A year.
I’ve had time enough to collect my thoughts in order that I might compose this entry, but I find that my keyboard has lost its cunning. Possibly the best I will ever do to provide a full account of her illness and death is to be found in the online (PDF) version of To the Undiscovered Country, so here I’ll do little more than to observe that Lina Foltz died a year ago this evening, following an abrupt and appallingly steep weeklong decline. She had outlived her original prognosis by almost two years, and contrived for almost the whole period to to wring a measure of happiness from each day granted to her.
She had grown frailer during the last three months of her life, but we were neither of us prepared for the violence and celerity with which the disease consumed her in those last days as she visibly dwindled physically and, in a way, psychologically: not that she was cognitively diminished so much as focused on the serious business of dying, from which those of us around her (family, friends—their visits and calls exhausted her) seemed to appear by way of distractions, wraiths, snow flurries on her laborious ascent through thin air to that icy summit. The effect, though, was akin to watching her personality seeming to be planed away with each day that passed.
Lina died on Sunday night at 6:30 (to paraphrase the W.C. Fields epitaph quip, she’d rather have been watching weekend football) as peacefully as the circumstances permitted. To this end she opted to take advantage of a legally-sanctioned elixir compounded of four ounces of apple juice with a powder of morphine, Valium, phenobarbital, digitalis and amitriptyline dissolved within. I have read—on authority for which I cannot vouch but certainly hope—that the preponderant morphine component would have had the effect of ramping her endorphin receptors up to eleven, so that the soundtrack for the last minute or so of consciousness vouchsafed her after downing the cocktail would have involved choirs of angels singing the “Ode to Joy.” Gods grant, if gods there be, that this was so.
For so long, we had each other’s backs.
It was, and remains, as though she took the soul of The Crumbling Manse™ with her when she left. The first time we looked at the place in 1999 it struck us both that, as Lina said, “People have been happy here,” and I will assert that we added to that vibe for the next quarter-century. I hope not to erode it too far in the years remaining to me, but during the interval since my wife’s absence it has been a bleak and cheerless house indeed. —“For life, as it were.”
