Late-Life Love Read online

  That rush of pleasure at the strength of another: what drew me to Don in the first place was his rootedness, for he could be depended on to be exactly where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there. The “new air” of being too intimate to think of the other while merging with the other: even before Don and I hid our affair from our kids and colleagues, I had thrilled at the awkward length of his splayed fingers in relation to his palms. The word tryst came to mind when we arranged our secret early meetings at night in his house or mine. Like Elizabeth, I wanted us to say over and over again that we loved each other, although on two awkward occasions, when my girls unexpectedly returned home, I hustled downstairs in a bathrobe as he quickly dressed upstairs.

  Before Julie sends glad tidings—the operation has gone well, Don will be moved from recovery to a room, he will be released tomorrow—I have determined never to leave him again. Each separation has had damaging repercussions, I realize as I send consolatory emails to Sandra, urging her to rest, to take comfort in her kids, to persevere. Maybe the bruised relationship with her partner can be patched up. She needs to be strong; I count on it.

  A jolt of adrenaline gets me through the airport surveillance lines (and my dread that the ostomy bag will lead to a body search), the turbulence (in a smaller than usual plane), the longer than usual limo ride (because of highway construction), the sight of wan Don in a wheelchair at the hospital entrance (with a black brace from his thigh to his calf, requiring him to lie on the back seat of my car), and the trip home (where Julie and I quickly roll up scatter rugs so he can use the supplied walker). Our friend Andrew, Mary’s husband, has already installed a riser on the ground-floor toilet to elevate the seat. I will be given an opportunity to care for the man who has so generously and thoughtfully cared for me.

  We are greatly relieved to be reunited, despite a scare the first night home. Don was standing in the bathroom holding on to his walker and then to the counter when he toppled. I could not pick him up. He had to brace his arms to push himself on his bottom all the way to the steps leading to the second floor. Gripping the banister, he hauled himself up one step and then upright and then we fell asleep exhausted, he flat on his back in the guest bedroom on the ground floor: me on his right, he now on my left, to be closer to the bathroom.

  In a dream that night, Don walks before me toward the big sliding doors of Kroger’s supermarket and I see him fall. As I run to help, his detached knee joint jerks and inches over to his calf. Then he manages to slide down, leaning back against the brick façade of the market with his reassembled leg outstretched before him. I notice how handsome he looks as he instructs me to phone 911. I gaze at my iPhone, willing myself to push the tab that will get me the phone number keyboard. After puzzling over this dream, I realized that I must get Don a cellphone he can keep with him at all times.

  Because of the fall in the bathroom, the next day we went to the ER, where a physician assistant outfitted Don with a longer brace: black Velcro fasteners now snap from his upper thigh to his ankle. In two weeks, we will see the surgeon, and so we settle down to a recuperative routine. For the first time in our relationship, I unload the dishwasher, make him breakfast, give him sponge baths, help him put on his clothes, do the laundry, load the dishwasher, and revel in the fact that I am strong enough to take on these tasks. Since I cannot leave him home alone, Jayne—my neighbor when I lived in town—brings in groceries. It is a struggle getting the bright yellow, nonskid hospital socks over his swollen feet and orange toes. He looks like an antique camper in his shorts, but the usual long pants do not fit over the black brace.

  Hunched on a chair in our kitchen, he glares at me, a wild thing trapped. It’s like seeing an eagle shot down. “Don’t fuss,” Don says, trying to lift himself up. Medications proliferate on the counter, as they did when I was at my weakest after surgeries. Then I could not open the childproof vials; now he cannot. Then I could not walk on my own; now he cannot. Then I dozed through pain; now he does.

  “This isn’t a disease, but it takes as much attention as a disease,” he says.

  “One, two, three,” I recite, pulling with one hand under his armpit and holding the walker steady with my other hand.

  “Give me a minute,” he says.

