Ginette

Finally the day came when my husband needed to go to the hospital and was too sick to get to get there except by ambulance; and after they had driven him off I looked at the clock and its blue number winked at me and said 10:23 which was the date of our anniversary and that dropped me, and I sat there in the living room and put my head down on my lap and howled. That morning David had shambled down the hall with paralysis already taking over his face and his legs about to follow suit saying, something's wrong, something's wrong. I called the ambulance and let them pack him away and a friend of ours drove his car down behind the ambulance and I thought that, if David didn't survive the trip into Boston, at least Bill would be there to give me the call when they all pulled into the hospital again and discovered the bad news. That didn't turn out to be what happened; I thought that morning I probably wouldn't see him alive again but that didn't turn out to be what happened, either. But I sat there with my head bent way over and cried until I stopped, and then thought for awhile about my kids being in school and what was going to be waiting for them when they got home that afternoon. I thought about how, a few weeks before any of this had started, my husband and I had spent a morning at their school together. My son was a first-grader then, and it was the day before Thanksgiving break which meant it was Family And Friends Day when all the classes had different programs and parents or grandparents came and milled around and visited the classes and everyone talked about heritage, or memory, or what Thanksgiving traditions were like in that peculiar little Yankee enclave, our tight-knit little town. We visited my son's room first, and thirty or forty of us adults sat folded into those miniature chairs with the crazy-excited six-year-olds and listened to the presentation. Mrs. Roffman, the first grade teacher, stood in front of us all and asked, who among the parents here remembers their first grade teacher? My hand went up: I remember mine, I said, because later on, she made my wedding cake.

My son won't remember this part, but later on, just a few months later on, his first-grade teacher was feeding him, too. I had to leave my kids with other people a lot in those days, because I was always busy with my husband having cancer surgery, or having chemo, or needing a follow-up with his surgeon or oncologist or surprising us with a new complication from the radiation--and no matter what house my son landed at, Mrs. Roffman always sent over a quart of strawberry ice cream because he had told her it was his favorite. I thought about that, I thought about how much I wished my first grade teacher made my wedding cake could have always been the punch line to my marriage instead of the diagnosis is Stage III metastatic pancreatic cancer. I thought about what I was going to say to my kids when they got home. And that thought of course wound me back up howling, only this time it came with a fearsome physical component, as if my body had suddenly developed an allergy to something that it just couldn't get rid of again.

Luckily all the boring machinery of the world is there to pull you back at moments like these, and just then two things happened at once: the telephone rang, and then the doorbell. It was the state Democratic party on the phone, fund-raising, and Sid, our UPS guy, stood at the door. I didn't know the woman on the phone but there was never a time you weren't happy to see Sid show up; all us women adored him, all our husbands looked at us blankly or with exasperation when we'd talk about him: Who the hell is Sid? they'd all say. Sid, liberal like me, always arrived not only with a package but also with a critique of the latest Rolling Stone article he thought I ought to read or a new slam on the Current Administration. Once, back around the election, he drove his truck up our driveway just to tell me he approved of our anti-Bush bumper sticker. He wore an earring and nights, he played guitar in a blues band. Any time there was a scene worth being at in Kensington, New Hampshire, he was there at it. Earlier that summer he'd happened by my friend Dana's house just in time to help her clean up the carnage in the wake of a fox decimating her chicken coop.

Sid was delivering morphine, and I had to sign for the package while he stood there watching me bawl--that was what he got that day instead of the remains of a chicken massacre--while the woman on the phone yammered into my left ear until I said to her I'm sorry, I can't deal with you right now. She was letting me know how much that offended her as I hung up. There was a lot of morphine in the cardboard box Sid held: I wondered what it was worth on the street. I thought about the time the doctors were dragging their feet on David's pain (this was in the days before they discovered the tumor that had broken his neck) and I was out buying barbiturates from a junkie I knew. Today, they were delivering so much of it to the house because since his CT scan had revealed the story of mets to the liver a few days earlier, David had started to slide, fast. The list of things going wrong grew exponentially, he was already starting to die under the weight of it all and the pain was coming back then, too. I wished I could have told Sid all of this but decided I couldn't deal with him, either, and so I signed for the package and went inside and left him there where he paused for a moment, baffled and, I knew, not sure just what to do. Eventually I heard his truck grind into gear and pull away. I thought, even a guy who can handle dead chickens and bad Presidents has at least one thing that will stump him, and I guess I just found what it is. That thought distracted me enough that I didn't cry all the rest of the day.

