From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(14)
I was in the land of the newly widowed, which felt like floating in the outer rings of Mars while my body was tied to Earth. All morning it had been like having one language in my head while the world spoke another that pierced my ears like hurried gibberish through a scratchy loudspeaker. My senses were jumbled. Sound was a bitter taste stuck to the roof of my mouth, and sight was a rough touch grazed against my eyelids. At ground zero of grief, up was down and down was sideways. I didn’t remember where we kept the salt; holding a knife took effort. I looked down at my feet because I didn’t trust the earth underneath me to be there. Nothing, absolutely nothing, made sense in the known and unknown world. Except being at home, near my bed, in Saro’s kitchen and in the room where we had said our last good-byes.
From the kitchen I could see my former office turned hospice room, which now held an altar, the soul center of the house. That night, Zoela and I would do what we had done for the last six nights: gather in the room, read poems by Rumi, play Saro’s favorite music—bluesman Albert King and jazzman Paolo Conte, burn sage, and say prayers for the newly dead from a book of candlelight rituals. Those rituals were our desperate attempts to find a way out of the darkness.
* * *
Our undoing was cancer. Saro had first been diagnosed ten years before with leiomyosarcoma, a rare soft-tissue malignancy that had initially appeared in the smooth muscle of his left knee and metastasized into his femur.
Because we had weathered so much over the last decade—so many ups and downs, clinical trials, remissions—I had no way of knowing that a series of hospital stays in a single month would be a sign of the end. A kind of medical chaos had begun to ensue after he had had an adverse reaction to a new drug. Suddenly we had descended into a medical landscape of dueling specialists, expert professionals each of whom saw one piece of the puzzle that was Saro’s body. I was the only one looking at the whole of his life, his body, his heartfelt desires. I tried to humanize the patient behind the chart. His name is Saro. Call him Saro, not Rosario, his given name. Not Spanish, Italian. A chef, a father. Married twenty years. As the heads of hepatology, endocrinology, immunology, gastroenterology, and orthopedic surgery made their rounds, I succumbed to writing my name on the hospital room whiteboard: “CARING FAMILY: Tembi, wife. Black woman sitting in the corner.” It was my response after two nurses had asked me if I was “the help.”
I employed everything I had learned as a caregiver in the face of escalating symptoms, conflicting diagnoses, and the longing of a daughter whose father was away from home more and more. I put books of poetry in each hospital room. I brought him an eye mask, a sound machine, a flameless candle. I sprayed aromatherapy in each room to balance the scent of disinfectant and rubbed Bach Flower Remedies on his temples at night and on his abdomen while he slept. I brought meals from home, from our own stove top, because hospital food is both nutritionally vacuous and psychologically oppressive. Especially for a chef. He was put first on a salt-restricted diet, then another diet high in protein. I purchased high-protein organic shakes in three flavors and kept them in an ice bucket at his bed.
Each night, I kissed his heart chakra before I left the hospital. Then I watched Beverly Hills fall away behind me so that I could be home for Zoela when she awoke in the morning. In the mornings I’d rise early and call the charge nurse for an update, I’d feed Zoela breakfast, assure her that Babbo (Daddy) was okay, and take her to school eastward, only to turn around and drive westward back across the city to Saro. I would spend the days trying to understand what was happening in his body, trying to ease his way.
Somehow in all the chaos that month I managed to put myself on tape to audition for the producers of two TV pilots because it was the network hiring season and we needed the money. Then I called my agents to say I was “booking out” until further notice. I had never, in twenty years, done that. I was taking a leave of absence from jobs I didn’t yet have and might never get. I was pulling myself away from possibilities. Because I had to make space for another possibility—that Saro would be leaving me.
When Saro had almost died of congestive heart failure on the operating table, it had been a turning point. I couldn’t look away from a growing awareness that this was likely the beginning of the end of our cancer fight. He had woken up in the ICU after surgery, taken one look at me, and said, “Vittoria—Victory.” It was the victory of a dying man.
I smothered him with kisses. I wanted to crawl into the bed with him, to feel his skin next to mine. I wanted to soothe his body with my touch. If it had been possible to make love to him, I might have done it then and there. But I couldn’t let down the guardrail. He was hooked up to an IV and monitors. The best we could do was hold hands. The best I could do was lean in and make him a promise.
“I will get you out of here. I will get you home. My love, I promise you our story will not end here.”
As he drifted off, I made other promises, too, the kind of promises the living make to the dying when we have the sudden realization that we are all, in fact, “the dying.” That life is fleeting, capable of bending the other way at any moment. We reach hard for life.
I promised him a road trip to the Grand Canyon and another up the Alaskan coast. If he could just get out of the hospital, maybe those things would be possible. I would have promised him the moon and stars, if I thought I could deliver. In the short term I focused on two things I knew I could make happen right away: “I will make sure your sister comes to visit, and I will bring Zoela to see you.”