musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

To be, or not…


Perhaps it’s my increasingly autumnal years, but lately I’ve begun to wonder about what extinction really means. Not so much my own, you understand -although that will happen soon enough- but ours. All of us…

Extinction has certainly happened before of course. I mean, the Neanderthals went extinct, the Dodos went extinct, the wooly mammoths went extinct… But so what? Something always comes along to take their places, and up until now it has always been different things. But we get used to what we have, don’t we; the familiar is important to us, and with the relatively short time-span any of us spend on this earth, we usually confine our worries more to the death of those who are close to us than to others we don’t know. And yet does extinction really have to mean everybody?

I remember that famous ‘No Man is an Island’ poem by the Renaissance poet John Donne: ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me…’

Yes, we all die, but often a part of each of us also dies when a parent dies, or a friend, or perhaps more especially, when a partner dies. Is that not a personal example of extinction to which we can all relate…? Does extinction have to be defined as the vanishing of all the members of a species? Can’t it also be a more personal thing -the vanishing of a special relationship, say, or even the disappearance of an identity, the loss of meaningful agency…? That, it seems to me, could be equally devastating. Equally diminishing…

“My wife is worried about our extinction,” a friend confessed to me over coffee the other day.

Lately, I’d only seen his wife with him in the supermarket, and she always seemed on a search for some brand on a shelf she could never find, or continually changing her mind once something was in her cart. In Jeff’s case, however, it was still the current fashions that eluded him.

“By the time I get around choosing a style of jacket, or the cut of a pair of pants, they’re already out of style, G,” was his usual excuse.

I’ve known Jeff since our long-ago days at university; he continued to wear baggy pants with cuffs on them, and the undershirts whose outline he’d never really tried to disguise still presumed he had muscles, not adipose tissue to fill the gaps. I thought he was still defending the way he dressed when he mentioned Cora’s concern after I’d sat down with him in the coffee shop. “That’s not really extinction though, Jeff,” I explained with a little smile. “I mean the styles you wear haven’t vanished, or anything have they?”

I’d been trying to console him, but he pulled a worried expression from his wardrobe of faces. “They have on everybody else, G…” He sighed and stared at his coffee undrunk and cooling on the table in front of him. “But this time I’m not worried about my fashion sense; it’s not always what people wear that vanishes. The important thing is not what disappears, but who…”

Jeff lived in a kind of folie à deux thing with his wife, though -he was a mirror when it came to her. They both dressed with a seeming disregard for the prevailing Zeitgeist and were seldom ever apart. I’d never met two people who were as close as them, so maybe she’d meant that their type of togetherness was going extinct nowadays. None of my other elderly friends were that close to their wives, and Jeff’s clothes were the last things they noticed at our Wednesday morning coffee meetings at the Food Court; they were just happy to get out of the house. Anyway, Jeff hardly ever showed up now and whenever he did, he just sat quietly and observed everything as if he was at a movie or something. He seemed lost without his wife to turn to.

In fact, it was because he was almost always with her that I was surprised to see him sitting by himself that day in the coffee shop. He’d asked me to meet him there just to tell me about Cora’s concern, I suppose.

I had a sip of my coffee and offered him the extra doughnut I’d bought for him. “So, where is Cora?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

He shrugged. “Probably at home packing her suitcase…”

I wasn’t sure whether to ask if she was going on a trip, or leaving him, so I just smiled. “Are you both going somewhere…?”

“She says she’s going to say goodbye to her sister…”

I waited for him to explain, as his eyes searched the room for a minute before resting on his coffee.

“She realizes she’s starting to forget things, G… She’s getting confused, too. This time, she says she wants to make sure she says goodbye to her sister before… well, before she can’t.”

He looked so pained as he said that, I reached over and touched his arm. “I don’t understand, Jeff. Why does she have to say goodbye…?”

He took a deep breath as his eyes shifted positions and drifted slowly onto my cheeks. “Her doctor seems to think things are deteriorating more quickly than he had first anticipated.”

All I could do was stare at Jeff. “I don’t understand,” I finally managed to say. “Why does…?”

“She has some sort of rapidly progressing vascular dementia,” he answered, his lips quivering at the word. “She sent me out of the house so she could pack this morning, but she’s not really going to see her sister -Flora died a few years ago. Cora’s actually with her caregiver now. She’s been coming every other day for a while, but Cora’s going to have to go to a full-time care facility when one becomes available.” He picked up the doughnut I’d bought him and slowly nibbled it the way he used to with his fingernails in those lectures he didn’t understand. Some things never change.

“I just had to talk to somebody about her,” he said, after putting the doughnut down again. “She is my life, G. We were never apart -you know that. It’s like we had the same thoughts over the years… we were almost the same person,” he added and looked down at his hands.

“How long were you married?” A mindless question under the circumstances I realized as soon as I had asked it -I was at their wedding- but I felt I should say something. We were both old men now and things were changing more rapidly than either of us had probably anticipated.

He took a deep, stertorous breath and thought about it. “Almost 60 years, G.”

“I’m so sorry, Jeff,” I said, but I realized my consolation wasn’t nearly enough. They both were facing extinction, really…

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gozzter

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