That was all on Wednesday morning, and by Wednesday night I'd learned that the paralysis stalking my husband was not a stroke, it was Bell's Palsy, and would go away. I cheered up considerably, and told the kids that Dad was in the hospital but would be coming home again, probably pretty soon. A week after that, on the next Wednesday I called the nurse's station on his floor because he wasn't picking up his phone, and his nurse told me, he's not doing too well tonight. Had his oncologist called me yet? No? Well, why didn't I give her a few minutes, then call his room back and she'd be in there and would hold the phone up to his ear for him.

Which is how I got the news, a few minutes before I really got the news, because when I did call his room and the nurse helped him answer the phone, my husband asked me the same thing: did Dr. Ryan call you yet? Of course I hadn't really heard it before when the nurse asked me, just like I hadn't really heard what my husband was telling me the whole hospital stay, when he'd complain about the terrible weakness that had overcome him and his inability to even stand up on his own now. No, I said, Dr. Ryan didn't call me yet, I already told the nurse that. Oh, dear, said my husband, and by then I noticed something was ribboning its way through my stomach. We've come to the end of the road, is what he said next, and you can bet I heard that although by then, I was deep into that gut-struck reaction I'd had the week before and I realized that ribbon-y thing in me was some piece of poison that was trying to murder me and I needed to figure out a way to get it out as quickly as I could...we've come to the end of the road, he repeated, and I realized he must have rehearsed saying that to me. There's nothing more to do. Die? I said to him, David? Die? He said: Dr. Ryan's going to call the social workers to set up the hospice people, and I'll come home on hospice in the next day or two.

I didn't call anyone that night except his brother, and I sent the kids off in the morning without telling them either because I knew that they wouldn't have another normal day for quite a while. After I called his brother, I went to bed and laid there all night long. You've heard that when you're about to die your whole life goes in front of you; and that exact thing happened to me that night, only it was our whole 24-year-history that played itself out in my mind, starting with the night we went home together from a bar, both figuring on a one-night stand, all the way up to the crawling minutes of the days since he took that ambulance ride. I don't know if the same thing happened to him, because I forgot to ask, although I always meant to. In the morning I got up and started making my phone calls early. David's coming home today or tomorrow, on hospice, I would say to whoever was on the other end of the line. That turns out to be one right handy piece of code. It's like a signal that tells people it's time to start showing up with the lasagna, the Ambien, it lets everyone know the one thing they need to know without having to say what's obvious: David's toast, I could also have said, or Pretty soon, we won't be seeing David comin' round here no more. Over at the school, Barbara choreographed the teachers into a precise schedule of who would cook what meal when. She's the kindergarten teacher and good at getting people organized. The women in my town loved that kind of work, anyway. A few years ago when Karen suddenly died of a brain aneurysm, all of 38 years old and leaving two sons for her husband to deal with, the cooking round robin went on for more than six months, by which time the husband had a new girlfriend and the boys didn't bother coming home for dinner most nights anymore.

So the teachers set to cooking, and Laura showed up with an envelope which, because she's pragmatic, didn't contain a sympathy letter but did contain a handful of her sleeping pills, and Jane came over with stacks of paper plates and pounds of coffee, the things she said she most wished she'd had on hand when her own husband had died from cancer a couple of years before. And all of this was the prelude to how I met Ginette.

Dave was finally supposed to come home on Friday morning, and so Ginette, the angel-of-mercy hospice nurse assigned to our case, arrived mid-morning that day. She liked to get in a little ahead of the patient, when she could, to go over things with the family. Meaning me, although by then my brother-in-law had come for the duration and the kids were home from school because I'd had to tell them the night before. I tried getting through my daughter's four o'clock flute lesson first, I really tried. Five years earlier, when she was nine and her father was first sick, it had taken her months to getting around to asking me whether her father had cancer, but that day it only took looking at my face and she knew. We'd been on our way to her lesson but I turned the car around and we drove straight home instead, both of us holding it in the whole way, because I knew she'd want to wait for her brother so they could have the news together. They're like that on Christmas morning, too, nobody making a move toward the tree unless the other one is right there. I think I had this image of myself opening my arms and folding them both back into me somehow and meanwhile managing to find some gentle language that would protect them from what I was about to say. A hieroglyphic sort of tongue that could both hide the truth and be the truth. I wanted to reassure them I'd been telling them the truth when I'd told them we'd be fine no matter what but I was clumsy, and rooted to the floor at the moment I should have been gathering them up and in the end I think I only said that we'd all tried really hard, Daddy most of all, but...he's going to die, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but he's coming home to be with us and he's going to die. I couldn't move, and they couldn't move and so nobody moved and everyone stood where they were and sobbed. I realized that I had absolutely no energy left for any of this. I'd already been holding my breath for five years. So we all didn't do anything else besides howl for awhile and finally, Uncle Don showed up and proved to be enough of a distraction that they were able to go to sleep pretty much right on time.

