So much time has passed, but the two and a half years of illness are still fresh in my mind. I can still hear his voice calling me from the hospital after exploratory surgery. From the tone, I know something is terribly wrong even before he tells me. He’s supposed to be in Canada or New York or somewhere, on a dangerous job site—although, let’s face it, just how dangerous could an air-monitoring job be? He tells me that a surgeon has opened up his gut to discover stage-4 colon cancer. It’s in his spleen and in his lymph nodes and he has six months to live.
Somehow those six months turn into one year and one year turns into two years and then, with those last hard months, two years squeak into two and a half.
We were supposed to be divorced. We were just getting over the angry part when he got sick. I knew it would be easier for him to go home to Iran, to have his family look after him instead of staying by himself in that crappy little apartment of his. I would have done anything to keep him around for our kids and that’s just what I did. I cooked for him, I drove our kids back and forth, and I went on family vacations with him. I did everything but sleep with him, even though I knew that’s what he wanted more than anything. I couldn’t bear that, though. I was giving so much of myself and I wouldn’t give that up as well.
I think of that time in the emergency room, where we went after he fell on my knee learning how to ski. We were laughing because I said, “It’s true that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” Out of nowhere he turns to me and asks why it was that I had divorced him. He weighed 120 pounds, his skin was jaundiced, he had lost so much hair, and he had wanted me to look at him and explain, for the millionth time, what went wrong in our marriage so that he could finally come to terms with it all before he died. I’m still sad that he never seemed to get it. I’m still sad that he never let me go. I’m still sad that he saw loving and needing me as a weakness.
I grew impatient with my limbo. I wondered how long he would live. I wondered when he would release me to my new life.
He asked me on the phone once, “Do you wish I were dead?” I told him that I dreaded his death, which was true, and that I would do anything to change the outcome. But, at the same time I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I needed it all to be over; I just didn’t say this with words. How guilty I felt when he told me that he was happy that it was him who was dying instead of me. How selfish that made me feel.
I also felt angry. He seemed to be making all the wrong choices. He had so little time to live; yet he frittered away the hours.
He watched TV in his spare time. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. Ignoring doctor’s orders, he ate beefsteak at every dinner. When his niece shipped him an herbal concoction that had cured a co-worker, he chucked it in a corner because it required too much effort to prepare. He’d lived his life without ambition; he faced his death the same way. From my perspective, he couldn’t be bothered to wage the war. Roles reversed, I would have fought like hell, particularly if it meant buying time with our kids.
While struggling to deal with my children’s fears, the promised loss of their father, all the decisions we faced as a family, I ran across a woman sitting in a bar. We were at a business conference, two women in a swarm of men, and we started talking about, of all things, life and death. It so happened that she’d recently lost her husband to a long battle with cancer, and, after listening to my story, she recommended a book that had helped her cope.
Written by two hospice nurses, Final Gifts shares their intimate experiences with patients at the edge of life. Through stories, they reveal the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments. We are allowed insight into the leave-taking process, and the ability to discover the gifts that the dying leave for us.
I sobbed as I read the book, but my anger subsided.
It’s important not to force your concept of dying onto someone else, let that person’s ideas about death take precedence…. At this point it’s worth reflecting on the stages of dying as described by Dr. Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance…Although Dr. Kubler-Ross has labeled these experiences ‘stages,’ a person doesn’t necessarily progress through them in orderly fashion.
Curious, it dawned on me that my ex-husband had skipped all the normal stages of dying and had landed squarely in acceptance. That it wasn’t a lack of ambition that made him behave the way he did, but an unquestioning belief in God and a fatalistic philosophy, one common to Muslims.
We sat beneath a shade tree one day watching our kids splash around in the backyard pool. “You realize,” he said. “That it’s fate that led me to the one doctor too messed up to diagnose my illness properly and then to the only radiologist on earth who could miss such an obvious tumor on film.” He took another deep inhale of his cigarette and stared off after the curling wisps of smoke, seemingly so at ease with the notion of his pending demise. I knew he was enduring a good deal of pain— problems going to the bathroom, eating, sleeping, all those things healthy people take for granted— but he rarely, if ever, complained.
It was hard not to respect the man. He firmly believed that God did not give an individual more than he could handle, that God had a plan for him and it was not his place to question or to intervene. A man who committed suicide to avoid overwhelming pain, according to him, is a man who has no faith in God, a man who has no place in heaven, where he will meet his reward.
He had begun having stomach pains the year after we divorced and, after several months of suffering, had finally dragged himself to a doctor for a check up. He had liked the doctor right away, felt sorry for the guy because he had lost his son in a plane crash, and admired the kind of stoicism it took to trudge on with life despite such a setback. He could empathize with the doctor because they were both, in their own ways, handling enormous loss with dignity. “I mean, really,” he continued. “What are the odds of me coming into contact with two people who could fuck up like that? This was just meant to be.”
As his disease progressed, he became more and more detached. I felt put off, hurt for my children’s sake, until I read: “The peace of another’s acceptance of death can be comforting, but with acceptance comes detachment, a drawing away from others no matter how close they have been. This can be painful for those being left behind.” I realized it wasn’t a lack of care that made him act the way he did, but a natural part of the process. Nature’s way of helping him release his grip on life.
He began talking about returning to Iran so he could be buried with his clan. He thought the kids and I should go with him and wait with him until he died.
For a while I felt angry. How could he choose his family of origin over the one we had made? How could he expect a workingwoman and two school-aged children to pull up stakes for an indefinite period of time? I’d had my fill of Iran. Hanging around for the grim reaper wasn’t going to improve that particular venue.
Having my children watch as their father fell apart wasn’t something I was down for. I understood the desire to die in his country, but our children needed to come first.
I came to accept his decision to leave with the help of Final Gifts.
Some people realize a need for reconciliation. Some request the removal of a barrier standing in the way of a peaceful death. Still others need particular circumstances to die peacefully—perhaps choosing the time of their death or the people who will be there…As death nears, people often realize some things feel unfinished or incomplete—perhaps issues that once seemed insignificant or that happened long ago. Now the dying person realizes their importance and wants to settle them.
Then he phones me on a Wednesday morning. It’s so out of character for him to call on a Wednesday morning that I know what he’s going to say even before he says it. His oncologist has said, “If you want to die in Iran, you have to leave right now or you’ll not make it home alive.” He waits quietly on the other end of the line for me to stop crying. He says, “Don’t cry, Ann.” But I’m crying because I know we’ll have to tell the kids that he’s not going to make it. I’m crying because he’s going to end up leaving them twice. I’m crying because I’m sad that he’ll not be here to watch our children grow up. And I’m crying because I’ll miss him too
