By Carol L. Gloor
Some deaths are massive, huge trees falling, dragging down the brush around them, leaving deep holes: Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, even John Lennon. Most deaths are at least noticed, like your grandfather’s: an old oak no longer there for shade. There’s a lunch afterwards where you see the cousins you knew as kids, drink too much, tell stories, drive away somehow satisfied: he had a long, good life; he didn’t suffer; we all knew it was coming. But a few deaths are like Sue’s: a ripple in a small stream, leaving those standing on the bank startled, with no place to declare their love, no ritual to celebrate their mourning.
Sue and Dave managed a tourist cabin resort in the small town in northwest Illinois, above the Mississippi River, where we moved from the city, like them, to stop working so hard. They lived a crowded life in one of the cabins, behind the sign marked “Management.” Layers of clothes hung neatly from pegs; pans balanced perfectly on their counter, and the way up to the sleeping loft was a ladder. I knew Sue had an unnamed digestive ailment which caused her to puke without notice, sometimes for hours, until nothing was left. When I asked her, the answer was always that they didn’t know, more tests were being done. But the puking was under control that first Memorial Day with them, pizza on their porch, bloody marys, and boxed white wine in paper cups. All that was left in the mosquito midnight were empty pizza boxes, empty wine boxes and empty bottles of vodka gleaming in moonlight. It all tasted wonderful. Sue said “It’s a red, white and blue holiday: red bloody marys, white wine, I just couldn’t figure out the blue.” I forgot to mention there was a blue vodka you could buy.
The first couple of years in town I was lonely, like so many of us in what I came to call the “expatriate community,” those who had fled the city for a simpler life, but found themselves at cultural loose ends. Sue and Dave were even more alone: no parents, no siblings, no children. Sue was good company and willing to try new things. Their little cabin was decorated with pictures she had done, of trees and deer and dogs, by burning the drawing into the wood. They were good likenesses and fit well in their cabin. Was this art or craft? I decided not to care.
On good days we would swim at the Y across the Mississippi River in Iowa. I had to do my disciplined laps, but she gently floated on her back near the side of the pool, and just as gently flirted with the buffed guys in the sauna, teasing herself about her big boobs and me about my long legs. We went to one of those paint-pottery-on-your-own places, where you paint the bare pieces and they fire them for you. Just before Christmas, Sue spent two hours on an ornament, a small bear in a wreath, using every shade of brown, every tint of green, with the smallest possible brush. We had to leave because of closing time, but she said “I’m not done. I’ll be back tomorrow.” Tomorrow turned into a puking day, so we didn’t make it back. I asked her what happened, and she said she was waiting for test results.
The next year we had a New Year’s Eve party, which turned into an eight-inches-of-snow-blizzard, but Dave and Sue came anyway, walking bent against the wind up the hill to our house. Some of the other expatriates were there, and some of us played recorder, that vaguely woodwind instrument for those who played clarinet or flute in their youth, but didn’t have the embouchure, the cheek strength, to do it anymore. It has a vaguely haunting, Renaissance quality to it. I was getting mine out of its cloth case, and Sue asked if I was getting my vibrator ready. I told her no, mine was upstairs, maybe later. We all drank warm champagne, and slow danced to old Sinatra songs.
After that, I could never tell if Sue would be able to do anything, because she couldn’t predict the puking. I just had to show up and see what happened. Once I came to pick her up for swimming and after she was in the car she said “Stop,” got out into her driveway, heaved everything out and went in the cabin. I asked Dave all the usual questions: “What is going on? Is there anything I can do? “ The answers were always on the theme of “It comes and it goes,” and “The doctors are not sure.”
The next summer Sue started to fade away. After she and I had sung “Steal Away to Jesus” at my church, the only one in town that didn’t scare you away with sin, Sue was supposed to solo” The Lord’s Prayer.” She came in five minutes before the service and couldn’t get beyond “thy kingdom come.”
I gave a ladies’ luncheon in October. Sue walked down the two stairs to my patio carefully, holding her macaroni salad, because her legs had doubled in size and her feet were bulging around the straps of her sandals. I thought “edema,” and wanted to ask why, but didn’t because I knew the answer would be the same: silence, or “They’re not sure.”
All of us knew that Sue was dying. We didn’t know what to say or do. Dave started going to The Table every day, a place where anyone could come for lunch, no questions asked. On good days Sue came with, always bringing macaroni salad and chatting with people who had grown up in town, learning their stories. October stretched into winter, Sue more swollen every day, Dave shaking his head in sorrow or disbelief.
