While Jake is Dying

Almost get into a car accident when what you think is an eagle rises up from the muck of the canal. Stop the car in the middle of Avenue A right in front of the Polish Credit Union and stay there oblivious to the blaring horns around you.

Say to your ten year old son in the passenger seat, “I think that’s an eagle,” and watch him watching you watch the great dark bird rise at an angle that hides its white head until it unfolds like a kite that’s caught wind. Then you can see the white of its head and gold of its beak and opening of its huge tail that looks like a cotton-gloved hand open wide and waving.

Watch the eagle round its back, catch a thermal and push up against the sky that today is crystal blue and endless.

“Now I feel good,” you say. “Now I feel good.”

Come to, with the electric blue flash of police lights in your eyes. Wave sheepishly at the cruiser and the young, dark cop inside it who is motioning for you to go. GO! Pull out of the tangle of traffic you’ve created and continue home.

Say to your son, “I've got more bad news.” Too quickly with too much edge in his voice your son says, “What?”

“Jake had a heart attack and they had to put him in intensive care.”

Be amazed when your ten year old asks, “Is it related to his cancer?” Remember yourself at ten being only open to the mysteries of wool, linen and calico, thin sharp silver needles and the solid construction your mother’s world. Remember hiding behind doors and crouching in closets when anyone mentioned death or illness. Remember how hard you pushed away from all things dead and dying: hit cats in the road, the too slow squirrel in the gutter, Grandpa O’Dwyer from next door who was dead in his Buick already when you walked past waving “Hello.”

“No, it’s from all that smoking they think. His arteries clogged up.” Be honest but unsure about what the outcome will be. Say, “My best guess is...but you never know.” Be grateful that for your kids Jake is more or less a tangent to their world. He’s not a Bumpa or Nana or kid friend. He’s “Mom and Dad’s friend.” “Lee’s husband.” “This guy.”

Get home and consider dinner, then melt watching your ten year old become little again, knee deep in snow, shoveling out an igloo, hiding inside and popping out to scare the dog again and again.

Make sandwiches and soup for dinner even though everyone else would rather have some type of meat. Decide not to tell your fourteen year old son about Jake because the tired charcoal color under his eyes from trying to process this dying that has crept into his world is still too dark.

Make a huge mug of tea and put in way too much honey. Drink it in sips that are so sweet your lips pucker. Push it towards the wall at the end of the table, still half full and try to forget it. Startle markedly when your husband and teenager try to get in the locked back door and can’t.

Listen and feel your neck tighten as you get all the details on Jake’s condition from your doctor husband. Try not to scream when he says the admitting ER docs wanted to do nothing.

“The ER director said that Jake was terminal, after all, but Jake was alert enough to ask that everything be done, so they said they had to do something.”

Wonder where the souls of those men are who so easily write off someone, a peer, saying “He’s terminal anyway,” as though death at fifty one was that easy. Just give in and go. Just accept the way the room will shrink away, the warmth of your wife’s hand will cool, some great black hole will swallow you. Just go. GO!

Ask your husband if he saw Jake’s wife Lee and wonder why you haven’t called her. Go through the list of truths: that there are people closer to her that she’d rather be with, that you don’t know what to say, that she and Jake have been so private through this all that you don’t know if it’s appropriate at all to do anything. Pick up the phone in the middle of your husband’s reply and call Lee. Leave a message because no one is picking up.

“Lee, It’s Annie. I heard about Jake’s setback. Let me know if you need help walking the dogs or shopping. Call if you need anything.” Hang up and feel completely stupid, useless.

Hear your husband say, “She wasn’t there when I was rounding on my own patients this morning and Jake had been shipped out by then anyway. But, when I stopped at their house last week she acted really funny. She couldn’t stay in the same room with me and Jake and she couldn’t look me in the eye when we talked.”

