Same Kind of Different As Me (23 page)
Dozens
of friends, many of them doctors, scoured the Web and medical literature, hoping to find a cure. We learned of a brand-new chemotherapy drug called CPT-11. The FDA had rushed to approve it after clinical trials showcased its effectiveness against metastasized colorectal cancer. To try it, we traveled 250 miles to the Cancer Therapy and Research Center in San Antonio. I rigged my Suburban so that Deborah could lie on a soft pallet for the whole five-hundred-mile roundtrip, her feet facing the tailgate, her head on the pillow-topped console where I could stroke her hair while I drove. I made arrangements for us to stay at the Hyatt Hill Country resort, hoping a sumptuous suite with a sweeping view of San Antonio’s rolling country-side might take the focus off our circumstances. It didn’t. Nor did the peppy mariachi band singing through their noses in the hotel courtyard seem the appropriate soundtrack for beating back death.
But Deborah had been born in San Antonio and on our second day there, before her first scheduled treatment, she began to reminisce as I drove out of the hospital parking lot, her head on the console beside me. “Daphene and I were the first Rh-positive twins born in the Nix Hospital with an Rh-negative mother. We both had to have blood transfusions,” she said to the ceiling. “That was risky back then. Now I’m back again for another risky treatment.”
Tears welled in her eyes then. “I don’t want to die here.”
“You’re not going to die here,” I said, smoothing her hair. But the truth was that the specter of death had begun to gnaw at the edges of my hope.
The next day, we found the rat-infested second-story apartment on Fabulous Drive that we had shared for three weeks in 1970. We had moved there for a job I’d accepted selling stocks via cold calls on straight commission. Lured by $100,000 in potential annual salary, I did receive one pay-check before the company went broke—for thirteen dollars and eighty-seven cents. Deborah and I ate thirteen-cent bean rolls for three weeks until the money ran out and we hightailed it back to Fort Worth. Now, thirty years later, we had returned, hoping this second gamble in San Antonio would pay off better than the first.
It didn’t. For Deborah, CPT-11 was a disaster. A veteran of scores of chemotherapy treatments, as soon as this one invaded her veins, Deborah’s eyes locked onto mine: “Please tell them to stop!” she cried. The nurses quickly reduced the flow, but burning cramps still rolled through her guts.
Still, we kept up the treatments for weeks. The CPT-11 treatments ravaged Deborah, stripping her down to a gaunt and hollow-eyed waif. During this time, I would often see Denver, sitting outside our home in prayer.
On July 14, 2000, we celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday. At the end of that month, Carson flew out from New York and drove with us to Colorado to visit Regan at Crooked Creek Ranch, Deborah lying in the rear seat, which we’d converted into a bed. But the trip was cut short when the altitude began, literally, to suffocate Deborah. The chemo had so depleted her red blood cell count that her heart had to race to pump oxygenated blood. We rushed her down the mountain at hair-raising speeds, dodging deer and rabbits on the way to the hospital. We were able to return to Crooked Creek, but only so long as Deborah remained tethered to an oxygen bottle.
After we returned to Texas, she caught me off-guard one day. “I’ve called Pastor Ken,” she said, “and asked him to come over to discuss my memo-rial service.”
On the Saturday before Labor Day, Regan realized it was time to come home. She called Carson, who hopped the next flight from New York to Colorado, helped her pack, and drove her to Fort Worth.
I, too, sensed time was growing short, like shadows nearing noon. Dr. Senter, Deborah’s first surgeon, confirmed my suspicions on October 8. Deborah’s condition had deteriorated to critical, and I rushed her to the hospital. She had begged me not to take her to the hospital, afraid she would never come out.
“I don’t want to die there,” she said, tears welling. Then she broke down: “I don’t want to die at all.”
After a stint in the ER, the hospital staff admitted Deborah to a private room. Trying to collect myself, I paced the hall outside until I ran into Dr. Senter, who asked me if I would come to his office for a personal talk—not as a doctor, but as a friend.
