GORDON'S DEATH

It’s been almost five months now since Gordon’s died and, in some ways, my life still seems surreal. When I last saw Gordon, we had aides with us around the clock. When I last saw Gordon, his son Barry was also staying with us. When I last saw Gordon, our apartment was a repository for his medical equipment and drugs.

I last saw Gordon on Friday morning, Jun 5, 2013. Early Saturday morning, June 6, Barry notified me by text that he had died. I knew it was coming. Gordon had been completely unresponsive the last twenty-four hours before I’d left him. But somehow because I wasn’t there, even though I knew he had died, it didn’t seem real.

To further compound the matter, when I got home ten days later, not only didn’t I see Gordon, but also our apartment was stripped bare of all of his medical equipment and drugs. It was as if our life together over the last twelve years had suddenly vanished into thin air.

I certainly didn’t choose for our life together to end this way. I just didn’t have a choice. For the last three or four weeks I’d known he was dying and I had every intention of being there when he did. But as I have learned painfully over this past summer, there are some things in life over which we have no control.

About two or three weeks before Gordon died, I’d come down with a respiratory infection. I’d immediately gone on antibiotics and thought I was getting better. But then I began to get worse; a recipe for disaster for anyone with severe Alpha-1 COPD. So early on the morning of June 7, I called 911.

Gordon and I had already said our good-byes a few days earlier. I’d also written out detailed instructions for Barry and our other children. So, after checking my vital signs and hooking me up to their oxygen, the EMT’s put me on a stretcher. Then they wheeled me past Gordon’s room and I blew him one last teary kiss.

I knew I had to do it. I also hate to think what could have happened to me if I hadn’t. But it was hard.

As I had suspected, I had a severe case of pneumonia and I was hospitalized for eleven days. It’s the longest I’ve ever been hospitalized and yet another sign of the deterioration that Alpha-1 COPD has wrought on my body.

Was it because I was so sick myself? Or was it simply because I wasn’t there? I knew that Gordon had died. I had even spoken with other family members and the Rabbi about his memorial service. But somehow it wasn’t touching me. It was as if I was in a protective cocoon.

My cocoon also traveled with me when I first went home. Yes, Gordon wasn’t there. But neither were his hospital bed, his motorized wheelchair, his hoyer lift and the rest of his medical equipment. It was as if I was returning to an apartment where Gordon had never lived.

Of course there were pictures, memorabilia and Gordon’s clothes. In addition, his memorial service was almost upon us and I had decided to write my own personal tribute. But even as I was writing, it was as if I was playing a role in a play about someone other than Gordon and me.

My first week home I was still sick and extremely weak. But we’d already set Sunday as the date for the memorial service and out-of-town family and friends were arriving on Saturday. So on Saturday I “entertained” from the couch. And I went to the Temple on Sunday in a wheelchair.

That Sunday was a long day. It began with Gordon’s memorial service at 11. All present were then invited to pay their condolences to the family at a luncheon reception immediately following at Glenmeadow. When it was time for the evening Shiva, only a few close friends and family remained.

That Sunday, June 23, 2013, was unquestionably the hardest day of my life. Gordon’s memorial service was beautiful and family did their best to surround and shelter me. But that Sunday there could be no more pretending. That Sunday we were all gathered to honor Gordon and to say goodbye to him for the last time.

From Gordon’s death until that Sunday I’d been living in an unreal world; a world in which Gordon wasn’t physically present but I hadn’t acknowledged that he was gone. That Sunday reality clobbered me. But it was painful and so, not surprisingly, I quickly slipped back into my unreal world.