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She always hated September, although she had at least one good reason why she shouldn't have. (more after the jump)
I could understand why. Her mother had died of lung cancer in September, for starters.
There are some folks who probably shouldn't have been parents, and my late wife's mother was one of those. Under her mother's alcoholic influence my beloved neglected her health before I ever met her to the point of losing her eyesight to diabetes. She inculcated similar self-destructive tendencies as a teen that would plague her for decades. Yet Donna was steadfastly at her mom's bedside as the lung cancer shriveled and tortured her to death. In her dreams they still argued for years afterward.
When I met and fell for her Donna was already seriously ill. One of my earliest memories of our time together was of attending an orientation with her for home peritoneal dialysis, a procedure I'd have to learn to help with. I was still married to someone else--in truth Donna had saved my life by showing interest. I had been quietly going crazy living with the wrong person, existing without love. I'd never have done anything to end it, though. To what point?
She showed me the point.
Her stepfather knew she was seeing a married man. He worried that I'd hurt her some day, but he hoped she'd get some happiness out of it first. Nobody thought she'd last that long anyway.
It seems to me it was around September 1999 that we got the padded envelope in the mail containing a pager (remember those?) That pager would become our lifeline to the transplant hospital 90 minutes away. Wherever we went we took the pager along. We heard its call twice over the next year. Both were false alarms--as we learned only after calling in and dropping everything to make the trek. You made the trip or they stopped calling the pager.
It seemed that the September curse might end during Labor Day weekend in 2000. We'd been living together since February in a one-bedroom home she purchased as her life's dream--a house, a boyfriend, maybe a dog. There wouldn't be kids or a career, she'd long known that.
That summer she took in two nieces, a teenager from her brother's family and a third-grader from her sister's, giving them a chance besides foster care or the streets. She was always taking in strays, getting them on their feet and sending them out again. She, who got by on disability checks, was the stable one in her circles. A dozen of her foundlings attended her memorial. Not counting me.
Another brother went to jail that summer and sick as she was she kept his small business afloat until he could come back, so he wouldn't lose everything. She talked about turning down a transplant if one came along during that time because she couldn't spare the time off. I told her not to be stupid. You give everything for more life.
So...September 2000. We'd just gotten bad news: her kidney function had crossed a line and we couldn't put off dialysis any longer. We had a surgery appointment to implant the catheter which would keep her alive until a kidney (and, please sir, a pancreas) could be found. It would have to be a cadaveric transplant to get the pancreas, so I couldn't donate, though we matched in blood type. Besides, she worried about losing me if things went wrong.
This particular Labor Day weekend she had a craving for Chinese food but didn't want to go to the expense of a restaurant visit for the four of us. I pointed out that the pager could go off any day (holiday weekends are good for transplant patients, highway accidents make for a spike in available organs.) So we went. Besides, who could say which favorite foods dialysis would rule off-limits? We already knew sushi and oysters were Right Out after a transplant.
On the way back from the restaurant, the pager sang. We dropped off the two nieces to fend for themselves and streaked for the hospital, where we learned this was the Real Thing.
I got to watch part of the operation through the tiny glass window in the OR door. This was pre-9/11, before they tightened security. It was just like on TV--the draping hid the operating field from my view. The anesthesiologist calmly read the local daily newspaper alongside, glancing occasionally at the gauges. I concluded things were going well.
I crawled off to sleep a few hours in the car. (She blew up at me when she found out--there'd been a shooting just down the street the evening before, and a famous murder in the run-down hotel around the corner.) I awoke to find her in recovery, the kidney kidding along fine and the pancreas pumping out insulin. Finally, an end to the September curse...
Two days later I returned from a quick trip back home to find her room empty. They'd moved her back to surgery after her pancreatic function started dropping. Bad luck--if you can call bad surgical technique "luck." (They changed it later, I was assured. Nobody else should have that problem.) I barely had time to speak to her before they wheeled her in. For the second time in a week they opened and closed the belly and she was a diabetic again.
It was a week or two later in a VA hospital just ten miles across town that her beloved stepfather died. We'd saved him from death by bureaucracy just weeks before, driving him to LA curled incoherent in the back seat for emergency care they wouldn't authorize in his home town. He lived long enough to know she'd gotten the transplant, at least. I broke isolation to tell her the news in person, without filtering it through a surgical mask. She wasn't allowed out of the hospital to attend the funeral. September again.
