From the wound

I’ve been married to my husband, Christophe, for over twenty years, and for the past five or so, with Christophe’s full knowledge and consent, I have also had another partner, Sean. I have not spoken about this widely, and until very, very recently, even some of my family members didn’t know. This secretive arrangement became untenable for me when Sean’s mother got sick with cancer and died. I was her caregiver, alongside Sean, and her eulogist, and not to talk or write about it now that she’s gone is too painful to bear, and dishonors the bond and love between us. So, now you know about the polyamory bit, and I can get on with what I really want to tell you about.

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I won’t make any attempt at a biography of Patricia Mattie; most of her friends and family had the great fortune to know her for decades longer than I have, by all the names she bore, from the earliest, to the last one she was called: Patsy Donegan, Pat, Pattie, Trish, Auntie, Mom.

            She was one of the most absolutely alive, vibrant, people I have ever known. She kept so many people connected to her, by long phone calls, texts, rambling talks over lunch, and I know that it must have felt to them all like she simply dropped out of the world mid-conversation. I know it hurt when that silence descended, so what I want to tell about is about what happened in that silence.

The First Day:

Pat came home to us on Wednesday. I watched from the front window as she was extracted from the ambulance, swaddled in three layers of sheets and blankets. She was not speaking to the paramedics, and her eyes were mostly closed. Normally she’d be joking, chatting, finding out the paramedics’ names and life histories, asking if her hair looked alright, and if she had any cowlicks. Seeing her so still and quiet backed my heart up into a corner. I was washed with a desperate wish to escape, to be delivered of this, to slip out the back door and leave it for someone else. But Sean was the only someone else.

She could no longer stand or walk, so the two paramedics carried her in a chair up the stairs of the Forest Street house. They were so strong and capable, these two young women, with their lifesaving equipment gleaming from every pocket. They were our first visitors from what I came to think of as that other world, that still went on outside the house. Their movements were quick, and sure, and Pat’s already slow and drifting. They were like hummingbirds around a flower, there, and then gone.

A hospice nurse came later and she and I lifted Pat’s slight frame into the hospital bed now taking up much of the living room. We settled her into it, and the nurse explained what we would need to do for her now. She would never get up out of this bed again. The nurse explained that a hospice worker would come by every day or two to check in on her, but, she said, “that’s maybe one hour of the day. And the rest of the 23 hours are long.”

These are the corporal works of mercy, Sean said to me, enumerating them: feed the hungry; give water to the thirsty; visit the sick. All her body’s needs would have to be provided by someone else’s hands, and we determined that they would be ours. So, Sean and I yoked ourselves together into harness for her, side by side, for this last work of love.

Already, by that first day, she spoke little. The hospice workers told us that dying requires an intense turning inward, and that as time passed, we should expect words to fall away, and that touch, and presence would matter more and more. Her lips were cracked and dry, and she no longer had any interest in food. We gave her sips of water, spread balm on her sore mouth, and planted the good, blue-black seeds of the morphine pills in her that sprouted and bloomed her pain away. Sean spooned a little applesauce into her mouth, a little bit of crushed peach.

The Second Day:

She slept more and more of the time. She was still herself, trying to make the nurse understand that the slowness of her replies was not evidence that she didn’t understand what was happening.

Every couple of hours, we shifted her in the bed, building elaborate geometries of pillows, rolled towels, blankets, to find a position she could rest in. I cleaned her body, spread ointment on the raw place at the base of her spine, re-covered her in clean, dry things. We read her the cards and texts friends and family were sending, showed their pictures, played their voice memos. These were the spiritual works of mercy they were doing for her, for us, with us: to comfort the afflicted; to pray for the living and the dead.

In the afternoon, her nephew and all-but-son Scott arrived from Georgia. She’d been quiet and still all day, but he came bounding into the room and her eyes opened wide and fixed on his face and it seemed like her spirit leapt up ahead of her weary body to meet him as he leant in and kissed her. They sat together, and spoke a bit, and she seemed to drink him in. The silence and stillness that descended after that would never lift in the same way again.

The Last Day:

She was going more and more inward. She was working hard on something inside her that she had to do alone. A labor akin to childbirth. This process of dying was a mirror to that other labor of fifty-four years ago, that other time when it took all her energy and focus to separate her body and Sean’s.

There’s a writing rule that you should write from the scar, not from the wound. This is why—the whole thing is a mess. I tried to conceive of what was happening, to grasp it with my intellect, to give it language, but it all kept slipping. She was on a raft, drifting farther out to sea—no she was in the water, sinking and sometimes surfacing again— no she was a flower, no she was the fruit, we planted morphine seeds— no she was already growing, she bore the seeds.

A home health aide came in the afternoon, and she and I bathed Pat together, dressed her wound, and changed her out of her johnny into a striped pajama shirt with daisies embroidered over the heart pocket. I was aware of myself as only a set of hands to attend to her, and eyes and ears to detect what she needed. I rarely sat down and barely slept. I was entirely forward oriented, aware that there was a back of me at all only when sweat sluiced down it in the sweltering room.

The nurse told us that she had begun actively dying now; her breathing pattern had changed. Sean said, “we should keep offering her water and applesauce, right?” She said no, that the time for that had passed, and Sean turned away from her as if he’d been struck. For months, he’d been breathing on the fragile flame of her intermittent, fickle appetite – cooking for her, fetching sandwiches, chowder, mashed potatoes, anything that she expressed even the most fleeting interest in eating.

Her body’s needs were falling away one by one; the works of mercy still to do few, but requiring an intensity of focus. We orbited her, watching for her needs now that she could not speak. We attuned our bodies to hers, recognizing subtle signs that something hurt—her eyes wider than usual, or a slow shrug of one shoulder to indicate her position wasn’t right. We dripped atropine under her tongue, and the holy sacrament of Dilaudid. When I left for the night, Scott and Sean were by her bed.

