I stopped at the door, turned back, and rolled my eyes at him.
“Okay, okay. I know. I’m a jerk,” he said. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“I’m gonna miss all those donuts,” he said, and added in a mumble, “And the delicious legs on that little brunette.”
“You’re terrible,” I said, and left thinking maybe gallows humor rescued us on some days. In any case, it clearly rescued Dr. Black. Not getting emotionally involved was obviously easier for him than for me.
I walked down the hall and turned to the right, making my way to Kathy Harper’s room. It wasn’t the first trip I’d made from Dr. Black’s office with a message of this weight to deliver. Technically, it was his job to convey bad news but he hated doing it. And he knew I was very close with Kathy’s friends, and truly, I wasn’t going to tell them something they didn’t already know. But I was going to tell them something they didn’t want to hear. My heart was heavy.
I took a deep breath and slowly swung the door open. There was Kathy, peacefully sleeping in her bed, or so it seemed, with Suzanne seated on one side and Carrie on the other. Suzanne was checking her email on her smartphone and Carrie was flipping through a magazine. They looked up at me and smiled.
“Hey,” I said quietly. “How are y’all doing?”
“Hey, how are you, Lisa?” Suzanne said in a voice just above a whisper. “How was your weekend?”
What Suzanne and Carrie did not yet know was that Kathy was not really asleep but drugged and floating somewhere in what I hoped was a pain-free zone in between sleep and consciousness. I knew she could hear our every word.
“Well, I took Pickle over to Sullivans Island and we had a long walk. Then I drove down to Hilton Head to check on my parents. My dad cooked fish on the grill. We had a nice visit. How about y’all?”
“I had three weddings and a graduation party!” Suzanne said. “Crazy!”
“I helped,” Carrie said. “You know that Suzanne was desperate if she let me in the workshop.”
“Oh, hush! I would never have been able to get it all done without you and you know it!”
Suzanne owned a very popular boutique-sized floral design business. June was her busiest time of the year, followed by December, when she decorated the mantelpieces, swagged doors and staircases, and hung the wreaths of Charleston’s wealthiest citizens. Suzanne was a rare talent.
“Well, I was hoping to have a word with y’all. Should we step outside for a moment?”
“Sure,” Suzanne said.
They stood and followed me to a small unassigned office that served as a private place for conversations not meant to be heard by the patients. It held only an unremarkable desk, three folding chairs, and a box of tissues.
Before I could sit Carrie spoke.
“This is really bad news, isn’t it?” she said.
Carrie Collins had recently buried her husband in Asheville, North Carolina, and was enjoying an extended visit with Suzanne while her late husband’s greedy, hateful children contested his will. And she had become great friends with Kathy while working at Suzanne’s design studio. She’d told me that she arrived on Suzanne’s doorstep with only what she could fit in her trunk.
“Well, it’s not great,” I said. “Kathy had a really difficult night last night. So the doctor ordered morphine for her and that’s why she’s resting now. He thinks it’s time to begin administering pain meds on a regular basis.”
“Is she already going into organ failure?” Carrie said.
Boy, I thought, for a nonprofessional she sure is familiar with how we die.
“Oh God!” Suzanne exclaimed. “She can’t go yet! I promised her I’d take her out to the beach!”
“The minute I came in this morning I could smell death in every corner of her room,” Carrie said.
“Don’t be such a pessimist. She’s just having a setback, isn’t she?” Suzanne asked. “Do you think we can get her out to Isle of Palms? Maybe by next week?”
“To be honest?” I said. “Who knows? She has a living will that dictates the care she wants for herself, but when she’s unable to make decisions, like now . . . You have her health care proxy. Her will says she does not want to be resuscitated or intubated.”
“Yes. I know that,” Suzanne said.
“Anyway, we feel the time has come to provide maximum comfort for her. Her living will also says, as I’m sure you know, that she asked for pain medication as needed.”
“Are you asking my permission?” Suzanne said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is she in pain now?” Carrie said.
“She was last night, but as you can see, she’s resting comfortably now,” I said.
“Then give her whatever she needs,” Suzanne said. “Please. God, I don’t want her to suffer!”
“She won’t suffer, will she?” Carrie said.
“We will do everything in our power to see that she doesn’t. I promise,” I said.
“Is this the end?”
This was the question every single person who worked at Palmetto House dreaded. I gave her the best answer I could.
“Oh, Suzanne. If I knew the answer to that, I’d be, well . . . I don’t know what I’d be. Einstein? The truth is that no one can precisely predict the hour of someone’s death. But there are signs. As she gets closer to the end, things will change, and I promise I will tell you all I know.”
Suzanne’s bottom lip quivered and she burst into tears, burying her face in her hands. Carrie’s eyes were brimming with tears too. She put her arm around Suzanne’s shoulder and gave her a good squeeze. They were both devastated. I pulled tissues from the box on the desk and offered them. Even though I’d seen this wrenching scenario play through more times than I wanted to remember, this seemed different. It felt personal. And suddenly I was profoundly saddened. I had become involved. In my mind, seeing Kathy Harper’s demise was like witnessing a terrible crash in slow motion.