Let all the dishes go. Watch crappy late night TV—police dramas with total killings and partial nudity. Watch the news. Go up to bed and lie there until your husband snores peacefully beside you. Try to find sleep there in the curve of his arms, but fail. Go back downstairs to the kitchen with a very confused dog at your heels.

“No walking now, Buddy. It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

Take your cold sweet tea and zap it in the microwave until it’s steaming. Curl up in the UMASS Basketball blanket and sit on the couch to wait for morning.

Remember all the places you’ve been with Jake and Lee. Monhegan Island when your first son was just six weeks old. Remember how terrified you were on the ferry ride over. Afraid the little ferry would go under and this beautiful new thing, “Family”, would vanish. Remember how you walked way too far around the island with Jake and Lee in the Indian Summer heat, trying to keep up with friends and still be a good mother, and how you sweat away your milk. Remember how Lee poured you cup after cup of water to try and top off your tank. How you slept restlessly that night and ate pancakes with fruit the next morning, your son in a garden basket beside you, Jake and Lee all smiles and black coffee on either side.

Remember how you hiked Mount Toby along its never ending trails. The time Jake lost his fucking keys and you had to back track, crying baby in a backpack and all, but eventually found them by a dislocated lean-to frequented by area homeless.

The time he thought with all his psychological wisdom that the beasts in dogs needed to be set free, so he let the dogs fly off into the forest after some unknown scent. Laugh at how pissed you were whistling dry mouthed for hours until the dogs came back covered in ripe dung. Laugh at how you told your husband that you’d never, ever, hike the dogs with Jake again. Never. Try and count all the times you did in the past fifteen years but run out of fingers and toes.

Remember riding the back roads down to Amherst on bikes with Lee. Remember watching her legs thicken over the years. Remember how you’d share the ways your families would stumble and fall through the years. Be amazed and inspired by her strength to try figure skating at fifty three at the height of her menopausal madness. Clap and feel as proud as she is when she earns patch after patch that marks her learning from simple figure eights to complicated school figures.

Remember all the trails at Wendell State Forest and how you walked them with Lee and the dogs. That time one May when you and Lee, mace in hand, walked a new trail near sunset and came upon two “Jim bobs” with guns who told you they were hunting squirrels. How you turned your backs to them and left, pulled out your mace together and asked simultaneously, “Which is faster, bullets or mace?” Then laughed and laughed. Pointed your mace at trees, at the shadows that followed you, at the setting sun. Laughed until the dogs stopped in their paths totally and utterly confused.

Remember the bike ride this past summer when you and Lee shared secrets like the botched hair color you tried to hide your new gray. Her wish to try botox. How you both cringed at the thought of adding yet another puppy to either of your broods.

Remember smiling when she said, “Jake and I spent a lot of time together this summer and I’m afraid of what it will be like when he retires. He’s much more high maintenance than I remember.” (It will be just six weeks later that Jake suddenly loses his ability to walk and is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer that spread there from his lungs. This all happens on his fifty first birthday.) Remember how you gave Lee half your granola bar and the wrapper during a stop on that bike ride so she could mark it on her Weight Watchers slip when she got home.

Come back to the present, the snoring dog at your feet, the clock crawling past three o’clock. Feel your head throbbing. Wish you could cry. For a week. Sit and be swallowed by the quiet. Look past your dog again at the clock. It’s four o’clock. Think you can hear your husband and kids snoring softly on the level above you.

Pull your cover around you like a coat and pray to all of your dead. Ask them to help Jake have courage. Ask them to ask God to be benevolent. Pray to Mary because every good nun you’ve ever known has told you that she’s the one who’s really in charge. “If you want something done right, ask a woman.”

Leave the blanket on the couch and the dog sleeping on the rug. Walk up the stairs wishing you were smarter, centered, cried out, a little more holy.

Climb into your warm bed and arch your back into the chest of your husband who receives you. Press back into him, your familiar, and remember the eagle pressing into its sky.