11. Life and Death Lessons

What an interesting turn of phrase Mario chooses, describing me as fearing his death, while I write in less straightforward terms: being obsessed with his health. Either way, both are correct. And it’s difficult to understand unless you’ve been there. Or at least, had someone close to you die.

I could play out either of those threads to their neurotic conclusion: become so obsessed with Mario’s death that I fail to fully live and appreciate him in the time we have. But I refuse.

So while I do concern myself with what he eats, and occasionally lapse into telling him what he “needs” to do, I try to keep my fear/obsession on a short leash and concede that Mario’s pretty good at watching out for himself.

The subtext to this is an uncomfortable truth for every relationship, for everything and everyone you love or will love: Sooner or later, one of you will say goodbye and one of you will be left alone. Many people have simply never contemplated this, especially young lovers, who can’t bear the thought of losing their beloved. (Ask a 9-11 widow or the mate of a fallen solider from the Iraq war whether it’s possible.) It doesn’t mean every relationship will end in death, but it’s true that every relationship will end. Each ending becomes a “little death” that must be mourned. (If you don't, you're just building a time bomb.)

So it helps to focus on what’s important and let go of what’s not. I think of my dad, who’s 91 and still chugging right along, like the model T’s he restores. Not too long after my mother died, he remarried, to a woman he has known since the second grade. She also had lost her mate after 50 years of marriage. They've been together 10 years and grab a hold of every minute they can.

They know: Life is too short to spend on petty squabbles. In five years, Mario and I have had maybe two serious arguments. It doesn’t mean we don’t have differences. It just means we don’t get too torqued about little stuff. It also doesn’t that mean people don’t have serious differences, serious enough to cause a split. Just that you develop the wisdom to recognize which is which.

My favorite example of this involves barking spiders. These little creatures have been known to skitter around so wildly some nights that the bedcovers luff like sails in a wind. Now I’ve known men who would be (a) genuinely offended or (b) horribly embarrassed in the same situation. But barking spiders are not a big deal once you’ve struggled alongside someone, like Izzy, who at times could not even eliminate, much less pass gas.

You learn to get over it and focus on what’s important.

My daughter, who has just bid her teen years farewell, gets the appreciation thing. You’ll remember I wrote about her and her boyfriend moving to another city to a house big enough for two cats and a bunny. Well, just a few days ago the bunny died at my house the morning they were leaving.

All of us cried. For all her pooping and peeing inappropriately (and appropriately, too), this little creature had a way that just melted your heart. ‘Seems that one of my cats, the scaredy one, scratched her, which led quickly to an infection. Chaco was gone before we could get her to the vet. Kinda like a guy who has a heart attack when you least expect it.

“It’s so weird, Mom,” Helena said through her snuffling. “I can handle death.” We talked a bit about that. “It gives you an appreciation of the now,” she said. “It teaches you about not taking life for granted, and how it’s spent.”

She says this was not necessarily learned through Gregory. And I can’t dispute her. One of her high school friend’s dad committed suicide. Another friend died of cancer. Helena doesn’t shrink from these events and has often been able to offer meaningful support. But I wonder: She and Gregory were so close, and the way she learned of his death was almost as upsetting as his death itself.

10a. From Mario ... "On The Run"

I’ve been on the run. For 5 years. So long, I’ve now run across the width of this here United States. Ann seems to be worried that I'm going to die soon. But with her experience, one can only understand her worry.

But let me tell you why she needn't worry about that.

To live through what I did with Isabel was a lesson in living and dying. But to not take care of myself would be to disrespect the battle she fought and ultimately succumbed to.

So while Ann fears my death, I fear not living, with respect to the battle one dear to me fought, to honor life.

Recently on a trip, a friend of ours lost her husband of 50 years. Our friendship started with her friendship with Isabel. They were colleagues, fellow writers.
When my wife was too incapacitated to hold a book or read the print, this friend would come over to the house and read every week. It was wonderful seeing them there sharing someone’s thoughts in print. It really was healing. Now our friend has lost her man of her lifetime. Now she starts her new life, again.

My aunt, who is approaching 90 years, lost her husband of 60 plus years not too long ago. She is missing his company; she is lonely for her mate. Everywhere you turn, if you choose to see it, there are people dealing with this basic fact of life.

