Another pithy saying people often blithely use is: ‘When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.’ Being that I am a writer, the only thing I know how to do with all the sh** that has happened this year — first my dad’s death, then my husband’s a few short months later — is to write about it.
I was inspired to write the first passage below after discussing the short story “How” from award-winning American writer Lorrie Moore’s 1985 debut collection Self-Help in a recent London Writers’ Salon Storycraft session I briefly contributed to. I noted how powerfully, deftly and effectively the author had used the second-person point of view (POV) — a technique I have used before in other stories and ‘proems’ (lyrical prose pieces) as a way to process and articulate difficult emotions. How else could I describe all I have been through? After I wrote the first one, the others followed, mirroring my thoughts and feelings in each section of this final, unexpected journey.
So here is my lemonade: three short prose pieces about my experiences with Roland’s illness and eventual death, as follow.
IT STARTS LIKE THIS
At first the change is so sudden you are blindsided by shock. Your nerves curdle and fray; everything is a whirl of confusion and panic. The familiar, lived-in but haggard, ragged features have taken a turn; the smile is lopsided, and the once-velvet voice is whooshed with slight slurs, shattering the soothing sounds you have loved and needed for so long.
You try to keep your daily routines in order, but the changes are happening so fast the chaos can’t be controlled. Your head is only occasionally inching above the parapet before yet another incident drags you down, plummeting into dizzying depths you don’t even have time to decipher. The calendar you’d hoped to mark with trips to sun-soaked seascapes is now just notching details of this unfolding disaster. You can’t keep up with all the calls, all the texts of concerned family and friends asking, asking, asking… all those questions no one knows the answer to. How long does he have? Will he be able to come home? When can we see him? Will he ever see again? You know you need to pencil in time to have a nervous breakdown, but there is no time… yet. Too much to do. The grief and despair you know will eat you alive is crouching out there somewhere, a hungry predator pacing in the shadows. You can hear its faint roaring in the background, intertwined with strains of strident death marches.
A few months ago, you vaguely sensed your time together may be short. Yet you thought you’d still have years to make your dreams of an improved tomorrow happen. To revive the passion that had begun to feel a little faded, jaded, displaced, discarded. To remember what it was like to feel deeply in love, to ache for each other’s arms, the thrill of close-breathed ecstasies. Once upon a time, we were happy. Once upon a time he was handsome, virile, strong, solvent. Once upon a time you were young and beautiful, and he looked at you, eyes aglow with love and desire. He still tells you you’re beautiful, that you’re the love of his life, even though when you look in the mirror now, all you see is flab and wrinkles and ever-harder-to-hide grey hairs. The trajectory of this love story is etched in familiar photos and well-worn grooves in opposite sides of the sofa, sung to yearly rhythms of morning coffees, afternoon hellos, evening meals and goodnight kisses, punctuated with occasional extravagances.
Now such comfortable commonalities gleam like rare and costly pearls. Inchoate sobs strangle in your throat as you cry for just one more minute, one more hour, one more day, one more week of normal. You hear the doctor’s harsh hard words: years and months are no longer possible. Yet you cling to hopes of miracles, puffing pitiful prayers as waves of sorrows wash over you each time you come up for air. Surely a just and loving God will not break this battered reed, extinguish this smouldering wick?
Your mind reels, still recounting the horrors of how it began. The horrors of how it will end paw at you, the predator lurking in the shadows, sharpening its claws. You feel its raw wet tongue lashing at you through growling teeth, its furious fur brushing against your skin. You know it is coming but do not welcome this bridegroom to your bed. You prefer to remain married to amazement, to this amazed love that has lasted so amazingly long, to all those years of wonder where the power of touch, taste, smell and myriad sensate joys engulfed you.
Now your only thought is to keep moving through that door into a new amazement, knowing he will be there waiting on the other side, under his vine and fig tree, looking up aglow with love and expectation as his bride takes his side.
- Jane Hurd Cahane, 21 June 2024
NUMBER CRUNCHING
You’re already on day 15 of the endless merry-go-round of carers, district nurses, palliative specialists, GPs and visitors constantly rocking up at the door of the house you once thought a haven. You can’t sit down for more than two seconds; as soon as one leaves, another arrives; the phone rings and rings again, yet another urgent discussion, yet another consultant weighing in with their estimable opinions.
You secretly call them the circus, all these multiple faces bearing badges with names you can never remember, some smelling faintly of foreign climes. You are suddenly cast into the role of lion tamer, though your whip is as frayed as your nerves. Sometimes the lion is on top of you, gorging your battered, battle-weary soul. You want to run away and not join the circus, to find a refuge from the weight of all the decisions thrust at you, weighing you down. Whose hands are his life in now? Who is calling the shots?
You argue and debate with some of them about the mounting milligrams of morphine needed, how best to deliver these. Their callous-seeming calculations make the singular conundrums of compassion circle crazily in your brain. Is this a kind of slow death, a mercy killing, or merely mercy? you wonder. How much longer will this go on? How much longer does he have? How many days before a bed becomes available? Oh God, please stop this! Will it ever stop? Where is the miracle we asked for? Where are all those we thought were here to help?
