The Woman Who Can't Forget (17 page)

On my thirty-ninth birthday in late December, Jim and I had dinner with my parents, and while my mother was making a toast, I suddenly got a horrible feeling that someone sitting at the table would not be here on my fortieth birthday. That was the beginning of a long period of dread that gripped me, which no matter what I tried over the next several months, I couldn't shake. I began to make special note of how suddenly some people were confronted with the harsh reality of death. On January 10 a mudslide in La Conchita, just north of LA, killed ten people in their homes. The news reported about one man who had gone out for ice cream right before and had lost his whole family. The suddenness of the tragedy unnerved me, and I started to feel more and more on edge. On January 21, I was out with Jim and our friend Andi, and I finally tried to verbalize how I was feeling, telling them that I felt as if I was hanging from the top of a cliff upside down by my toes. Then on Wednesday, January 26 at 6:03
A.M.
, a man left his Jeep on the Metro link train tracks, and eleven passengers on the train were killed when it barreled into the car. Jim woke me up to tell me about it, and I remember looking at him and thinking how horrifying it was that people could say good-bye in the morning to their loved ones, thinking they would see them that night and then never see them alive again.

Jim was working on thinking about more pleasant things. In early January 2005 he saw a job listed in the newspaper for a forklift repairman in the town of Santa Maria, two hours north in central California. He told me he wanted to apply for it and move us up there, and though that was farm country and I'd never relished a rural life I was resolved that if that's what would make Jim happy, that's what we'd do. We planned that once we got settled in up there, we'd start our family. He got the job, starting a spell of a long two-hour commute up to work and back every day. Our new life was getting under way, but even though he had focused my attention on our future, I still couldn't shake the sense of dread I was feeling.

On March 15 Jim and I were in a Chinese restaurant, and when I opened my fortune cookie, there was no fortune in it. I'm superstitious, and with all of the foreboding I'd been feeling, that was more than a little unsettling to me. He could see the look on my face, so he asked for a couple more, and when I opened another one, again there was no fortune. Jim's fortune said,
Your life will change for

ever,
and though with our plans for moving up to Santa Maria in the works that should probably have been a good omen, it only seemed ominous to me. I started to become convinced that I was going to die.

Death seemed to be calling out for attention. On March 20, I found out that one of my best friends from junior high school had died of cancer in late February. She would have been forty years old on March 22. This was also the week that Terri Schiavo was taken off life support, and Jim and I had a conversation about what we'd want the other to do if we were in her situation. He told me he'd want me to pull the plug, but I told him not so for me; he'd have to carry my dead body around with him, because I was never going to leave him.

Wednesday, March 23, Jim and I had a wonderful dinner with my parents. I had received some questions by e-mail from Dr. Parker that day for a paper the scientists were working on about my case. The questions were actually for my mom, and so after dinner, we all sat around and answered them. I was heartened that they were moving forward with a paper about my case, and I couldn't wait to read more fully about their findings. That was a wonderful, warm family night, and as it turned out, it was the last such night we would ever share with Jim.

The next night as I got on the computer to e-mail my mom's responses to Dr. Parker, Jim told me he wasn't feeling well and was going to bed early. As I wrote my e-mail to Dr. Parker, I thought to myself that maybe I should get off the computer and spend some time with Jim. A little while later, though, he came in to give me a kiss goodnight.

The next morning, March 25, Good Friday, we were up and out of bed by 4:00
A.M.
as usual. I made his lunch while he got ready for work, and then we sat and talked while he ate his breakfast. At 5:00
A.M.
I hugged and kissed him good-bye, and I listened as he drove away into the darkness. I will always be haunted by the vision of Jim walking out the door that morning into the darkness, and as poignant as that memory is, and as hard as it is for me to go back and back to, the vividness with which I will retain that memory for the rest of my life is also a great gift. Because he had a two-hour drive to work, he always called me along the way. That morning he called at 6:00 and again at 7:30, and the last thing he ever heard me say to him was that I loved him.

At 9:38, I was on the computer, responding to a message from Dr. Parker acknowledging mine of the night before. The subject line of her message was “the future,” and she had asked me whether I knew days of the week for dates in the future in the same way I knew them for dates in the past. Could I, for example, say what day of the week September 25,2005, would be, or January 8,2007? I answered that I could see the days of the week through the end of 2005, but after that, the future was blank. I added, though, that in regard to the future, I had been thinking a good deal about it lately, because I was about to turn forty and I “would like to step into the next part of my life with a clean slate.” Those e-mails back and forth seem eerie to me now, given what happened the very next moment.

At 9:40, just as I sent my e-mail, my cell phone rang. It was my mother telling me that she wanted to talk to my father.
Why hadn't she called him then?
I wondered. She hadn't wanted me to get the news over the phone. Her number at work was Jim's second emergency contact number, and his boss had called her because he couldn't reach me at home. Our Internet connection went through our landline, so the phone line had been busy. After talking to my mother, my dad came in and told me that Jim had collapsed at work and had been rushed to the hospital. At first I couldn't even understand what my father was saying. When I called the hospital moments later, they told me that he was unconscious, and my mind went into shock. The rest of that conversation is a blank in my mind; the next thing I remember is hearing the theme music to
The

Price Is Right
on TV after I'd hung up the phone.

My mother came and picked me up, and we drove the two hours north. I spoke to the emergency room nurse three times during the trip, but there was no change. When we arrived, we were rushed into the emergency room to see him. My forty-two-year-old husband was lying in a coma on life support. A vision that will haunt me for the rest of my life is that when we walked into his room, his eyes were open, looking dead, like a doll's eyes. So began six days of hell.