  I leave the room so he can garner the strength he will need to move into a standing position. There are aspects of Don’s care he does not want discussed. We do not discuss them. A proud and fastidious man, he finds his dependency humiliating. The less said the better, I think as I Google “how to use a bed urinal” and “what to do about swollen feet.” There are lists of chores: scheduling appointments with his GP and kidney doctor, doing lots of laundry, making the ground floor habitable since he cannot go upstairs to our bedroom or downstairs to his basement study.

  “How do you feel, Bear?” I whisper.

  “I’ll take the pain pills now, and the cyanide later,” he deadpans.

  In the midst of all these tasks, my cancer, my ostomy, my medications, and my port have dwindled into irrelevance. That I am well enough to be here seems a miracle. In his crumpled state, Don helps me more than I help him. We are still together, even more closely together through these two weeks of convalescence than ever before, and I rejoice that soon the surgeon will see how much stronger Don has become, how well he gets around with the walker, how few pain pills he needs.

  I think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most famous sonnet, which focuses with bravado neither on her emotional reactions nor on Robert’s physical characteristics, but on the capacity and magnitude of love itself. In a sequence that contrasts the before and after of ripe love—a before that is quite a bit longer than the before of young love and an after that might, alas, be briefer—she reminds herself that her love derives from “the passion put to use / In my old griefs” and the “Smiles, tears, of all my life” (XLIII). The past definitely infiltrates her future. Indeed, past sorrows intensify the joys of the second part of her life, which would stand in sharp contrast to the “old griefs” of the first part.

  During the two weeks of recuperation from the operation, poor Don hates his dependency: relying on the walker, being unable to stand without my help, peeing in a plastic urinal, getting his hair washed at the kitchen sink, having to ask for his eyeglasses or a pencil or the iPad. He drowses in his chair, while I ponder a ranch house being built on a quiet street in town. Should we move or stay put? A move would be hugely disruptive, but we would be forced to get rid of half of the stuff we have accumulated. I don’t want our possessions to become the sort of quagmire for our children that Roz Chast had to confront in her funny but wrenching graphic memoir about dealing with her aged parents’ crammed apartment. It would be easier in town—a one-level apartment. I can’t figure out what would be best for us.

  In the past, I would have discussed this sort of problem with Fran, who has always been more practical than I. Every single move I have made was based on lengthy discussions with her. In fact, she found the last house I lived in; she even stripped the paint off the wood around the dining room windows. Decades ago, when I spent a year in Boston, she loaded the truck. Unlike me, she is sturdy, palpably grounded, a source of strength.

  But I am upset—no, I am deeply wounded—that she has not made one effort to help out. The only way I can keep myself from reiterating irate tirades in my head is by gazing at the blazing prairie fire crab apple, the pink and white flowers floating above the dogwood’s greenery, the unfurling copper scrolls of the stately beech, its thick trunk like an elephant’s leg. We are surrounded by the clemency of great beauty. During the nights, I find it easier to shelve Fran. Since she has always gone to sleep hours before I do, we never talked on the phone at night, only in the afternoons—every or every other afternoon, sometimes for an hour, for exactly forty years; how many hours does that add up to? Our common past, so long and thick, has shattered. I had informed her of Don’s surgery and she has not offered any assistance. She called once or twice, but seemed oblivious,
chatting on about some event she had attended.

  To distract myself, I would put in a CD, pour a glass of wine, and consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lineage. For Anne Bradstreet, America’s first published poet, as for Barrett Browning, the married couple constitutes a doubled creature. More than one of Bradstreet’s poems repeats the point: “If ever two were one, than surely we.” Similarly, Katherine Philips, now enshrined in the lesbian literary tradition, celebrated a dear companion in “To Mrs. M.A. at Parting”: “Thus our twin souls in one shall grow, / And teach the world new love.”

  Barrett Browning’s contemporary, Harriet Taylor, was in her twenties, married with two children, when she met John Stuart Mill. Soon she separated from her husband and engaged with Mill in twenty-one years of intimacy and collaboration. He began to view her as the coauthor of his greatest works of philosophy. Two years after her husband’s death, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill finally embarked on a marriage—they were in their midforties—that concluded seven years later with her death. It was a late-life marriage, but not a late-life passion. When Mill explained that happiness can be attained not by making it a direct goal but rather by fixing the mind on the happiness of others, he described one foundation of late-life love.

