Mourning becomes

 

On September 23rd 2020 I woke up to a text message at 4.30 in the morning from a social worker whom I had previously given as an emergency contact. It said "The Farren Care Center just called me about Jo. The nurse said he is not doing well. They are trying to get in touch with you. Are you there?" I was. I called and spoke to a nurse I knew well. She told me that Joe's pulse was rapid, his blood pressure very low, and that he was unresponsive. Did I, she asked, want to revisit the Do Not Resuscitate I had signed on his behalf? The only way that they would know what was going on was to send him out to the emergency room in the local hospital. I asked her five minutes to think the question over, messaged my friend Sophie who had recently retired as a senior hospice nurse in Wales, and with whom I had discussed at length how to make these difficult decisions on somebody else's behalf. By the time Sophie got back to me five minutes later I had already decided that there was no revisiting to be done. I called Farren back, told the nurse that I wanted Joe to to stay right where he was, and to be made as comfortable as legally possible. I said that I would be there as soon as possible, and if I wasn't allowed into the facility because of Covid, I would wait in the car park outside until whatever was to transpire transpired.

On my way to Farren, I pulled over to call them again and said that Joe had to see a priest. Or a priest had to see Joe. Either way, for Joe, the recidivist Catholic for whom la chose religieuse had always been a gristly morsel to chew on, the formalities of his childhood faith must be observed. If it was possible, because of Covid. They would see what they could do, they would see if I, and a priest, and eventually our children would be allowed in, but nothing was sure, because of Covid. I called the priest from my local church, Father Thomas Lisowski, whom I had never met, and explained the situation. I asked him to pray for Joe. That was the least I could do.

By the time I had arrived at Farren, it was after 8:00am, the administration had arrived and the administration had decided that in spite of Covid I was allowed in to see Joe, but in full PPE because of Covid. So I shed and donned and was ushered into a room that had been set aside for Covid patients, of which there had been none that far at Farren because Farren was wonderful, where my husband was lying. He wasn't doing anything except lying, and breathing more or less, and twitching, and occasionally opening his eyes and looking at the ceiling with what seemed from the outside to be unfocused fear. This was to continue for the next 27 hours. It turned out that the priest was also allowed in, in full PPE, and in spite of him being the a**hole priest who believes that Pope Francis is an anti-Pope because of his refusal to condemn the sin of homosexuality, he was qualified to do the job. In this case the job was to administer the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick and the Viaticum, and that he did. It's a good thing that he met Joe under those circumstances, because Joe could have given him a run for his money on questions of theology. Most likely Joe would have muttered under his breath and stalked out of Mass.

 

 

After Father Sean's departure, and after a negative Covid test for Joe, I was told by Mindy, the head nurse, that the team had had a team meeting and decided screw the protocol, I could take off the PPE and could touch and hold and be with my husband in the ways that he and I would need during the hours to follow. That was the sort of place Farren was, and now all that expertise is gone, scattered to the winds in the name of profitability. So I did. Kind Father Thomas from Northfield turned up and was allowed in too. He sat with Joe and me for 45 minutes or so. We had a good laugh when I said that Joe didn't need any more Extreme Unction since he hadn't apparently sinned since it was given to him twenty minutes previously. Father Thomas told me about his mother and his own varied and lurid brushes with death and gave the Holy Eucharist he had brought for Joe to me instead. Then he left, and sandwiches and coffee and people I knew from the years of visiting Farren came and went, each as loving and caring as the last. Meanwhile, our children were driving the 190 miles or so from Brooklyn to come and say adieu to their father.

During that long day and night I said farewell to Joe as best I could. I held him, held his hands, laid mine on his chest as it strained to do the basic stuff of life, played the Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould) for him, ate sandwiches with nameless pink stuff in them. Around 5:00pm Claire and Pierre arrived. They held him, held his hands, laid theirs on his chest. By late afternoon his eyes opened less and less frequently. I'm not sure they ever saw that terrified look. By common accord we ordered a take out, I fetched a bottle of wine from my house, and the four of us were together for dinner one last time, although only three of us were dining. The hours we spent together that evening were a time apart, an indescribably beautiful and terrible time, a time which none of us remember and which at least three of us will never forget.

 

 

The charge nurse at Farren offered to put up a cot for me in Joe's room and I slept in the same space as my husband for the first time in nearly four years and for the last time ever. I really slept. I woke up I don't know how many times to swab his poor dry mouth with a sponge on a stick, and when the CNA's came in to give him an injection, to lovingly turn him, to straighten his sheet, to provide 'comfort measures' as far as the law and decency allow. Around 6 in the morning Joe's breathing, which had been mainly shallow and occasionally desperate and shuddering, became raspy and loud. Thus it was to remain until it stopped altogether around 11am the same day.

When he died, I was back at my house undressing for a shower. The children were with him. Claire texted me to say that they thought he was going, and five minutes later when I had thrown my clothes back on and leapt into the car and called her, he was gone. The twenty minutes from my house to Farren were filled with a wild joy, with tears on my face and rapture in my heart. He was finally freed from the prison that had become his mind and body. I didn't know where he had gone, I still don't, but I am quite sure that it is better than the torture of a slowly receding life where all that is familiar is stripped from a man, indignity by indignity. During the hour or so we were alone with him, Claire sketched him, Pierre wrote in his journal, I said prayers. At one point I told somebody that I wished to wash him. A kind CNA called Roland came in to help me. We drew the curtains around the bed, stripped him naked and I washed him from head to toe with a washcloth and warm soapy water. Roland turned him over for me with an "Over we go, my friend." That's how I said goodbye.

This is who Joe once was.