From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(16)
I went back to his room, where he was falling asleep. I leaned over him as he slept, kissed his forehead, and, filled with determination, made a new, fervent promise: “Our story will not end in this hospital. I’m gonna get you out of here.”
I went out into the hallway and up to the nurse’s station. “What do I do? I have to get him home. Please tell the attending we want palliative care,” I said to the charge nurse. She could see my desperation.
“I’ll let him know the family is requesting hospice. He’ll have to write an order for it.” The way she said it gave me no sense of assurance.
Sometime between the ICU and the conversation about a transplant, Franca had arrived with her husband, Cosimo, from Sicily. Saro could not wait to see his sister. When she showed up, it was clear that she was not prepared to see her brother so frail, his breathing labored. My stoic sister-in-law cried openly at the first sight of him. She spoke to him in his native tongue, and I knew it was a salve to his soul. She knew she was bringing him comfort. He would get to say a personal good-bye, hold her hand, see her face.
When Franca kept Saro company at the hospital, she made him smile with childhood reminisces about Sicily. She brought him lentils she made in our kitchen and transported to him in a glass jar. She pushed aside the hospital food and spooned a serving onto his lunch tray. From morning to evening, they tried to cheer each other up. But each night, she wept silently when I drove her back to our house and he remained there. When I returned to the hospital later in the night, he’d tell me he was worried about her.
“When will they release him?” she asked as her stay was ending. I tried to explain the procedural steps in a medical system that was more complicated and bureaucratic than any with which she was familiar in Sicily. “Saro needs platelets so he can be stable enough to leave the hospital. Getting him home requires a precisely timed transfusion, immediate discharge instructions, and EMTs waiting on standby.”
She was crestfallen. “Do you think it will happen?”
“I’m doing my best.”
Two days later, the moment came. We exited through the ER off the back elevators. The EMTs guided the gurney through corridors and secondary hallways. After years of seeing the flurry of hospital activity in one direction, seeing the same hallways in reverse felt as though I were moving in slow motion. I held on to Saro’s gurney, as if it might roll away if I didn’t hold on. He had never left the hospital on a gurney.
When the glass doors slid open, the air felt crisp, a harsh assault on my lungs. I could not breathe the air of normal life. Under the overhead lights of the parking garage, Saro looked more ashen and jaundiced than he had just a second before. I took off my coat and put it over him. As the paramedics took great care to hoist him into the back of the ambulance, they warned me that it would be a slow drive. No sirens.
The doors closed behind us with a heavy thud, as though they were vacuum sealed. I held his hand. The vehicle began to move. Soon I watched the lights of Beverly Boulevard shimmer past. People emptied out of late-night restaurants, others walked in duos and trios laughing along the sidewalk. We had once been the couple who tumbled out of restaurants laughing; we had ridden bikes across the Arno in Italy. Now holding his hand was the only thing that mattered. He didn’t have the energy to speak. Not even a word. When we crossed Vermont Avenue, I realized that we were almost home. Hospice would be waiting. Zoela would be asleep upstairs. I was bringing Saro home to die.
* * *
In Silver Lake, that March was cold and wet. Still, the fava beans in our front garden were going strong. Fava beans are sacrosanct in Sicily. They are eaten around Easter. The bean is associated with resurrection, renewal, sustenance. Saro had taught me that favas are the only plants that actually give back to the soil, they don’t deplete it. They enrich it with nitrogen, spreading generosity and determination with every sprout. The fava beans that spring stood tall in the garden, the last connection to Saro’s culinary life, his culture, the garden of his construction. Years earlier, while he had followed his doctor’s instruction to rest and let his body recoup from the chemotherapy until his immune system was strong enough for his next surgery, he had made it his mission to design a front-yard garden. He had spent two weeks rendering its landscape in a sketchbook—raised-bed planters in diamond formation around a central fountain with a gravel pathway to move between each planter. Within a month he had transformed our front yard, with the beans as a centerpiece. And here they stood now, verdant and swaying in the wind, impervious to my husband dying in the next room.
Inside, the house had swelled with the necessities and unfamiliarity of hospice. A nurse passed me, people came and went. I stepped over a game of Twister while I talked to Margaret, a social worker, on the phone. It was Tuesday midmorning.
Margaret worked exclusively with kids who had lost parents to cancer, AIDS, ALS, and other illnesses. After asking a series of questions about how old our daughter was, how long Saro had been sick, and what our funeral plans were, she sped to the heart of her counsel.
“Children, especially those your daughter’s age, are prone to magical thinking. You will need to help her understand what is happening because her brain will want to forget. Her brain and heart will not be able to hold it.” Her voice came to me slow and steady.
I had to sit on the floor, moving Twister out of the way.
She continued, “You must let her be part of this process. When her father dies, bring her to him. And do not let them take his body away without her seeing it. Let her have a moment with him. Let her touch him. Ask her how it feels. This is important. She’ll need to remember how his skin felt.”