Is loneliness the real issue here? Is there something about not wanting to be lost among one’s belongings without someone there to help navigate life?

I see it with my son, still so young but really having to deal with the hard reality of a solitary existence, and not liking it.

All these jets roaring above our heads, all this distraction, time slipping into the stream of their trails and getting sucked out of our life accounts. I’m not liking it, either. This isn’t easy. This is relentless.

So I eat well, and I exercise, and I shift over from farm-raised to wild and from gas-fired to charcoal. I do what I think is right. But they’re still going to get me, eventually. Ann hopes later, and I hope she is right. In the meantime, what we do with our time and our resources, those are the places at the table I need help setting. Don’t we all?

I will run my run, day by day, step by step, tear by tear. It’s a race I know I’ll never win. But run I will. For Izzy. For Ann. For my mom and for my son, with memories and hopes as my backwind, along the sandy shores, with the sun in my face.

-Mario

10. "You are not the boss of me"

Although I got to know Mario three years after Gregory’s death, the impact of losing a love who seemed so vigorous and vital has probably made me a little obsessive about Mario’s heart and health.

Aside from that single McDonald’s indulgence, Gregory ate such a healthy diet that one of his best friends remarked at the memorial service, “When we’d go out to eat, everyone else would order enchiladas and beer, and Gregory would get a salad and water.”

But because Gregory steadfastly refused to go for a physical, I’ll never know if medication – or some sort of intervention – would have lengthened his life. Like so many men, Gregory took better care of his car than himself. (That’s another story.)

So it is refreshing that Mario is almost girlish in his attentiveness to his body, making sure to get regular physicals and going to the doctor if anything seems amiss.

Mario cuts a leaner profile that many men half his age. Yet he is a little overweight. He is a committed runner. But work and knees sometimes conspire to prevent his doing this regularly. He eats better than 90 percent of Americans, with an affinity for salmon and spinach. But he has a weakness for cheese, in particular Upland Pleasant Ridge Reserve, which won Best of Show at the 2005 American Cheese Society conference.

In addition, Mario can get passionately, exquisitely angry. He hates stupid drivers (see “idiot-watching with Mario” in No. 5). He hates hot weather. He hates his pool, declaring yesterday, as he toiled beneath the unrelenting sun, “I’ll never own another pool again!” He rails against politicians he believes are wrecking the country and bemoans how greed has replaced relationship-building in business.

The thing is, Mario expresses this, rather than holding it in, as Gregory did. More accurately, Gregory learned to do what his father did: withhold, withhold, withhold, then explode in a violent rage. By the time Gregory met me, this had been largely tamped down, one of those things he shoehorned into his heart-as-vessel.
Despite Mario’s obvious attention to his own wellness, I still want to give him “advice” about his health. Sometimes he welcomes this, as when I helped devise a plan where he lost about 10 pounds. (Of course, he’s lost 10 pounds in Italy before, just by walking.) More often, when I mindlessly say something like, “No. You’ve had enough of that,” he comes back with some defensive retort, such as: “You are not the boss of me!”

But Mario is no 3-year-old. He means it. Yet he is happy for me to cook on weekends, a way I can covertly, creatively control some of what he eats. He’s got a well-equipped kitchen, too, remodeled about a year ago. So I cook at his house a lot.

Shortly before Gregory died, he had begun to provision his own kitchen. After living with and taking care of his mother for about four years, he had moved to my condominium complex. For reasons that I’ll explain in a future posting, it fell to me to pack his things and close the place up.

His dishes, flatware, knives and pots and pans were all new. Yet I was reluctant to give them to charity. Sometime during the dull throb that follows a death, I hit upon an idea: I would pack them away for my daughter, Helena, for when she left home. Even though she was only 12 at the time, I knew the day would come. Gregory would have approved, and Helena would appreciate that the things had been his.

In fact, in less than a month Helena is moving with her boyfriend to a new city to start her third year of college. The two have rented a house. Just enough space for them, their two cats and the rabbit. Already, Helena cooks. She is 20, beautiful, and full of herself – which Gregory would have loved.
She may not know it, but when she sets her table with his dishes and cooks for the boyfriend and others with his pots and pans, she will be setting the table for her own party of two, or four. Only, being so young and full of the potential of life, she will not have to make places for those who have left. At least, not yet.