Two hours later, Sean texted me to ask what it meant that foam had appeared on her lips, and I got in my car to drive back. When I got there, he’d been alone with her, talking, holding her hand. I joined him, and for the hour that remained, the whole world fell away except for her. I stroked her head, traced circles at her temples. Sean leaned over her, told her over and over that she was not alone, that we were staying with her until the end, that it was ok for her to go. I lay my head on the bed beside hers and watched her face, the raven-black brow, those astonishing eyes half open. Her skin became luminous, soft, like a newborn’s, and we were captivated as by a newborn, watching her chest rise and fall. It was impossible not to fall in love with her.

Sean laid his phone on the bed, and from its tiny speaker we listened to Gladys Knight and the Pips sing “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” When it ended, we dripped another sticky slick of Dilaudid into her mouth. The breathing was steady. There was no pain. And then, an expression of deep concentration crossed her face, her shoulders rose in a gesture of shrugging off, and when they fell again, the last pulse leapt in her neck, and she was gone.

After that, it only remained for a hospice nurse to come and confirm her death, and then the funeral men to take her body. One of them told us that we might not wish to watch them at work, that we could step out if we liked. But we had cared for her body until the end, and would not leave it now. The last of the corporal works of mercy is to bury the dead, and we wanted to see her as far as we could before turning her body over to them. So we watched them turn her bedsheets into her shroud, and cover her, and then we followed them as they carried the stretcher down the stairs, and we stood on the porch in the hot quiet night until they had driven her away.

Now, everything that had touched her body became holy. The ointments, the cool cloth I’d lain on her forehead, the borrowed bed that had become the center of this little world. We read the messages of love and grief that people sent when they heard the news to each other over and over. Sean said we’d midwifed her out of this life.

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Two days later, Christophe and I went to watch our seventeen-year-old run a 34 mile trail race in western New Hampshire. Mostly, we waited around for many hours to catch a few glimpses of him when he stopped briefly at the aid stations for water, pickles, Coke, gummy bears, blue powdered electrolytes, and ice. While we waited, I worked on Pat’s eulogy in the backseat of the car.

The race is what’s called “unsupported” which means friends and family cannot offer snacks, drinks, dry socks, or massage cramped legs. We were permitted only to stand nearby murmuring encouragements to him, hovering with our arms at our sides until he ran off into the woods again, and people, impressed at his undertaking given his youth, asked me if he was mine and I said, “Yes, he’s my son” and I really wanted to say, “have you ever seen anything so beautiful and golden and shining?”

The course skirted Eagle Pond, where the poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon lived, and then finished with a climb and descent of Ragged Mountain. I had with me my copy of Hall’s Without, about Kenyon’s death from cancer. My copy bears my maiden name on the cover page from when I first read it in 1998, while one of our high school teachers died of cancer, and her husband, also our teacher, canceled class, or didn’t, communicating with us via notes pinned to his classroom door. I read the poems while we waited for Malcolm to cover each bundle of miles, running, walking, or cramped up and lying by the side of the trail in the woods somewhere—who knew? my brain too scattered and fragmented by days of insomnia to handle anything but poetry.

From Midsummer Letter:

                                     Last night
before sleep I walked out
to look at the cold summer moon
as it rose over Ragged Mountain.
I slept six hours,
then woke in the dark morning
to see it huge in the west
as if this were any August

Time involuted and folded on itself, like a blanket, like going down on your knees —the far parts touching, calf to thigh, ankle to rump. It was 1995, it was right now, it was two days ago. Sean and I looked through photos to make a slideshow for the wake. I see Pat’s profile in a photo from her wedding—her mouth wide open, miming as she feeds her new husband a piece of cake; I see it again after she’d died, jaw slack below the bony, beaked nose.

Malcolm descended Ragged Mountain to the finish line. He was barely a speck coming out of the summit trees when I started yelling his name. The race director, hearing me, asked over the PA, “who is it? who’s coming down?” and I, suddenly uncertain, remained mute. How could I be so sure, when he was so far away? I was sure. His gait, its cadence, his pale skin, pale hair—I needed only the barest, briefest glimpse to know my son. Standing alone by the finish line, I jumped up and down, whooped, and pumped my fists in the air. “I love the enthusiasm,” the guy on the PA condescended. I jumped some more.

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Out on Forest St., in front of the quiet, hollow house, the flux and flow of human life continues. All the mundane elements of “people just being themselves”—Pat’s favorite theme—pass in front of that porch: an old couple, their heads inclined toward each other, chatting. A young father dancing on the sidewalk to try and make his shrieking baby laugh. Two teenage boys teasing and shoving each other.

I read an astonishingly long and dull article about four writers entangled in mutual infidelities and then, from the scar, writing a lot of auto fiction about it. I could not get enough of these stupid writers and their boring problems. I see them as she would—funny, ridiculous, fascinating. I can’t believe I will never see her again. When I close my eyes, I still find myself in that room where she is dying. When I open them, I see the living, and I am washed with tenderness for them. For their foolishness, for their worries, for their ideas about the future, for their anxieties, for their griefs. They’re all so beautifully alive.

I keep thinking I’ll get to tell her about how she died, what we did, what it was like. I read about people that lived longer than 82 years and feel indignant wrath. I know I am lucky to have known her. I know I am the luckiest, that she loved me. I whine and wheedle at the universe to give her back, as if I were a child and she were a toy someone stole from me. When people say, “she lived a good, long life” I think, “not fucking long enough.” I am horrified by her absence. I hold my hands up in the mirror, thinking of their capacities, of what they did. Some thoughts are bleak. Some are grateful. And I am still alive.