Week 18

January 1,2,3,4,5---

This thread started because about a week ago, with the bright early sun searing the front of the apartment as early as 5:30, I decided to have my coffee/grief read/journalling/puzzling ritual in bed. The view from the bedroom is west over apartment buildings and churches and, these days, leafing trees. This was the view I used to ponder while chatting in the mornings with Richard.

Because I now ponder this view on my own I try to recall when we last did this together, and a sad recollection returns.

Because after he switched to nocturnal dialysis last October, we stopped sleeping together. I tried. I really did. But I am not a champion sleeper and there were the restless legs and the machine filling and emptying by which I actually mean he was also: his peritoneum emptying and filling: lots of noise.

And I really needed my sleep. I didn’t know it at the time because who does but I was running on fumes.

So was he as it turned out.

So on this morning in May when I had retreated back into the west facing bedroom with my coffee and my journal, I page back to January.

And for the first time I visit those last days before the fall. Masochism, therapy, call it what you will, it was, on that bright May morning, a place that I felt compelled to return to.

January 1: A joyous New Year’s brunch with friends and a languorous afternoon watching Mamdani and his crew speak hope into the frigid air and feeling like life was possible again. Then the next few days–January 2, then 3, then 4, and then, 5–my journal scribbling relates that we are both struggling with depression. Richard is sinking and knows it, can barely walk. The pills, the digestion, the blood pressure, every bit of it is getting harder and harder. I am not seeing past the moment, I can tell from the reportage tone I am using and I am also recording, oddly, but let’s be real, characteristically, my frustration with his lack of effort, of trying to rehab, to exercise, even to hold a conversation.

Looking back this morning on those dark days, I cannot believe my callousness. During what turned out to be his last days. It must’ve been a defensive reaction, my own attempts to get my own ass off the couch and into the world. Or to protect myself from the darkness that was closing in. I see now that I was punching above my weight class, as they say. Thank goodness I recall saving the nasty for my journal and speaking gentle encouragement to him.

I do remember saying to him: “I’m here. For all of it. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

I don’t remember what he said in response, if anything.

But I also remember him saying, during one of our tearful conversations about calling the game, throwing in the towel, (so many sports metaphors):

“I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave the kids.” Even then, when we had lost our way through easy conversation, Richard had a distilling quality about his way of speaking. Fewer words, stronger punch. Smooth.

Because really, what did we know in those early (last) 2026 days besides that it was so hard to live, to move forward, to get through another day? That living had become an agony but dying, him actually leaving this earth, was still inconceivable?

It wasn’t all that complicated.

He didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t want him to leave.

The kids didn’t want him to leave.

But he couldn’t stay either.

And on that morning, the morning before the afternoon that he fell, we had gone to the hospital for a procedure and then celebrated with lunch at Potbelly’s on Clark St. Then he asked to walk and we did: one block away from the car and then back again.

And then he was tired. Always so tired those last days.

We went home, glad for our cozy high rise nest, and we both napped, after promising each other that we would face the depression together, shoulder to shoulder. We would get out every day, do something every day. We had accomplished something, it seemed, on that dark afternoon, elevated each other, pulled each other up out of the muck.

And right after he woke, he made it safely down the two steps into the living room and caught his foot on one of the barstools and fell.

And couldn’t get up. And we both knew that we’d have to, he’d have to call the game.

And yet in the windowless, cramped emergency quarters in the following days, (no rooms in the hospital) with doctors doing what doctors do, he started to buy into the talk about rehab and getting better and stronger.

And I thought I would go mad.

The rest I guess I couldn’t write. The pages in the journal go blank until he dies.

His last cogent words to me on Thursday morning were

“I’m confused.”

And then,

“What’s happening?”

I gave him the clinical answer: no dialysis for four days now, build up of uric acid and potassium and phosphorus.

I ducked.

And then I called the kids back from their planned morning activities.

We thought we had more time. I thought I had more time, that there would be a poetic ending that my last words whispered into his ear would be I love you forever.

But by the time I spoke those words, he was already gone, only his heart left to beat a few more moments into the black space ahead for all of us he was leaving behind.

The above entry is so dark I feel a need to apologize, and did try, in fact, by writing three other posts to fill this week: the dog, the spring, opening the Empire house. Something forward looking to match the growing warmth and light, something that would fit the season. But I come back to the impulse that started this whole “Losing Richard” Substack thing: write to get through it, write to chew it and swallow it and try to digest it. Write to survive.

Spring will have to wait.