And So Here We Are
Dorothy and I always expected to someday be geezers, confined to rocking chairs, sipping good wine and coasting through the twilight of our lives while basking in the afterglow of wonderful memories acquired over many years of marriage. We had been quite young when we got married by a city hall justice of the peace and despite all odds managed to stay together for more than 50 years. They were years of growth and accomplishment. We were working-class kids with dreams and ambitions that for the most part were realized by the time I retired. We both got college educations after we got married and we managed to send all three of our kids through college and two of them through law school with none of them emerging with debt. Our lives had taken a dramatic turn toward prosperity when the Chicago Tribune recruited me from the smaller newspaper where I was working in North Carolina. The money, more than triple my salary in North Carolina, was the main attraction, for me at least, but Dorothy was also intrigued by the chance to live a big-city lifestyle for the first time. We had planned to be in Chicago for three years, long enough to save some college money, but wound up staying for nearly 20. Along the way, we traveled extensively and met many famous and interesting people and I moved into senior management at a Chicago publishing company that recruited me from the Tribune. It was a breathtaking run for both of us. When I retired, early, we moved back to North Carolina, which both of us had enjoyed very much while living there for 14 of the first 15 years of our marriage. By then our children and two of our grandchildren were there too. Over the next few years, five more grandchildren arrived and we were on hand to greet and spoil them all. Life was good, we felt blessed and we were very happy. Many times Dorothy and I marveled at how, against all odds, we had done everything we always wanted to do and then some.
During our post-working years we found more ways to enjoy our lives and each other. A favorite was to have a candle-lit dinner and a good wine on our screened porch while music that reminded us of places we had been and things we had done played softly in the background. Sometimes we would invite the kids over to join us. At other times we would invite the grand kids, who seemed to delight in experiencing a more "formal" dining experience than burgers and fries.
Dorothy and I were also blessed by very good health. We both exercised regularly, kept our weight in check and refrained from smoking. Dorothy was so healthy the she didn't need any prescription drugs, even as she moved deeper into her sixties and I had only two, both low dose and generic. Sometimes Dorothy and I would good-naturedly argue about which of us would outlive the other. I told her that she was destined to be the last to go. After all, she was female, nearly two years my junior, in excellent health and blessed with a much calmer nature than I. She would pooh-pooh my analysis, pointing out that I clearly was aging slower than she was and was also in excellent health. Then we would laugh and take another satisfying sip of wine.
In the back of my mind I thought a bit more deeply about mortality and the like. I indeed fully expected Dorothy to outlive me and I was careful to be sure she would enjoy a comfortable widowhood but I wondered what her day-to-day life would be like. In our more serious moments, we would talk about such things and I would ask her what kind of lifestyle she would envision if I were gone. She said she would probably downsize a bit but that would be about it. Like me, she had pretty well lost her urge to travel and most of her life was focused on kids and grandkids, all of whom were close at hand. So she wouldn't need to make any major changes. Oddly enough, we rarely talked about how I would live were Dorothy to go first. It just didn't seem likely.
As the years rolled on Dorothy did get a little concerned about her health. She had developed some mild arthritis and chronic back pain and her mobility wasn't quite what it had been. She also worried about eventually developing Alzheimer's, which had taken her mother and an aunt and seemed to run in her family. Dorothy had a great mind and the thought of losing it terrified her. She loved to read, had always been a strong student and had a creative streak that had led her to pursue painting good enough to produce works for each grandchild. Sometimes I would find her quietly working brain-building games such as Sudoku. It was obvious to me that she was determined to do all that she could do to keep her brain working at a high level. I could understand her concerns, but since there were no signs of mental slippage in her as she approached her late sixties, I wasn't terribly worried. Dorothy was so smart and capable that I couldn't imagine her being anything less. She even did our taxes.
