I've been looking at the computer screen for awhile now trying to think of how to write about the main reason that I flew 3,000 miles out to California last week during a month when the weather is about as unpredictable as it comes and have finally decided that I'm not quite sure how to write about my friend of 25 years who is quite obviously dying but doing it in her own inimitable style. I'm going to try though as writing is cathartic and I could use some of that right now.
I knew that going out to Stockton to see Cyndi was going to be tough but I also knew that it was something that I was not willing to not do. There was just no way that I was not going to take the opportunity to visit the person who probably knows me best in this life, the person I could always turn to no matter what, the person who always knew what to say and how best to say it, and the person who loved and supported me during some of the stupidest - and hardest - moments of my life. "Tough" be damned, this visit was important - for both of us.
"Tough" might not be the best way to describe it, though. "Heart-rending" might actually be a better description as that's exactly what it is when you walk into a hospital room in the Respiratory Intensive Care Unit and see someone that you dearly love hooked up to more gadgets and gizmos than you'll find in most Best Buy showrooms. To see your best buddy lying there in the middle of all those whirring, clacking, buzzing machines with the plastic tubing and bags of dripping fluids and charts and bottles and all manner of medical paraphernalia, looking twenty years older and pale as a ghost against the hospital sheets is difficult - darned difficult - as that's when it really hits you that time is winding down; that Death is coming long before you ever thought possible riding that pale horse found in Revelation 6:7-8; and that there's not a damned thing that you can do about it except accept it and hope that he's not coming at a fast gallop but instead maybe taking a slower trot towards his final destination. And it hurts.
When I first walked into Cyndi's room at Saint Joseph's Hospital last Tuesday and took in that scene before me, it finally fully dawned on me that there were never going to be any more drives up to Lake Tahoe to park on a spot on high looking over the lake and reveling in the beauty that God had wrought, no more trips to the cemetery that I could see from her hospital window to sit on the grass near Timmy's grave and chat with a fallen friend as we reminisced about days gone by at the Stockton Police Department, no more dinners or lunches at our favorite Mexican restaurant in downtown Stockton where we no doubt ate too much but enjoyed every bite of it, no more impromptu trips to San Francisco or the wine country or the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, no more late-night phone calls that would last for hours with topics that ranged from the Armed Forces to how many cats did she own now to our families and their trials and tribulations to politics and how she wanted that vote she had wasted on Obama back to the possibility of past lives and how we surely must have known each other then to be such good friends in this life to everything in between, and never would there ever be that long-promised return trip to the East Coast and the chance to visit Gettysburg together - something that we had often talked about.
The reality of the situation is that my friend is being robbed of her life by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movements. Cyndi is now tethered to this life simply by the tubing that runs from the ventilator next to her bed into her throat and provides her the air that keeps her alive; life-sustaining air that the secretions that build up in her throat won't allow her to take in by normal means anymore. She's dying - she knows it and I know it and there was pretty much no getting around that fact as I held her hand and felt the paper thinness of her skin - skin that reminded me of my 92-year old grandmother but which encased the muscles and bones of a beloved friend who is only 58.
Fortunately, Cyndi had regained her ability to speak by the time I was able to get out to see her and she did a pretty good job communicating with me, though at times it was hard to understand her and she quite frequently had to stop in mid-sentence to try to get her throat muscles to work well enough to form the words she wanted to say. Ever the resourceful one, she had a back-up system should her voice fail - next to her was mounted an iPad2 with a text-to-talk program ready to go if talking became too difficult but luckily we never had to resort to that. Considering that typing isn't all that easy either with the muscle weakness and contractures in her hands, I was glad we didn't have to go that route. Besides, it's hard to convey that patented Cyndi sarcasm via typed word!
No stranger to adversity in her life, Cyndi is handling this latest lousy turn of events with the same aplomb that I've seen her use in many a difficult situation and she's not shying away from the cold hard facts of the matter. We discussed her final wishes (no funeral but a BBQ would be nice, cremation is the way she wants to go with her ashes being spread at some of her designated favorite places) and her biggest worry - which is that her husband of 35 years won't be too lonely and become a hermit or worse when she's gone. We talked about some of our good times and some of our bad times and how our friendship was special in that it had not only stood the test of time and distance but that it had grown stronger over the years rather than faded away like so many friendships do. We talked about the fact that I'm perfectly happy being single and no, she wasn't going to get her dying wish that I meet someone who loved me as much as I loved him even if she tried to play the "but I'm dying card!"
She told me that she'd had a good long life (I said I failed to see how 58 qualified as being long) and that she had gotten to see and do a lot of things that she had wanted to do in life; she said that it could have been worse, she could have lived during a time when you had to go to the river and pound your clothes with rocks to clean them or where there was no Pepsi (she's been a Pepsi addict for as long as I've known her). We talked about the people on her list she had all intentions of coming back to haunt or at least giving a cosmic kick to and we talked about the people she'd meet in heaven.
And she told me not to be sad that she was dying.
Well ... that's something that I can't do and I told her as much in between trying not to cry (and in turn making the nurse who had come in at that time to give her a breathing treatment cry also). I told her that if there was ever a time to be sad about something that this was it and I was going to by-golly be sad whether she liked it or not. She finally acquiesced and said that okay, I could be sad but just a little and not for long but to be honest, I'm having some trouble with that.
