Chinese Broccoli

My memories then are both blurry and stop-motion. There were two or three days docked in ER due to a lack of room on the (apparently booming) transplant floor of Toronto General Hospital. The room in ER was attended by various infectious diseases specialists, two of whom had rhyming names and were married, and with whom I discussed that yes, we'd tried that drug before, and no, that one wasn't any good either, and he'd exhausted the utility of the other as well. They tried this or that and in the intervening hours I brought acceptable food and got yelled at for using a cell phone near the (unplugged) equipment, though what I was using the phone for was to solve a $2,000 shipping mistake at the hand of a French Canadian printer whose misunderstanding of a pronoun, I am reasonably convinced, provided the stress that would hasten Jeff's slip into sepsis and the timeless aether. There was the admissions coordinator who for some reason attempted to guilt me and the family by "upselling" a better room "because of all the hospital does for these transplant patients, anyway". There was the eventual transition to a real room, on the real floor where we knew the nurses and the toaster oven and where to get the ice, the floor where, bittersweet or not, we were comfortable — and had even been given (it's too sad, right?) the "honeymoon suite" once (yes, too sad).

He went in on a Monday and by the Wednesday had already stopped making much sense. For a two-day stretch, as well, his voice had been shot (so many things malfunctioned then; since Montreal he'd been seeing in green) and so two of his last lucid days were mired in a rasp of speechlessness. At some point he asked me why I wasn't wearing my new square glasses, things I don't own for a vision problem I didn't have, and I slowly began to realize he was mixing realities, that his interface was jammed up, that I might be lucky to be recognized at all. One day I went to get pizza for him and almost saw a guy get shot by an undercover cop in the gardens behind College Park: it was a hot weird August and nothing about it felt normal, nor, I suppose, should it have.

I performed at a Pontiac Quarterly in the middle of all this, a weird thing to do but what the hell else was I going to do on a Wednesday night. I remember taking lots of pictures along hazy University Avenue, along the hospital campus row, of sodium lights and city planters full of zinnias, of red and white streetcars streaking past. This was with the old, slower camera, not the newer nicer one of the sort one's parents will get you for Christmas the year your husband happens to die. I remember getting to the venue and seeing Jason and Pauline and they said something like, I heard your husband is sick, that is very sad, I hope he gets better soon, and me saying, well, actually, he will not get better, this the first of many awkward interactions I would (and do) effect from my inability to be anything other than straightforward, uncouched about this kind of thing: it is true, it is sad, this happens to people, and I am sorry if it makes you uncomfortable when I tell you, but I am not any happier about the facts either, believe me.

By the weekend I didn't need to take the hints and hushed tones of nurses ("Has....the family been in?") and had started amassing clumps of his friends at the bedside. Sean was one of the first to come, right after an appearance on Breakfast Television to promote his Subway Rider Efficiency Guide. Jeff was at the half-crazy point then and said something wonderful to Sean, like, "Hello! We heard you coming around the corner and decided to speak only the truth!" Later he would say something to Jeremy about him being a crack dealer or something, and here and there would break through with weirdly real and wrenching statements like, to his sister and brother-in-law Carrie and Pat, "Thanks for coming. I know it's really exhausting to be here."

There are a million other bits to revisit, or not, like the fourth-to-last night when we ordered piles of sushi and Kate, Nousheen, Pete, Andrea, and I, probably Lise was there too, sat around eating it and talking. We congregated around the spare bed that had by then been brought in for me on the night I was so angry and resistant to the idea that I really did have to start staying the nights, that there were that few left, that he really was that helpless and my attention was that needed. Marianne was our night nurse during the sushi party, coincidentally the mother of a casual friend of Jeff's and mine, and when I thanked her for letting so many people (more than the rules say) stay so late (well past the official hours) she simply said, this is the right thing, he is sleeping but he knows you are here, the energy is here, I think it should always be like this. She would replace the chlorpromazine drip that helped both the hiccups and the psychosis, and we ate the sushi and shared in friendship and making the good energy at him in the saddest and strangest way.

