STAGES OF MISSING

Summer is getting old.  Because there hasn’t been much rain the erratic yellowing or deteriorating green of the trees seems like more like a sign of decline than the natural phenomenon of fall.  I’m done with it.

No, that’s not true.  It has nothing to do with the season. It has everything to do with Ken.

(See “Missing Person” July post)

It’s as if his physical body and his mind are at war.  Sometimes the cancer has the upper hand, and seeking relief from pain is the issue that sets him apart.  A need to be comfortable.   To be able to walk around while others are sitting.  Small adjustments.  Other times his mind takes him away from reality and pain isn’t what’s foremost.

When he asks me in the middle of the afternoon or in the middle of the night–it’s random­–“What’s happening?” or “When are we going home?” or maybe:  “Where is everyone?  Is someone else here?” I can feel tears pressing just behind my eyes.  That’s where they are most of the time, pressing, filling my head and ready to materialize at any moment.  Other times he knows just where he is.  He hasn’t failed to recognize anyone. Could it be that's still to come?

Ken used to say in no uncertain terms that he would never want to live if his mind were slipping away.  Yet he is.  His body is slipping away along with his mind.  It is also clear that the person he was, the person who would not want to live with a mind that was slipping away, is not the person he is now.   This present person doesn’t have ideas like that.  This person lives in the now.  He accepts what is, because there is no other reality.  When that other guy, the one from the past, appears–and he does sometimes, with full awareness–I feel it like a knife wound, the full tragedy of it.  Is it better to forget?

People lie and steal for drugs like oxycondone and percoset.  They’re looking for peace, joy, thrills, happiness, calm–something better than what they’ve got.  They take the drugs to get high.  Where is the land of “high” anyway?  Why couldn’t those same drugs Ken takes for actual physical pain make him high?  High would be nice.  High would be good.  Do they bring peace, joy, thrills, happiness, calm?  No!  All they do besides mitigating the pain is make him groggy, sleepy.  They push the pain into the background.  Until the dose was increased he slept less during the day.  Now he sleeps more.  Much more.  Sometimes I see him sleeping on the sofa and he is all folded in upon himself, as if the air has gone out of him.  An image of Stephen Hawking comes to mind, and I shudder.  Would it be better to be in more pain but awake?  No!  Isn’t it better to have less pain and sleep more?  No!  It is a trade-off about which there is no real choice and no happy result. 

We sit on the porch and look at the sun setting behind the mountains.  The view fails to soothe.  Jokes fail to connect.  Stories fail to make sense.  Ideas become fragments of thought.  Conversations are haphazard, unsatisfying.  I point out a stick bug outside attached to the screen, an unusual sight.  He turns to look at it with an appreciative smile, but his admiration of small living things is only half there.  It wasn’t more than a month ago that I was away for a good part of an afternoon, leaving him alone, not something I do these days.  Worried that he had been alone for several hours I came back home to check and found him having a lovely time:  his microscope was on the rear patio and he had been absorbed in examining a bug.  This is how he always was, and I knew that at that moment on that particular afternoon he was okay. 

Walking stick on the outside, my hand on the inside for scale.
This bug hung around the outside of the porch for days.

Strange things happen:  I make a lemon pie and Ken cuts slices that he places on pieces of toast.  He gets up early one morning and starts to make coffee but in distraction fills the dog’s bowl with instant coffee.  This entails a visit to the vet for induced vomiting.  At 3 AM Ken wakes up, gets dressed and heads downstairs.  We watch a DVD of “House of Cards” but Ken finds it makes him anxious, walks out.  (To tell the truth, this reaction doesn’t seem all that odd.  I get the same feeling about our current political reality.)  Now and then he forgets steps of personal care.  He becomes obsessive about small things, like locking the doors, folding notes into small squares, closing the sun umbrella, tying up the hammock when it’s windy, tightly wrapping up the package of bread on the counter. I realize these are small protections:  they are ways of keeping things safe.  It reminds me of how he long had a habit of putting important things in “safe” places.  Things like a Christmas gift, tucked away so securely that when the date arrived he couldn’t find it himself.  Security.  Funny.