Anyhow, more later as I'm quite violating Cyndi's edict not to be sad right here in this very post where I've pretty much decided that whole 'not being sad thing' is going to take me a long time to master - if I ever do at all.
I knew that going out to Stockton to see Cyndi was going to be tough but I also knew that it was something that I was not willing to not do. There was just no way that I was not going to take the opportunity to visit the person who probably knows me best in this life, the person I could always turn to no matter what, the person who always knew what to say and how best to say it, and the person who loved and supported me during some of the stupidest - and hardest - moments of my life. "Tough" be damned, this visit was important - for both of us.
"Tough" might not be the best way to describe it, though. "Heart-rending" might actually be a better description as that's exactly what it is when you walk into a hospital room in the Respiratory Intensive Care Unit and see someone that you dearly love hooked up to more gadgets and gizmos than you'll find in most Best Buy showrooms. To see your best buddy lying there in the middle of all those whirring, clacking, buzzing machines with the plastic tubing and bags of dripping fluids and charts and bottles and all manner of medical paraphernalia, looking twenty years older and pale as a ghost against the hospital sheets is difficult - darned difficult - as that's when it really hits you that time is winding down; that Death is coming long before you ever thought possible riding that pale horse found in Revelation 6:7-8; and that there's not a damned thing that you can do about it except accept it and hope that he's not coming at a fast gallop but instead maybe taking a slower trot towards his final destination. And it hurts.
When I first walked into Cyndi's room at Saint Joseph's Hospital last Tuesday and took in that scene before me, it finally fully dawned on me that there were never going to be any more drives up to Lake Tahoe to park on a spot on high looking over the lake and reveling in the beauty that God had wrought, no more trips to the cemetery that I could see from her hospital window to sit on the grass near Timmy's grave and chat with a fallen friend as we reminisced about days gone by at the Stockton Police Department, no more dinners or lunches at our favorite Mexican restaurant in downtown Stockton where we no doubt ate too much but enjoyed every bite of it, no more impromptu trips to San Francisco or the wine country or the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, no more late-night phone calls that would last for hours with topics that ranged from the Armed Forces to how many cats did she own now to our families and their trials and tribulations to politics and how she wanted that vote she had wasted on Obama back to the possibility of past lives and how we surely must have known each other then to be such good friends in this life to everything in between, and never would there ever be that long-promised return trip to the East Coast and the chance to visit Gettysburg together - something that we had often talked about.
The reality of the situation is that my friend is being robbed of her life by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movements. Cyndi is now tethered to this life simply by the tubing that runs from the ventilator next to her bed into her throat and provides her the air that keeps her alive; life-sustaining air that the secretions that build up in her throat won't allow her to take in by normal means anymore. She's dying - she knows it and I know it and there was pretty much no getting around that fact as I held her hand and felt the paper thinness of her skin - skin that reminded me of my 92-year old grandmother but which encased the muscles and bones of a beloved friend who is only 58.
Fortunately, Cyndi had regained her ability to speak by the time I was able to get out to see her and she did a pretty good job communicating with me, though at times it was hard to understand her and she quite frequently had to stop in mid-sentence to try to get her throat muscles to work well enough to form the words she wanted to say. Ever the resourceful one, she had a back-up system should her voice fail - next to her was mounted an iPad2 with a text-to-talk program ready to go if talking became too difficult but luckily we never had to resort to that. Considering that typing isn't all that easy either with the muscle weakness and contractures in her hands, I was glad we didn't have to go that route. Besides, it's hard to convey that patented Cyndi sarcasm via typed word!
No stranger to adversity in her life, Cyndi is handling this latest lousy turn of events with the same aplomb that I've seen her use in many a difficult situation and she's not shying away from the cold hard facts of the matter. We discussed her final wishes (no funeral but a BBQ would be nice, cremation is the way she wants to go with her ashes being spread at some of her designated favorite places) and her biggest worry - which is that her husband of 35 years won't be too lonely and become a hermit or worse when she's gone. We talked about some of our good times and some of our bad times and how our friendship was special in that it had not only stood the test of time and distance but that it had grown stronger over the years rather than faded away like so many friendships do. We talked about the fact that I'm perfectly happy being single and no, she wasn't going to get her dying wish that I meet someone who loved me as much as I loved him even if she tried to play the "but I'm dying card!"
She told me that she'd had a good long life (I said I failed to see how 58 qualified as being long) and that she had gotten to see and do a lot of things that she had wanted to do in life; she said that it could have been worse, she could have lived during a time when you had to go to the river and pound your clothes with rocks to clean them or where there was no Pepsi (she's been a Pepsi addict for as long as I've known her). We talked about the people on her list she had all intentions of coming back to haunt or at least giving a cosmic kick to and we talked about the people she'd meet in heaven.
And she told me not to be sad that she was dying.
Well ... that's something that I can't do and I told her as much in between trying not to cry (and in turn making the nurse who had come in at that time to give her a breathing treatment cry also). I told her that if there was ever a time to be sad about something that this was it and I was going to by-golly be sad whether she liked it or not. She finally acquiesced and said that okay, I could be sad but just a little and not for long but to be honest, I'm having some trouble with that.
Anyhow, more later as I'm quite violating Cyndi's edict not to be sad right here in this very post where I've pretty much decided that whole 'not being sad thing' is going to take me a long time to master - if I ever do at all.
