The tower and the bathroom

This evening, Wife passed out in the bathroom.

We were in the bedroom talking. She was standing, holding a cup of water and fidgeting with her evening medications. Halfway through what she was saying, she swallowed her medicines fairly absent-mindedly, and went on talking. Then after a few minutes she started to slur her words. I told her she had better start getting ready for bed.

She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and when I looked in (a couple of minutes later) she was half-squatting in mid-air, holding onto the sink with one hand while she tried to brush with the other. Then she halfway put away her brush and tried to cup her hands for water, to rinse her mouth. But it is pretty hard to cup your hands when you are also holding onto the sink with both of them for dear life, so in fact she was clutching the sink while her knees slowly buckled beneath her and she watched the water from the tap flow freely down the drain. I encouraged her to wake up and stand up, but I was reluctant to lift her and push her through the rest of her evening drill. As I tried to explain to her, "There will come a day soon when you'll be on your own and have to do this for yourself -- so you had better be able to do it now." Her response was to stare vacantly and uncomprehendingly, and then to slide slowly but inevitably down to the floor where she lay back flat, head in the shower and feet at the door, totally insensible of anything.

I was still reluctant to do this all for her, so I let her lie there for five minutes or so while the boys brushed their teeth in the other bathroom and got ready for bed. Then I came back and spoke to her. She roused herself to a half-sitting position, as if she were doing a spider-crawl. She tried several times to pull herself up to a sitting position, but could not do it. I suggested that she might want to scoot over to the bed and then lift herself on that. FInally, slowly and after infinite pains, she did so. She pulled off her rings, tried to set them on the end table, dropped one, but then found it after I turned up the lights. She took off her watch, after long minutes spent futilely fumbling with its catch, and gave it to me to put on the dresser. She undressed -- although this was far more difficult than usual because she was hunched over even on the bed. And she pulled on a nightgown, though she got stuck halfway through and had to back up and start over. All in all, it must have been something like a half an hour that she was not very functional, although I have abbreviated the account significantly here. Then she let her head crash onto her pillow, and she was out.

My guess is that it was the medications, or rather those plus the wine she had with dinner. And in fact, our conversation had begun around the end of dinner with her expressing frustration over the low-grade infection and constant pain that she has had (she tells me) for something like two years now. She said one doctor has proposed to take out her tonsils, but at the same time admits that he is just guessing and that her tonsils don't look red or inflamed or infected in any way. Wife's guess is that her lupus is acting up, but her rheumatologist says that can't be true because her tests all look good. In any event, she went on, she is in constant pain and nobody seems able to do anything about it; so she is steadily using up her stores of Vicodin (which she had stockpiled in quantities seemingly planned to get her through the next ice age), she is chasing the painkillers with wine, she knows that she is "self-medicating" and that this is a bad thing, ... but she feels so rotten she can't bring herself to stop. And my guess, as I say, is that it is this combination which knocked her into oblivion on the bathroom floor.

Ironically, the rest of the conversation was about the positive signs in her life. She says she is trying to lend a hand around the house, and indeed I have seen as much. She wants to take a class, or go back to playing a musical instrument with somebody. (She used to be pretty good on the pipe organ.) She is making and keeping appointments, and she wants to make friends who are real, live people, friends in the flesh and not merely voices at the other end of a phone (like Friend) or an IM chat line (like Boyfriend 5). She has even started saying "thank you" pretty frequently -- maybe not Nobel Prize material, but progress all the same.

Then she spends a lot of her time alone reading. She has also tried to meditate or hypnotize herself as a way of dealing with the pain; on the whole this hasn't worked too well. And she has been reading Tarot cards for herself and others.

I have never explained this before, but Wife learned to read Tarot cards years ago, somewhere around the time we got married. Of course sometimes she deals them and gets random noise, but on the whole she has been (by her own reckoning) pretty accurate. I asked what results she has gotten for the boys; she said she never gets very consistent results, which she interprets to mean that their futures aren't very well determined yet. The only trend she notices is that Son 1's readings show a lot of cards representing friendship (like the Three of Cups), and she figures this is a fair representation of his life right now. In the readings she has done for me, she says she sees a lot of Major Arcana, which makes no sense at all. (According to what her teacher told her, that would mean -- if it were consistent across multiple readings -- that my life was being shaped by cosmic forces these days, and I sure can't see them.) She also said that she has seen the Page of Cups show up for me several times, a card that she interprets as a seduction of some kind. (Her teacher did a reading for Wife that featured the Page of Cups prominently, not long before she met Boyfriend 1.)

And for her? All she told me is that she regularly gets the Tower (pictured) showing up in her future somewhere. What does that mean? Most textbooks say that it represents major change, sometimes catastrophic or overwhelming major change. But Wife's teacher, all those years ago, always insisted that the Tower was the one card she considered a reliable predictor of death.

Of course, maybe there is nothing to Tarot cards in the first place, and it is all just silly.