Same Kind of Different As Me (24 page)
Apart from the cowboy memorabilia we’d gathered from junk stores to decorate the ranch, Deborah never was much of a collector. But she had accumulated a small collection of antique perfume bottles. She loved the colors and shapes and the notion that they’d once held a fragrance whose essence you could still catch if you removed the top. One by one, over two days, Deborah summoned her closest friends, told each what they’d meant to her, and gave them one of her treasured bottles. The first one went to Mary Ellen, who’d been with Deborah every day of her illness.
Late in the afternoon, on the day she finished giving the bottles away, I walked into the bedroom to find Deborah propped up with several pillows behind her back, smiling cheerfully, somehow expectantly. I sat down beside her. She wore a soft green pajama top, and the edge of the sheet was folded back and smooth across her waist. I marveled: She was even dying in pristine fashion. I slipped in under the sheet beside her and snuggled up close, careful to run my hands over the folded edge to brush away the wrinkles.
“I want to have a meeting with you and Carson and Regan,” she said.
“About what?”
“You’ll see. Just ask them to come in.”
Having just slid in, I slid out of the bed again and called the kids. Minutes later, as we all sat on the big bed, Deborah addressed Carson and Regan with the tone of an affable but busy CEO handling emergency business that couldn’t wait. “Your father has been a wonderful husband and father, and I want you to know that I am releasing him to find someone, date, and even marry.”
Her words triggered actual pain in my body, as though my blood had suddenly turned hot.
“No . . . please,” I interrupted.
She continued talking to the kids as if I hadn’t spoken. “I know it’s going to be hard for you, but I’m asking you to honor his decisions and let him be happy again.”
Carson and Regan stared at her, openmouthed and silent. Suddenly, trying to breeze away the heaviness in the room, Deborah smiled broadly: “Of course, you two are also free to marry whomever you choose.”
Regan smiled and cracked wise. “
Thanks
, Mom.”
The meeting lasted less than five minutes, but seemed so much more a “final detail” than any discussion we’d had to that point. An acknowledgment that though we had journeyed together for more than thirty years, one of us was preparing to step off the path.
Carson, then Regan, crawled higher on the bed and kissed Deborah on the cheek. Then they slipped out, seeming to sense their mother had more to say. They were right. She asked me to help her into the wheelchair that the hospice people had parked by the bed. She wanted to go to the garden near the waterfall that architects had designed into the landscape behind our house. She’d rarely been able to enjoy it since we moved in.
I pushed her chair near the edge of the shallow reflecting pool and pulled up a lawn chair next to her. Though she’d been in command in the bedroom, she suddenly seemed more subdued. She spoke, but even the soft splash of water spilling into the pool was enough to steal the sound of her voice.
I asked her to repeat herself and leaned so close that her lips brushed my ear. “Even her,” she said.
I knew immediately what she meant. True to her promise of eleven years before, the one she made the day after learning of my infidelity, she had never once mentioned the Beverly Hills artist.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go there.”
“Yes,” she whispered resolutely. “It was a
good
thing, a thing that turned out good for
us
. Look at the last eleven years . . . if she hadn’t happened, our life together would never have been as wonderful as it has been. And now you have my permission to go back to her.”
I told her I didn’t even want to think of those things. I was still praying that God would heal her, I said, and added,“I’m still hoping God will take me first.”
October 25
We
had prayed to be able to celebrate our thirty-first anniversary together. Now, watching her cling to life, her breathing hitched and shallow, I wasn’t sure she would live to see it. But she did. As daylight peeked through the crack in our bedroom drapes, I whispered in her ear: “Debbie, we woke up.” But she could not answer. Five days earlier, she had fallen silent.
So I talked for both of us. Read to her from Proverbs 31 about the “excellent wife” . . . reminisced about the first time I saw her . . . walked through memories of our first few dates to football games, when I was too frightened to kiss her and serenaded her with “Mack the Knife” instead. She lay still on the bed, at less than eighty pounds barely raising the sheet. I gently slid my arm under her head and touched her face with my fingertips.
“Blink if you can hear me,” I whispered. She did and tears trickled like tiny streams.
In the afternoon, the hospice doctor came, and after a quick examination called me out of the room to tell me that Deborah would not live through the day. I chose not to believe him. I chose to believe that God would not be so cruel as to take her on our anniversary.
The next day would have marked a week of total silence, but Deborah began to stir and moan. That afternoon, the kids and I, and Mary Ellen, were sitting with her, when she suddenly cried out, “Ron! Get me some wings!”
It wasn’t a request, but a command, and it startled me into laughter. Unable to move for nearly two weeks, she now began reaching her hands toward the ceiling—right, left, right, left—as if she were climbing a ladder. Fearing she’d yank her IV tubes out, all four of us tried to restrain her, but she struggled mightily, fighting to go up, up. She really was no more than a living skeleton; it was an extraordinary display of strength.
Day passed, then a long, thrashing night as we all stayed with her. “Jesus! Jesus!” Deborah cried as sunlight crept into the room. “Can you see them? They’re flying!”
“What are you seeing?” I asked.
