By Lisa Richter
I’m sitting in our garden wrapped in a quilt, my body warmly protected, my head exposed to gusts of chilled air. The weather has turned; a storm is blowing in. Adrienne Rich’s collection of prose, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence rests by my side. I’ve returned to this book several times over the past years; its pages are marked with comments, story starts, my own spontaneous poems. I open the book to find an oh! in the margin beside a passage I’ve underlined. The liar, it begins, leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
I consider what part of my life might be a lie, perhaps to some degree most, for my body has lied to my mind, my mind to my body, and I think of Lyn during her years of treatment, how we never talked about the end, for it wasn’t going to happen, how her doc never mentioned the end for it wasn’t going to happen, and how my mind told my body that it wasn’t going to happen, though my body knew the truth, and hadn’t Lyn, too?
Lying is done with words, Adrienne writes, and also with silence.
Tucked between pages of the book, I find a loose-leaf sheet folded into a neat rectangle. It is wide-ruled, threeholed. Pale blue horizontal lines, one long thin vertical red. I unfold the paper, and with it the memory. Three simple words stacked one atop each other, a list written with care in loopy cursive, the p connected to the t, the t to the u.
1 Neptune
2 Neptune
3 Omega
The shock of these words. The uselessness of uncovering them now, six months later. I don’t recall stashing them here; how strange to have silenced them within these pages urging the spoken truth.
Her name was Marie. She’d had hair dyed the color of butter and shaped in a teased style—rolled bangs, puffed out sides smoothed stiff with spray—a look which dated her and made her somewhat unreal. She was the second try of hospice at our home; the first, Carol, had arrived with a pitying look and an “I’m sorry I’m here….” and was sent packing immediately
The discussed plan was to use hospice just for a while, until Lyn recovered from the lung surgery, to eliminate for a couple days (maybe weeks) the exhausting drives back and forth to the hospital. It had been my suggestion, impelled by awaking to Lyn’s gasps for air in the middle of the night, panics which frightened us both. Just for a while, I’d promised Lyn, though our parents had been in hospice and our experience spoke otherwise. Just for a while, though for them, as for nearly all, it had been a one-way passage. Marie offered encouragement. “We have had patients who’ve entered our care,” she emphasized to Lyn, “then left, then sometimes came back in, then left again. It requires a little bit of paperwork, that’s all.” A sympathetic shrug, a tight smile.
Alone with Marie afterwards, outside where I am now, I remember pointing out a cluster of magnolia blossoms birthed just that morning, their velvety white petals falling open like bowls, cupping the sun’s glowing warmth. Marie didn’t look. She took a blank sheet of paper from a folder and uncapped a black pen and this is what she said:
When it is over, here is who you call.
Her tone was abrupt, but not harsh. She was, I reasoned, being professional. Death was her specialty.
“Neptune,” Marie said as she wrote the name of the mortuary following the numeral “1” on the lined paper, a sizable diamond and a diamond-inlaid wedding band flashing on her hand. “It was a family business once. Terrible sibling feud. They split, yet each kept the name.” On the line below she wrote a numeral “2” followed by “Neptune” again. “Either will do…” she said. She paused and then went ahead with the story. “Some of our patient families aren’t aware that there are two…and both local. It’s happened that they’ve called one for the pickup and accidentally been connected to the other for the ashes and been informed the body isn’t there, was never there.” She chuckled as she wrote Omega down as a third option. This was not funny. I wanted to tell her she needed to leave, but then Lyn called from inside and Marie got up to tend to her.
After a couple minutes, I followed Marie downstairs to our bedroom.
There had been many firsts, but metering out morphine in a syringe to my love came along unexpected. Roxynol, it was called. Marie drew a picture of a sucker and a bottle, using the same careful movements with which she’d written the names of the mortuaries. “Give her, when she needs it, .25,” she said to me, explaining its position on the gauge. “That is ¼ the way up. The center is .5.” She studied my face, touched my hand. Her job involved interacting daily with people like me, the numbed ones who loved, who stood by and watched and waited, who eventually nodded yes to the worst of news.
When Lyn died one week later, our friend Andy picked up the phone and called the local mortuary, McCormick and Sons, a fake stone façade building on a gravel lot with a small fountain in the front. It was to this sullen place we went the following day, he by my side, to sit in the office and discuss the options: the cost of Lyn’s cremation, when it would take place, which vessel would contain her ashen remains.
Who are you? The woman hovering in the mortuary’s vapid front room wanted to know. During the preceding years of hospital visits and chemo treatments, everyone had wanted to know. You a relative? A friend? “Her partner,” I’d say, and they’d nod – whether doctor, nurse, or undertaker—and they’d know that legally this meant nothing, but heart-wise it meant I was being ripped in half.
I filled out the cremation forms, signed them, spoke a couple yes’s and no’s, maybe a thank you at the end, Andy there, gentle witness, holding steady for me. I wrote a check, and we left, terrorized. “You did good,” he said.
Would Neptune, Neptune, or Omega have been any different? Any less harrowing than the goth woman who opened the door of the mortuary when I returned to pick up Lyn’s ashes? Black gypsy cloth, dyed raven hair, a face as bland and colorless as moon dust, the foyer in which she stood, an unlit gray. She slid the canister across a wooden desk toward me, pushing it with the tips of her fingers. The voice rasping in her throat said “Sign, and you can go.”
“I’m sorry,” Lyn had said just a week earlier to friends when they came to visit before departing on a trip; they’d brought birthday cards and candles for her 60th birthday which was, in fact, this day, the day I cradled the small canister of her ashes in my arms.
“I’m sorry, baby,” was all I could think to say as I settled the canister in the car’s trunk, propped between books and boxes for the ride home. I’m sorry. Not an apology but an admission of utter helplessness. The ultimate surrender of nothing more to give.
A puff of wind descends in an exhausted sigh. I refold the loose-leaf sheet and return it to Adrienne’s book, its pages flipping softly beside me.
We never said goodbye.
How does one voice the inconceivable? Our farewells during the final weeks took the form of spontaneous guttural wails, begun by Lyn and joined in by me, indulged for a couple moments then halted as swiftly as they’d taken hold.
I’ve saved some of Lyn’s phone messages, listening to them when I feel strong enough, when the crave of their comfort is greater than the sadness I know they will also bring. Her faith was unshakable. In one of the last recordings, she confides in her characteristic sanguine tone that she’s just awoken and is breathing somewhat freer, the aches are somewhat less, perhaps things have finally turned around. She pauses, an intimacy. Then the whisper, I love you, her words absolute