Flash forward a year; I took a September Monday morning off from work to attend a college creative writing class and hear her read her compositions aloud. She was justly proud of her writing efforts. God knows she'd had the requisite suffering to be a writer. A friend called to tell me to turn the TV on, and "September 11" would forever have a new meaning for others, if not for us.
It wasn't always September or always bad, of course. We got a second pancreas in March of the following year, and her near-fatal blood clot followed in May. She fought back. Then one October night as we studied for a Russian class we were taking together, she looked at me and complained of "the worst gas pains ever." It was the last thing she'd remember for weeks as the transplanted pancreas tried to kill her, new technique and all.
I'm glad she didn't remember. I remember signing a "do not resuscitate" order on my birthday a week later as she faded. I remember revoking it before the Halloween ambulance ride those same familiar 90 miles. I remember the surgeries which saved her life but confined her to an ICU bed for five months, and constricted our lives to the periods between thrice-weekly dialysis sessions. That winter I put 1000 miles a week on my car, driving to visit her, working full-time.
I'm sure she expected to die every September afterwards, but we kept cheating the odds somehow.
I pushed her wheelchair up the gangplank of a three-day cruise to Mexico, in-between dialysis. She developed weird blood pressure problems that put her in a nursing home for six months. I found a drug treatment that gave us back our life together, in-between dialysis. She had a stroke and a broken hip and surgeries and recoveries and setbacks and gains.
We married on New Year's Eve in 2005, and again in May, 2006 at a Renaissance Faire--her dream wedding, in-between dialysis.
I lost 40 pounds and applied to be a kidney donor. No dice. They made her jump through countless hoops before deciding she wasn't a good candidate anyway. They clearly wanted us to give up, to not make it their decision. It wasn't medical, it was political--but it was final. She would die sometime in-between dialysis.
(An aside: In the ten years I watched closely, she never once was denied medical treatment for financial reasons or bothered with paperwork. Don't tell ME that single-payer government insurance doesn't work.)
She started an adaptive fitness class at a local college. They pointed her out as an example when someone slacked off. "If SHE can do it, YOU can do it."
We bought and refurbished the house from my first marriage and made plans to rebuild my father's MGB sportscar. She was bouncing with excitement at that prospect; she loved old cars. I saw and purchased a car online that matched her first high-school ride, a '71 Spitfire. It was in bad shape--hell, so was she--but we'd fix it up together. Her mom had been a mechanic, among other things. Like the Russian lessons we'd had to drop, we'd learn it somehow. It was one of the fun outings we'd always envisioned as we rode up to Lake Tahoe to pick it up.
And it killed her, on July 15 of this year.
As deaths go, it wasn't bad. She'd been exhausted and not coping well with the altitude. She woke me half a dozen times to help her change position, hoping to get some sleep. At 4 a.m. she asked me to help her sit up. She slumped against me, and my fatigue-addled brain thought finally, she's fallen asleep. I laid her down again and found her cold in that same position two hours later.
I'd give everything short of my own life to have that week back again, to do it differently this time, to cheat death one more time. Why the "short of" caveat? Because of some lines I read which hit me viscerally years before I had the misfortune to experience it first-hand.
Spider Robinson in his "Callahan's Bar" stories had his narrator observe casually that he knew what was a fate worse than death:
"You see, I used to have a wife and daughter before I decided to install my own brakes," Jake would say casually. "I saved thirty bucks, easy."
And I got a heckuva deal on that Spitfire.
If the tables had been turned, we both knew she wouldn't have survived me by more than a week. To have someone die, to die so unnecessarily, to know you should've been able to stop it but didn't...Robinson knew whereof he spoke. I would wish that on no one. The universe gave me plenty of warning, I just wasn't listening.
But the universe says there's no going backwards. And here it is, September again. And in three days, September 11. And for the first time in nine years I won't wake up next to Donna and wish her a happy birthday and present some silly card. And hold her.
She would have been 44. Many more birthdays than she expected to have before we met. Many fewer than we needed.
Happy birthday, Donna Ann.
I think I hate September.