Then came the morning of October 9, 2013. As was her normal routine, she had gotten out of bed ahead of me and gone downstairs to let the dogs out and make a pot of coffee. I was sound asleep. I'm a bit of a night owl so I like to sleep in. I was awakened that day by the telephone ringing. I was surprised that Dorothy didn't answer it. I picked up. It was our daughter-in-law calling. I don't recall the reason, but it wasn't particularly important. At about the time I hung up from that call I heard Dorothy call out from downstairs. Something seemed wrong. I quickly got out of bed and rushed down the stairs, asking her in a loud voice if something was wrong. I couldn't make out her answer but when I got to our family room my fears were confirmed. She was lying on the floor, unable to get up. I went quickly to her and saw that one side of her face was twisted into a gnarly shape. She was trying to talk but her speech was badly slurred. I knew what it was. She did too. "I think I'm having a stroke," she managed to say, slurring her words. Somehow I got her off of the floor and on to a nearby loveseat. Then I called 911 and told the dispatcher that my wife was having a stroke. As the ambulance sped toward our house, the dispatcher kept me on the line, asking me to get Dorothy to perform several tasks, including smiling. She had always had a wonderful smile. It was one of the first things I had noticed about her when I met her for the very first time when I was a young newspaper reporter and she was a pretty young office worker in the courthouse. I've never forgotten that moment. But today, as I stood trembling with the phone held to my ear and the dispatcher giving me instructions, Dorothy could not smile. Her lips would move but her mouth was crooked as if her smile muscles wouldn't work. Her left arm was lifeless and her left leg was jerking involuntarily. I feared that I was going to lose her. I had never expected that. I certainly didn't want it. I was terrified but determined to remain calm and clear-headed enough to get her the help she needed.
The paramedics arrived quickly and began examining her. Soon she was on a stretcher headed for the doorway and the awaiting ambulance. One of the paramedics asked me which hospital I wanted them to take her to. I told him to go to the closest hospital that has a stroke center and that would be able to give her a TPA injection if she was a candidate for one. I knew about those clot-busting drugs from earlier reading. I knew that if Dorothy's stroke was caused by a clot the drug might break it up and lessen the damage to her brain. But if the clot was caused by bleeding, the TPA shot could not be used.
The ambulance sped away while I got dressed and rushed to my own car to make the seven-mile drive to the hospital. On the way, I began calling our kids from the car. When I reached the hospital ER, I was ushered into the room where Dorothy was being attended to. The doctors had several questions, mostly concerning when the first stroke symptoms had appeared, what if any medication she was taking and what kind of medical history she had. Dorothy could answer most of them. I chimed in when it made sense. The doctors cleared her for the TPA shot and administered it. The kids began arriving while we waited for the results. By then Dorothy's face was no longer contorted and her speech was much better. She greeted the kids by name. It was clear to me that she wanted to calm them.
As it turns out the TPA shot failed to dissolve the clot and Dorothy was quickly transported by ambulance to a bigger hospital less than 15 minutes away. This time, I rode with her. We got there quickly and she was immediately examined by a neurologist and a neurosurgeon in the invasive radiology department. Dorothy was fully awake as the neurologist explained what had taken place and what they thought should be done next, which was to attempt to remove the clot by running a cath device through the affected artery and capturing it. After asking about some of the risks, we both consented to the procedure. Thirty minutes later the neurosurgeon came out, frowning, and reported that he had found the clot but had not been able to remove it. The damage was done, he said. There would be no undoing it. I listened carefully, asked a few questions and then began processing it all. I was comforted at least a little by one doctor's suggestion that the TPA shot, though unsuccessful in dissolving the clot, might yet aid in Dorothy's eventual recovery. He said there is research to support such reasoning. To this day, I keep that in mind.
Dorothy stayed in intensive care for the next two nights and was then transferred to a regular room on the neurology floor. She was heavily sedated for most of the time but her vitals were good. As she slowly emerged from the initial fog of her stroke she was able to communicate surprisingly well. She also still had her memory as best I could determine. I felt oddly blessed. It was beginning to look as if I wasn't going to lose her after all. I found myself feeling uncharacteristically religious. I thanked God and asked him to heal her.
Standing by Dorothy's bed during those dark nights I thought about how we had slowly come to more or less take each other for granted over the years. We rarely said "I love you" anymore, though we remained very much in love. Our routines were such that we spent much of each day doing our own respective things. Dorothy liked to read, I liked to spend time on the computer. She paid the bills, I managed the investments. She took care of the housework, I took care of the yard. We were together and apart at the same time. Still, we were close. It's just that the closeness was assumed more than it was nurtured.
A couple of years earlier, when Dorothy's health was hitting some turbulence and she was openly worried, she had blurted out that if we were ever going to make it to Italy, the one place we had always wanted to visit but had not, then we needed to get on with it because if we delayed too long we might not be able. Or at least she might not. I thought that was a bit over the top but I could tell Dorothy was quite serious so I told her to put the wheels in motion. As it turned out, we had already waited a bit too long to put the trip together that year so we decided to plan it for the following year. In the meantime, in the current year, we would re-visit one of our favorite cities, San Francisco. That trip turned out to be one of the best trips we had ever made. We had a wonderful, wonderful time as we ventured over to Sausalito, up to Napa, down to Carmel and all over San Francisco itself, stopping for dinner at a little restaurant I had long adored but Dorothy had never visited. She adored it too and told me so as we strolled arm in arm back to our grand old hotel, the St. Francis, a few blocks away. We were reminded of how much and how deeply we loved each other.
