Late-Life Love Read online

  “He turned and instead of taking the elevator, he stomped up an iron spiral staircase without a word of goodbye. Bill and I were really frightened that he would have a stroke or something.”

  “What do you think set him off?” someone asked, as the Schnitz started barking at Jack rolling around in the wheelchair.

  “We thought then that he was thinking of his own impending death and the ghastly prospect of his privacy being invaded by some fool biographer or archivist . . . at some future time when he couldn’t protect himself. His vulnerable posthumous existence. Later we found out that Auden objected to all personal papers being released so that strangers could read them.”

  The ghosts of Keats and of his wrecked passion for Fanny Brawne dimmed when Don mentioned Yeats’s visit in 1903 and Dylan Thomas’s in 1950 and Susannah began telling Julie about The Foundry. Apparently some architectural firm in Indianapolis was planning a four-story condominium just off the courthouse square. Zak was excited because it was intended for retirees who wanted to be within walking distance of shops, drugstores, and restaurants.

  “Zak’s going to drive you two up there to see the floor plans. Since it’s still in the design phase, you could have a say in choosing flooring or making decisions on grab bars and a walk-in shower, that sort of thing.”

  I got up to get ice cream out of the freezer as Susannah turned to Jack. “Tomorrow, before we leave, you can bring that wheelchair down to the basement for Poppy. He doesn’t need it anymore.”

  Then she turned back to us. “Daddy, if you can get into the passenger seat of the car, you can get into an airplane seat and you know Susan wants to see the baby . . . and you know how comfortable my guest room is. I’ll arrange a wheelchair at both airports. Why not consider it?”

  Putting bowls and spoons on the kitchen table, I rejoiced in Susannah’s contesting the distinction between young and old people that Montaigne had emphasized and that the owner of the Hampstead house had discussed with Lady Slane: “Young people compel one to look forward on a life full of effort. Old people permit one to look backward on a life whose effort is over and done with. That is reposeful.” In another month, Don would reach the age of Lady Slane, but I wanted us to look forward as well as backward. While Julie took out the dogs and Jack hauled the garbage bin out to the road, I considered the ghosts of Mr. FitzGeorge and Lady Slane, Keats and Fanny Brawne.

  After the sudden death of Mr. FitzGeorge near the end of All Passion Spent, it becomes clear that he has left his considerable art collection to Lady Slane. She determines to give the artwork away to benefit hospitals and museums, in part because she wants nothing more than quiet, in part because she knows the act will shock her greedy sons and daughters: “Think how much I shall annoy my children!” Finally, a visiting great-granddaughter thanks Lady Slane. Not having an inheritance has made it easier for her to break an engagement that would have hindered her from developing her passion for music. Seeing “one last opportunity for annoying” her children, Lady Slane encourages her great-granddaughter’s artistic ambitions and dies in repose at having found a surrogate who may lead “the unled life”—a resonant phrase from my friend Andrew—that she had relinquished.

  The tranquility Lady Slane values above all else would often elude turbulent John Keats, as it does many young people, as it sometimes does me. “My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it,” he confessed to Fanny Brawne in March 1820. But in loving her, he achieved a respite from agitation. “I never felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out the window: you always concentrate my whole senses.”

  Impecunious, tormented by thwarted poetic ambition and sexual desire, the twenty-five-year-old Keats struggled with disease and despair. It was very late in his life, though he was very young and troubled by the figure of Fanny “eternally vanishing,” as he prepared himself to step through death’s door: “I always made an awkward bow.” The hemorrhages from his damaged lungs, along with the miserable treatments of tuberculosis, led to his tragically early demise. Pondering Keats’s great suffering, Fanny Brawne resigned herself to the death, or so she claimed in a letter mourning only the fact that Keats had died so far away from home, for “he might have died here with so many friends to soothe him and me me with him.” While contemplating Keats’s final days in Italy, was she lamenting his losses or her own? Would it have soothed not only “him” but also “me me” to have him dying at home?

