52-Done, Gone, Empty

The house grew increasingly small as each newcomer felt their way toward peaceful coexistence with our already installed group of weirdly symbiotic strangers. Personalities and psyches ebbed and flowed as they tasted unconditional acceptance, a heady freedom when it comes in one’s twenties—especially when set against a background of two emphatic alphas, long set in their wrangling ways, each just as fiercely defiant as supportive to the other. I imagine it must have been disconcerting squared to the incoming outsider—especially those of the Christian variety—to be thrust headlong into Jewish-family throwdowns.

How does one explain to persons raised on obedience, compliance, conformity, and get-alongness that the Jewish fundamentals of life are food, questioning, arguing, fighting, and food? Is all that contention good for one’s mental health? Oh, hell no, of course not. It’s terrifically stressful! But does everything work out in the end, especially after a little nosh?

In the immortal words of drummer extraordinaire Brian Zsupnik: “Is there a question here?”

Ripping each other to shreds over pilpul disputes—real, imagined, assumed, or inferred—doesn’t change our basic connections in the Jewish milieu. Yet having typed those words, I understand why others would think it does, particularly if they haven’t been around long enough to see the combatants’ shared friendship, affection, and love. And while I non-pretend I was above all the Father-Daughter cage fights or the verbal machete slashes I accepted as a matter of course, as Yogi Berra said, “You can’t hit and think at the same time.”

Don’t get that? How about Satre’s “You have to choose: live or tell.”

Still no good? What about, “One cannot participate and observe at the same time,” taken from a can of Trader Joe coffee?

No? Fine, I’ll spell it out: I’d spent my life listening and watching rather than physically grinding the beans. I won’t pretend the screaming and spitfire didn’t affect me, but in my always-better-in-the-morning personal norm, I didn’t take it the way my novitiates would/did. It didn’t stop me.

Nothing stopped me. Hell, I had six people and seven cats to support!

Ergo, while I explained and defended and deconstructed as much as I could, I had neither the time nor inclination to protect my new adult kiddos from the Battling Bickersons. I figured they could learn to raise that umbrella on their own. Adulting 101.

Meanwhile, they all signed up for community college: T, N, D&D, and even Daughter, who already had enough credits for university. Tom had earned his B.A. and a history honor of some sort, which I non-retain but which made him happy, thus making me happy. I went to the awards dinner but not the formal graduation ceremony because it, like his mother’s funeral, was an outside-under-the-midday-sun affair, and nobody—especially Tom—wanted to leave the celebration early when my spine said, “Oh fuck this heat, I’m outta here!” Now, as D&D joined the throng, my husband set his sights on his master’s degree, with which he could teach history, which he fervently non-wanted to do.

It wasn’t the only thing he non-wanted to do. He also had very much no interest in dual-piano work, which was replacing traditional club gigs (but, in fact, turned out to be a passing fad). Even more, he definitively non-appreciated the repeated asks for him to finally knuckle down, pro up, and take studio work.

Too much pressure to accomplish too many things that had never been on his bucket list. He’d already gotten his teeth fixed, made peace with his bald pate, and re-sculpted his Dad body into an Adonis physique. His music cred had made every incoming manager of the best-gig-behind-the-Orange-curtain proclaim, “I’m not going to be the one to lose Tom S!” He’d even nailed his amateur scholar creds by extending the university history journal’s twenty-five-year winning streak under his direction for yet another year.

Check, check, check, check, check.

And so his slow physical disintegration began, approximately three years out from final curtain, right about when our sex life ran ground. Of course, I see that progression in retrospect. At the time, I was aggravated and furious. I knew long-time spouses often followed their mates to the grave within two years, but I was fucking not going to let myself feel the Cassandra truth Woodpeckering at my shell that he was going to follow his mom within five. If’n I didn’t accept it, goddamn it all to hell, it wouldn’t happen!

Ah, the savagery of spirituality. Believing isn’t manifesting. It’s connection that matters.

It all started subtly enough. A smidgen of gastric distress after his favorite foods. Antacids to settle his gut, Tylenol® to fight the ache. Some random nurse said she took two Tylenol and three Ibuprofen to get her through her pain-laden days. Of course, she didn’t mention repeated or prolonged use would also grow an ulcer the size of Dodger Stadium in his duodenum, or that he shouldn’t wash down the pills with tequila and a side of Thailand’s finest, or that it wouldn’t touch stage four pancreatic cancer. Not that he would have cared. She’d given him a magic bullet, so he locked and loaded.

Understand, I don’t blame that nameless, faceless phone voice. In fact, I don’t hold anybody responsible for my husband’s decision to be done—not his dealers, not the liquor store around the corner, not the doctors he lied to, nor even the healthcare hospitalists checking off their forms to discharge him as fast as possible so they could admit him twenty-four hours later—such was “healthcare” in the pre-Obama years. I can’t even rationally fault myself, despite my fury and denial and non-wifely behavior.

He was done. He’d gone as far as he could or wanted to go. We’d been lying to each other about the future and reaffirming our love at the top of our lungs in public too much for either of us to pretend it wasn’t the end. He was ready, I wasn’t, it was that simple, that non-discussed, that poison-edged dismissed.

At the end, in those ludicrous where’s-that-rabbit-hat, throw-money-to-the-wind days, he talked about the man I’d meet, the one I deserved, the guy who would treat me so much better. Sitting in a visitor’s waiting room, he attempted a kiss, told the woman watching, “Excuse me, I’m trying to woo my wife.” Too little, too late, too not funny—he never could pull off quips like me. He cried, a few trickling tears. I wanted to beat the shit out of him.

No, I’m not going to vent my spleen for all to read, dissecting the last six months, the gut-wrenching final piano sit-in, the endless medical ordeal, the gore, blood, and bile, his last anguished cry, the horrific hours Daughter and I watched his heart keep beating in the body his spirit had long departed.

My husband, the love of my life, my champion and protector, my universe-matched soul mate, died June 28, 2010—exactly five years and one month after his mother passed away on May 28, 2005. His father had died August 28, 1980. Quite a remarkable coincidence.

I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence.