jumpingfish

At the beginning of a sunny day in early March, Spiderwort blossoms open.

At the end of the day day, they close.

What ever will tomorrow bring?

1.

Chachi Bette was up before the sun this morning, sitting at the table in the dining room eating yogurt for breakfast as she read the news on her laptop. It was 5:15am. It was dark outside. But she was dressed and packed, her suitcases standing by the front door waiting for Ben to arrive to take her to the airport.

“Do you want some eggs?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I have yogurt.”

Some breakfast, I thought. Just like those big lunches consisting of a piece of bread with some cheese.

We all talked for a half hour or so, the last relaxed (?) minutes of her vacation (!?) in Texas.

2.

She was my caretaker. When I was in Houston going in for radiation therapy every day, she was there. She shopped for groceries. She walked Miss Izzy. She researched recipes in continual search for some kind of food that might taste good as my taste buds stopped functioning or that might go down easily as my throat got progressively more sore. She brought me water as I sat working on my laptop, reminding me that the nurses had told me to drink a lot of water. She mades lists of when I had taken my medicine last and when I was to take it next (tiny lists on narrow slivers of paper so as not to waste a single sheet of it needlessly).

She was my companion. She walked with me in the evenings. She rode with me sometimes to the hospital. Her giggling laughter filled that apartment on South Main Street. She went for walks with Ben when he was there and helped him strategize on his resumé. She listened to the Skype conversations I had at work and asked about the people I was talking to.

She made that time in Houston seem like a home away from home instead of a lonely room. 

3.

And when we returned to Austin after the treatment was done, she worked like a wile woman around the house.

She washed the windows. She swept the back patio every day. She watered the Apple trees. She weeded the lawn. She pulled up wild onions coming up in places where even we don’t want them. She trimmed and cut back dead stuff as this year’s early spring pushed out new green growth ahead of schedule. She collected fallen leaves and piled them up in the leaf pile in back. She tirelessly spread a yard of hardwood mulch in the more civilized beds, refraining from questioning those wilder parts of the yard where anyone else would have said something like, “Why are going to do to clean that up!?” She cut the roses. She watered the vegetables. She walked the dogs. She helped us hang and rehang our artwork, something we would have let slip for months without her tenacious encouragement.

4.

And now she has flown home, leaving the 82 degree temperatures of yesterday for snow on the ground and obscenely cold temperatures in New York.

Goodbye, Chachi Bette. This will be a silent place for a while. And there will be no smiling face at the door when we get home.

Thank you for all of everything you did. We will miss you. The dogs will miss you. It’s too quiet, already.

I walked into that room with the piped in music and the big gun hanging over the gurney where they put my personal form-fitted cage over my face and clamped me down one last time.

The staff calibrated the big gun from behind the thick walls and a bank-vault door, taking some X-rays first to make sure that I was properly aligned. It rotated into its starting position, adjusting and whining and clicking and blocking out the light from the ceiling as it came briefly to a stop above my face at which point the usual alarm rang while the radiation poured down onto my throat.

It was wild music Friday, so I tapped my fingers to the beat of some Pandora stream that I never will recognize (although it was a great beat). The gun came to a stop and then started its second pass as the alarm rang out again and another stream of radiation poured down on me. The buzzing stopped. And then the gun came a stop again.

It was the 30th and final time. Six weeks come to an end.

The machine retracted and locked into a safe position. Laney and Tutu and Sarah and Sonya came into the room, cheering for me before I could cheer, because I was still strapped to the gurney with the cage holding me down and a stent in my mouth holding my jaw open. For the final time.

And by way of celebration, they let my local companions and caretakers come into the room, and we posed for a photo with that big gun.

And then we went out into the waiting area, where a brass bell hangs in wait on the wall for everyone’s last day of treatment.

“Pull it three times,” Tutu said.

I pulled on the rope. Gave it a good yank three times, celebrating that this was indeed my final time and I shouldn’t be returning.

“That’s the loudest I’ve ever heard!” Tutu said. The staff and I gathered together for a group hug. And we posed for one last picture beside the bell.

And it was good.

We came to a stopping point on our descent from Sardonahütte, where the old path to the hut joined the new path.

And we stopped for a moment to look back,

tracing our steps back to where we had spent the night.

Except that it was a little more distant than that photo suggests:

Having taken in that view, we turned to find that we were making a spectacle of ourselves.

And so it was time to keep moving on. Jerry opened the gate from the field into the woods.

And we began the second half of our descent.