  Give and Take

  IN THE GRIP of self-revulsion, in need of guidance, I stared at the six lines, read them silently and then aloud, reread them, and then reread them again, for days on end. On the page of the hardcover book I had found in Don’s study, the six lines appear set off, framed by a space break symbol—the word for such a symbol is dinkus or dingbat, he tells me—within a long poem by Donald Hall about his relationship with his cherished wife, Jane Kenyon. I copied them by hand into a notebook, paying attention to the line breaks and centering.

  Why were they not

  contented, four months ago, because

  Jane did not have

  leukemia? A year hence, would he question

  why he was not contented

  now? Therefore he was contented.

  I admired the slightly archaic “contented,” instead of the usual “content,” which could be mispronounced and misunderstood. Just a snippet in a longer poem, I gave it the title “Contented.” The last phrase became a refrain to reprimand myself for impatience and irritability, to remind myself that I should be contented, contented, contented. For I had become visibly exasperated: grouchy about the interminable rounds of blood work, doctor appointments, physical therapy, and pharmacy trips. I had been getting progressively more peeved at how long it took to get the Velcro sneakers on Don’s feet. Worse, at a rare social outing—we had been invited to a close-down-the-pool party—and within earshot of a number of young colleagues, I had asked Don if he needed to use the bathroom before our trip home.

  The discourteous remark became my very own Box Hill. I was wedged in the gulch associated with the shameful incivility of Jane Austen’s Emma . . . even after I apologized profusely. It was a worse moment than when, years ago, in a highly inappropriate setting, I had inexplicably called Don by the name of my first husband. Surely now was the time to try a secular version of lectio divina—the practice of “divine reading” that involves not fast but slow, very slow reading. In monasteries and convents, students of the Bible for centuries approached reading as a meditative, devotional practice. One passage would be reflected upon, prayed over, and contemplated.

  Why would my impatience grow when Don was clearly getting stronger? And why when we were actually out of the house and among friends after such a long seclusion? Somehow being shaded by an umbrella on a sunny back deck, conversing with young people and being interrupted by their children’s antics, he had looked so brittle, so tentative. But why would that have sparked feelings of anger . . . at him . . . that blemished, and then blighted the day?

  “Contented,” Donald Hall’s six-line secular catechism, reflects on what remains. While Hall ministers to Jane Kenyon in the hospital, the disease that threatens her teaches him about their earlier relationship, when they took for granted their being healthy together. During our everyday interactions, of course, most of us do not congratulate ourselves on not having a mortal disease. But while dealing with Kenyon’s leukemia, Hall realizes how grateful they ought to have been for the time before the diagnosis. And just as he understands the plenitude of the past through the privations of the present, the privations of the present swell with significance in contrast to the prospect of a diminished future without her.

  The book in which these six lines appear is titled Without. Part of it meditates on Jane Kenyon’s death. However, I ignore the elegies. As the short mounds of grass by the front door feathered and tasseled, as
the Eupatorium Chocolate at the edge of the back yard put out tiny white flowers glowing against burnished brown leaves, I was caught up in the first half of the volume, where Hall suggests that there is a reason why we use the words caregiver and caretaker interchangeably. Nor is he alone in pondering the paradox that the caregiver receives caretaking by caregiving, a perspective I thought I knew, but must learn again. Opsimathy: it turns out to be an unexpectedly useful idea.

  I was contented by our plans to fly to New York and grateful that Don would undertake what would feel to him like a hazardous journey. I was contented that he was well enough for me to leave him alone at home while I lunched with my cancer support group. Though Carrol was accepting hospice help at home and Ilka looked fragile, the rest of us were scheming to improve community cancer care. I was contented that I could continue composing my Times columns and correcting the first pass proofs of a book about cancer I had not thought I would live to see into print. Yet as the town teemed with students and Mary emailed pictures of her new house in Baltimore and thousands of refugees poured out of Syria but were barricaded out of Europe—the photographs were devastating—an intermittent rash of irritability kept on breaking out.

