth of July party that summer, I was seated again next to one of the gnomes of Wall Street. We had always joked about the sky being about to fall, and I would ask him, “Is it time, or can I have one more year in my house?” He had told me what he was telling his private investment clients: not to worry yet, housing prices were still climbing and the market wasn’t about to blow up. But this summer he did not smile when I asked, “When do I have to sell my house before the sky falls?”
“Yesterday.�
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As if to resist this ignominious fate, the East Hampton house developed all kinds of problems: scabs on its shingles, holes in its roof, plumbing backups of a severity that seemed to call for a colonoscopy. At first it felt like a reprieve. How could I sell the house that Passages had bought? It had been my family home for thirty years. All the best things happened here—watching my children splash in the pool and bounce on the trampoline, letting grandchildren try out their rubber legs on first tricycles, planting rosemary and rue and foxglove and cowslips to create a Shakespeare garden, picking lunch from our herb garden, doing yoga on the sun-dappled grass, entertaining friends under a bower of wisteria for long lazy Sunday lunches, and the solitary pleasure of early Monday mornings, when I could plunge into the pool and swim laps and settle in my favorite writing room, gazing out the bay window at the linden tree and watching for the resident pheasant to parade by until the words came and I lost myself in writing. At 10 A.M. Ella would arrive from New York, bringing me a container of coffee and a jelly doughnut and ordering, “Get up off your meat, Miss Sheehy. Time to take a walk!”
I bit down hard and put the house on the market. Nobody wanted it. It cried out for renovation. Where to begin?
I began by trying to let go of control. Starting the morning with meditation in my Shakespeare garden, I would sit in the sunlight below a row of life-size Madonna lilies. Their huge white bulbs would be clasped as if in prayer. I prayed, too, for the serenity to accept the things I could not change. And then I asked for help. By the time I opened my eyes, the Madonnas would have opened their ivory trumpets and be pointing to the sky. I could have sworn they were playing Bach.
One morning as I was leaving a village coffee shop, I stumbled over help in the form of an exceedingly long leg.
“Sorry,” said a tall, gray-haired man. His eyes were deep-set and sad, mischievous but a smile played around his lips; I suspected he had tripped me up deliberately. I ignored his faux apology and went back to my sidewalk table. He followed me, mouthing more sincere apologies and bad jokes. I stared at my newspaper. He told me he designed and built houses. Did I live here? I turned my back. Then he let me know he was a recent widower. That got my attention. He had cared for his partner for two years after her stroke, he said. His eyes clouded. He recalled lovingly how he walked her up and down this very street, slowly, daily, until her life had ended six months earlier. I couldn’t help but sympathize.
How did he know I was on the same journey? He didn’t.
I mentioned that I had to sell my house, but I worried that it wouldn’t pass inspection. He lit up.
“Why don’t I come over and take a look at your place and see what we could do to increase its value?”
I declined his offer, said good-bye to the widower, and forgot about the impudent encounter.
It wasn’t long before the widower bumped into me on the street, this time definitely on purpose. He introduced himself as Richard.
“Any offers yet?”
I had to admit there were none.
This time I allowed him to follow me to the house. He marched around the property like an African hunter, taking a machete to the thicket of vines and dead shrubs that obscured a good quarter of an acre of the land. I was suitably impressed by his strength. He was a man of about seventy, I guessed, but his legs in shorts looked to be made of rock and rope. He mentioned that he was a skier, world class; he was not shy.
“I could clear all this out and then buyers would see a vista straight into the woods,” he tantalized me. “It’ll raise your price by half a million.” For emphasis, he performed an excavation of a rotted tree stump with his bare hands.
“I couldn’t pay you very much.”
“Don’t worry about it. Whatever you can, when you sell.” He would be my property manager, he said. To have anyone managing anything for me sounded tempting.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of a chain rattling and the groan of an overtaxed engine. It was Richard, hauling out the stump of a thirty-foot arborvitae with his truck. If he was an angel sent by the Madonnas, they knew how to find one tough angel. From that day on, the widower worked miracles on the house. He hired day workers to acid wash the stucco and repair the roof and spackle and paint. He rewired the electrical system and replaced faulty water pipes, and when I told him I couldn’t afford to replace the pool, he dove to the bottom and plugged the leaks without a snorkel.
Within weeks, the house and grounds were handsome and virtually inspector-proof. A movie actress made a solid offer and put down a hefty deposit. I was, literally, home free.
Until the fickle buyer backed out. Her check had never been “cleared” for deposit. A crushing blow.