And when he came home it was lovely and bizarre and sad; we knew why, and yet, how do you ever really know how to bring someone home to die? (I myself would continue to hold onto the idea that it was useful to, say, continue antibiotics, seeing only later how much of the doctors' role at that stage is to manage the family's ability to deal with whatever it is they are able.) Wrapped in a white-and-orange-striped hospital blanket I still think I have not washed (instead sentimentally rotating it back to the bottom of the laundry basket again and again for 24 months) we wheeled him out to his parents' car, where once inside (not remembering he couldn't really stand or walk, or that he was barely anymore a living person) Jeff suggested we could all go out to a nice restaurant lunch on the way back to our house. At home he talked to his best friends on the phone — Jason in B.C., Terri in Italy. Terri got maybe the best phone call ever, which went something like: "Terri I have three things to tell you. #1 we had Pizza Pizza for dinner. #2 I love you. #3 I should hang up now." I hope when my best friends die they are able to be as succinct.

In the weeks that followed I found immense comfort in talking about the moments of his actual death. It made it real and it made the pain more present and more explicable somehow. It was short and awful and not something people should have to see, and yet I took weird solace in the fact that through his pain and confusion he actually did realize what was happening, saw the last page of his own story for what it was, reached out to me in clarity and selfless compassion (it happens all the time, of course, but how fucked is it to know you're dying and leaving someone you love, and muster up the ability to feel shitty for their loss and loneliness to come?) all while, you know — suffering greatly. It was a hell of a thing to watch, I would tell people, and when Lesley would return my page from the hospital later, and say, in some doctorly manner, "Well, I'm glad it was at home and peaceful", I took some twisted pleasure in correcting what I'd felt was an attempt to gloss over the harsh truth. "No," I said, "it actually wasn't peaceful at all. But at least it was here."

And here, of course, is the place in which my role was so quickly called into question — will you stay? They asked. Not that I hadn't thought I would move on one day — with him, or with another after, to a place with room for a kid maybe, or the furniture I will one day inherit, or whatever, new lives, new movements in them. But right when he died I was so resistant and heel-dug-in. And despite flitting around the country (two countries!) for months and days and weeks and suddenly all the time, I never realized until recently when everything fell into place that I might not stay. Not that I could not be in the house with its ghosts — they weren't many, and several of them I even liked — but that life had simply changed because it was supposed to. Because that is the right thing for life to do, whether you want to hang on to the way things were or not.

So after a year of not even noticing how little I had committed to the walls around me (nothing planted, nothing repaired, the money given for a new gas stove spent on plane tickets, escape) I began to consider things differently. From no fewer than four points on Lake Michigan (my real home, in some senses) across four midwestern states did I begin to measure the idea, test the strength of the dare, that I might chase the other things and places that I love even if they risked moving one step further from the memories and persons tied to the physical here, house, trees planted by him and for him in the yard — Toronto itself.

Of course, no one I have run this past is actually surprised (well, a couple of people said they thought I might return to Chicago, but I mean, really, have you seen the traffic there?) and yet it is simultaneously not easy and not happy and also so amazing and exciting and the right thing to have decided, yes, sorry, 2000 words into this ramble, that I am moving along to the next stop. Not precisely for the need to turn a new page or run away; or for any other sideways reasons — but for the reasons of taking the lesson of a loss, of a life change I had absolutely no say in, and turning it into the impetus to own my happiness more fully; be ahead of the changes this time, come to accept that you truly cannot have all the things you want simultaneously, but you pick the most right one at the most right time you can and run with it hard and fast because that is the only way to get anywhere at all. Life is short and time's a-wastin', and nothing will drive that point home more fully than the person who loved you most disappearing in front of you and telling you that no, it is you they are sorry for, and they wish it could be different but you will simply have to move on to Plan B without them. So, Plan B it is, two years after someone asked the question the very first time. It took that long to finally be able to ask it to myself, as it turns out. I will see you all in New York.