“Deborah is very sick,” he began. “The last patient I knew of in her condition lived only three or four days.”
I wasn’t surprised. Deborah’s waking hours had dissolved into a blur of writhing agony. But I didn’t want to believe him. That death was so near didn’t square with our prayers, our faith.
“You should start calling family and friends that she would want to see before . . .” He paused and rearranged his words: “Ron, the clock can’t be turned back. I’m sorry.”
He walked me to the door and gave me a hug, something doctors don’t do enough of. Then I wandered out of his office, down the antiseptic hall-way, fumbling with my cell phone as I went. Who to call? . . . Carson, yes, of course, Carson . . . and Regan . . . and Daphene. I walked across a street to a parking lot. I don’t know whether cars passed. I got into my car. I closed the door, laid my head on the steering wheel, and wept. At some point, I realized I was screaming.
Carson
called me and told me what the doctors told Mr. Ron, so I went on down to the hospital and stood outside Miss Debbie’s door and prayed. Ever now and then, I’d peek through the window and I could see folks in there . . . Carson, Regan, Miss Mary Ellen, some nurses. I could see Mr. Ron, too, sometimes sittin beside Miss Debbie’s bed, a lotta times with his head in his hands. I could tell he was hurtin real bad, but there was somethin else in his face that bothered me some: He was mad. And I knowed Who he was mad at.
Ever once in a while, somebody’d come out of the room. I’d hug em and they’d go on home. Got to be around midnight by the time everbody was gone. Purty soon after that, Mr. Ron come out in the hall, and I asked him if I could talk to him alone.
I knowed what he was goin through. It was just like when I was standin there watchin that house burn down and my grandmother was in there. I also knowed that if Miss Debbie died, he was gon’ have to live through it, just like I lived through it with Big Mama, BB, and Uncle James.
There’s somethin I learned when I was homeless: Our limitation is God’s opportunity. When you get all the way to the end of your rope and there ain’t nothin you can do, that’s when God takes over. I remember one time I was hunkered down in the hobo jungle with some folks. We was talkin ’bout life, and this fella was talkin, said, “People think they’re in control, but they ain’t. The truth is, that which must befall thee must befall thee. And that which must pass thee by must past thee by.”
You’d be surprised what you can learn talkin to homeless people. I learned to accept life for what it is. With Miss Debbie, we had done got to the point where we had to leave it up to God. Sometimes to touch us, God touches someone that’s close to us. This is what opens our eyes to the fact there is a higher power than ourselves, whether we call it God or not.
You know already Mr. Ron’s a talker, but he didn’t say a word to me out in that hallway . . . just wandered over in a corner and stood there starin down at the floor. I got kinda firm with him. “Mr. Ron, raise your head up and look at me!”
He snapped his head up like somebody’d jerked it, and I could see through his eyes that little pieces of his heart was breakin off while we was standin there.
“I know you is hurtin and questionin God,” I told him. “I’m hurtin, too. And you is probably wonderin why a saint like Miss Debbie is in that room sufferin when all them street bums she ministered to seem to be gettin along just fine. Well, let me tell you somethin: God calls some good ones like Miss Debbie home so He can accomplish His purposes down here on the earth.”
Mr. Ron just stared at me. That’s when I noticed his eyes was all red and swoll up. His throat was just a-workin, like he was fixin to break down on me, but I went right on anyway, ’cause I felt like if I didn’t, he was gon’ turn his back on God.
“I ain’t sayin God can’t use the bums and the addicts to work His will down here—He’s God, and He can sure ’nough do anything He wants. I’m just tellin you He sometimes needs to call the good ones home to bring glory to His name. And I can tell you something else—I don’t care what no doctors say, Miss Debbie ain’t goin nowhere till she finished the work here on earth that God gave her to do. You can take
that
to the bank.”
When
I found Denver in the hallway, I was still walking in a stupor, so I didn’t remember everything he said. But I did remember his words about Deborah’s not dying, that I could take that to the bank. I recall being dimly encouraged that a bank still existed somewhere that would accept deposits of what pitiful little remained of my faith.
