Chapter Five

Her Tear

For four long days my wife, Hope, lay cocooned in her body. Excessive calcium in her blood, caused by cancer eating away at her bones, had shut down every sensory system in her body except her hearing. The hospice nurse tending to my wife informed me that hearing is the last of the senses to disappear before consciousness is lost. In this state of being, the dying person cannot move a muscle, talk, respond, or function, but hears everything around them vividly.

I remember reading one of my father’s Korean War magazines. It described how a soldier who lay bleeding to death was motionless and incapacitated but heard everything. Like my wife, his every sense shut down except for hearing as he lay slowly dying in the snow. He heard all the sounds around him, yet he couldn’t summon anyone to save him. Luckily, a medic knew enough to put a mirror to his nose to see if there was any breath. The mirror fogged and the medic immediately gave him plasma. That mirror saved the soldier from death and enabled him to tell his story.

The calcium had shut down Hope’s body, and she lay motionless waiting to die. For four days her family and friends visited, our conversations one-directional. How she must have been tormented at being unable to respond. This imprisonment of the mind must feel like being shut in a coffin waiting slowly for the oxygen to run out. My wife was a woman full of vitality and conversation. Now she lay like a frail ghost waiting for her final goodbye. Hope was strong-willed and did not want to let go. She didn’t want to die. There was still so much for her to accomplish in life. Hope wanted to teach, she wanted to see her grandchildren, and most of all she wanted to grow old with her best friend. Knowing my wife, she was hoping a miracle cure would come like a knight saving a damsel in the tower keep, but the knight’s weapons were now exhausted.

And so the story of her tear began the morning of her death. My entire family was suffering and slowly dying with Hope. Sisters and friends from out of town lost wages and were ravaged by the roller-coaster medical ordeal. The wait for Hope’s last breath sapped the life out of the four parents, who were in their own twilight years.

My younger son studying abroad in Europe made the round-trip twice to see his mother, not knowing whether to continue studying or to dismiss an entire semester. Our elder son looked like he was wasting away with anxiety. And then there was I, the seven-year manager of my wife’s illness. I had stopped working. I was bloated from stress, eating junk food, and drinking too much alcohol. My life coach and others thought I was going to die first as I rotted my body and mind.

After six months of staying home, I began to work part-time again as a consultant. The hospice specialist urged me to work and keep my mind busy, and so I did—at the price of guilt that nearly two years later still haunted me. I didn’t know I would wish back every second I worked those last few weeks of my wife’s life. I wanted to work to escape the daily pain, but also because of Hope’s newfound abuse of me.

During those last few weeks, she made fun of me, ignored me, and was indifferent to me. This hurt so much. Why didn’t anyone tell me it was a standard reaction for a dying person who would never be able to converse, share life moments, or make love with the man she had known for thirty-two years? It was her way of distancing the pain of losing me. As my soul, mind, and body rotted and the whole family struggled, my wife held on in her cocoon, trying not to leave us.

I often wonder how much reality and fantasy were going on in her entrapped mind. Don’t we fantasize in normal life when bored as we wait for a train or bus or stand in line at Disney World? Our fantasies are individual additions to our dreams and desires as we wait for whatever will eventually come. Now imagine dreaming in reality and fantasy as you can’t move your body but can hear all around—hours upon hours of thoughts to manipulate. I am sure of one thing: Hope had fantasies that the medical knights were coming to save her. I know this because the hospice specialists told me they’d never seen such will to not let go. I believe this was Hope’s foremost thought. I witnessed my wife endure cancer for seven long years, with over three years in the hospital and hundreds of chemo treatments. They are coming to save me from death, she must have thought. I’ve got so much unfinished business.

On Saturday morning, April 7th, 2012, one of our closest friends visited me. She came with a piece of new information no one had shared with me. We sat alone in my living room, coffee in hand, and she shared a taboo secret of the type revealed only on the most ominous occasions.

“There is a way to stop Hope’s suffering,” she said. “We know of others who have been down your path and made the ultimate decision to stop the pain.”

Euthanasia was her secret, and as she told it to me tears streamed from her eyes. She loved my wife, and this was the most painful secret to reveal, but she saw the toll on my family and on me and assumed my wife’s torment should not go on.