  Donald Hall’s poems, composed with the sort of clarity that comes from having experienced caregiving in both directions, do not gloss over the anger, claustrophobia, and estrangement that can burgeon when one must take care of an invalid. Nineteen years older than Jane Kenyon, who had been his student, Hall assumed she would outlive him, especially after colon cancer metastasized to his liver. Like my Donald and me, they continued to presume that he would die first, until her leukemia disabused them. The intensity of her fifteen months of treatment is recounted in the poems of Without.

  Anger is contagious, I am somewhat relieved to be reminded. It may be impossible not to resent disease or disability that threatens to take over the lives of the well and the unwell alike. Sick or disabled people take out their distress on those most proximate. When Hall’s wife no longer knew the month or year, she had to be moved from a clinic back into the hospital, where the return of normal consciousness was accompanied by depression that caused her to erupt in fury. In one poem, he quotes her saying, “I wish you could feel what I feel!” After a stanza break, Hall describes how her rebuke triggered his nightmare:

  At Eagle Pond, Jane

  sprayed his body with acid

  from a booby trap. He was dying.

  He followed her in his rage

  to Connecticut and his mother’s house.

  Just before he woke, he saw

  Jane crouched in terror at the bottom

  of the cellar stairs while he

  crept down, his hands clutched to choke her.

  “There’s nothing more selfish than sickness,” Don once remarked. Jane Kenyon, furious at her disease and its terrible treatments, lashes out in the physical attack of the dream-Jane who sets out to murder Hall. At the house of his mother, the dying caregiver wants to strangle his terrified wife, to put an end to their torment. Toward the close of the most beautiful movie about elderly caregiving, Michael Haneke’s Amour, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) smothers his beloved wife Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) with a pillow, knowing that the end of her life means the end of his own as well. Of course, the physical confinement of caregiving can make people stir-crazy.

  Near the beginning of Amour, we see the aging couple at a concert; in a dream sequence at the end, they put on coats to go outside. But all the other scenes take place inside their apartment, where Georges bathes, dresses, undresses, feeds, medicates, moves, and massages his increasingly immobilized wife. Georges and Anne weave from the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room, where the grand piano evokes the fulfilling teaching career Anne had to relinquish. By spitting out food, by pushing Georges away, Anne repeatedly mimes the rage she cannot put into words about her intensifying incapacitation. At one point, he becomes so frustrated that he slaps her.

  Donald Hall captures a claustrophobic year in hospitals and clinics when the seasons were obliterated by sickness. The disturbing title poem “Without,” which he read aloud to Jane Kenyon—“ ‘That’s it, Perkins,’ she said. ‘You’ve got it. That’s it.’ ”—describes a world without color, without seasons, trees, animals, or garlic, which have all been annihilated by the war against cancer: “provinces invaded bombed shot shelled / artillery sniper fire helicopter gunship.” It is a poem without punctuation that repeats the words of loss—“without” and “no”—to protest the “pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare / confusion the rack terror the vise.”

  An incomprehensible, medicalized vocabulary erupts to swamp the “we” of the opening line: “vincristine ara-c cytoxan vp-6” would be impenetrable without the next line about “loss of memory loss of language losses.” There is a moment of possibility, a stanza about the potential return to the normalcy of sun and moss and leaves and a market and a dog, but it is overwhelmed by “the sea unrelenting wave gray the sea” with its successive surges of unmitigated negativity. “The days were endlessly the same in the way that the ocean is the same,” Hall noted in a prose memoir: “When you are so sick, there is nothing wherever you look that is not sickness.”

  “Without” reminds me of the seventeen days I spent in an Indianapolis hospital on TPN (total parenteral nutrition)—tube food, I called it—in February 2009 and how the indistinguishable hours slipped by without the punctuation of meals or even of night and day, since the window slats were broken. When Don arrived with a bouquet of yellow roses, I could not believe that there was a world elsewhere celebrating Valentine’s Day. “They didn’t call it off,” Don said. The scene that shocked me in Amour: Georges standing at the kitchen sink with a bouquet of flowers. Instead of cutting off the bottom tips, he chops the heads of the blossoms off their stems. It seemed a desecration until I later saw them strewn over the face of his dead wife.

