Sink's Gone

I'm loading the last boxes, and as is typical for my moves (and I have made many in my life) I am now at the "Screw it, don't think, throw it out or throw it in a box," stage of the proceedings. I sorted, I organized, now it's time to just finish this.

I got home from work at 3, after going in early and working through lunch and having a hell of a week, and caught Oprah's interview with Sharon Stone (which is still on as I type). Stone talked about her stroke and her near death experience, and much of what she said rang so true with what I saw in my husband. One part in particular - after her encounter with the "white light and seeing dead relatives," when she "came back" she was a different person. Calmer, more serene, and no longer afraid of death.

My husband had gone into a coma shortly after 911 - it's hard to pin down the exact day, he remembered watching 911 on CNBC while his oncologist was visiting him in the hospital. He was in the PCU, undergoing treatment with a custom "cocktail" of meds including Interferon, though that wasn't the primary ingredient. It's amazing that the names escape me now, I really have done an effective job of blocking the details. Anyway, he was lucid - I was at work, I watched the towers fall in a conference room at the office. I remember I was standing next to an architect, and when the first tower went down he said quietly, "The second one will go too." He knew it was structural. I called my husband in the hospital and we discussed it, and he was still totally lucid. But I digress....

I think it was two days later my husband went into what I call a "coma" but wasn't really quite, but it's close enough for descriptive purposes, and stayed in it for about three weeks. He gestured at things I could not see, and sometimes, and it freaked me out, folded his hands in prayer, and the expression on his face was so happy and absolutely rapt, I wanted to see whatever he was seeing. For the cynics: This was not a predictable programmed brain reaction from a man whose mind was trained to think of prayer and worship. My husband had a very eclectic and screwed-up religious upbringing and was a devout agnostic. He hadn't been inside a church since our wedding and that was just to make my mother happy. So to see him spontaneously folding his hands in a gesture of reverence and looking so happy about it was quite eerie - it was as weird as if he'd jumped out of bed and done a headstand. It sure wasn't anything I'd seen in the decades I'd known him.

He came out of the "coma-like" thing about three weeks later a different person. The doctors never could explain what the hell it was, what caused it or what ended it. He had no memory of any of it, and was fascinated when I described what I saw. He said he wished he could remember it, but hadn't a clue. The changes in him were obvious. He no longer feared death. He was truly in what can only be called a state of grace - accepting of his situation, sad about it and still determined to keep on fighting to live, but not afraid or angry or resentful. All of this flashed through my mind as I listened to Sharon Stone describe the changes in herself after her stroke. She was there and got the t-shirt. It changes not only the person who experiences it, but those watching from the sidelines, like me.

So that's today's random thoughts. In the far more mundane world in which I live, I am really starting to see that living without a kitchen sink is going to be a lot like an extended stay in a hotel. Without the room service. I can't wait until this is all done.