Separation Anxieties
About a year ago we got a hospital bed for my husband, moved it into the bedroom and shoved the king bed we shared aside. He lost his ability to walk after he’d fallen in the bedroom and hit his head, resulting in a small brain bleed. At first I thought I’d still stay in the room with him, but it wasn’t long before I couldn’t stand sleeping there any longer. I just couldn’t rest with his mumbling, a noise he made whenver he moved his restless stiff legs on the plastic-covered mattress. So, I moved into the second bedroom. He didn’t like being trapped in the hospital bed, with its side rails, but it was where he would be safe. He didn’t like me in a different room, either.
One evening he took off his wedding ring. I was startled, but he’d been losing weight for some time from his disease and assumed he might’ve been afraid it would fall off. Or, was he no longer comfortable wearing the wedding ring in a greater, symbolic sense? I wondered whether he was separating from me, divorcing me in a small way, even as he was becoming increasingly dependent on me.
A month ago, he wanted to take my ring off after a tough confrontation. He needed to be moved to the bathroom; I couldn’t move him, lift him, take care of him. And as I tried and kept failing, fearing he was going to fall or that I’d hurt myself, I kept shouting. Both of us got angry and by the time we were resettled in the living room, he was mad and said, “we are not compatible.” He stopped talking and groped at my finger, trying to brush off my ring. “What, do you want me to take off my ring?” Yes, he nodded. “Well, I’m not going to, damn it. Not ready for divorce, after forty-seven years.” (Though, secretly I thought I’ve had enough!)
He used to say in early years of our marriage, whenever he had a bout of depression, “I want to be alone.” Sometimes he didn’t even want to read in the same room. There were times he didn’t want to go to the movies, or to a party, and I’d have to go by myself. Now he wants me around all the time, though I’ve got to leave for work, which helps to keep my sanity!
When I realized I had to arrange a burial plot, (you have to plan for the future even if you’re supposed to live in the present), I asked him the difficult question, “where do you want to end up? New York? Connecticut? Illinois? Minneapolis?” After much prodding he would finally say, “I don’t care, I just want to be next to you.”
So I had to not only decide what to do with him if he died first, but also where I wanted to have my final resting place, as they say, though I had no idea where I might be living when the time came. Would it be New York? Would it be Champaign-Urbana Illinois where I’d taught and lived for so many years and still had friends? Would I want to be near my son and his family in Minneapolis? The future is unpredictable. All that is certain is that some time the separations will come. Life feels like an extended, improvised dance where we repeatedly connect and detach, until the final separation in which we lie alone.
I recently went to Minneapolis to visit my beloved granddaughters for a few days. One night, from his bed in New York he kept calling loudly, “Achsah, Achsah!” He repeatedly asked our aide where I was and this went on throughout the night. He wanted to go to the airport convinced I had gone to Europe or Israel. It reminding me of when our son was about 10 years-old and would worry I’d go away. Every night as I tucked him into bed, he’d plea with me, “Promise you’ll still be here in the morning, Mom?” This would throw me a bit off guard. Did he not trust me? Did he think I’d leave him, run off, me, the faithful mom who had read him “The Runaway Bunny” when he was a little boy? Perhaps it was more inherently primal.
Well before my husband got sick, whenever I would go out, he would say, “be safe,” as if he feared that if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t return. When I’d go down to Times Square to go dancing to Zydeco or Cajun bands, he said he was afraid I’d get kidnapped.
John Donne, one of my favorite poets, wrote so many intense lyrical poems about love, both human and divine, about his longing to feel connected with God, and the experience of human intimacy and erotic desire. But what stands out to me at this moment in my life is how many poems he wrote about separation. He wrote “Valedictions” addressed to his lover as he was about to go on a journey overseas. For example, “The Valediction: Of Weeping” and “Valediction: of my Name, in the Window.” These poems express his fear that he will not come back, that he may die, even as he tries to assure his beloved that he will return. He gives her instructions making her feel as if stability will enable his safe return. A kind of magical thinking.
His most famous valedictory poem “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” opens with death, bringing up the subject that the lovers most fear:
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
A strange beginning for a poem offering assurances that he will return to his beloved, that their love is something higher and stronger. But that first stanza makes great sense to me. Donne reminds us, sharply, of what we don’t like to think about—mortality. He doesn’t allow us forget that even temporary farewells are like death, a separation. Maybe this is why his great valedictory poems, even as they hope and promise the lovers’ reunion, are all obsessed with dying. For every separation is a rehearsal for death.
I’m not a gloomy person. I love life, take pleasure in it, remembering Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” urging us to seize the day, with that line: “at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” But two weeks ago, the doctor said it was time for “palliative care.” Now all I can hear is Leonard Cohen’s achingly beautiful song,“Closing Time,” playing over and over again in my head.