“I’m okay. Sorry,” Suzanne said. “It’s just that this whole thing is so unfair.”
“Yes. It is terribly unfair,” I said, “But I can tell you this. Everyone around here has seen y’all come and go a million times since Kathy came to us. And every time you visit, her spirits perk up, and by the time you leave, she honestly feels better. Who could ask for better friends? Y’all have done everything that anyone could do.”
“Thank you,” Suzanne said, and then paused, gathering her thoughts. “Oh God! I really hoped, or I had hoped, that she’d get to a place where she could come to the beach to convalesce. The salt air would do her so much good.”
“Well, for now I think we just take one day at a time.”
“Yes,” Carrie said. “God, this stinks. This whole business stinks.”
“It sure does. But, listen. Keep talking to her, even when she appears to be sleeping,” I said, “because she can probably hear you. She just can’t respond. Y’all are helping her in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“And shouldn’t we pray?” Carrie said. “Prayer can’t hurt.”
“That’s right,” Suzanne said to no one in particular.
“Prayer helps everyone. I’ve seen some pretty amazing things happen when people pray.”
They looked at me and I knew they were hoping against reason that I was going to tell them I’d seen people miraculously cured. I’d heard of miracles, lots of them in fact, but I had not seen one. I was sorry. I wished I had. I wanted to give them hope where there was so very little, but I failed. I could not lie to them or give them false reassurance.
As the day crawled by, I became more and more disheartened. Every time I went by Kathy Harper’s room, she seemed a little worse. By the time I got home, I was beside myself with dread and all sorts of claustrophobic and woeful feelings. But Pickle was at the door and all but swooned with
happiness to have me back. Dogs were so great. I adored mine and could never resist her enthusiasm.
“Hey, little girl! Hey, my sweet Pickle!” I reached down and scooped her up in my arms and she licked my face clean. “Did you go outside today? Did John and Mayra come and take you to the park?”
Pickle barked and wiggled and barked some more. Apparently, John and Mayra Schmidt, my dog-loving next door neighbors, had indeed taken Pickle somewhere where she found something to roll around with or to challenge because she smelled like shampoo. They were retired and kept a set of keys to my house. Mayra spent a lot of time making note of the personal comings and goings of all our neighbors. She was always peeping through her blinds like Gladys Kravitz on that old television program Bewitched. I loved her to death.
“What did you do, Miss Pickle, to deserve a bath today? Hmm? Did you find a skunk?”
Pickle loved skunks more than any other mammal on this earth. Maybe it was the way they moved in their seductive stealth, low to the ground. They held some kind of irresistible allure. That much was certain.
She barked again and I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that she said yes, she’d been rolling around with a dead skunk. But most dog owners thought their dogs spoke in human words as well as dog-speak. I took her leash from the hook on the wall and attached it to her collar.
“Let’s go, sweetie,” I said, and we left through the front door.
John and Mayra were outside getting into their car. I waved to them and they stopped to talk.
“Hey! How are y’all doing?” I said.
“Hey! Good thing we had tomato juice in the house!” Mayra said. “Our little Pickle ran off with Pepé Le Pew this morning!”
“Pickle,” I said in my disappointed mommy voice.
I looked down at her and she looked at the ground, avoiding eye contact with me.
“So John baptized her with a huge can of tomato juice and then I shampooed her in the laundry room sink.”
Mayra squatted to the ground and held out her hand. Pickle was so happy to be in Mayra’s favor again that she pulled hard against her leash, yanking me forward.
“Thank you! She sure does love you,” I said.
“We love her too. Little rascal. Good thing I went to Costco,” John said. “I stocked up on enough tomato juice to make Bloodies for the whole darn town!”
John was famous for his Bloody Marys but refused to share the recipe. I had tried many times to figure it out and finally decided, because he grew jalapeños, that he must’ve been using his own special hot sauce. And maybe celery seed.
“Well, good! Call me when the bar opens! And thanks again for taking care of my little schnookle. She’s like my child.”
“Ours too!” Mayra said. “I love her to death. She gets me out of the house, and golly, she’s good company.”
“Thanks. I think so too. Come on, you naughty girl, let’s get your human some exercise.”
We walked the streets of my neighborhood, passing one midcentury brick ranch-style home after another. Some had carports and some had front porches but they all had a giant glass window in the living room. Some people parked their boats in the yard and others didn’t even have paved driveways, so the cars were just pulled onto the property.
After my near bankruptcy—which is a story I’ll tell you about how I wound up with boxes and boxes of yoga mats—I was basically homeless. Fortunately for me, my mother had elderly friends who owned this house, which is in the Indian Village section of old Mount Pleasant. My financial disaster coincided with their decision to move to Florida because our climate was too cold for them. I know. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Here I am swearing up and down that it’s a sauna outside and someone else thinks it’s too cold. Maybe it’s my age. Hmm. Anyway, I do whatever maintenance there is to be done. I can mow the grass and turn on sprinklers with the best of them.