I guess Don took them out somewhere, probably to lunch, that Friday morning, which left me and Ginette alone in the house and as it turned out, we had a lot of time to get to know each other. Dave was supposed to have been home by 11:00 but missed that by hours; it wasn't exactly the same thing as being late for his own funeral but it was close, and the ambulance didn't arrive until after five in the afternoon. Ginette and I sat there looking at each other for a time, and then she decided to give me a run-through on the medications list. There are a lot of medications that come along with coming home on hospice, most of which are there under the funny moniker palliative which, never mind my English degree, I always think means the same thing as the word pall. They're just too close: you're under palliative care now, we're going to be laying that pall over your box now, pretty soon, you won't be comin' round here no more. Ginette would show me a vial of this liquid or that, tell me what the dosage was, what it was for. I wasn't paying any attention, and would nod to show I understood, and she would note the directions and the dosage on a little sheet of paper. Every now and again she would hold up a medicine vial and say, now, if you give too much of this, it can stop the breathing. She'd pause, and repeat it, to make sure I got it. I got it. Those directions, she didn't write down at all. I wondered whether it would be the same thing as murder. David had been a lawyer and would know, but either I decided I didn't want to bother him with questions like that, or I forgot to ask him that one, too.

Ginette was from Alsace, she told me, which explained her odd accent and the unusual way she spelled her name. She seemed historically inaccurate, somehow, like she could have been a child late in the 1800's or maybe a young married woman in the 1930's, and had somehow survived into our century as a woman of a certain, but still indeterminate, age. Later on, after I'd had the chance to study her a little more, I concluded that what she probably really was, was some manner of statuesque troll out of Alsatian folklore, that if only I could travel there and find an antique library and go through the musty shelves and pull down an obscure town history and open it at random, I'd find a description of Ginette and her hijinks and her ways of terrorizing the villages, probably all illustrated with old woodcuts done by some medieval hand. The stories would have been set down there finally after having been passed along orally for many, many years, and there is no doubt in my mind that they all would have cautioned the same thing: she lives still, they would say, she disappears for a time but then always comes back. Probably generations of young children had been threatened into obedience and prayers by the specter of a Ginette dangling in front of them. Ginette as shorthand just like coming home on hospice is shorthand. You know what they mean.

So my husband was dying and we were all about to go walking through that gate in the company of an 800-year-old pseudo-European vampiric troll nurse who now sat with me at the table and wouldn't go away no matter what because she was determined to be there when my husband finally got home again. She told me the set-up I had for him was all wrong, that he was going to need that hospital bed even though he had stressed to me he wanted the couch. She told me she had another patient to see that afternoon but he was pretty far gone, might even be dead by the time she got there. She told me the pharmacy would deliver everything from then on out, I would never have to go to the drugstore even if it was the middle of the night. She told me, you know, your husband's going to the light.

I don't know if language like that makes you cringe the way it makes me cringe, but I guess she must have seen how I took to it because she reached across the table and laid her hand on mine and said, now, I'm a Christian but I'm not here to push my beliefs on you...and I thought about that for a moment and even though I never believe it when I hear it I said all right, then, very well, we're not a Christian household but my husband is a Taoist.

And then Ginette, dear, confused Ginette looked at me with her searching eyes and an earnest desire to understand written all over her face and the furrows on her forehead proof of how hard she was trying to comprehend and said, all serious and searching and earnest and furrowed, you mean, he's one of those people who finds water?

On the inside I was bent right in half with laughter and was also swearing up a storm, because goddamnit, the one person who really should have heard that wasn't here, and that was David of course who would have been laughing even harder than I was. So on the inside I was laughing and swearing and thinking to myself that this is how you get your stories, and on the outside I was looking at her mildly and saying no, Ginette, that would be a dowser.

I explained a little bit about what Taoism was, and once again the lines emerged on her forehead and I could see her searching her memory for something and she finally began speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. What's that, I asked her. It's from one of the Vedas, she said, it's Tamil. I was wondering how a woman from Alsace happened to have learned sacred Hindu texts in the original, and decided that the centuries-old part of her must be rather adventurous and probably at those times she had disappeared from her own countryside she was off stalking other continents, poaching bits and pieces from other places and storing up everything she learned in her Interior Monster Encyclopedia Of Stolen Knowledge. It occurred to me that maybe that was why she was a death worker, maybe through some weird alchemy she was able to absorb knowledge from the spirits of the dying she attended. You can see what kind of stature she was acquiring in my own psyche. I wondered, briefly, if she was here to initiate me into her mysteries. I will be there to help you lay that pall over him in the morning, I will show you how it's done. I have to tell you, David, this whole business of your dying has cast a real pall over pretty much everything else these days.