Next time: Mario speaks.

9. The Heart: Muscle vs. Vessel

Gregory died on a Saturday. Here is what I have been able to reconstruct about his final hours.

We started that day early. I had to catch a plane. I was going to a convention to promote my new book. A lot of mornings, Gregory and I unwound from our entwined sleep and made love. Not this morning. It was so early that the backs of my eyes felt gritty and grainy. We were doing well to stir.

We showered, and drank a little coffee. Gregory spent the usual time on his hair, progressing through different size picks in front of the mirror to get the right balance of kink and curls. He brought his car around to the front of my condo and loaded my luggage. As I was preparing to lock the door, he said, “Leave your keys here. You won’t need them.” And so I did.

We didn’t talk much on the ride to the airport. That was OK. I was so deeply happy and fulfilled in this relationship. We didn’t need to talk, to fill every void with a rush of words. We could ride in comfortable silence. But at some level, Gregory had felt bad about this, as I would learn later.

Stopping curbside at the airport, Gregory got my luggage from the trunk and placed it on the curb. He pulled me close and kissed me, and wished me a good trip. I remember watching him get back in the car and pull away, always looking forward, never looking back. It was the last time I would see him alive.

That day, as I moved through the convention, Gregory did what he always did on Saturdays, starting this one with breakfast at McDonald’s. I know. Don’t wince. He’d get the scrambled eggs and pancakes and sausage. It was his one junk-food indulgence, and he didn’t do it every week.

From there, he would go to his mother’s house and work most of the day in the yard. There were towering oaks that he would trim and pamper, a lawn to mow and edge, a border of other plants to tend, including grape leaves and the crape myrtle where Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal, as he always called the pairs, had had a nest.

Sometime later in the afternoon, he had stopped in at my condominium to feed the cats. He still had on his yard clothes – he hadn’t yet shaved and dressed for the party he was expecting to attend that evening for a client who was a photographer. He locked my unit and walked toward his own in the same complex. He crossed the courtyard and began to half-walk, half-run up the stairs to his own unit.

He made it just to the top, where he gasped, grabbed his chest, and fell. Two co-eds and a neighbor from nearby units saw him fall. One went to his side; the others called an ambulance. It got there quickly. Gregory was hustled away to the hospital, where they worked on him for several hours. To no avail. They could not revive him.

I believe Gregory died at the top of those stairs. He had one thing in his hand as stumbled and fell: the key to my unit. It was on a Perrier-Jouet Champagne keychain we had gotten at a wine event.

How do I know he was coming from my unit that day, and not just going to it? Because on the following Monday night when I came home and first found out that he had died, at the end of the evening spent huddled with a close friend and my son, when I finally said goodbye and dragged myself alone up the stairs to my bedroom, to the bed where I had last slept next to Gregory's warm, living flesh, I looked up to see on my chest of drawers an envelope addressed to me in his handwriting.

I slid the card out. It was a fool-the-eye image from Claude Monet of two men in a gondola in Venice. Inside, Gregory had written: “…flesh and blood needs flesh and blood and you’re the one I need.* …I apologize for slugging you with my frustrations. Hopefully, it won’t happen again. Love, G. *Johnny Cash and me.”

Well. He was right about one thing. It didn’t happen again.

A heart attack may seem like a sudden event. But it is not. When coronary arteries narrow and clog to the point of choking off their own life-giving blood, it is merely the climax of a slow-motion drama that has been shaped atom by atom and cell upon cell for years.

The heart may be strong muscle, but it is also a tender place – a place where many of us hold ourselves and our hurts away from the world as if, by shielding them from all eyes (including our own), our hurts will somehow evaporate and disappear.

I used to place my head on Gregory’s chest and listen to the slow, steady tha-tump, tha-tump of his heart, secure in its strong, unceasing rhythm. I thought I knew what that heart held, thought I had some sense of the wear and tear it had endured, both as muscle and vessel.

But this precious heart held vastly more than I had supposed.