The house is an old unrenovated ranch constructed of deep burgundy bricks that would never win a beauty pageant. One bathroom is blue and white tile with black trim and the other is mint green with beige. The kitchen is completely uninspiring, and no matter how much I scrub the linoleum kitchen floor it never looks clean. It’s pretty gross, but for the cost of utilities, five hundred dollars a month in rent, and a swift kick to the lawn mower, I have a roof over my head. And one for my daughter when she visits, which is, so far, not much. We’re not speaking and I’ll tell you about that too.
So Pickle and I walked around the block and she sniffed everything under the late-day sun while I looked at other people’s landscaping, wondering how this one grew hydrangea in the blistering heat and why that one’s dead roses weren’t cut back. And I wondered how much longer Kathy Harper could and would hang on to the thinning gossamer threads between her life and the great unknown.
Later on, in the evening after a dinner of salad in a bag and half of a cold pork chop, I called my daughter. She didn’t take the call. I thought about that for a moment and it made me feel worse. I didn’t leave a message because she would know from caller ID that it was me who had called. Then I called my mother. It was either sit on the old sofa and watch Law & Order: SVU until I couldn’t stand it anymore, do sun salutations to relax my body, or call my mother. I sort of needed my mom and some sympathy.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Mom. You busy?”
“Never too busy for my darling daughter! What’s going on?” She put her hand over the receiver and called out. “Alan? For heaven’s sake! Turn that thing down!”
“All right! All right!”
My father yelled from the background and I could see him in my mind’s eye: pushed back in his leather recliner, fumbling with the remote to his sixty-inch television that had its own pocket in the chair opposite the cup holder that held his beer and yet another pocket for his reading glasses and the latest issue of TV Guide.
“I just wanted to talk for a minute. I had sort of a rough day.”
“What happened? Gosh, it was nice to see you last weekend.”
“You too. Well, we have this really sweet patient at Palmetto House who’s got terrible cancer and it’s like almost the end, you know?”
“Loss has always been hard for you to handle.”
“Well, Mom, death is hard for most people to deal with.”
“You spend too much time dwelling on the negative. Why don’t you join a book club? Or an online dating thing? My book club is coming here this Thursday night. What should I serve them?”
“Oh, just go to Costco and buy a brick of cheese and a box of crackers. And I can’t join book clubs and dating sites because that stuff costs money. You know that.”
“Well, then, do the free things. Go for a walk! Take a book out of the library! Get interesting! Go back to teaching yoga, but in someone else’s studio!”
“Mom! Stop!”
“I’ll tell you, ever since Marianne moved to Denver and you closed your business, you’ve been on a big fat bummer and it’s time for you to snap out of it! All this wallowing—”
“Mom!”
“I’m just saying that you’ll regret your wallowing when you’re my age. You’ll get up one morning and every bone in your body will be killing you. You still have a lot of living left to do, so don’t waste it!”
“Mom! Stop! I didn’t call you to—”
“Here! Talk to your father! Alan! Come talk some sense into your daughter!”
“I’m busy! Just tell her I love her and to quit spending money!”
“Your father’s right. Now, how’s Marianne?”
“How would I know? She never calls.”
“See? There you go again! Why can’t you call her?”
If I told her why Marianne and I weren’t speaking she’d have a heart attack. Somehow, I got off the phone, stared at it, and thought, That’s all he ever says. And she?
??s always telling me what’s wrong with me! Then I had a terrible thought. What if one of my parents died and the surviving one wanted to live with me? Oh! God! No! I sort of said a blasphemous prayer, petitioning the Lord for my mother to go first because I could tolerate my father’s company without every moment feeling like I was having a deep scaling in the dentist’s chair. But my mother was overbearing and loud and frankly not very nice to me. We would kill each other! But living with Dad would be terrible too. First of all, I couldn’t afford to take care of him. Second, having Dad in my house would obliterate any hope of an intimate life. (Yes, I still had hope.) And third, I might be a nurse but being a personal nurse to my father wasn’t something I could easily do. We were both ridiculously modest and those personal moments of his hygienic routine would be so awkward. On top of it all, he was so set in his ways. He wouldn’t be very happy if the refrigerator wasn’t arranged by size and category or the spice drawer wasn’t alphabetized. Worse, my stupid brother, Alan Jr., and his horrible wife, Janet, would want no part of my parents’ care but they’d want quarterly expense reports on how this arrangement was affecting their inheritance. Oh Lord, please be merciful. Take Carol and Alan St. Clair home to heaven at the very same moment while they sleep.
On that night life seemed dreary, but when the sun came up in the morning, I was filled with irrational happiness. And it proved to be irrational. When I got to Palmetto House I found Suzanne and Carrie with Kathy as she took her final breaths. I cried with them. I couldn’t help it. I’d had no idea she would die so soon.
“Listen,” I said, as soon as I could speak without the fear of sobbing, “I can help if you’d like, with phone calls or arrangements. Just tell me how I can help.”
My words hung in the air for a few minutes until the reality began to sink into Suzanne and Carrie’s minds.
“There’s no next of kin,” Carrie said. “Isn’t that terrible?”
“She wanted to be cremated and she wanted a Mass to be said,” Suzanne said.
“And she didn’t want flowers. She worked at a florist but she didn’t want flowers,” Carrie said. “No flowers at her own funeral. Oh God.”