Like a kid on a slide

Late in his medical journey, when they inserted an IV, or a tube, or put him through pain, he’d lost the masculine stoicism he’d carried proudly throughout his life. He would yelp in anguish, complain, push medical staff away, tell them, no, no, no.

Nephrostomy tube, catheter, stent, leadless pacemaker, IVs, PICC line, cardioversion, the works. He got it all in the battle, the fight to keep him alive, although in a diminished state. Ultimately, that was not his destiny. He knew it, and escaped.

A magical life has a magical end; on Lord Rama’s birthday, with thunder in the heavens, in his own bed, his wife and his dog beside him.

Going back to the hospital that last time, as we were urged to do to save his life, gives me the sense now that we were like veterans, compelled to return to war. We had to go back, it had become what we knew, and we were trying to get it right.

In some ways we did. Lovely young nurses sat with him because of his inclination to leave, partly dressed in his street clothes, or disrobed, yelling. Those were bad moments, but they were pure, the authentic rebellion of a freedom-loving soul.

I came into the room and a willowy young brunette was sitting beside his bed. “Linda, this is Abby,” he said, his voice rich with warmth, “and she wants to go to Italy, too!”

On an earlier hospital trip, I watched a girl with a crooked face bring him his meal. Suddenly she was smiling at him shyly. I turned to see him beaming at her. Our nurse friend laughed when I told her of this moment, “Coping mechanisms,” she commented.

During our last hospitalization he was surrounded by caring and kind people, from the wonderfully present doctors to the male student nurse who watched women’s basketball games with us. Everyone who had the time was interested in him. He recited scraps of Hafez to the palliative care staff, “No one does not lift a great pack.”

Such grief, now.

And yet. He had to go on. I know he waits for me, just around the corner of the river, basking in the sea of consciousness and bliss.

Today, the leaves of the silver maple trees dance gently in the summer breeze. Sparrows, robins and catbirds sing in the garden. The magenta spirea bush waits patiently for me to take it out of its black plastic pot and place it in the dark, worm-filled Iowa dirt.

The futon and cushions rest on the deck, a copy of Emerson’s Essays sits on the patio table. Like so many of Tor’s books these days, it fell off the shelf, metaphorically. At last, I can really see these intensely intellectual books, and open them to find the perfect wisdom for this moment.

Perhaps Tor takes me seriously, still, when we laughed about his vast library. “You’re going to have to figure out what to do with all these damn books,” he laughed. And I replied, “I’m going to read EVERY word.” To which he said, “You’re just like me.”

We were alike: in our rebellion, our tenderness, our life-long taste for adventure, our spendthrift tendencies, our love of learning and our love of Love. Seekers forever!

Sex is the seed, love is the flower, compassion is the fragrance, Tor taught me this, quoting his one-time guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

When he returned to Minneapolis for a while in the 80’s, his carpenter buddies teased him, calling him The Bag Waag.

What is it like to meet your death with a library full of books on death and dying, global teachings on the afterlife and ancient religious practices, and not be able to read them? I suppose you rely on the accumulated wisdom of your soul’s lifetimes, reinforced by the volumes you’ve ingested over the years, in whatever way you can.

This life is but one day in the life of the soul. Tor taught me this too, and it gives me great comfort. It’s what I told the caregivers when I shared that he hadn’t eaten in a few days, not really at the end of our hospital stay and not when we came home, either. That’s when they said it was time for hospice to assess him…

He grabbed that opportunity. As pneumonia came on and his breathing became labored, he swallowed the morphine and passed into the afterlife, whoosh! Like a kid on a slide.