The full and rather stunning range of her language abilities came on display when my brother-in-law got home with the kids. She spoke to them and discovered my daughter studied French, and launched into a dialogue with her in that. My son, who was just in sixth grade and so didn't take a language yet (not to mention being a shy and depressed kid with a speech problem whose father was dying and frankly, we were all pretty pleased that he could still manage English) was off the hook. When the dog, who up until that point had wisely been making himself invisible in the corner, emerged, Ginette took after him in German. I know she was giving him commands and the dog, being a dog, wanted to obey but alas, he does not speak German and neither do I, so I couldn't translate for him. He walked back to his corner, sorrowfully, but at least now we all know the preferred language for the owners of the Hounds of Hell to train in, is likely German.

For the next ten days we kept her out of the way as much as we could. She'd call in the morning and I'd say, cheerfully, oh, heavens no, nothing's changed, there's no need for you to come by at all today. Some days she insisted, she had to take his vitals, she had to lay her eyes on him for herself. Those days, I'd get the kids out of the house if they didn't happen to be off at school, and I'd hope that, if I couldn't keep her out of my life I could at least minimize her contact with it. And to tell the truth, I kept thinking, any day now it's going to happen and Dave's going to surprise us all and pull this one out, he'll fool them all after all. I was still thinking that when he died, when I woke up to hear him saying to me, curl your toes, curl your toes because a charley horse was tearing through my leg at the same time he was dying and I was waking and his voice was skimming across the top of me and out of the room and on off into wherever it was he was finally headed.

But that came after Ginette was gone, and the end of her time with us came, I am sorry to tell you, in the company of blood. I should have known it. When he'd been home a week and a half or so, David stopped feeling like sitting up any more, which meant that Don and I no longer had to lift him up and down to the chair or the toilet, but it also meant it was time for a catheter, and although I was uneasy about Ginette being in charge of that particular procedure, there it was, she was our hospice troll and anyway, I knew she had years of experience and that inserting a catheter wasn't exactly the same thing as brain surgery. She loaded my husband up with morphine and Lorazepam and sat him in a chair, and inserted the tube as he began to scream through the meds, and I stood there and watched as a line of bright red plumed out through the plastic tubing and into the quart-sized bag at the end. You hurt him, I said, look at that, he's bleeding. Why is he bleeding like that? No, she said doubtfully, I think it's okay, and she left a little while after that and my husband said, never again, that woman is never again to come into this house. Fire her, he said, and so I had to pick up the phone and call the office and speak to the man in charge and I told him, she hurt my husband, she fucked that catheter completely up, he's in pain, I need another nurse here now and Ginette's fired, I told him, she can't come back here.

And the office man-in-charge said, I'm sorry, you know Ginette is one of our most experienced nurses, if you're really sure you don't want her back I'll take care of it, of course, but you know, she's very experienced. And I said yes, I'm completely sure and more to the point, my husband's completely sure he doesn't want her back here again. She's fired. And the man was quiet for a moment and then finally said to me, I guess it's just as well. You people were really flipping Ginette out.

So a little while later our new nurse came, and we liked her right away: she was direct and compassionate, she had cropped hair and wore LL Bean Maine hunting boots. She fixed the catheter and got to know my husband a little bit and was there with me on the day we peeled off his socks and discovered his feet were turning blue. They were the same color as the blue patch that had developed on his nose. That was the day of his 55th birthday, and as she left she turned at the door and said to me, I can come back and sit with you tonight, if you like. I said to her, you don't need to do that, why would you want to do that? She nodded and said, well, sometimes the families are...nervous. Sometimes they don't want to be alone. But, she added, you don't seem like you're nervous. You know I was surprised to find out you're not a nurse, because when I got assigned to you, all the other hospice nurses said they think you're a nurse, too.

And your monster thinks I'm a monster.

I shook my head no, meaning yes, I agree with you that you don't need to stay, and after I shut the door behind her I turned back to the house where lights were already on in the dim November afternoon. It was my husband's birthday, and he was going to die just before the following dawn but after I'd said goodbye to his nurse I went back upstairs and fed him small bites of ice cream and he ate as much as he could until he finally told me, I think I've had enough, I think it's somebody else's turn now.