Back in the room, Carson and Regan slept fitfully in Naugahyde hospital recliners. I finessed my way through an obstacle course of IV lines and pulled Deborah close. Soon I could feel her warm tears sliding into the narrow valley between our faces. “Ronnie, I don’t want to die,” she said, whispering so the children couldn’t hear.
Grief crippled my vocal cords, and for a full minute I couldn’t speak. When I did, all I could say was, “I don’t want you to die either.”
The next morning, doctors suggested a last-ditch colonscopy. In her frail condition, the risks included death. But we agreed to keep walking through every open door until all were locked and impassable.
Mary Ellen was there. The medical staff prepped Deborah and took her away. Hours later, we saw surgical technicians wheel her into recovery and raced to join her. The surgeons filed in, looking grim, and I wondered bizarrely if they teach appropriate facial decorum in medical school. Back in her room a couple of hours later, a doctor named Redrow came to give us a more thorough summation.
Before he could speak, Deborah smiled weakly and greeted him. “I’m so-o-o hungry. When can I have something to eat?”
Dr. Redrow looked at her sadly. “You can’t eat.”
Deborah smiled again, used to postsurgical protocols. “Right, but when
can
I eat?”
He gazed at her steadily. “You can’t.”
She looked at him, processing words that refused to be processed. “You mean I’ll never get to eat again?” In disbelief, she flashed me a look that begged me to ask him the question differently so that the answer might be different. I knew it wouldn’t be. Though I hadn’t told her yet, I’d already learned that the tumors, overwhelming and inoperable, had grown inward around her remaining colon, sealing it like a vault. Digestion of anything solid was biologically impossible. Ice chips and small sips of water were all she could have.
In measured, quiet tones, Dr. Redrow explained. When he finished, she asked him, “How long can I live on ice chips and water?”
“Days . . . maybe a couple of weeks.”
He expressed his sorrow, businesslike, and left just as Alan arrived. The room grew still and quiet. Then Deborah let a question slip into the silence: “How do you live the rest of your life in just a few days?”
On
October 14, eleven days before our thirty-first wedding anniversary, we brought Deborah home. As I drove through the warm autumn day, she seemed to notice every detail—the sun’s brilliance, the cool breeze on her face, the fiery fall colors just beginning to show.
Later that day, we sat in the master bedroom with Regan and Carson, poring over memory albums that chronicled our family’s thirty-one years. The kids and I had often over the years made fun of Deborah as she sat for hours creating those books, stacks of them, painstakingly pasting in treasured photographs. But she hadn’t made them for then; she had made them for such a time as this, and by turning their plastic-covered pages, we were able to travel back in time.
We laughed at pictures of our wedding: Here, a shot of her grand-mother sitting with her legs a little too far apart and her girdle showing. There, a shot of friends toasting with bottles of champagne. (Two weeks after we married, Deborah’s father had sent us a bill for the champagne, with a note explaining that he never intended to pay for our friends to get drunk.)
We paged through hundreds of shots of the kids: Pictures of us holding Regan for the first time sparked the thousandth retelling of how we’d honked the horn of our 1970 Chevy all the way home from Harris Hospital. And shots of Carson as a tiny baby had Regan insisting again that she’d got-ten to pick him out of several other choices at the Gladney Home nursery. We thought then that he looked a little bit like a turtle and we hadn’t changed our minds. In the space of a few hours, our kids grew up and we grew gray through thirty volumes of photos. And we remembered, laughing and crying, just the four of us on the big, four-poster bed.
A couple of days later, Deborah seemed to turn her attention to house-keeping, to final details. Not with sadness, but with the joy of a traveler lightening her load before a trip to a place she’d always wanted to go, Deborah began giving away nearly everything she had. On the same big bed, we sat for hours with Regan and Carson, and Deborah talked about the things she wanted each one to have. I brought her jewelry box and she laid out all her necklaces, rings, and brooches, told the story behind each piece, then gave it all to Regan, except for a strand of pearls she gave to Carson, a gift for his future bride.