Legally, I can’t describe what I learned of the process, but it took many hours to grasp. The details understood, I corralled my two boys. You could see the stress of the last week marking the skin of their young faces. They had wrinkles and odd colors where smooth youthfulness used to be. I sat them down and was about to ask them permission to silence our very best friend forever. My memory of the discussion is cloudy, and I bet if you asked each one of us you would get a different description, like the colors of a rainbow, but the rainbow doesn’t always end in a blue sky as it also did not that day.

Together, we made the decision that it was time to stop all the agony. There are no words to convey a decision of such magnitude; only those who have endured a similar conversation can understand the torturous internal debate that culminates in an answer. This is a Divine decision.

With our agreement in our minds, I walked to the bedroom where my wife lay on the bed. She had that gossamer appearance you see so many times in the movies. I sat down and cried like never before. It was a new type of crying, one I’d never experienced. I cried for my kids, I cried for the parents, I cried for my entire family. I cried a cry of goodbye to a woman I’d loved for thirty-two years. Then I administered the first of many doses of the prescribed droplets into her mouth.

Before this, Hope would take droplets of water or ice swabs in a gentle way and slowly let the water settle down her throat, but she instinctively rejected the first dose of euthanasic liquid and let it dribble from her lips. My memory is cloudy: I’m not sure if I said anything to her, but she clearly did not want to die. In her determined-to-live mind, the mounted medical knights were still on their way to rescue her. I left the room crying profusely and didn’t know what to do.

Hope was a physical vegetable in all regards; her calcium levels indicated she was supposed to have heart failure, her family was dying with her, and I was the caregiver to toil over it all. For seven long years I was the designated driver of my wife’s illness—and now was the supreme test.

I gathered my tears back into my eyes and returned to the room where my wife lay. I embarked on a conversation no one ever expects to have in his or her entire life. I lay down on the bed next to Hope and hugged her deeply. I knew she could feel my embrace but couldn’t respond. Her mouth reflected no emotion, only a stillness of muscle I never thought possible in a living person. I brought my lips to my wife’s ear and whispered in the softest voice:

“Hope, I love you so much. I have been the luckiest man on this planet. But you have got to let go. There are no medicines or treatments left to save you. I promise you, my dear wife. We have worked as a team for seven long years, but now nothing is left. What do you want me to do? Please, with all your might, try to move your eyelids once for yes and twice for no. Please tell me what to do. Please.”

Somehow Hope managed to communicate with the faintest motion of an eye. After many minutes she told me to stop all medicine. She saved me the indignity of ending her life; saved me from a hurt I would never be able to truly forgive myself for.

After this exchange of instructions, I told her, “I love you and will miss you forever.”

And then one, and only one, tear eased out of her eyelid and ever so slowly ran down her soft check. I can never forget the sight of that one teardrop that foretold my entire future without her. It was a tear of regret, a tear of goodbye, a tear of wishes, a tear of never being able to embrace her best friend again, a tear of true love.

Two hours later, I held my wife’s hand as her breathing slowly subsided. As her life slipped away, her angelic appearance illuminated the room. Then, as I looked upon her face, her breathing ceased and her gorgeous eyes opened and she smiled at me. She died so happy, knowing she had a marvelous life and a lifelong best friend.

A few hours later the funeral director entered her room to remove Hope’s body. She said, “I rarely see such a face as your wife’s. She was one happy woman and must have loved you so much.” I did not answer. I was listening to the Harry Nilsson song Without You.

I am learning that I’m never without Hope, and her last tear is the life force to embark on my next joyous journey. To me, that single small droplet is bigger than the universe. I live by that tear. Over the last few years it has turned from sadness into joy and from regret into a future. For me that tear is one of living life every day to its fullest. The tear has emboldened me to experience global bucket-list adventures and has reacquainted me with lust and love. The tear has directed me to reduce my psychological stress to a minimum and has enlightened me not to sweat the small stuff. The tear has taught me to trust Divinity, and most important, Hope’s tear has taught me to enjoy every single day no matter if the rain is pouring or the sun is shining.

I am living and savoring the joys of life. Hope’s tear is a constant reminder that when it’s my turn to cry my last tear I’ll be satisfied that I lived a life with no regret.