Journal: May 2002

We unload the car.  Tish carries up most of the things.  Unfortunately we are on the third floor.  One or two trips are all that I can manage.  I am very winded when I reach the top and have to sit down.  We take a nap for a few hours.  In the late afternoon I am out on the deck, reading and watching the ships.  The phone rings and Tish answers.  She is talking about our drive down so I assume that it is one of her family.  I become lost in my reading until I am aware of a woman sobbing.  At first it seems to be coming from the floor below.

Then I realize that it is Tish.  I enter the living room where she is still on the telephone.  I listen and gather from the conversation that her brother, David, has died.  He was only forty-nine but had been suffering for six years from cardiac problems and more recently congestive heart failure.  He has been a patient in my hospital twice in the previous two months, arriving by ambulance in cardiac or respiratory arrest.  But recently, after insertion of a Pacemaker and two cardiac balloon procedures, he seemed to be on the mend.  He had stopped smoking and was active in a cardiac rehab program.  But this is what my nurse colleagues in cardiac care tell me.  Their patients can be doing fine, sitting up, playing cards, entertaining visitors, or readying for discharge one moment, then flipping into complete arrest the next moment.

This is one gift that we persons with cancer are given.  We usually have time to see it coming, time to prepare.  And time is a gift that we never fully appreciate until our own measure of time is almost exhausted.

I try to comfort Tish, knowing that there can be no comfort given.  Over the next few hours we talk, make phone calls, and arrange to fly Tish home for the funeral. She is to fly out on Tuesday morning and return on Thursday afternoon.  United Airlines gives us a generous bereavement fare.  Our first night on Tybee is fitful and wrenching.  This is especially difficult for Tish.  Not only has her younger brother died but she is also made to be painfully and viscerally aware that someone close to you, someone near your age and in otherwise good health, can succumb to death.  It is I, her husband who happens tp suffer from a rare, aggressive leukemia, who lies beside her through this night of sorrow and grieving.

cancer