Good-bye for Now
Our days with Hallie have transitioned from versions of horrible to sad. There is a difference. The horror mobilized us to fight: Fight with the doctors because she wasn’t getting enough pain meds. Fight with the oncologists to continue her chemo even though it wasn’t working. Fight with the nursing staff because breakfast was taking too long to be delivered or it arrived cold. Sad is when the fight is gone and the inevitable sets in.
Soon it is Passover, Hallie’s favorite holiday, the one that she loved to host for our family. So we ask for special permission to have a Seder for our family in the hospital, with her. It’s hard to ignore the unhappy contrast between this Seder and the last Passover Seder we had before she was diagnosed with cancer—when she prepared everything expertly, led us in singing as she carried her delicious food from the kitchen, then carried our empty plates back again. She sped from cooking to singing to serving, and smiled the entire time.
Now the scene is the family lounge at Mount Sinai Hospital. Aunt Lynda, Hallie’s mom, has run around town in a mad dash to buy all the perfect dishes for this impromptu hospital Seder. Watching my aunt care for her daughter has been the worst part. Aunt Lynda is caring for Hallie like she is her baby again: feeding her, tending to her wounds like boo-boos that she wants to make better. I have watched her cry, “This isn’t the natural order of things. This is a cruel joke! This should be me!” Aunt Lynda has rallied to make Hallie’s last Seder special: She even remembered the scallions, which were Hallie’s favorite touch. In Israel she had learned a special Persian tradition that Jews swat each other with the long scallion stalks at Seders during the singing of the “Dayenu” song.
My cousin is seated in a hospital chair, dressed in her hospital gown but wearing lipstick. It’s hard for her to talk because the cancer has gotten to her lungs and she’s so short of breath. We are all gathered around her, our chairs pulled close to hers. Hallie has not abdicated her role of leader. She has always been the teacher in the family, the “wise one,” even though she wasn’t the oldest.
Hallie begins the Seder: “Suffering is so important for what it teaches us.”
Her hair has started to fall out again from the chemo that isn’t working. Her arm is swollen and excruciatingly painful. The cancer has ravaged her bones now, and when Tyler looks at her X-rays he can’t believe the multitude of microfractures he sees.
But she is still beautiful.
The real meaning of Hallie’s speech isn’t lost on us. She tells us about suffering, and how suffering is part of our heritage and the holiday, how the Jews had been enslaved for so many years in Egypt. Passover, she reminds us, is about the Jewish people finally finding freedom, and we don’t miss the parallel: Now Hallie is a prisoner of her cancer and there is only one way she’ll find freedom.
If any one of us has doubts that Hallie knows this is her last Passover with the family, she dispels them: “Next year, take time. Don’t just rush and throw the Seder together. Really take the time to do it. Be thoughtful about it.”
Hallie’s time is leaving her, and she wants us to grab on to ours. Hallie is giving me a master class on life and living; she is the most important professor I’ve ever had. I look around at my family and can’t imagine us next year without my cousin.
· · · ·
It is hard to identify that line where Hallie’s treatment ends and her dying begins. She is having chemo until two days before she dies. Hallie is in love with hope. She loves it when her art therapist comes to visit her. It is as if she leaps into a cloud and is able to leave the hospital behind and do collage for an hour straight. She loves discussing the peace process in the Middle East because she had lived in Israel and is very opinionated about it. She loves discussing her book, Rare Words, and I open it up and quiz her on the meanings. She remembers every one. She plays Facebook Scrabble with the family and beats everyone. And she is still wickedly funny. We had been sneaking wine into Hallie’s room for cocktails for visitors. One night, an important-looking hospital administrator comes into the room.
“There is a report of alcohol being stored and served in this room. I’m going to have to do an inspection.”
Hallie perks up, “Forget the alcohol, there are controlled substances in this room!” She’s been taking methadone because every other pain med has stopped working.
I decide to sleep over to keep Hallie company. It is so different from our sleepovers when we were roommates for a summer after college, when we would stay up late laughing, eating, and watching TV. It is totally quiet; the room is dark, except for the red lights on the machines. Tonight it’s snowing, a light and beautiful snow, and the lights of the city are glowing like candles. It seems like we are trapped in the sealed little bubble of a snow globe, unable to interact with the outside world, hiding from ordinary life. We have no idea how much time is actually left—is it days, weeks, months? Do we even want to know?
It’s ironic that outside her hospital room window at Mount Sinai, Hallie has a perfect view of Central Park. A park she spent her childhood playing in, a park she will never walk through again: She’s more comfortable in a wheelchair or her hospital bed in these last days. My gorgeous cousin, with whom I danced just months ago onstage at my daughter’s bat mitzvah, doesn’t complain or say it is unfair. But that is what I’m thinking as the nurse comes in to take her “vitals,” although she is clearly dying.
“I’m a late bloomer, like my mom and dad were. There’s so much more I want to do.” Hallie is fading in and out of sleep.
Every once in a while a machine beeps, but aside from that there is a comforting silence between us, where she could say anything and we are safe from the crashing reality that starts at daylight when the doctors visit with more dire news and painful procedures.
How will I say good-bye to Hallie? I feel so helpless, and any optimism or delusions we had about her getting better are long gone. The only thing I can do is just tell her how much I love her.
