All the Days of Your Life
This dispatch is longer and took a little more time than I’d hoped, thanks in part to an icy path that honored me with a mild concussion. I’m okay now, mostly, and gradually regaining whatever “speed” a man in his middle years might claim. In all honesty, this post toes the outskirts of ground already covered, but I know that most of us replay the events that shape us. Why should the days before and after Valerie’s death be an exception?
I’ve also written previously about the generosity of family, friends, and acquaintances—and many strangers—in the weeks after Valerie died, and I’d like to share that our friend in the poetry community passed away on Thursday, March 17th. There’s a GoFundMe to help his wife and their two very young children. Consider contributing if you have a few dollars to spare.
I try not to dwell in remorse or the many “what if” scenarios. To put it another way, I attempt to cultivate a partnership with regret that allows opportunities for growth. That sentence totally sounds like something from the self-help section of a bookstore, but even if you visited my life at the end of the last century, you’d find a kid fresh out of college, completely unprepared for the world, and offering this: everything—the good and the bad—shapes who you are in the present, and if you're happy with who you are now (I was) then you cannot regret anything.
From the armchair of my mid-forties, I believe more and more that honesty is the key: with who you are, with the choices you’ve made (or didn’t), and with the chance to use what you’ve learned to become a more thoughtful, empathetic person. “Now that I know better,” says Maya Angelou, “I do better.” As for me, I feel it’s essential to carry forward what my thick skull managed to absorb from my relationship with Valerie.
But us humans—you, me, the cashier at the grocery store—are fallible, often foolish, and unparalleled in our stubbornness. I know, for instance, that I could have done more to support Valerie, especially during her illness. And because communication is essential to both healthy and struggling relationships, I can likewise acknowledge that I should have asked more questions, provided more space for Valerie to share her hopes and fears, and explored more of my own feelings through conversation. They say the road runs both directions and, in the immediate days after Valerie’s death, I was able to find perspective and recognize that we—both of us—missed any number of occasions to lift each other when we needed it most. Sharing that responsibility, along with honoring what we did well, has helped as I continue to grieve and seek meaning from Valerie’s life.
In that last sentence, I first wrote “honoring what we did right” before changing it to “honoring what we did well.” Language matters, and this small revision rings true: there’s no guidebook to consult after a diagnosis, and the shock of Valerie’s death was amplified by the fact that she died so soon after we learned—on that Monday in late July—that her cancer metastasized. I’ve revisited and described how we spent those days in telehealth appointments, conferring with doctors, and determining whether we should follow through with the vacation booked at the beginning of the year. And I’ve thought a lot about how we didn't have time to make more than a few calls to family and friends. We guessed that radiation and chemotherapy would be part of the next few months, yet a lot of our delay was tied to the reality that we were waiting until we knew more. Too many folks wouldn’t know that Valerie’s health had taken a drastic turn until it was too late.
I don’t regret any one thing we did or didn’t do during those days. The simple fact is that no one suspected Valerie had less than two weeks to live: not the three separate doctors who told us it was okay—with some extra precautions against Covid—to take that vacation with our friends, not our families, and certainly not us. When we finished packing and made that first turn from our home onto Lawrence Avenue, there wasn’t reason to believe we wouldn’t have the rest of summer. We arranged for Valerie’s father to travel to Chicago with sufficient time to quarantine before our return, but Valerie hadn’t yet shared any updates with her mother in California.
And as though all of this wasn’t strange enough during a pandemic, we were simultaneously keeping tabs on Isaias, a hurricane that was weakening into a tropical storm but would regain strength as it approached the Carolina coast. At best, the storm felt emblematic of our inner turmoil and unknown future. When we learned of the mandatory evacuation of Cape Hatteras just hours after we left Chicago, Hurricane Isaias began to feel more like an omen.
“Do you think,” Valerie wondered aloud, “that it’s a sign we should’ve stayed home?”
