A week ago, I drove Wife to the hospital. Yes, we’re separated. Yes, we live in different cities, an hour apart.
I guess in a sense the story started the Tuesday before that – June 23, just a couple days after I had driven the boys down to visit my dad in the nursing facility where he was. Monday (the day after visiting my dad), I dropped the boys off with Wife for a week. Then the very next day, Son 1 texted me from Wife’s house asking if I could identify what was wrong with her. She had gotten up that morning: her speech was slurred, her actions were totally uncoordinated, and soon (with Son 2’s help) she tottered back into bed and slept soundly. It was now several hours later. At the time, I said what sounded most likely was that she might have taken one of her sleeping pills in the morning by accident, and they should just wait till it wore off. (If she wakes up any earlier in the morning than usual, she’s so worried about being sure she gets enough sleep that she will take a sleeping pill which knocks her out for another four to six hours.) I heard nothing more from them that day.
Sunday afternoon – we’re up to the 28, at this point – Son 1 called me again. Basically the same story, except that after sleeping several hours she had woken up and was making no sense. That is, Son 2 was talking to her, trying to keep her calm and reassuring her that she didn’t have to get up and do anything until her coordination was working better. But when she spoke back to him, what came out was gibberish. He started writing it down, to keep track; apparently at one point she told him there were men underwater controlling how we think. Their question to me was, WTF? In all the years I had loooked after her, had I ever seen something like this? Answer: no, not really. We discussed on the phone whether it could be one of her psychological ailments, but those have been pretty well under control lately. Son 1 suggested maybe a TIA (mini-stroke). I asked, could they get her to a hospital? Well, she was in no shape to drive. They could call a taxi, but the way she was talking they thought she would refuse to go. So I asked:
“Do you think it would help if I drove up there?”
“Actually, Dad, yeah – that would probably be a good idea. She might not want to see you, but it would probably help.”
So I drove to her place. When I came in her house, her first reaction was hostility and suspicion: what was I doing there? Had I come to take the boys away from her permanently? (She still wasn’t making a lot of sense.)
I sat and talked with her, as gently and slowly as I know how. I reassured her that nobody wanted to take anyone or anything away from her, and in fact that I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I explained – many times – that Son 1 and Son 2 were worried about her and had called me because they were afraid something had happened. And finally I persuaded her to let us take her to the hospital to have her checked for a stroke.
OK, that took several hours. Hospitals always do. But during that time she began to come around. By the time we left that evening, her speech still sounded just a little bit funny but she was lucid and making sense. The tests for stroke came up negative, but the doctor said yes, it might have been a TIA and she should follow up with her regular doctor.
Gosh – taking Wife to the hospital, explaining her symptoms because she’s unable to do it, sitting around for hours and then listening to the after-care instructions. Just like old times.
When I drove back Monday night (to bring the boys to my place for the week), she seemed completely normal. She also said that she remembered nothing of Sunday before I walked into the house.
__________
So far I’ve told this story to two people: one co-worker, and Elly. (In fact I more or less re-used the e-mail to Elly in writing the above.) Both expressed concern for Wife, and said they were glad she had come around. Elly added, “What on earth happened? That was very odd. The boys dealt with it very well. It must have been scary for them” – so I’m pretty sure she has no idea how self-reliant the boys are, nor how familiar they have become with Wife’s intermittently debilitating medical conditions. Still at some level they must have been frightened for her or they wouldn’t have called.
I have imagined to myself telling Debbie the story, and have imagined her critical of my still being “entangled” with Wife. Maybe that’s not what she would say at all, though in general she is a stern critic of co-dependency and believes that if you’re going to break with someone then you should break … not let yourself get sucked back into the same old dance. She still communicates with her ex-husband, but apparently they get along like old friends now (or that’s how she tells it). Mind you, this conversation never happened in real life – I haven’t heard from Debbie in a couple of months now (not since we went on a weekend meditation retreat together). So I don’t know why I invested the energy in imagining this scene (though I imagined it quite a lot in the subsequent week). Maybe I was just trying to criticize my own involvement, and was using Debbie as a mask for doing so. Certainly at this point I thought I was out of the business of coaxing and cajoling an irrational Wife, much less the business of taking her to the hospital and acting as her advocate because she can’t advocate for herself. And yet at the time it seemed the most natural thing to do.
Of course it seemed natural: thirty years is a long time to build up a habit. And it is less likely that I would have stepped in had the boys not been there; in a sense I was bailing them out as well as rescuing her, because otherwise they would have had to deal with her alone. For all their self-reliance, they are still only teenagers.
And I know Wife pretty well. At first they called me because they thought I might have seen this behavior before. But in the end I think the main value I added (besides a driver’s license) was that I knew how to talk to Wife to dispel her distrust and coax her into the car. I knew what words to use and how to pace them. Not that I had it planned out in advance – I could never have told them over the phone, “Say it this way.” But I “talked with all of my senses” as I tried to describe it later: watching her closely and listening carefully to see how she reacted to each word, each idea. So I could try out this approach and later that one; if this one nudged her towards a better place, I followed it up; if that one threatened to shove her back into a worse place, I cut it short and tied off the end to make it innocuous. In a weird way this is one of my strongest skills, though it is fine-tuned around just one person – Wife – and it’s not one I enjoy using.
Part of what made it possible, too, is that Wife trusts me with her medical care even if she doesn’t trust me in other areas. Years ago, when she first stopped working, she was in bed for most of each day and relied on me to pull together all her medications three times a day. The few hours she was awake, she would spend on her e-mail talking with Church Tenor about what a jerk I was and how she wanted to leave me and take me for everything I’ve got; but she would willingly swallow any collection of pills I handed her.
In fact, this side of the relationship is very old. Back in the early 1980’s, before we got married, we lived together for a while. Wife’s mother didn’t think much of the idea, and kept encouraging Wife with observations like, “Why should he buy a cow when milk’s so cheap?” Finally we planned a wedding, and for a while Wife moved back with her mother in order to do the sewing and baking. They fought constantly and it was a miserable time for all. But one evening – just before the wedding itself – I got a call from Wife’s mother. Wife had just left her house to come back to where I was staying. And Mother-In-Law explained, …
Hosea, I’m really disappointed, but it’s going to work out. There were a lot of things I hoped for from having this time with W, and none of them happened. But I know this marriage is the right thing for her. See, all the time she was growing up, whenever W got sick she wanted to come home to me … because when she was sick she felt vulnerable and defenseless, and being with me meant home and security. Even when she was in college, wherever she went or whoever her friends were – when she got sick she wanted to come home to me. Well, she’s been coming down with a sore throat and headaches these last few days – probably all the stress – and finally this evening she told me, “Mom, I’ve got to go. I’m sick, I feel rottten, and I have to go to Hosea.” What that tells me is, she’s made the switch from me to you. Now you’re the one she wants to be with when she’s sick. You’re the one that means home and security to her. And so it’s right that she’s marrying you. Now is the time. It’s going to be OK.
Wife’s mother may have been a little off-base with her guess that it was going to be OK, but at a medical level Wife has always put unbounded trust in me. And apparently still does today.
I really did think I was out of this job. But maybe it’s true that as long as you have kids together you can never really separate all the way.
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