BY MIDSUMMER, MY DAYS AND NIGHTS ran together in the pallor of a midtown hospital where double pneumonia kept Clay confined for weeks in and out of an ICU. When I finally got away to Long Island to arrange another house showing, the molten sun of late summer made me ache with longing. I knelt in the Shakespeare garden and wept as I cut back the wilted roses. I felt enveloped in darkness. Richard appeared. Suddenly the balance between light and dark shifted. I felt a jolt of masculine energy.
He insisted on taking me to his favorite spot, the walking dunes on the Atlantic Ocean. The sun there was still strong. The beach deserted. I tossed my sandals aside and slipped off my sweater and began running. My leaden legs loosened up. My white skirt billowed. The warm sand on my bare feet, the spanking breeze, the sparkling water, jolted my senses awake. How could I have forgotten the joys of nature? The delight in feeling again like a woman?
Richard asked if he could carry me to the top of the dunes. To be touched again was electric. Long-deadened desire erupted like a madness. Melting into his arms, I felt an explosion of joy and surrender. It was all wrong but I couldn’t stop the wanting, it took me beyond thinking. And then we were rolling over and over down the dunes, laughing like kids and kissing.
I had to stop. I couldn’t do this. “You are a delivering angel, Richard. But Clay is the love of my life.”
“I know.” He told me he was a rescuer by nature. He needed to fill the hole left by his partner’s death. He saw me as another “damsel in distress.” Helping me helped him.
“I wish I could bring Clay out here,” I moaned. “For the last weeks or months before we give up our home.”
“Why not?” Richard offered to set up a hospital room in the country house. It sounded like deliverance.
BEFORE LONG, CLAY WAS SITTING in his favorite chair in the dining room, a dominant presence again, supervising the interior repair work on the country house. We ate lunches together, the three of us. I no longer felt isolated.
A unique bond formed between these two men, both grown old enough that their macho urges were tempered by the rise of tenderness and need for connection. One day, when Richard helped to pull Clay up from his chair, they stood for a long moment, chest to chest. I watched Clay size up Richard. Clay had always been possessive and proud of being my protector. Although his mind was still fully functional, his body betrayed his efforts to help me. His shame was palpable. Clay raised his right arm. I froze. He clapped his hand on Richard’s shoulder. Then, leaning on Richard, the two men walked the house with Clay pointing out cracks in the ceiling that needed patching. An understanding passed between them, man to man, without words. Clay let it be known that he appreciated what Richard was doing to help me. He needed to know that I could survive without him.
Richard insisted that I claim at least an hour a day to restore myself. “Just an hour when you take your mind completely off what’s happening with Clay and not happening with the house.” It was my own mantra to other caregivers, coming out of his mouth.
Before the world woke up, Richard would come by with a thermos of coffee and sweet buns and drive us to a cove where he would slip his canoe into the still water and we would paddle out to a bank and spread a blanket. Silently, we would open our senses to the birdsong and the fiddling of rushes in the breeze, wat
ch for fish jumping and maybe a tiger salamander slithering, for just an hour as the sun came up, a hidden hour, to feel fully alive. Those sunrise sojourns, I believe, restored my capacity for joy.
WEEKS BEFORE THE IRS THREATENED to put a lien on the house, I had a solid offer. This time I was smarter; I asked that the deposit be nonrefundable. This buyer agreed. My Passages house was about to become history. So, sadly, were our Thanksgiving soirées.
Yet Thanksgiving that year was never truer. Maura gave birth to a third grandchild, a golden redhead she gave the very Irish name Mairead. Bringing Clay out to the country for three whole days required elaborate arrangements. It rained like hell. When we arrived, I struggled to get Clay out of the car. We came close to the two of us sprawling in the mud. I called Richard. Racing over, he picked Clay up and carried him inside to his makeshift hospital room. Neither of them said a word. They didn’t have to. Faced with the cruel limits of aging, people form attachments beyond the ordinary, and that summer and fall, we three helped one another survive.
The family all came and we cooked a traditional turkey dinner. Sitting in his chair by the window, Clay spoke with his eyes. His mind had always been engaged day to day, but he was seldom emotionally involved. He had seen himself as an outsider, extraneous. His transformation on that Thanksgiving was remarkable. He was an organic part of all that happened. Presiding over the family, he experienced himself as belonging again.
In the middle of carving the turkey, I stopped. This was Clay’s role. I handed him the great knife. As I leaned over to kiss him, I saw his eyes glow. The muscles in his face relaxed, he looked around at everyone and smiled. Warmth and love radiated from him, and his presence once again filled the room.