With the Outer Banks “closed” to both visitors and residents, we weighed the prospects of trying a vacation elsewhere—Cape Cod or a cabin somewhere in the woods—but we ultimately settled on a hotel and then an Airbnb in Richmond, Virginia. Maybe, just maybe, the storm would drift one direction or the other and part of our vacation could be salvaged. A pair of friends driving from New York soon joined us. On the next day, August 4th, another couple waiting out the storm in Norfolk grabbed barbeque from Doumar’s and drove the ninety minutes to deliver lunch.
At some point in the afternoon, we gathered on a small deck with a modest view of the skyline. I remember sitting next to Valerie, staring at my feet or maybe a place far more remote, while she shared some of what’d I’d texted my family a few days before:
Valerie stopped driving last week and I helped her submit final grades for two summer classes earlier today. Detached retina was ruled out… She had an MRI and MRA yesterday and, well, they found multiple tumors, including in the occipital region (thus the vision problems). An MRI five months ago was clean… The CT scan shows new, small tumors in both lungs. The spot on her liver that they’ve been watching has grown as well… There's also a new spot on her kidney. It's clear we’re now looking at systemic treatment instead of these repeated surgeries.
Valerie went on to explain that what began as a blind spot in her field of vision now felt, for all intents and purposes, closer to blindness. Valerie was an avid reader—her teaching position required it—but she could no longer discern the words on the page or on a screen. By that second morning of our drive from Chicago, she put down her phone and gave up trying to help with directions. Whatever the course of treatment, the doctors were clear that her vision might not return. To our gathered friends, Valerie admitted that she was angry and, understandably, added this: “I’m really fucking scared.”
“What can we do?” our friend Lauren replied.
Valerie asked if someone would paint her toenails.
“If I swim in the ocean,” our friend Molly texted a few days before, “this week was a success.” And indeed, there was first relief and then something approaching triumph when Hurricane Isaias, despite the many projections, made landfall two hundred miles southwest of our destination. The order to evacuate Cape Hatteras was lifted and we drove the final leg to the Outer Banks on Wednesday, August 5th. The week was not what we planned, but our arrival felt like a small miracle, especially when our hopes and fortitude had been tested. After unpacking, Valerie sat on the edge of the bathtub and—in what seems to me now like an act of independence and defiance—used touch and muscle memory to shave her legs.
I wish I had a recording of what Valerie later said among our friends at the beach. In short, she noted that despite the hurricane models and the best that meteorology could offer, the unexpected happened. There was a sense of possibility in her observation, yet I can’t remember if she connected that possibility to her illness or—here comes the fog of memory and time—I’m making that connection on my own. There’s no question, however, of what happened next: Valerie’s headache grew steadily worse. Neither rest nor stronger medications could help and, after saying goodnight on Thursday, Valerie kept the curtains closed and didn’t leave our room the following day. I hoped she might sleep for an hour or two, but Valerie was awake each time I inched open the door, refilled her water, or brought a fresh bag of ice. She was in far worse shape than even the days after surgeries, each of which left her feeling five or ten years older. On a scale of one to ten, I relayed to one of her doctors, Valerie allowed that this increasing pain was at least a nine.
“Do you need anything?” I asked in the afternoon.
Valerie replied with a question of her own: “A flight home?”
The next morning, an employee with United Airlines guided Valerie’s wheelchair toward the security checkpoint at Norfolk International Airport. Valerie landed in Chicago less than two-and-a-half hours later, refused her father’s offer to drive to the hospital, and spent the last day of her life at home in our bed. On Sunday morning—after I watched the sunrise and packed Valerie’s clothes, after taking a breath and asking our friends to join me in the living room for the awful news—we finished loading our cars and said goodbye. I remember, not far down the road, pulling over to return a phone call. The funeral director had a few questions, and it was then—in a busy gas station parking lot—that I decided Valerie’s body would be cremated and that, no, neither the kids nor I would view her body.
We traveled onward to Pennsylvania, checked into our hotel (reservation under Valerie Pell), and ordered Chinese food. Throughout the early evening, I made excuses like a missing charger or forgotten toothbrush and paced near the ice machine down the hall. I talked with our friend Steve in Missouri. I spoke to Eric on a long trip of his own. Back in our room, I took a photo of Emerson and Whitman as they watched a movie from one of our room’s two beds. The weight of that second image felt enormous: this would be the last image of my children before we arrived home, before I shared that they couldn’t again hold their mother, and before their young lives crumbled into so many pieces.
