Death Takes Away a Holiday

My husband and I were dying to get away, yet everyone else was just dying.

Last May, my husband, Douglas, an internist, signed three death certificates in one week. One was for Annie, a favorite 56-year-old friend and patient, who 17 years earlier had had breast cancer, and it had metastasized to her liver. “Nobody talks about that when they talk about five-year survivals,” he said after the memorial service in her backyard.

I wasn’t signing death certificates, but I had my own kind of deadline: I’d been working nonstop to finish a book.

Under such pressures, we were really looking forward to our summer vacation. We both needed to recharge, refresh, recover, to give ourselves a rebirth.

Usually I can set my watch by my husband’s vacation. His vacation is holy, a sacrament of which he partakes annually and usually for at least 21 days. He’d started planning ours last fall. Back then he’d been suggesting the Black Sea. “The ship stops in Istanbul,” he’d said, reading from the glossy brochure, knowing I don’t like cruise ships but I do like seaport cities.

He signed us up. Standing between us and Istanbul was a medical conference in Hawaii. While he sat in a ballroom in Hawaii, learning the latest about hepatitis, I was holed up in our hotel room, finishing the final chapter. I was at my computer when I heard Douglas at the door. He dived into bed, shivering. As his fever spiked and he missed the lectures and the luau, he diagnosed his ailment as an airplane bug acquired on our flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

On our return from Hawaii, we changed our summer plans. The cruise, with its 18-hour flight from L.A. to Athens, fell by the wayside partly because we didn’t feel like confronting a similar airplane-acquired illness. What’s more, I’d always had nagging doubts that the Black Sea was way too far from my dad, who lives in Seattle and suffers from serious health problems like emphysema and prostate cancer.

*

Instead, Douglas suggested a more relaxing, closer-to-home train trip. “A trip across Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto,” he said, holding up another glossy brochure. This one showed tourists gazing at the Rockies from the dome car.

On the last day of May, I FedExed my book to the publisher, bought a disposable camera and copied our itinerary for my parents, just in case.

The first day of our vacation we were in Seattle on our way to Vancouver to catch the train. Barely 24 hours into our trip--we’d had one raucous dinner with friends, a lunch with my parents and were indulging in a delicious afternoon nap in our splendid hotel room--the phone rang.

A dear friend, a neighbor who we thought of as a member of our extended family, had just died in Los Angeles. Kerry hadn’t been sick. At 53, his death was a fluke, an embolism in his lung.

We flew home. Douglas oversaw the business at the hospital and the mortuary while I did what women friends traditionally do at such times: I put fresh sheets on the spare bed so our friend’s wife, Christel, could sleep over; baked an extra turkey breast so she wouldn’t have to cook when she went home; and sat by her computer, helping to compose her husband’s memorial service.

But even in death, things don’t necessarily go smoothly. The coroner didn’t agree with the cause of death stated on Kerry’s partial autopsy and ordered a full autopsy. So our dear friend lost his place at the crematory and his memorial was delayed another week.

Douglas and I moped around the house, grieving for our friend, his widow and, I admit, a little for our lost vacation--the train with the glass-enclosed dome car and the romantic inn on the St. Lawrence River. We were a living testament to literary critic Alfred Kazin’s line: “In the midst of death we are in life and itching to get away for the weekend.”

On the very day we were supposed to scatter Kerry’s ashes in Ventura Harbor, Christel’s mother, who is Dutch, was hospitalized in Amsterdam. She had been complaining for some time about a persistent cold, and the next week, Christel, an only child, was in Holland making arrangements for her mother’s funeral.

*

By mid-July, Douglas said, “We’ve been through so much, I’m not sure I want a vacation.” After 10 years together, I gave him a wifely look of disbelief.

He came up with a modest plan. “How about a car trip up the coast? With the dogs?”

I found a lodge at Pebble Beach that would take us and our cocker spaniel and Yorkie. Not 30 minutes later, my mother phoned. Dad, who hadn’t urinated in 24 hours, had just returned from the emergency room with a catheter.

Douglas and I looked at each other. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said.

A 50ish friend, who had to rush home a week early from the house she rented in Tuscany because she sprained her knee, said, “Maybe we’re at the stage in our lives when we should expect that from now on our vacations will always be interrupted by one thing or another.”

In the middle of the night, our Yorkie, sleeping at the foot of the bed, had a bronchial attack. He hacked and honked, fighting to open an airway as his trachea collapsed. Alarmed (“Good, grief! He’s dying too?”), I scooped him up and cradled him through our dark house.

Sitting on the kitchen floor, I offered ice cream to this small creature who has been my constant companion for 15 years. As the cool substance hit his throat, his spasms let up, and, for that instant, it felt as if there was nothing sweeter than being at home when you’re needed.

The next morning, Douglas, looking at the Yorkie, said, “We can’t go away with him like this.” But by the light of day, I protested, “The dog sitter would have done the same thing.” He shook his head. “She would have panicked and taken him to the hospital.”

*

Summer was skidding to a close. Christel, who was dining with us, said she was going to Holland to visit her dad.

“When?” Douglas asked.

“In September,” she said. “The tourists are gone and the fares are down.”

“Maybe we’ll go with you,” Douglas said.

Thinking windmills and canals, I smiled. I felt a vacation, finally, coming on.