Meanwhile, the agonising, heart-rending cries of pain continue. You watch in horror as he shrivels and fades daily, becoming dozier with each dose. It wounds you to see him rejecting all those nice meals you and his close friends made for him, preferring weakened, sweetened sips. A little honey with your poison, sir? You can’t sleep in case he wakes and coughs again, needing more and more of the soothing poison. Days and nights begin to blur and merge; you’ve forgotten what day and season it is, whether it is day or night, summer or winter. You’re vaguely aware significant things have happened in the world — wins of persuasive political parties, sports successes, celebrity comings and goings — but you’re too tired to take anything in. It all seems so hollow, so peripheral, so inconsequential.
The spectre of doubt clobbers your windscreen as you drive into the raging rainy night, solemn sobs racking your breast. At times you feel angry, cursing those you feel failed you — the system, friends and family, yourself, even him, maybe God too. You want to believe it is all part of the plan, that each of his thinning hairs have been counted, the numbers of his days known and measured. Yet every day some new crisis clouds your view, new tears river down your cheeks. For better or worse… but how much worse will it become, you wonder? How much more pain and suffering can you take?
You know some part of you is hardening, wearing thin and dissolving into bobbing blurs of regret, fears, vague reprimands directed at an even vaguer entity. You are too weary to think straight, even to pray; the hopes that once buoyed you seem subdued and distant, flung to some far shore whose horizon is no longer visible. You crave the caverned days of certainty, of sunshine and rainbows and tomorrows. A future now tossed overboard. You know that anchor you’ve clung to for so long is somewhere, but the maelstrom has misplaced it, and it now seems like a strewn fragment of a collage your marbled mind is making in those rare hours of half-sleep.
But again, you hear him howling your name, and all those tired thoughts dissemble into disarray as you leap into action. You never thought you’d be someone’s champion, this hardy hero, but here it is — your unwanted cape, your undiscovered crown. Perhaps in some version of eternity you will wear these, once you and he are finally awake, once this nightmare passes. But for now, you can only ache and act, your reflexes as honed and poised as an oiled pulley hoisted by a creaking crane.
- Jane Hurd Cahane, 13 July 2024
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Death comes at noon — three days, 72 hours, multiple misread minutes, several seconds earlier than what you were expecting. They told you they could not say exactly when it would come, but he beat you to it, dying 45 minutes before you struggled through the traffic, the confusing roadworks, the disassembled streets and signs, arriving to a disfigured corpse, a faint last warmth in that withered, bluish hand. You hear his daughter say he went peacefully, but what peace is there for you now, knowing you missed his final moments?
You fling your tired, exhausting body on top of his, hoping your still-alive pulse will transcend the trapped stillness, breach the yawning gap, revive him in one last almighty miracle. Death kissed him last before your lips reach his, hoping your breath will give him life, that his sleep-caked eyes will open and see you there, and feel the love that fought to keep him here, in the land of life you still inhabit. You know Death is smirking, mocking your hopes, but still, you hope against hope, leaning into him, holding his hand as the piled sobs wrench from your parched and quaking throat.
And all those final words, promises, memories, benedictions, blessings, oaths you meant to utter while he could still hear them now stumble and stutter from your mouth, a pathetic, pitiful parade. Relatives and friends gather round you, wrenching you from this crime scene with healing hugs and helpful words, but you are still wound up and furious at everyone, mostly yourself. You try to trade that torment tearing at you for tumultuous tirades against all those you believe failed him, failed to feed him in his final hours, failed to handle his fragile body with the same tender care you had for him, failed to read and interpret the signs accurately, and lastly failed to tell you in plain words how quickly it would all happen. You rage and rage at them, subdued only by their acknowledged errors of failures to listen when you spoke your truth about his needs, his wishes and desires. The realisation that it is now too late to amend the damages hits you and you are helpless: it couldn’t be helped, it happened, you must give up the fight, move on somehow… but you know you can’t. This peculiar anguish is a nasty last trick of Death. You watch, recoiling, as he sets down his cards, a triumphant smirk gleaming in the dark, his hollow, coal-burned eyes fretting you when you try, vainly, to sleep.
The strangled sobs go on for days. Sometimes you are absolved and peaceful; others you are still deep in the mire of your own troubled morass: a mass of guilt, anguish, anger, doubt and unending, ineffable sadness. Why won’t they just go away and leave me alone to grieve in peace? you wonder. Haven’t I had enough of the blunt doctors, the endless busy-bee, matter-of-fact nurses and pharmaceutical administrators, the caring but nosey friends phoning you at all hours? And now you must also contend with Death’s booming business, that other callous calling card laid at your door. You want to hang a wreath, a sign, a something that shouts, ‘Go away!’, that pleads for some humanity, some dignity, some respect. But things must be done. Paperwork must be signed. The invoices and bookings and arrangements must all be sorted. The body must wend its way to join the worms in fresh-turned soil, the last home he will ever have.
Inevitably, you will stand by the gravesite, the chanted prayers and Nigguns niggling at your soul as you say a final farewell, proclaim a ceasefire from all the stress and striving for different conclusions of the past few months. You know you’ll have to walk away, rebuild, restore, replant this garden that has been your shared life for so long, but for here, now, his body will be planted, take root in the mothering soil, and ascend along the trail of roots to become one with the tree that towers above you as you stand blinking brokenly in the dappled sunlight. You know the seed from this species of fig won’t flourish in a wintry English soil, but you cast the seed into the grave anyway, hoping against hope you will someday eat its fruit.
- Jane Hurd Cahane, 25 July 2024
Image credit: Photo by Comstock Images on Freeimages.com
Small Writer at Large 
One thought on “Postscript: My Lemonade”