Dave Tells His Stories

It’s hard to re-tell this part of our lives together: the part that covers the last week or so of Dave’s life. So I’m going to do it in two pieces. First comes a surge of action, as our choices and our lives together narrowed down into a chute that forced us forward.

March in Vermont can be snowy, still. My writing room was at the far right window. Dave’s office and our bedroom were in the tallest part of the house, on the second floor. The red door next to the garages opened into a mudroom, and from their, six steps led up to the kitchen. Outside the kitchen window is the bird-feeder trellis that I asked our contractor to make, so Dave could watch birds from his seat in the kitchen.

Taking care of Dave upstairs, with the kitchen and laundry downstairs, and my writing room/office at the far end of the building, meant a physical challenge beyond what I’d met before. My cellphone in my pocket meant Dave could summon me quickly from his own phone — it also meant my steps, and my climbs up and down the stairs, got counted. Those final days meant 30 or more times up and down per day.

Already, sleep wasn’t easy for either of us. Dave was increasingly uncomfortable with pain in his belly and felt constipated (friends drove to the drugstore to get a laxative, and to the grocery for his favorite flavor of sugar-free Jell-o). He often needed to urinate during the night, so he’d wake me and I’d help him up from the bed and walk with him to the bathroom. The arrival of an electrically powered “hospital bed” helped us with the process of getting him on and off the bed, because we could lower and raise it with a button. But the bed also was not very comfortable, even though (with the hospice nurses coaching me) I quickly ordered a foam pad to add to the thin mattress.