I’ve never really understood this expression: I can’t imagine what it must be like… Thoughtful, caring people said as much after Valerie’s death, and I’ve heard variations in response to other losses and hardships. Perhaps I have an unusually active imagination, or maybe the movies (not to mention the actual world) have offered material enough and there’s no need to imagine the darker depths of suffering. In the realm of possibility—my possibility—the departing flight crashes a hundred times, housefires leave the lone, heartbroken survivor, and a gunman walks through the hallway of my children’s school even as I tell them to have a great day or catch a final glimpse before they disappear inside.
It’s strange to admit: from time to time I actually imagined some version of this current life without Valerie. Less strange is that I often consider what the ongoing, evolving ache feels like for my children, as well as for Valerie’s parents. There's consolation that Valerie’s father was here, in our home, during his daughter’s last hours—he in fact climbed into our bed and held her just hours before she died—but Valerie’s mother was blindsided when the news reached her in Sacramento. The wound she felt from being left in the dark was clear each time we spoke on the phone, and she asked me several times if I'd seen the body. She knew both our friend and Valerie’s father were here when Valerie died, but said she would only know for sure that her daughter’s death was real if a third person (me) had seen. I considered, momentarily, making arrangements with the funeral home, but then remembered—even as I was navigating my own emotions—that grief is individual and that this denial (mixed perhaps with bargaining) was part of the grieving process for Valerie’s mother.
Valerie's body, along with several letters and pictures from the kids, was cremated on Friday, August 14th, 2020. On the following Monday, I walked the half mile to the funeral home, met with the director for a final time, and walked a longer route home so I could call a close friend. As the two of us spoke, I saw myself as though from a passing car or maybe from a room of one of the endless houses along Giddings Street. With that persistent imagination, I studied the figure who looked very much like me…
A man—cotton sleeves rolled just below his elbows—walks along a quiet street. He holds a sturdy, well-made bag and shifts the ribbon loops from one hand to the other. There could be a gift inside, a pair of expensive shoes or a wedding present. But the man, in truth, is stunned to move so casually through the August afternoon. He feels as though he could walk like this forever, merely a stranger who might disappear into the background. The world around him—even as it pulses with sunlight and the fragments of a familiar tune from the sparrows—echoes a ruinous injury. The man waits for a car to yield so he can cross a busy, two-lane street and wander the last blocks with that well-made bag—both heavier and lighter than it should be—and its steady purpose: to hold what the fires have left of the woman he knew as his wife, the mother of his… He doesn't yet regret the decision he made not to view her body. That part will come a few days later and when—suddenly, as if out of the same midday heat and the same timeless song among the trees—the man remembers his wife’s toenails.
Our time with friends at the Outer Banks was a true delight, but our abbreviated, unfairly abrupt visit—not to mention the increasing pain that led to Valerie’s early flight home—left few opportunities to answer this last of last wishes. The bottle of polish—chosen by Valerie and not unlike the color of the ocean—ultimately traveled through North Carolina and Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and then home.
When Valerie and I first met, she’d already transformed herself into a writer: hours at a desk, her fingers strong when she typed a page or journaled for many more. But Valerie also had the beat-up, slightly misshapen feet of a dancer. Those feet spent a separate lifetime—long before I came into the picture—in ballet studios and on the stage. They eventually guided me as I struggled to learn the foxtrot in the months and weeks before our wedding. Her feet carried and rocked each of our children in their earliest days and through the middle of many nights. Her feet, for a few days each summer, were lifted from the shoreline by a cresting wave and returned safely again in the shallows. I can hear that ocean still and, in my imagination, those last days of summer never end. Only this time I take Valerie’s feet in my lap. I hold the small bottle that swirls with a color in which we could just as easily swim.
I lift its brush and paint each of her nails.