Slipped away to dinner Thursday evening with my beloved, to a crowded restaurant where, as she points out, we lower the median age of the customers just by walking in. But the food hit the spot, the server was gracious as could be, and we relaxed and caught up on the events of a crowded couple of days. Then we rose, smiling and satisfied, to head for home.
We wove our way through the restaurant, turned the corner into the last room … and came upon a team of half-a-dozen paramedics, working feverishly on a big man sprawled on the floor – his shirt open, his eyes closed. Around him, servers endeavored to meet the ongoing needs of dozens of people who carried on with their meals and chit-chat, stealing quick glances at the quietly intense efforts of the medics crouched beside them.
Finding another way through the restaurant, we paid our bill with the jovial cashier up front and were moving toward the door when a voice barked “Coming through!” behind us. We lunged aside as they wheeled the man past and toward the parking lot, one medic keeping up a steady pumping on the man’s chest.
Outside, the front walk was gradually crowding with people just arriving, wending their way between fire trucks and looking over their shoulders at the man being lifted into an ambulance. We emerged from the restaurant with several others, to find our cars blocked in by the rescue vehicles.
We waited. As the ambulance door shut, the paramedic was still pumping the man’s chest. A couple came up, their small dog strangling at his tether to reach out to all the new, strange ankles and kneecaps before him. Nearby, an older woman dabbed at her eyes as a more middle-aged man patted her arm. They seemed to be the family or friends of the man now pulling away in the ambulance, and a paramedic came over to explain the man’s condition, and where they were taking him.
The ambulance pulled away, then the fire trucks. No sirens. The customers whose dinners went very much as they’d planned made their way out to their cars. And the grieving man and woman moved toward a far corner of the parking lot, she silently sobbing, he grim-faced and sorting through his keys.
* * * * *
Back home, I remembered to make a phone call. The next day was the birthday of an elderly man from my church, now too ill to attend. Our deacons take turns delivering birthday cards to those “shut-in,” and I was calling to find the best time to come by.
His wife answered, a bit out of breath. They’d just moved her husband to a care facility for those suffering irretrievable memory loss. It wasn’t going well. The medical staff asked her to stay away for a few days, until her husband grew accustomed to his new surroundings.
But now he was in a panic – so desperately upset at the change of scenery and loss of all things familiar that they could hardly control, much less console him. So they asked her to come back, after all, and help calm him.
She came, bringing her still-remembered face and voice into his maelstrom of confusion. In time, he calmed a bit. Now, they’d sent her home again. But he won’t be seeing her, or visitors, or birthday cards for a while.
Her voice saddened as her breath returned. He is her husband, and so deeply lost and unhappy. He’s alone now, isolated in ways he can feel but not really understand. The treatment center seems the best place, the only real option. But her home is deathly quiet tonight … empty of his confusion and frustration, but overflowing with him.
The memories he’s lost press in on her, now, from every side.
* * * * *
I’d hardly set the phone down when a text beeped. A man from a men’s group I’ve been attending, asking for prayer. His critically ill wife has been in the hospital, enduring tests that answered some questions but not their concerns.
The initial news was goodish, but the fevers were rising now; the doctors had begun calling in specialists. The husband looked down into the eyes of his wife, and saw the depths of her exhaustion.
A weariness that is more and more blurring the delights of their love, the moments they’ve shared, the family they’ve raised … their hopes for the years ahead.
How to pray? How to hold on … and on … and on?
* * * * *
The joys of being married to the right person go on like that … the sweet, ineffable pleasures of knowing this remarkable person, being known by this lovely person … two souls knitting ever more tightly together as the minutes and days and years go by.
And yet, at odd moments amid the passing, there creeps in that nagging, ominous dread, reawakened by moments like those above, of the time when human ties must break. When the two made one become two again.
It’s something people have lived with always … at some point, Adam lost Eve, or vice versa. (Mark Twain imagined her tombstone, beautifully: “Wherever she was, there was Eden.”) We know widows and widowers survive, endure, marry again, or bear with the loneliness. But the awful certainty of those empty days, coming, shivers sometimes like an icy breeze on a warm spring day.
From my favorite book, Friendly Persuasion, by Jessamyn West: a moment, a pause in the dusky afternoon – day’s work done, supper still not ready. A farmer and his wife gaze through the lengthening shadows toward the setting sun, and listen to the gentle quiet, with its whispers of mortality.
“The mind,” said Eliza, puzzled, to her husband, “the live mind can hardly take in the idea of death.”
“No need,” Jess said. “No need. It ain’t in nature.”
“We ought to prepare.”
“This is preparing,” he answered, lifting his face to the sky.
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