  While Don slept in a hydrocodone daze, I started stepping around the living room to the stately strains of a Mendelssohn octet. It was a prayerful dance, asking the powers that be for the physical strength to continue doing this good work. On previous nights, last year or the year before, had he done the same? No, it would have been Charlie Parker or Ella—“Let’s fall in love” was one of Don’s first hidden notes, tucked in my bathrobe’s pocket—and he would never have danced. He would have had his headphones on, listening to Ellington with a beatific smile. Getting into the wrong side of the bed, I think: a supreme privilege that I can care for this resolute man who has cared for me. I awake to his hand in mine, our fingers intertwined.

  Unlike the frontispiece of Don’s volume of Sonnets from the Portuguese, the poems themselves emphasize the mutuality of the Brownings, as does Harriet Goodhue Hosmer’s 1853 sculpture of their clasped hands. A replica sits on my desk, a gift from Sandra. Only the cuffs of the sleeves on the cast give away the identity of each hand: Robert Browning’s below with a straight edge cradling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s on top with a scalloped edge, palm to palm, invoking pulses that “beat double.” Handling the hands, I realize that there is no “below” or “on top.” The sculpture can be positioned with either hand below or on top.

  The verse grounded in Elizabeth’s soul was inspired by Robert and would be cultivated by him. My Donald has also tended every phrase I have composed. Decades ago, he edited each of the chapters for which I was responsible in my collaborative work with Sandra; now he edits each of my cancer essays in my column for the electronic New York Times. Elizabeth’s gratitude reflects mine at discerning my life and my life’s work anchored in another’s mortal existence. It was Robert Browning who wrote, “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be.”

  One of Don’s scores of graduate students had been tormented about her doctoral dissertation on Robert Browning. How could she presume and who was she to make these interpretive claims? “Oh, Professor,” she fretted. “Browning specialists all over the world will be reading this.” Of course he did not disabuse her. Like me, she was lucky that he would be responding to every single word.

  The Trace

  THIS IS NO country for young people. Members of a dying generation lie comatose in single beds within darkened rooms or slumped in wheelchairs parked along hallways lit by overhead fluorescent panels. I stride down the long beige hall several times a day: first at 8 a.m., when I arrive, and then later at around noon, when I go on various errands, and then around 8 p.m., when I leave for home. No matter how breezy or bright the day, there is no weather in here. Just the beige walls and the stink of mortality. Would it be a courtesy to smile and nod at the dying animal wheeling herself forward by toeing the linoleum, gnarled talons on the hallway’s handgrip? Or should I protect her privacy with an impassive downward gaze? It is a she, I can tell by a wig perched less convincingly on her head than on mine.

  The errands vary. Dirty laundry must be taken home; warm sweatshirts brought in, since Don is always cold, and chocolate malts or the swill on the trays will result in weight loss. Shorts need to be bought extra-large to fit over the cobalt-blue thick cast that now encases his left leg from his upper thigh to his foot. A bottle of wine, smuggled within a discreet brown bag, gets me through sundown syndrome, when Don’s depleted spirits plummet into sorrow at his complete incapacity, for he cannot use a walker, cannot take one step, cannot get into a chair. I sit between his hospital bed and a window overlooking the parking lot. We are determined to stay in this miserable place as long as necessary—four days, a week, ten days—but how we landed here still shocks me.

  We had gone to the post-operative appointment with high hopes. After Don hauled himself into an examination room and onto its table with his legs outstretched, Dr. Licini took off the brace, probed the knee, and said, “It’s not attached.” The tendon is not attached? What could possibly have happened? Might it have been that second fall the first night home? Why had we been sent home with a flimsy brace and assured that the leg was weight-bearing with it?