The following year we made it to Italy but not until after swinging through Kaiserslautern, Germany via rental SUV so that I could visit the Army base to which I had been assigned nearly 50 years earlier. As I drove through what had once been familiar streets I didn't recognize one damn thing. Even my old post had been expanded and rebuilt. If our vehicle hadn't had a navigation system we might have been lost for days. Dorothy found all of that really humorous and reminded me of how really, really old I had become. I laughed, agreed and drove on. Dorothy had planned every step of that trip, from plane reservations, to renting the SUV to booking train tickets and hotel rooms. She did it flawlessly. Even I was impressed. I later told her that I had half wished for something to go wrong just so I could give her a bad time. Alas, she had left me no nits to pick. I was left to simply brag on her flawless perfection. She seemed to like that. It was the second time we had visited Europe since I retired but it was the best. The other trip, to London and Paris, was very nice, mind you, but this last one was simply the best. We celebrated our anniversary in Florence, Italy. How perfect is that?
As such memories flipped through my mind in that dark hospital room I thought that if Dorothy had not survived that stroke we may have left each other without saying I love you. Sure, we knew we did but if we hadn't actually said it wouldn't be quite the same. So I vowed right then that from now on, for as much time as we have remaining, I would be sure to actually tell Dorothy that I love her each and every day, at least once, especially at bed time, always sealed with a gentle kiss. And so I do, without fail, more than a year into this new phase of our life together. And so does she. It has become part of our nightly ritual. You never know when it will all end. That's something the stroke taught me.
Dorothy has come a long way since she that day I found her helpless on the floor. She's had inpatient, in-home and outpatient therapy and continues to work hard at home. Her speech has remained good, her memory is excellent and she is steadily re-learning much of what she used to do. Just today she went online to pay our AT&T bill. Yesterday she paid an Amex bill. You can see her brain spring to action each time it goes over what was once familiar territory. Physically Dorothy still can't use her left arm but she's working steadily with the Bioness H200 functional electrical stimulation device that we bought several months ago and she can now grasp a cup of water to carry with her when she is moving about in her wheelchair. She doesn't use her wheelchair all that much, however, because she gets around quite well with her quad cane. We've now got a chair lift for our staircase and she can get on and off it without assistance, as long as she is wearing her leg brace. I have become the family cook and fortunately for both of us I am pretty good at it. Dorothy in fact raves about my cooking. I'm not sure if that is because I'm so good at it or because she's so happy she doesn't have to do it any more. And, oh yes, she can once again smile that beautiful smile.
I stay busy as Dorothy's caregiver but I do not feel burdened. That's not to say I don't have my moments, it's just that I feel very blessed to have the opportunity and the physical ability to do things for her that she cannot do for herself, at least not now. She is in no way a burden. She sometimes thinks she is but she's not and I am quick to point that out to her. I am not sure if she believes me but it is true. I'm frankly surprised at my own attitude because I have never been good at the whole caregiving routine. I wasn't even good about changing diapers when the kids were babies. Dorothy was always the caregiver in this family, even when my own mother was seriously ill. My support took other forms. It was important, too, but it was not actual caregiving. Actual caregiving just wasn't my thing. Not until Dorothy had a stroke. Dorothy, who knows me better than anyone, says I have been a "pleasant surprise." It's a surprise to me too, to be honest.
I suppose it is still possible that Dorothy will outlive me, even though she is now a stroke victim. Such things are unpredictable. But I do find myself pondering what will come of her if I go first. I've tried to broach that subject with our children, all of whom are adults and all of whom adore their mom and would certainly do whatever they can to take fine care of her in my absence, but I get the idea they haven't really thought it through in any real detail. Kids don't like to think about their parents dying. There is so much involved in caring for someone who can't fully care for herself. The middle-of-the-night potty calls, the careful moves to help her on and off of the shower bench, the intensely personal chores that are comfortable to the caregiver and cared for only if accompanied by a lot of true, intimate closeness built over many years. Yes, Dorothy will be cared for and she will be loved even if I am not around. But what I wonder is how comfortable she will be.
I mean it when I say I feel blessed to be able to care for this wonderful woman. I am forever grateful that she is still here and that we can still, in a very real sense, relate to each other and share all that we have experienced together for more than a half century now. It may not be exactly what we imagined when we conjured up those visions of sipping wine while rocking gently into our final chapters, but it is pretty darn nice. And it is a whole lot better than it could have been.
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