Actually, it was better than typical. August 31st came in oddly cool and breezy. So cool, in fact, that I actually took a four-mile walk after church, around 11:30 am.
By 1 pm, it was still pleasant enough outside that Jeff decided to mow the yard. He got it done pretty quickly, came in and showered, then lay down for a short nap. I was propped up in bed beside him, reading my book club book. We’d done the weekly Publix run a day early, so we had the whole afternoon to be lazy. Life was good.
About a half hour later, Jeff got up, walked out the bedroom door toward the bathroom across the hall. “You up for good?” I asked. “Yeah, you wanna watch the show?” he answered.
(We’d been binging Law & Order: Organized Crime for the past few weeks – all five seasons – and we only had two episodes to go. We were both obsessed and agreed that Christopher Meloni is the most underrated actor in America.)
“Absolutely!” I responded, shutting my Kindle.
Then I heard a loud noise in the hallway – a cross between a thunk, a thwack, and a crash. Almost like a tree had fallen.
That tree was Jeff.
We still don’t know what caused the fall. Later, when he was communicating only with his eyes, a barely detectable nod, and an alphabet board, he told us he’d had a dizzy spell. The cat scan showed some kind of “occlusion” in his neck, so he might have had a stroke. He was diabetic, so maybe his blood sugar was low. Who knows? The cause doesn’t really matter, because the fall was the thing. He fell head-first into a dresser, which bent his neck, which injured his spinal cord, which left him paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe on his own, feed himself, or speak. Permanently.
Before we knew all that there was an ambulance ride, a helicopter flight, and an eight-hour surgery. Nothing worked.
When Jeff was apprised of his situation – and its permanence – by a team of doctors, he lay quietly for a moment, then used his eye-spelling system to tell me, “We’ll figure it out.”
I knew and loved Jeff Evans for 27 years, and this was always his response, to every problem, great or small.
We’ll figure it out.
My daughter and I spent that week in Charleston with my sister and her family, leaving the ICU each evening for a warm home filled with love and companionship, good food and wine. Meanwhile, Jeff lay trapped in a failed body – ruined in a flukey instant – with his sharp mind fully intact, pondering his fate, and ours, hooked up to a thousand beeping machines and cared for by strangers. My strong, self-reliant, hated-to-be-fussed-over, borderline-control-freak of a husband.
Even now, the thought of it steals my sleep.
When he finally told us – again, with his eyes – “I can’t live like this,” Amelia and I were utterly heartbroken and deeply relieved.
At MUSC we were surrounded by a team of compassionate caregivers – from doctors and nurses to therapists and chaplains – committed to easing Jeff’s transition, and ours, in any way possible. While there’s really no way to lighten such a load, I will be forever grateful to them for their knowledge, wisdom, and unfailing kindness.
On the day they were to remove the breathing tube, Amelia and I entered the ICU with dread, hoping Jeff had been sedated all night and not tormented by his thoughts. But no. “He’s been very busy,” we were told. He’d stayed up all night, dictating notes with his eyes and head to the poor night nurse, who’d left several pages for us to decipher. Everything from amusing observations – “I should have finished Star Trek” – to important information about our businesses (computer codes, contacts, etc.), to a long list of people “to thank and/or apologize to.”
We stayed with him for several hours that day, and the list of instructions, observations, witticisms, and words of love grew much longer. I still refer to it regularly. I guess I always will. Though communication via letter board was incredibly slow, we savored every word he gave us. Jeff was still “all there” mentally – his handsome, funny face expressive as ever. We laughed together and cried together. We stroked his hair and kissed his eyelids.
His last few moments, after the tube was removed, were too intimate to share – too sorrowful and beautiful. At least for now. Maybe one day I will write about it all, every detail, if only for myself. For now, it’s just too much.
Maybe even this – what I’ve written thus far – is too much. Jeff was never entirely comfortable with what he called my “oversharing” about our life together. He thought I was too free with our personal information. “TMI,” he’d say, after reading some of my columns, and yet he never insisted I stop. He was proud of me – and admired my writing – and I think he knew, deep down, that I “overshare” not to exploit, but to connect. He understood this about me, and loved me, even when I annoyed the hell out of him. God, I miss that.
Anyway, I’m writing about this – about what happened to our family – because I don’t see how I could write about anything else, ever again, without first writing about this.
And because I want you to know about Jeff’s stunning heroism. Not necessarily for the decision he made – if you knew my stubbornly independent husband well, you know there was no other decision to make – but for the courage with which he faced the end of his life. Plenty of dark humor, but no self-pity. (With his eyes, he spelled out “this is f’ing ridiculous,” and the look on his face was priceless.) Expressing gratitude. Hoping to make amends. Thinking of his “girls” – and how to ease our life without him – until the very end.
Jeff did so much for us. He was our maker of meals (I can cook, but he loved to cook), our fixer of broken things, our changer of tires, our mower of lawns, our handler of paperwork, our planner of adventures, our weaver of dreams, and the one who always believed we would “figure it out.”
I have learned a lot since his death – how to lay out a newspaper, how to read a spread sheet, how make hard phone calls, how to get through the day on two hours of sleep. But the main thing I’ve learned about is love, itself. Jeff and I didn’t have an easy marriage. We were very different people, and we clashed in many ways. For one thing, he couldn’t understand why I worried so much about money and security. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t.
And there were plenty of other irritants between us. But here’s the miracle: they have completely evaporated. Vanished into thin air. Not because Jeff is gone – despite his excruciating absence, he is still very much with me – but because they’ve been thoroughly overshadowed, literally obliterated, by memories of the love we shared.
While he lay dying, all my trivial – and not so trivial – feelings of frustration with my husband just melted away, and there was only love. There is only love.
What a lesson. I just wish I hadn’t learned it the hard way.
