Chapter 6

In the years that have passed since Rebecca and I decided to end our affair, my life has taken many twists and turns, as probably has anybody else's life. Some of the things that transpired were good, and others not so good. I guess we take what life sends our way, hoping for the best, but knowing that sometimes things just don't go the way we want.

For the first five or six years, I kept track of Rebecca, looking up her address and phone number on Internet web sites. The place where she worked also had a web site with articles written by her, sometimes with pictures. She was always smiling, always looking happy.

And maybe she was keeping track of me, too. On more than one occasion my phone at home or work would ring, but no one would be there. I'd say hello a couple of times, and then the phone would go dead, almost as if someone was listening just before hanging up.

But one day it wasn't her name at the web site anymore, it was that of another woman. And when I tried to check her home address and phone number, my searches came back empty. Maybe she'd moved on to someplace else. I didn't want to think that maybe something else had happened to her.

In my life, my wife and I continued to be husband and wife. But in many ways we were just going through the motions, just living together in a platonic relationship. We enjoyed each others' company most of the time, neither of us having the energy to argue anymore. We went out together to restaurants, movies, and so on. But I guess we were just really good friends. I certainly didn't want to take up with anyone else, and I think my wife didn't either.

Almost every year we went to our favorite place on Earth, Hawaii, specifically to the island of Maui. If you've never been, you simply must go there at least once in your life. It's paradise on earth.

I worked for a few more years, then finally decided I had enough money to retire. I was 59 years-old and my wife was 63. We were thinking about retiring to Hawaii as I recall, and had started to look at real estate brochures for condos. I was hoping to find a place on or near a golf course. I wanted to die like Bing Crosby, out on the course, dropping dead doing something I really loved doing.

But I guess it was not to be, at least not in the way I had hoped at that time. One day my wife came home from work complaining of severe headaches. Even though I had retired, my wife continued to work because she really loved her job. And being self-employed, she saw no reason to stop.

At first we thought her headaches were a return of the migraines she suffered when she first reached menopause. She took some over-the-counter pain pills and initially they seemed to work. But when even those pills would no longer help her, she went to the doctor.

After lots of tests, the headaches getting worse all along, the doctors at our clinic were still confused and sent us to a specialist a couple of hundred miles away in another city.

The specialists gave my wife a new type of catscan than what was available in our hometown. She had to spend the night in the hospital the night before. I held her hand as she was wheeled from her room down to the examination room. She went in with the nurse while I went in the waiting room.

The test was only supposed to take 30 minutes. There was a little prep work to be done and she would be given a sedative, not because it was going to be painful or anything, but because she was going to have to be perfectly still. In addition, her blood pressure needed to be low, and the sedative had something extra in it to do that.

45 minutes passed, then an hour. Another half hour passed, and I wondered if they had forgotten about me. So I went up to her room to see if she gotten back yet. But the room was empty.

I got back to the waiting room just in time to see one of the doctors I'd met earlier leaving.

"Here I am, doctor," I said.

"Oh, there you are. I was just looking for you."

The look on his face told me that the news he was about to deliver was not completely the news we'd been hoping for.

"All along we thought your wife was having a type of tumor that is very rare. One in a million get it, it's so rare in fact."

He looked very serious, as if he was explaining it to a medical class. He continued.

"The test we gave your wife confirmed our suspicion. I won't go into technical details on why one scan shows it and another doesn't, but the tumor is not operable."

"So, she's going to die?", I asked.

"Probably not right away, but already it's started to take a firm grip on the area of her brain where it's situated."

I stood there like a dummy, fathoming what I'd just heard.

"So what's going to happen?", I asked.

"Well, I guess there's no easy way to say it, so I'll just be blunt. The tumor is growing rapidly and will continue to grow until there's no more room in her skull. The increased brain pressure will probably be excruciatingly painful. At that point she'll probably lose consciousness, never to regain it. We could drill holes in her skull to relieve the pressure, and even cut out a panel to let her brain expand out of her skull.

"But all that would do is delay the inevitable. If we don't cut any holes in her head to relieve the pressure, she'll probably succumb to the tumor within five or six weeks. With the holes, maybe another three or four beyond that.

"My suggestion is that you take her home, make her comfortable. We'll give you some drugs to help ease her pain, pills at first, then we'll install a drip line so you can give her the pain medication via in-line injection.

"I have to warn you, at some point she'll lose consciousness and she'll never come out of it. Her pain receptors will still be working, so even thought she's not awake you'd still have to inject her.

"If you don't think you can do any of this, let me know and I'll recommend a couple of good hospices to you. There's nothing else we can do for her. Keeping her here at the hospital would just be wasting a bed. Besides, she'll probably feel better dying at home."

"Maybe I should get a second opinion," I said.

"Well, we brought in a doctor from the university. He pretty much wrote the book on brain tumors, this kind in particular. He's the nation's foremost authority. He was good enough to come over, that's why it took so long to get back to you. But he agreed with our diagnosis. You could go and get another opinion, but to be quite honest I think you'd be wasting your time and money for nothing more than false hope."

"So what's next?", I asked.

"We've taken her back up to her room. We'll give her a couple of hours to regain her senses, then we'll discharge her and you can go home."

I stood there not knowing what to say. He'd spelled it all out pretty thoroughly.

"I'm sorry to have to be the bearer of such bad news. I'm more sorry than you can know how much I regret not being able to do anything more for her."

"Thank you for all you've done, doctor."

