So we still thought of that year.
Quintana’s “recovery.”
We had no idea then how rare recovery can be.
No idea that “recovery,” like “adoption,” remains one of those concepts that sounds more plausible than it turns out to be.
Colin sur la banquise.
The wheelchair.
The detritus of the bleed, the neurosurgery.
In summertime and wintertime.
I wonder if in those revised circumstances she remembered The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, what it meant to her then.
She did not want to talk about those revised circumstances.
She wanted to believe that if she did not “dwell” on them she would wake one morning and find them corrected.
“Like when someone dies,” she once said by way of explaining her approach, “don’t dwell on it.”
29
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
So go W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” sixteen lines that, during the days and weeks immediately after John died, spoke directly to the anger — the unreasoning fury, the blind rage — that I found myself feeling. I later showed “Funeral Blues” to Quintana. I told her that I was thinking of reading it at the memorial service she and I were then planning for John. She implored me not to do so. She said she liked nothing about the poem. She said it was “wrong.” She was vehement on this point. At the time I thought she was upset by the tone of the poem, its raw rhythms, the harshness with which it rejects the world, the sense it gives off of a speaker about to explode. I now think of her vehemence differently. I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it.
On the afternoon she herself died, August 26, 2005, her husband and I left the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell and walked through Central Park. The leaves on the trees were already losing their intensity, still weeks from dropping but ready to drop, not exactly faded but fading. At the time she entered the hospital, late in May or early in June, the blue nights had been just making their appearance. I had first noticed them not long after she was admitted to the ICU, which happened to be in the Greenberg Pavilion. In the lobby of the Greenberg Pavilion there hung portraits of its major benefactors, the most prominent of whom had played founding roles in the insurance conglomerate AIG and so had figured in news stories about the AIG bailout. During the first weeks I had reason to visit the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion I was startled by the familiarity of these faces in the portraits, and, in the early evening, when I came downstairs from the ICU, would pause to study them. Then I would walk out into the increasingly intense blue of that time of day in that early summer season.
This routine seemed for a while to bring luck.
It was a period when the doctors in the ICU did not seem uniformly discouraging.
It was a period when improvement seemed possible.
There was even mention of a step-down unit, although the step-down unit never exactly materialized.
Then one night, leaving the ICU and pausing as usual by the AIG portraits, I realized: there would be no step-down unit.
The light outside had already changed.
The light outside was no longer blue.
She had so far since entering this ICU undergone five surgical interventions. She had remained ventilated and sedated throughout. The original surgical incision had never been closed. I had asked her surgeon how long he could continue doing this. He had mentioned a surgeon at Cornell who had done eighteen such interventions on a single patient.
“And that patient lived,” the surgeon had said.
In what condition, I had asked.
“Your daughter wasn’t in great condition when she arrived here,” the surgeon had said.
So that was where we were. The light outside was already darkening. The summer was already ending and she was still upstairs in the ICU overlooking the river and the surgeon was saying she wasn’t in great condition when they put her there.
In other words she was dying.
I now knew she was dying.
There was now no way to avoid knowing it. There would now be no way to believe the doctors when they tried not to seem discouraging. There would now be no way to pretend to myself that the spirit of the AIG founders would pull this one out. She would die. She would not necessarily die that night, she would not necessarily die the next day, but we were now on track to the day she would die.
August 26 was the day she would die.
August 26 was the day Gerry and I would leave the ICU overlooking the river and walk into Central Park.
I see as I write this that there is no uniformity in the way I refer to Gerry. Sometimes I call him “Gerry,” sometimes I call him “her husband.” She liked the sound of that. Her husband. My husband.
She would say it again and again.
When she could still speak.
Which, as the days continued to shorten and the track to narrow, was by no means every day.
You notice we’re doing hand compression.
Because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the vent.
For at least an hour now.
In an underpass beneath one of the bridges in Central Park that day someone was playing a saxophone. I do not remember what song he was playing but I remember that it was torchy and I remember stopping under the bridge, turning aside, eyes on the fading leaves, unable to hold back tears.
“The power of cheap music,” Gerry said, or maybe I only thought it.
Gerry. Her husband.
The day she cut the peach-colored cake from Payard.
The day she wore the shoes with the bright-red soles.
The day the plumeria tattoo showed through her veil.