Chapter 8: Jacob Spills His Guts Ew!

Continuing Jacob’s Story.

I was 24 years old, making good money in my new investment research job. Research convinced me to buy a house for the potential appreciation, but I needed to have tenants to cover the mortgage payments. So I buy this house with an internal in-law suite, I will live there, and rent out the rest of the building.

My tenants are a middle-aged couple, Ginny and Robert. Robert had been a high-level corporate officer, but he was permanently early-retired. That was because he had a complete disability from a neurological disease: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Ginny worked as an LMFT, that’s a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, certified by the state government. She would see clients in a little office space set up in the front of the house.

She also was counseling me, although I didn’t realize it at first. First, she got me to leave open the connecting door between my unit and the rest of the house. This was so that when I smelled the delicious dinners she made, I was unable to resist their invitation to join them. Very sneaky.

Of course, she was highly aware of my various emotional and psychological issues.

But our dinners were relaxed conversations. For the first time in my life, I was interacting easily with other people. It started to feel normal to me. Robert and I would discuss business news. Ginny would, within the bounds of privacy, talk about her past and her current clients (using invented names for privacy).

Again, she was subtle, as she told a lot of stories about men who were introverted, who were shy, who had trouble showing or feeling affection. Men who had overcome these issues.

As is unavoidable, Robert was deteriorating from his ALS. It was making him progressively weaker as the weeks and months went by. He went from using a four-wheel walker, to a wheelchair, to being bedridden. We moved our dinners to the master bedroom so he could eat with us while propped up in his mechanical bed.

Well before that, Ginny and I spoke privately about her husband. It was before the pandemic, but I was already working from home. (My investment research job was entirely on-line, so there was no issue with my employer to arrange that.) Ginny asked me to be an extra hand for Robert in case he needed help while she was busy with clients in the front of the house.

I was happy to assist as needed. But I asked Ginny, “You guys seem to have plenty of money, why have you avoided hiring skilled help for him?” Ginny explained herself, in a way that affected me greatly. I remember very clearly everything she said to me then.

They had met and married in college, and Ginny was soon pregnant. But, when she went to deliver, there were complications. Bad ones. Ginny was dreadfully injured during labor, when her uterus ruptured and her baby died while still inside her body. In the midst of that incredible tragedy she very nearly bled to death.

“Within the space of 40 minutes, Robert lost his baby and almost lost me,” she explained. “But they brought me back, somehow. I went home nineteen days later, minus the wreckage of my womb. Robert had made sure the nursery had been emptied and returned to being a guest room. But I still went in there and cried and cried for our loss. Of course I needed, and received, psychiatric help. He made sure of that.”

“But in all the other hours and days he was my rock, he held me, and comforted me, and soothed me. It was months, but I fought my way back with his faithful help. That’s when I went back to school for my counseling degree and license, and why I do this work now.”

And so, Ginny explained, his illness, the ALS, meant it was then her chance to help her husband, in any and every way she could.

Hearing all of this was too much. Something broke inside me. I cried that day, and for days following. I’m sure Ginny was concerned by my over-reaction.

I think this was the first time I fully understood what love and caring for another person could be like.

I thought of Robert in that ghastly situation. What it must be like to be in a loving marriage relationship, expecting your first child, and then have it all be almost ripped away. The unfairness, that a good man like him was denied the chance to be a father. And then, in his later life to be afflicted with this truly terrible, untreatable, and terminal disease—the ALS.

I went to Robert and told him I now knew Ginny’s hospital story. That I would be helping out with his needs. That he could count on me, not as his landlord, but as family.

As time went on, Robert lost more strength. We stopped putting clothes on him, it was a pointless hassle since he wasn’t leaving the house and lifting him up in order to get shirts and pants on him was a heavy effort for Ginny.

Now, the sad thing about ALS is that Robert had little muscle control, he was weak as a kitten. But his genitals weren’t affected, he still had sensation, he still had erections. For convenience, we had a urinal bottle with a four foot long hose. He would pee into the end of that hose and the urine would drain into an attached bottle, which we would empty and wash later.

So I come in one day, she’s with him and holding the hose, and he’s pointed straight up like a flagpole. “Oh, Jacob, Robert says he can’t pee when he’s hard.”

“He’s right, Ginny, we men have kind of a valve. He just needs to think about algebra for a while, and then he can pee.”

“Robert, there is NO ALGEBRA when your wife is with you.” Ginny bent over and gave him an exceptional blowjob, right in front of me. I was going to step out, but he came very quickly, and then about a minute later he was filling the bottle with pee. When I left the room to wash out the bottle, Ginny moved up on the bed with him. They were kissing and hugging and silly with happiness.