  Tears welled at the surgeon’s office, in the car as I drove us to the hospital to sign admittance forms, during the reoperation, and intermittently throughout the three-night hospital stay, which (I was convinced) the doctor connived out of a guilty conscience or fear of litigation. For, as I kept on saying to Don and to his daughters and to mine and to anyone I could buttonhole, an eighty-seven-year-old man should never have been sent home after the first surgery. Two operations in two weeks: an outrage. If the first failed, would the second also?

  After the first operation, Don should have been counseled on the need for therapy in a rehabilitation facility. The problem is that he looks much younger than his years—like Julie, who in her fifties looks twenty-something (and sometimes, in her skinny jeans and Humane Society T-shirts, twelve). It was my fault, too. In New York, I had no inkling how difficult recuperation with a torn tendon repair would be, much harder than a hip replacement.

  Now, in a rehabilitation center called Bell Trace, the monthly calendar lists coffee ice cream socials, manicures, singalongs, church services, bingo, aromatherapy, balloon volleyball, puzzle tree crafts, and (much to Julie’s delight) therapy dog visits. From his bed, Don can see mountainous or skeletal Hoosiers shambling or rolling slowly down the hall. He wonders, why aren’t they screaming?

  It takes me a while to realize he is reciting lines about inmates in a nursing home, Philip Larkin’s poem “The Old Fools.” What, Larkin asks, do the old fools think has happened to them? Do they suppose that their mouths always hung open drooling, or that they should be peeing in their pants, or that they were born crippled? Bewildered and shocked at relics of time’s ravages, Don and I wonder, perhaps with more hope than Larkin had, if all these people inhabit clean well-lighted places inside their heads, rather than the beige smelly hallways.

  Do pockets of memories of other voices, other rooms protect them from registering their inverted infancy of diapers and restraining belts and spoon feedings? With all their choices as well as the power of choosing gone, what must they make of their twisted hands, lined faces, flaccid trunks, and wasted or engorged limbs in this second childhood “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”? Are drugs keeping them quiet? Why aren’t they screaming? Larkin extends a tradition founded by Juvenal, who also decried the regression of the aged: “Doddering voices and limbs, bald heads, running noses, like children’s, / Munching their bread, poor old things, with gums that are utterly toothless.”

  We are not screaming but waiting—for the paperwork, for the next pain pill, for the physical and occupational therapists, for the nutritionist and the podiatrist, for an attendant who might move Don onto a commode or
help me give him a bath in bed. No matter how solicitous I am, though, his waiting diverges from mine. I can get up and go to the nurses’ station to complain that the paperwork, pill, therapist, nutritionist, podiatrist, or attendant has not yet arrived. That our troubles differ troubles me.

  We would never have landed in this place had I not gone to New York. Right before the first fall, Don was downstairs in the basement study working after dinner, which he would never have done if I were home. So I blame it on Pride and Prejudice. He was holding the edited manuscript in his hands when he stood on the first step and looked back to check that the door to the garage was closed. All the pages scattered as he tumbled down on his knee. Not one of them included any mention of later-life love. Austen could no more imagine late-life romance than could Philip Larkin, who convinced himself that he was born “too late” to experience sexual freedom. For me, it’s easy to blame the second fall on Dr. Licini, whose second operation has resulted in Don’s complete immobilization. It is impossible to walk on one leg. If the heavy blue cast must stay on for weeks or months, what are we to do?

  Enter Tyrone: this is no country for young people, unless they are physical or occupational therapists. A fit Filipino who looks like Yul Brynner in The King and I, Tyrone brings all sorts of odd implements. With pride, he shows us a long pole attached to a grasper that can be used to obtain objects out of arm’s reach. Then he holds out a plastic tube with strings; what do we think it might help with? Don and I don’t have a clue. Tyrone proceeds to manipulate a bright yellow hospital sock on the tube, place it around Don’s toes, and pull up with the string until the sock encases his swollen foot. How ingenious, we agree, although Don’s hands cannot reach down to his toes and the soles of his feet have begun peeling. Yes, Tyrone nods, he was himself intrigued and did some research, and it is not patented because it was invented so many centuries ago.