He put his hand on my shoulder for a moment, then turned to walk away.

"One more question, if I may."

The doctor turned to face me, waiting for me to continue.

"If we had come in right when she began having the headaches a couple of months ago, could anything have been done then?"

"No. Once the headaches come it's already too late. Even if we had caught it when it was still microscopic, it's doubtful we could have done anything. This type of tumor is extremely agressive. In past cases we've been successful cutting them out, but they always come back. And they don't respond to chemical therapy, either.

"So no use beating yourself up about anything. There's nothing you or anyone else could have done."

"Any idea about what causes these things?"

"Nobody knows. Maybe one day we'll come up with answers, but today...".

The doctor held his palms up and shrugged his shoulders. He pressed his lips together and exhaled audibly, then turned and walked away.

When I went up to my wife's room, she was wide awake sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked up at me with tear stained eyes.

"They told you?", I asked gently.

She nodded her head looking at me sadly.

"I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I'm so sorry. I feel so useless."

I started crying, too, and we embraced, sobbing in each others' arms. It was the first meaningful embrace we'd had for a long time. I felt very guilty that it came at a time when it was too late for her, for both of us.

I don't want to belabor the sad story of the rest of my wife's life, so I'll be brief and not get into too many details.

We went home that afternoon, agreeing in the car that we'd try to carry on with our normal lives as much as we could until it became impossible to continue. For the first three weeks, we kept to our usual routine.

During that time, my wife transitioned all of her clients over to her coworkers. She never told them of the problem that was killing her, only saying that it seemed like a good time to retire. She made me promise not to tell anyone, not even our relatives and closest friends. She didn't want all the sympathy. "They can cry after I'm gone," she said.

She took her pain medication, sometimes taking more than the prescribed dosages. "So what if it kills me. I'm going to die anyway," she'd say.

After taking her pills, she'd sit on the couch watching her favorite movies over and over. She drank a lot of her favorite wines, too. The combined effect of drugs and wine made her a bit goofy, not able to speak coherently.

And then one morning about four weeks after we came home from the hospital, my wife just didn't want to get out of bed.

"I think I'll just lie here for a little longer," she said, closing her eyes.

She stayed in bed all day, and in fact didn't get out of bed, except to use the toilet, until she died. I brought meals to her, but she really didn't want to eat unless I forced her. I put the TV at the end of the bed and propped her up so she could see it, but she wasn't really interested in that, either, instead sleeping most of the day.

When it became too difficult for her to take her pills, I called the doctor. He sent a nurse to our house and she set up a drip line, showing me how to change the bags as well as how to inject her pain medicine.

Each night I'd crawl in bed, lying next to her, holding her hand. All day long, I'd sit next to her, reading, holding her hand when she reached for me. We didn't converse much, but every now and then she'd ask me how my day went.

Before she became bedridden, we'd worked out her will. Several years before we got a lawyer to set up a trust to protect our assets should anything ever happen to either or both of us. But it's a good idea to have a will, too, just in case there's something the trust didn't cover. In the will she specified what was to be done with her remains, dictating what kind of ceremonies should be held to commemorate her death.

Almost a week before she died, I was reading next to her holding her hand when I felt her grip pressure increase. Turning towards her, I saw that she was looking at me, smiling blissfully.

"Thank you," she whispered, almost inaudibly. "I love you. I forgive you."

"I love you, too." I smiled back at her.

I wanted to ask her what she was forgiving me for, but I think I knew. She must have known somehow about Rebecca. Then she closed her eyes, never to open them again.

I continued to keep her drip going, giving her the pain injections every two hours, day and night, until the morning of her last breath. For a couple of hours her breathing was eratic, shallow sometimes, other times deep. There was a final exhalation, then she was still.

It was my wife's wish that she be cremated. She didn't want any formal funeral or service, just that her closest family and friends get together and remember her and have a few drinks. She specified that her ashes were not to be kept, but instead be scattered in her two favorite places, Maui and Napa Valley.

True to her wishes, I drove up to Napa Valley a few days after her cremation and scattered about half of her ashes, a little at each one of the vineyards of her favorite wineries. And a few days after that I flew to Maui.

I was lucky to have been able to rent the condo that we always liked to stay in. I thought about doing something similar to what I'd done with her ashes in Napa Valley, scattering them at all her favorite places. But I came up with a different plan, one I thought she'd like.

The last time my wife and I had made love several years before, after Rebecca and I were no longer seeing each other, was at a secluded beach on the north shore of Maui along the Hana Highway. We'd found the place quite by accident, and had a picnic lunch, making love in the sand, washing ourselves in the ocean afterwards.

I thought it apropos to leave her remaining ashes at this same spot. Parking the car in the bushes off the unpaved road leading to the shore, I hiked the hundred-or-so yards down to the little beach. There I stripped myself naked and waded out into the water with the urn.

The ashes sank quickly, but the currents swept them away before they could hit the bottom in the clear, turquoise water. When the urn was empty, I rinsed it out. Replacing the lid, I buried it in the sand at the base of a large palm tree.

"Goodbye, sweetheart," I said as I patted the sand down. "I'm so sorry for everything."

I sat there for some hours, looking out over the ocean, quietly saying goodbye again and again. Only when it started getting dark did I dress and go back to the condo.

Before flying to Hawaii, I'd looked at a lot of real estate brochures and had picked out a couple of places I thought I'd like to spend my remaining days. One was a retirement condo complex in Kihei, my favorite area of Maui.