  As I took Don to a shoe store where we could not find any extra-wide shoes, as I drove us to the post office to return the shoes he had ordered online, “Without” brought back another day without the punctuation of weather, in August 2012. A week earlier, I had signed a sheaf of papers informing me that the medicine in a Phase 1 clinical trial would not cure me of ovarian cancer but could kill me and that neither the clinicians nor the pharmaceutical manufacturer would be held legally responsible. I had decided to become a guinea pig.

  Don and I arrived at 8 a.m. at the research wing of the hospital, where my blood and vitals would be checked every half hour, then every hour, then every few hours after I took four pink capsules of the experimental drug. By late afternoon, it became clear that my magnesium or potassium levels were insufficient. We waited through the ordering of the prescription and then through the long infusion and by 9 or 10 p.m. I was cranky, petulant, but some other test had to be done before Don would find our way to a motel for the night so we could return back to the hospital the next day at 8 a.m. for more testing. I was antsy to get out, snarky, and, yes, in need of a glass of wine.

  Don somehow found an app on his iPad to get a succession of the most beautiful tenor arias—by Puccini, Bizet, Verdi, Donizetti, sung by Pavarotti, Björling, Domingo, Caruso—one after another soaring, throbbing with such passion that I was drenched in the pleasure of listening. And then he found “The Slow Drag”—a joyous chorus from Scott Joplin’s opera Tremonisha that could not fail to lift anyone’s spirits—and we replayed it over and over again and an aide crept in to listen with open-mouthed amazement.

  That the experimental pills have continued to work for three years astonishes us. No more stressing about medical bills: clinical trials cover most of the costs of treatment. Last time I had a blood test, the nurse took an extra vial of blood, and I could not figure out why. “They want to sprinkle it on the sick,” Don said. “Test its magic powers.”

  Jane Kenyon managed to buoy Donald Hall’s spirits—“ ‘That’s it, Perkins,’ she said. ‘You’ve got it. That’s it.’ ”—even when her imm
une system was so compromised that she had to be quarantined. During a perilous bone marrow transplant, Hall had to suit up in sterile gear to enter her hermetic cubicle—a floppy hat, yellow mask, a paper gown, long white booties, and sterile latex gloves: “Jane said he looked like a huge condom.” The line, written (as throughout the sequence) in the third person, testifies to the poet’s self-alienation and also to Jane Kenyon’s retained sense of humor. Perhaps that is why the character Alice in the movie Still Alice says, “I’d rather have cancer.”

  Absorbed as I was in the concentration of all this slow reading, it came as somewhat of a shock that two dates on the calendar suddenly drew nearer and then in a flash were gone. On September 18, Zak drove Don and me to Indianapolis to meet with the firm constructing The Foundry, the apartment building that would be erected along the B-line trail downtown.

  The pretty girl who met with us knew nothing about the design layouts she showed us: not which direction the windows faced, not the size of the rooms, not the materials planned for the floors, cabinets, or countertops. At each of our questions, she looked stunned and then left to confer with some mysteriously unavailable authority only to return with indeterminate information . . . except she promptly answered our final query about the price of the three-bedroom unit we liked.

  Our jaws dropped.

  “Eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars?” one or the other of us exclaimed. “Who would pay that in Bloomington? To live around the corner from the Irish Lion and across the street from Chase Bank?”

  “Dentists,” she said.

  On September 21, I drove the two of us and Julie to Jonathan and Alexandra’s for a celebratory dinner. Don did not want any gifts on his eighty-eighth birthday, so Jonathan made a lavish meal with plenty of vegan dishes. On our return to the Inverness late that night, we found a package propped against the front door. It turned out to be a replacement of the framed Bloomington sign we had given away to Mary. How generous, I thought as the phone rang—my son-in-law in New York, calling to congratulate Don on reaching the number of the keys on a piano. In two years, he would be a nonagenarian, a word that alarms me.