Jim was moved to the critical care unit, and I stayed by his side all day and most of the night for all those days. My mom stayed in a motel with me, and my brother and my dad drove up regularly. Jim's mom came, along with his sister and brothers. Our family friend Beverly arrived, and my friend Wendy came to give support. We sat vigil, we comforted one another, and we prayed.

The doctors ran a battery of tests to try to determine what had happened to Jim, and on Saturday morning they informed us that he had suffered a massive stroke;a blood clot had exploded in his brain stem, almost surely the result of his diabetes. The nurses told me that he might be able to hear me, so I bought a bundle of magazines and read to him. In
People
there was a review of the movie
GuessWho,
a remake of
GuessWho's Coming to Dinner
, which I loved, and I suddenly found myself singing the theme song of that movie, “The Glory of Love.” Up to that point Jim had not made a single movement in all the time I had sat with him, but as I started in on the song for a third time, suddenly his body jerked violently from side to side. I was sure that he was trying to tell me to stop singing, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I clung desperately to that sign that he had heard me—that he was still alive in there and would make it through this.

On Monday, the third day that Jim had been in a coma, his doctor came in and started talking to me about organ donation. I was stunned. I was still praying desperately that he would miraculously snap back to life as people in comas sometimes do, and I wasn't ready for that discussion yet. Then, at 3:00
P.M.
on Wednesday, the doctors attending Jim called a family meeting and informed us that the results of a CAT scan had shown that he had almost no brain activity. They were going to be declaring him dead at 5:30. I felt as if my insides were being ripped out of me, and I put my head down on the table and let out a horrifying sound that sends a shock through me every time I relive those moments again in my mind.

I've heard that in times like that, confronted with such devastating news, a person often goes into automatic, operating on some sort of emergency backup system in the mind, and I believe that's what happened to me. Jim's mother and I talked with the doctors about the organ donation procedure at 5:00
P.M.
that day, and then I signed the consent papers. It wouldn't be until the next day that they harvested the organs. I had decided that there was one part of Jim that I was determined to keep. We had planned to start a family, and now those dreams of doing so together were shattered, but I asked the doctors if they would harvest his sperm, in the hope that I would someday be able to have his baby. At first, they refused, and I couldn't get them to budge, but then my dad went to the hospital administrators and told them a moving story.

When we had gone to pick up the car Jim had driven to work that last morning, we had discovered the lunchbox that I had packed for him still sitting on the backseat. My dad had taken it back to our house in LA, and as he cleaned it out, he saw that the food had started to spoil, and his eyes had filled with tears. My family had embraced Jim and come to love him, and it was at that moment that the truth sank in to my dad that Jim would never be coming back. He said to the hospital administrators that as they knew, Jim's body would spoil as surely as that lunch had spoiled, but that harvesting his sperm was a way for me to preserve at least some part of him and possibly create some happiness out of a horrible tragedy. After a good deal of deliberation, the hospital consented.

For hours on the morning before the organ donation procedure, before the surgical team came and took him off support, I sat holding Jim's hand. Even legally dead, he wasn't going without a fight. When the nurses walked in to begin preparing for the procedure, his heart raced wildly, and one of the nurses said to me that he was stubborn. She was right about that. He was strong and stubborn, and I believe he had hung on with all of his might. I gave Jim one last kiss and without looking back, I walked out of the room.

My mom cut a lock of his hair and put it in a box given to us by the organ donation network, and I have kept that box next to my bed ever since. I put his glasses inside, and his wallet, and several other mementos.

Since Jim's death I've felt that he is watching over me, giving me strength to live the way that he would have helped me to if we had been given more time together. I like to say that he's been sprinkling me with fairy dust. In those first few days after his passing, I was to perceive a number of signs of his presence. The night before his funeral, I was feeling horribly depressed, waiting at home for Jim's mom to show up; she was going to be staying with us. The new house we'd moved to was on a quiet street, and all of a sudden outside in front of our house, half a dozen police cars came screeching to a halt, with lights flashing and sirens blaring. They had surrounded a civilian car, which I learned later they had been chasing through the streets. I couldn't believe it—this major incident happening on our quiet street. Then, though I know it sounds crazy, the thought occurred to me that knowing how I loved car chases, Jim had sent this excitement to me to lift my spirits.

Another sign, I felt, was that my bereavement ribbon kept falling off. In the Jewish religion, mourners wear a black ribbon that is ripped by hand or cut with a razor blade in symbolism of the times when people tore their clothing as an expression of grief for their loss. We were all wearing them, but mine was the only one that kept falling off. Everywhere I turned, it was on the floor. Then I realized Jim didn't want me to walk around with that ribbon, a mark of my widowhood, and the next day it continued to fall off. I would pin it on again, and then find it later on the living room floor or in the kitchen. Finally, on Monday, April 4, when I met my friend Andi for dinner, the ribbon blew away in the wind when I got out of my car. I felt that was a message from him telling me he wanted me to go on with my life.

The eeriest sign came from one of the people who had received his organs. After they had all been operated on, I was told a little about them and given word about how they had fared. Jim's right kidney was transplanted into a sixty-five-year-old man who was married and had four children. He was a hotel owner but was disabled due to his illness. After his receipt of the kidney, he was doing well. The liver recipient was a forty-five-year-old married man who enjoyed reading, watching old movies, and doing Native American beadwork. He had been on the waiting list for almost three years. Following the transplant, his liver function was good, and he was recovering at home with his wife. The heart recipient was a sixty-eight-year-old married man with two children who worked as a dentist and enjoyed cooking for his family. Prior to the transplant, he had suffered from cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle that is often fatal. He had received the heart successfully, and it was functioning well. The last was a thirty-year-old woman, who received Jim's left kidney. She was single and lived with her family and had been on the waiting list for five years. She was “doing superb” according to the transplant coordinator, and her kidney function was great.