Dave called in February. He had found Sue on the floor, unconscious, and an ambulance had taken her to the closest hospital, as they are required by law to do. The closest hospital was not the best. We expatriates called it St. Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of death. We wondered what had 53 happened. No one seem to know. Sue was not one of those people who somehow stayed herself, despite medical institutions. The Sue we knew disappeared into unconsciousness that February day, and the Sue that came out was not someone we knew–no banter, no jokes. She did not even want to listen to music. Most of the time she just sat silent, watching the ever-present TV screen, without sound, answering yes or no if you asked her a question. I was very lucky that I talked to the Sue I knew the last time I saw her, but that was months away.
She stayed at St. Anubis a couple of weeks. I visited her every few days–the usual tubes, growing bruises where they had punctured her. Once when I was leaving, she mouthed “Thank you for coming,” and I thought maybe she was back, but she fell into the TV dream right away. When several of us visited, we talked around her: about how high the river was, and that Dave was really doing good work at The Table and The Pantry.
We nagged Dave for a diagnosis. We believed that if a problem could be named, a solution must exist. Dave didn’t know, couldn’t find out, but could always tell us how no one was paying attention to Sue, how the doctors changed every day, and how the janitors knew more than the doctors anyway. After two weeks at St. Anubis, Sue was moved to the hospital’s rehab center, which we called Go Home, You’re Better. By then, Sue’s legs and stomach were swollen with edema, bloating her small body. We pestered Dave. It was the puking, or maybe she had been drinking too much so her liver was affected. So, the answer was to see a gastrointestinal specialist right away in the city. We gave him a name, feeling good that we were helping, that we had an answer now that we had figured out the question. Dave told us he asked the doctors at Go Home, You’re Better, and they said she would die if she were moved. Dave went to what they called “consultations,” his only report being that they didn’t know what they were doing.
Go Home, You’re Better kicked Sue out after three weeks, sent her home, rehab completed because the insurance ran out. She could not make it to the sleeping loft, so she rolled onto the couch to sleep, wrapping herself in an ancient afghan. Three times she fell off the couch in the night, and Dave couldn’t lift her back in without help, so he called a teenage friend for help, and together they hoisted her back onto the couch. Sue muttered to the physical therapists who came to not use that tone of teachy voice with her. The physical therapists gradually dwindled, then disappeared.
Sue sat all day in front of the TV, watching it over her swollen belly. We expatriates visited and talked to her. When she didn’t answer, we talked anyway, hoping some word would catch her, bring her back. Once she asked where the bill was from Dr. Phillip, a very specific, and hence hopeful, request. Dave excavated the mound of papers at her feet to rescue it. Sue examined it, and told Dave to make sure it was paid, then sunk back into TV torpor. Leaving on icy steps, one of us said that she had lost the will to live.
Sue and Dave lived on Meals on Wheels. Dave was helpless to force her to do the physical therapy exercises; we were unable to name a new problem so we could come up with the right solution. I talked to the church pastor, in our helplessly reasonable way, agreeing that Dave could not take care of Sue anymore.
The next week Sue was moved to Big Prairie Nursing Home. Sue told us that they had put some of her artwork in the lobby. We didn’t see any, so we asked staff, who knew nothing about it. We brought some of her wood-burned pictures and put them up in her room. Sue never said anything about them.
Winter faded into spring. Sue was helicoptered to the University of Iowa Hospital because of convulsions. Convulsions? So now it’s the brain, we hectored Dave, so now what is the diagnosis? In March, gray beads of rain splattering the cheerful windows, I found Sue in a wheelchair, back at Big Prairie. I asked how the food was, and she said pretty good. And then she said she almost died the night she was taken to the University of Iowa Hospital, and that when she came back she blubbered to Dave to take her home for one night. Blubbered was the word she used and then she laughed. For one moment, Sue was there again. I kissed her goodbye as they wheeled her off to lunch. It was the last time.
The call came from a fellow expatriate while I was on vacation. Sue died yesterday. There was no use asking what she died from. Stomach? Liver? Brain? Maybe she just lost the will to live. When I got home I called Dave, asking about a memorial service, since she had been cremated. Dave said no, that Sue would not have wanted that.
We few, in the small town above the river, had our separate memories of Sue. Mine were about blue vodka, painting Christmas ornaments with great care, paddling in the pool, joking about vibrators. Dave still cannot let go of her stuff, the woodburning tools, the afghan, her clothes. At The Table they put a straw into a paper cup, put an index card on the straw: In Memory of Sue. Nothing else happened, besides the brief obit in the newspaper: beloved wife of David.
We hold onto such small memories, smoothed down into round pebbles, the kind people walk on without noticing, the kind that barely cause a ripple in the stream.