time stands still for a moment, flows backwards, moves forward again
Two years ago I watched the slowest week of my life go by when the person I had knowingly signed on “for worse” with began to take my leave. Jeff was fine (and I use the term liberally for someone who suffered infection and fluid buildup and clinical depression and a million other quality-of-life-siphoning complaints) for almost all of the months between his diagnosis and his death. He stayed out of hospital, for the most part. He travelled. He wrote, and worked, and called his friends back, and despite almost getting picked up by the community services van for a bit of jaundiced park-bench napping that one time, walked and rode the streets of Toronto with just as much ownership and capability as he ever had.
We went to Vermont and ate cheese, threw parties, boated around Chicago’s looming buildings, sat in a balcony for the Gang of Four, all kinds of crazy things people who are in the accelerated process of dying maybe do not always manage. And then there was the night he was shaking, this was not new, this was a thing he did, because part of the thing that was killing him was infecting him, and the part of the thing that was infecting him made him sick, shake, tremble; it’s called “the rigors” and it puts you through them indeed. He began to shake and I offered Arrested Development DVDs, hot tea, the emergency room, a cat; he opted for the first and did not decide to check in for the final checkout until mid-day next day when I was supposed to be swimming and instead I met him at the hospital where Susie, who will be married in less than two weeks and is a friend I am so glad to have carried over into post-hospital life, took his blood pressure and said, “You know, I think you might be staying here this afternoon.”