Sitting with Phil and Karen

The time when one can write about Phil and Karen together in the present tense is quickly passing.

I got to sit with Phil and Karen together for several hours today.  Karen may not have known I was there, but I was.  I saw her, pale and gaunt, eyes shut, gasping for breath after breath in a slow rhythm, usually punctuated by a sound like apnea as each breath came.  The medical professionals predicted death in a matter of hours, a day or two at most, but it did not come while I was there and, so far as I know, has not come yet.

Most of the time Karen was unresponsive, but for a minute or two at about 3:30 in the afternoon her eyes came open. They did not focus, nor did they track anything in the room.  Still, Phil leaned into her field of vision and said, softly, “I’m still here Karen, and I will be until the end. I love you.”  Karen’s mouth moved.  Though no sound came out, it looked to Phil (and to me) that she was trying to say “I love you” back.

I have never sat in a vigil like that one.  If Karen is still with us tomorrow, and Phil is open to it, I’ll go back and sit some more.

— — —

It was not all so weighty, the sitting with Phil and Karen.  Tim was there, Phil’s son, down from Kennewick with his wife and 16-month-old son. At one point while we sat together in the living room, between turns at Karen’s bedside, Tim said “I’ve heard a lot about the sufferings of the Pears, but how did your team do this year?”

I laughed. “Tim,” I said, “you are probably one of only 15 people on the planet who would ask that question.”  Tim was an original owner in the EFL, of the Victoria Roses. He snagged Miguel Cabrera in our original draft and — as I reminded him —  stubbornly wouldn’t trade him to the Wolverines. So when the Roses folded, Cabrera was lost to us forever.  But other than that I was merciful to him, and kept my recounting of our four-team pennant race, with it’s hair’s breadth finish, to a minimum.  You know, five minutes or so.  That’s about all I can stand to talk about the Dragons anyway, without dredging up unseemly bitterness.

This was not the day for bitterness.

— — —

I left Phil and Karen to go pick up my son Ben and take him to his friend’s house for a sleepover. Ben asked me what it was like to sit with Phil and Karen today. I told him what I could, but it was at least as inadequate as this note.

Ben asked me how I would feel if I were dying early like Karen is.  I said I didn’t really know, but I hoped I would be able to remember something I read in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (That is a book of reflections on the mysteries of a universe full of gratuitous beauty and grotesque pain — a world in which chlorophyll comes in the form of stunning trees lit up by sunlight, next to pleasant creeks in which big beetles make their living by sucking the insides out of live frogs.)  I told Ben that Dillard, on the next to last page of her book, says (as I quoted from memory, probably inaccurately):

I think the people falling from airplanes cry “Thank you! Thank you!” all the way down until they reach the cold rocks drawn up like carriages below them.

What that means, I told Ben, is I need to recognize I didn’t have to exist — the Universe itself didn’t either — and everything good and beautiful (and painful and ugly) is a gift.  Our lives are gifts, and even if mine ends too soon, I want my gratitude to be so intense I hasten to express it before it’s too late.