I know I will have to say a final good-bye soon. During one of her awful treatments, I run out of her room and start heaving into a trash can—I am crying so hard that I start vomiting, and vomit pours from my nose too. A nurse in the hallway comes over to check on me.
“How do you do this?” I ask her. “How do you stay here?”
She looks at me and says, as if it were obvious, “It’s my job to help make them feel better any way I can.”
I don’t know how to comfort Hallie in this long last hospital stay, but I am going to learn from the oncology nurse and make my cousin feel better any way I can. I buy her a book called What I Love About You by Me, which is sort of like a Mad Libs, and I have to fill in the answers specifically about her. It is pretty cool how much she loves being told how much I love her. Our love feels very present tense, but is also something that can never be taken away from us. Talking about our love takes us out of the horror of the moment. As Hallie gets weaker, I read her the same book louder, again and again. We both know it by heart, but she still laughs at each page as if it is her first time reading it.
#1. I love your EYES
#37. I never get tired of your LAUGH!
#47. I am kind of obsessed with your BRAIN
#43 was my favorite: If you were a dessert you’d be a cheese plate
The nurse taking her blood pressure stops and asks, with a bit of a New Yawk accent, “Who would ever eat cheese for dessert?” My cousin smirks. She has been to Paris. I want to kidnap Hallie from the hospital so we can go to Paris and eat cheese for dessert.
· · · ·
I’m awful at saying good-bye. In a tiny ziplock bag I still have all my hair that fell out after chemo. I’m a borderline hoarder and I can’t give anything away. I still have all my baby teeth, my college papers, high school papers, my kindergarten report card, all the love letters and birthday cards I ever received. I don’t know what I will do with all these things I have saved, but I can’t throw them away. I have to do better with my kids. I have to teach them how to say good-bye to things, but I can’t throw away any of Hayden’s finger paintings—they are so good, and they represent something so deep to me. I’d be giving away a piece of him if I gave away his four-year-old artwork. The hats that I wore during my chemo are sitting in my closet; I can’t give them away because it will seem like I am disrespecting that time we shared together. My story was part of an off-Broadway show called Love, Loss, and What I Wore. My bra was in the story—a lacy push-up bra my friend bought for me before my mastectomy. I can’t throw that away. I still have the negligee from my honeymoon even though I have changed so much it doesn’t fit over my reconstructed breast or my ass. I can’t part with anything; it makes me too sad. “Let’s burn all the notes you got when you were sick with cancer. It will be very therapeutic. We can have a ceremony and transform the energy,” suggests my friend who loves organizing. Creative idea, but nope.
I’m too attached to things, so how can I even think about losing people?
I remember my mom’s best friend (and my godmother), Aunt Honey, whom we lost to pancreatic cancer. Told she had only months to live, Aunt Honey refused to do chemo and decided to turn her bedroom into a salon. It was a long good-bye, filled with hugs and memories about her life. She wasn’t afraid of dying, she told me. My godmother was giving me the greatest lesson in life: She was showing me how to say good-bye. At my last visit with her she was propped up against the wall so she could greet me—standing—when I went to see her. I remember when Hayden and Skye learned to walk, and how hard it was for them to stand. Honey had practiced.
She knew that she wouldn’t live to watch her youngest daughter, Brielle, get married that summer, so they moved the wedding up to the winter. What was going through her mind as she walked Brielle down the aisle, giving her daughter away to her husband-to-be? How could Honey give her away knowing that soon she wouldn’t be there? How did she find the courage to give this gift to her daughter? She looked tired at the wedding, and she was starting to shrink from the cancer and become so frail and thin. Somehow she found a last bit of energy and grabbed her daughter and they danced one last dance.
What was she thinking when she danced for the last time? Her face was so pained and tired, yet determined to be there for her daughter. The way she held Brielle was a good-bye that said, “I will never leave you.”
The last day I see Hallie, she is getting chemo.
“I love you so much, Hallie.”
“Isn’t it sad that with all the love I have, it can’t cure me?”
Hallie is the deep thinker in the family. Why can’t all our love cure her?
I have brought her a veggie burger; she takes a bite and pauses. “This would be so much better with mustard.” She is right. She is Hallie, tasting the most in the little bit of life that remains to her.
Dying is hard work; like being born, it takes labor. For several days we watch over Hallie in the hospital, until we see the last pulsing vein in her neck, and then there is no more breath. Although we have been waiting, the finality of it is stunning.
Tyler is there to officially confirm that her heart has stopped beating.
My aunt Lynda crawls into the bed with her daughter and hugs her baby for the last time before the funeral home comes to take her away. She caresses her, kisses her face, strokes her hair. She doesn’t want to let her baby go.
Her body is still there but she is gone, and it is impossible to understand how she had just been with us. At the hospital we all ride down in the elevator with her and leave her with her friend Julia, near the loading dock where the hearse has pulled up. Julia wants to ride in the back of the hearse with Hallie to the funeral home.
“It is an honor to ride with Hallie.” She doesn’t want Hallie to be alone. None of us does.
Julia tells me later that they strapped Hallie to a gurney, and that the woman from the funeral home protected her when the hearse rounded sharp corners, like holding on to a child in the back of a car in a car seat. Julia delivered her to the official watcher in the funeral home. In Judaism it’s a tradition for someone to sit with the body, to guard the soul until burial. It feels good knowing that Hallie’s friend took that final ride with her, to care for her until the end.