“Angels!” she said. “There they are!” And she would point to one part of the room, then quickly to another. We followed her motions expectantly, hoping to see angels ourselves. Her climbing and crying out continued for twenty-three hours. Then, as suddenly as she had broken her silence, she fell silent again. Ice gripped my heart as I thought she might have died.
But after about two minutes, she spoke again in a loud, clear voice: “Jesus! How are you?”
Another minute of silence and then resolutely: “No, I think I’ll stay here!”
It was 2:00 a.m. Regan and I stared at each other, astonished. Had we just witnessed a visitation? I pressed my ear against Deborah’s soft cotton gown; her heart was still beating strong. I kissed her cheek.
“It’s okay to go with Jesus,” I said. “Regan, Carson, and I will join you in heaven soon.”
“And Mary Ellen . . . ,” she whispered faintly.
“Yes, and Mary Ellen,” I said, thrilled to know she had fully comprehended the moment.
Early the next morning, Denver showed up on our doorstep in dirty, ragged clothes, smelling like cigarettes.
“Come on in,” I said, opening the door wide. “Want some coffee?”
“I didn’t come for no visit,” he said. “I come to deliver a word from the Lord.”
He was agitated and looked like he’d been up all night. He took a seat at the kitchen table, leaned forward and eyed me. “Last night, I was drivin up on the interstate, Mr. Ron, when I felt the need to pull over and pray. So I pull over on the side of the road up on that hill that look over the city, and that’s when God spoke to my heart. God says Miss Debbie’s spirit is cryin out to be with the Lord and showed me visions of angels comin into her room to take her home. But the saints on earth was holdin on to her body ’cause her work here ain’t finished yet.”
He told me he had seen Jesus and angels and lightning. He also told me what time he’d seen this “vision”: precisely the same time it had happened in our home.
It had now been more than three weeks since Deborah had eaten. Her skin clung thinly to her limbs like gauze, hugged her cheekbones, crept into her eye sockets. How many times had various doctors predicted she would not live through the day? And yet a “foolish” old homeless man had been far more accurate than the learned medicine men.
The next morning Denver knocked at the kitchen door again. We sat at the kitchen table, stirred our coffee. He dropped his head and paused a long moment, unhurriedly collecting his thoughts like shells on a beach. Then: “God gives each person on the earth a set of keys, keys to live this life down here on the earth. Now in this set, there is one key you can use to unlock prison doors and set captives free.”
Denver turned his head just slightly so that the right side of his face was closer to me than the left. He leaned in with his right shoulder and narrowed his eyes even farther. “Mr. Ron, I was captive in the devil’s prison. That was easy for Miss Debbie to see. But I got to tell you: Many folks had seen me behind the bars in that prison for more than thirty years, and they just walked on by. Kept their keys in their pocket and left me locked up. Now I ain’t tryin to run them other folks down, ’cause I was not a nice fella—dangerous—and prob’ly just as happy to stay in prison. But Miss Debbie was different—she seen me behind them bars and reached way down in her pocket and pulled out the keys God gave her and used one to
unlock the prison door and set me free
.”
Denver pounded home those last words like eight separate nails, then sat back in his chair, sipped his coffee. He put the mug down. “She’s the onlyest person that ever loved me enough not to give up on me, and I praise God that today I can sit here in your home a changed man—a
free
man.”
November 1
A week
past our anniversary, the hospice doctor and nurses were beyond amazement that Deborah was still alive. They had stopped making predictions and instead discussed how the books on dying should be altered, or at least footnoted, to include the possible outcomes of people like Deborah, who, when death came calling, summoned the strength to reschedule and politely close the door.
For months, we had been in a long Texas drought, but now dark skies brought cold, sluicing rains. I imagined that the angels were crying.
But
why?
I thought bitterly. It seemed God was getting His way. I remembered what Denver had said, that He needed to take home some good folks to work His will on earth. I thought that was a crappy plan.
That morning, Deborah lay in our bed, still and spectral. But at noon, her body began to tremble, then convulse. Within seconds, violent seizures began ripping through her torso and limbs. Her face contorted in pain. I jumped into the bed and tried to hold on as she shook and thrashed, pleading silently with God to stop torturing her. Alan, Mary, the kids, and the hospice people watched in growing horror.
After two hours, I leaped out of the bed and literally shook my fist at heaven. “Stop it, God! Please!”
For two more hours, Deborah writhed on the bed like a live power line. After what seemed like a frantic consultation, the hospice people decided to give her phenobarbital. The dose was enormous; it would probably stop the pain, but it might kill her. The hospice doctor asked if I was willing to administer the drugs. I consented without hesitation. I would’ve done anything to stop her suffering. Still, I wondered if I was signing her death warrant.
As the drugs began to flow, her tremors subsided, closing off what might have been a glimpse into hell. Without a doubt, I was now ready to see her safely to her eternal home. And I thought she must be ready to go, too.
November 2
Early in the morning, the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, I saw Denver standing there, ragged, looking again like a vagrant who had not slept. But his eyes were different this time—blank and hollow, almost as if he were in shock. I hugged him, but he only stood there, as though he was too exhausted to respond. He kept his head low and for a couple of minutes, wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“I didn’t come for no coffee or no visit,” he said as we took seats at the kitchen table again. “I come to deliver a word from the Lord.”