I spent Thanksgiving of last year with my dear friend Carolyn, well aware that it would be her last Thanksgiving. Suffering with Stage 4 cancer, she knew it too but she was still hoping for a miracle of indeterminate origin. It was like a game we all play in some form: Once you admit bad news out loud or even to yourself, you feel like you're closing off all possibility of that miracle.
She spent the last ten months of her life in a building that was part Skilled Nursing Facility and part Assisted Living Home. It was very nice for what it was but the meals were not good and they were not in alignment with the diet Carolyn felt she should eat. Either I or my assistant John would bring her food, or sometimes I could arrange to have a restaurant deliver. I bought her a little refrigerator for her room so she could store leftovers and food which did not require heating.
Now and then, she felt well enough that I could take her out to a restaurant. Last Thanksgiving Day, we planned to do just that. I made a reservation at a very nice cafe for 4 PM but by 1:30 or so in the afternoon, it was obvious Carolyn was in no shape to leave the place where she was living. I made a dozen phone calls and finally found a restaurant that was willing to make up two turkey dinners "to go" that were configured for her dietary requirements and my food allergies. When I got to the Assisted Living Home with them, the nurses were clearing away the last of the meal they'd served the residents and patients there. It was obviously better chow than what I'd brought and it would have been fine for both Carolyn and me.
Most of the residents there were effectively alone in the world. They had each other, sort of, but there weren't a lot of relatives around. More than a few of them told Carolyn that they envied her having me visiting her several times a week and seeing how John would bring her whatever she needed. She was probably the youngest resident in her part of the complex and when she was well enough to leave her room and walk (or be wheelchaired) around, the sunniest and cheeriest.
Thanksgiving Day, 2012. Photo by me.
Carolyn was simply the kind of person it was impossible not to love, even if all she'd done to deserve it was to smile in your direction. During her final weeks when she never left her bed, let alone her room, the others there would stop me in the hall and ask with true concern, "Is she any better?" The answer was always no. In her last week or so, it got around the building that the wonderful lady in room 305 wouldn't be living there or anywhere much longer. When they saw me in the halls then, they didn't inquire. They just nodded in sympathy.
I was lying in bed this morning thinking how last Thanksgiving was, to use an overused phrase, the Beginning of the End. It was around then that Carolyn dying became something that could happen shortly instead of off in some indeterminate and fuzzy future. Her very wise Palliative Care Doctor told me she would probably be unable to walk by the beginning of February and unable to talk by the beginning of March. The end, he said, would come in mid-March. If you added two weeks to every projection, he was right on target.
Every time he told me something like that, I couldn't help but think of the joke about the doctor who told a man he had six months to live and then, when the man couldn't pay his bill, the doctor gave him another six months. My thoughts shifted, as I'm told thoughts usually do in these situations, from "I don't want to lose her" to "I hope for her sake it's over soon." I was not unaware that her passing, sooner rather than later, would be for my sake, as well. You try not to connect your comparatively-mild problem with what the sick person is going through but since you suffer together over the same thing, it's silly to deny the link.
From Thanksgiving of 2016 until it was over are easily the saddest four months of my life. I hope they always will be because I'd hate to think I have four sadder months in my future.
Today, I am thankful that I had her in my life for almost twenty years. I am also thankful that her death was not much, much worse for her because it certainly could have been — and again, for me as well as her. But overwhelmingly, of course, for her.