Obituaries

This Monday I woke earlier than usual— the added hour from the end of daylight savings helped me to do that—when surprisingly, at 7 am, just a few moments after I plugged in my telephone, it began to ring. "Hi Susan, I'm Evan," the voice said, "I'm sorry to say I have tragic news." Since I had just taught a workshop on the weekend and spent most of the day Sunday in bed recovering, I had a long list of tasks to accomplish before picking up my grandson in the afternoon. But suddenly another reason to rush had fallen into my life. 

Though I had not met Evan before I knew his name from my friend Dorie who, suffering from pain and various serious medical conditions for years, often called on him for small jobs, to drive her places, to walk her dog, the little Wizard of Oz Terrier named Abby. Dorie, who had attended my workshop and started writing again after a long drought, was exuberant, even irrepressible, bursting with an energy that would not let her sit still all day Saturday. She was still very excited that night, Evan says, but ill, with the headache that so often plagued her, pain in her foot from a recent surgery, and, as no one knew then, an infection in her blood. Up past one am in the morning with Evan, wailing as in jazz not pain, but also feeling fragile, she asked him to stay in her spare room that night. She was still asleep when he left in the morning. 

He checked on her later, a couple of times. The second time she was still out and not breathing. After an ambulance brought her to the hospital, they tried to revive her. Eventually she was breathing. But over night all her systems had shut down. Call her friends, the staff had told him. "She only has a few hours," he told me. I raced around doing the minimal—teeth brushing, clothes, a few spoonfuls of cereal and yogurt. The critical care staff had placed her in a room that looked over Berkeley and the bay. 

The day was uncommonly clear, even for a fall day, and beautiful. We were all—the dozen or so people in the room—thinking how effusive Dorie would have been about this view. She was effusive, large souled, large breasted, big-hearted, passionate, often over the top, pushing your boundaries and your tolerance and then making you laugh, amazingly honest, with blazing insight into the human psyche. Alternately we sang and told stories about her, discussed a few practical necessities, stood by her bed and stroked her, some cried, some teared up, a gentle Rabbi came, the nurse giving us the schedule: the morphine drip , the removal of the machine that had been making her breathe. We couldn't decipher the blinking lights, the green and blue graphs with numbers running across the screens on either side of her bed. And in any case there she was, Dorie, strong in her presence, unconscious but still herself it seemed, breathing hard, not giving up as she had not over 17 years of pain and illness. 

In my own mind I told myself stories. They were wrong, the doctors, her kidneys would come back, her liver would miraculously start working again, that heart which had been arrested would spring free and give her life again.  

After leaving the hospital I went shopping, picking out my grandson's favorite foods, which gave me the particular kind of humble joy that has the power to answer shock and grief, at least temporarily. As I cooked he drew a wonderful design and made a cut out from it, like a badge or a decoration. We watched 2 Loony Tunes cartoons together, for which he had a running commentary; it was not unlike watching a movie with a knowledgeable critic. Over and over again the heroes, the coyote or the duck, would be smashed to smithereens or exploded and then without much evident damage, spring back to life. But Dorie, I had learned from the hospital, had really gone, two hours after they removed the life support and I left her side. 

The next morning, as I was changing my sheets, I found two loose socks. In an inexplicable world, this gave me some comfort. I tried to penetrate my long list of tasks, and managed to accomplish a bit, but my own heart still propelled me in the direction of this death, as I started calling and writing people we knew in common, writing an obituary, faxing it to Blanche, Dorie's brave and caring mother. By the end of the day I was exhausted and sorting laundry once more. Socks misplaced again. I matched up all of them. Except one. A red one is still missing. Dorie would have loved this. Red, her favorite color.