The possibility of having hot sex was half the reason for our stay at the Art Hotel. With Denver on COVID lockdown, except for hospital stays and doctor’s appointments, we hadn’t left our house in months. In the kind of impulsive decision-making typical of stroke survivors, my husband Tom decided we needed to paint the entire first floor of our house, and one caregiving lesson I had learned was to choose my battles carefully.
The stroke left Tom paralyzed on his left. In our dozen years together, I had always taken care of him in some ways—cooked for him, cleaned up after him, organized our social life. But after the stroke, I trimmed his nails, including his gnarled toenails. I rubbed his feet with lotion. I helped him from his wheelchair to the toilet, and then I sat on the edge of the tub and talked to him to keep him from falling asleep or to remind him where he was and what he was doing. I bathed him and checked his delicate skin for red spots, the telltale sign of pressure sores. He was only sixty, but the stroke has rendered him fragile as a newborn.
In the days leading up to our hotel stay, I moved all the appliances off the kitchen counters, took artwork and shelves off the walls, pushed the furniture into the middle of each room, checked in with the painters to confirm they would do the ceilings. Periodically, as I buzzed around, Tom said, “Remind me again why you’re doing all this?”
“We’re having the house painted,” I would say, sometimes reminding him: “You picked white with dark blue trim.” With my low vision, I can’t be trusted to pick colors.
“Oh, right,” he would respond. “That’s going to look great.”
Sometimes he asked if it was Black Friday yet. “No,” I told him, “That’s the day after Thanksgiving.” He was excited to do online shopping for his son and my daughter. The stroke wiped out the little bit of financial restraint he had and I froze his credit card.
“Is today Thanksgiving?” he asked.
* * *
Sex was always a cornerstone of our relationship. And by sex, I mean fucking. We never made love. No, we fucked, hard and fierce, each of us driven to possess and be possessed, devour and be devoured, taste and be tasted. When we fucked, we held nothing back, giving and taking with abandon in a way we never could through conversation. Our fucking was fueled by a deep hunger for connection that neither of us could express any other way. Our sex left us both sore, exhausted, and hungry for more. Neither of us ever denied the other, no matter what was going on in other parts of our marriage.
After his stroke, the desire was still there but buried beneath so many challenges we needed an excavator to find it: his limited attention span, the physical logistics of his paralyzed body, his unpredictable response to the little blue pills his doctor prescribed, and my exhaustion. We were hoping the days in the hotel would allow time and space for the excavation.
As a result of the stroke, Tom had a mysterious condition called left neglect, which made him unaware of anything happening on his left side. He read book pages starting in the middle of a line and reading to the right margin, never realizing he had missed the first half of that line. If I whispered sweet nothings into his left ear, his brain didn’t process the sound. Those same sweet nothings whispered into his right ear could elicit an oh, baby…
The most difficult challenges had to do with his penis, which I had referred to as his cock before the stroke. During his six weeks in the hospital, it became commonplace to talk with the nursing staff about his penis as they showed me how to use the condom catheters, a catheter that fit over his penis like a condom and connected to a tube leading to a drainage bag for urine. It felt oddly clinical to discuss that most intimate of body parts as a penis. How many steamy things had I texted and said about that body part over the years without ever using the word penis? How different and starkly comical those same texts and sentiments would have been had I used the word penis.
Sometimes we laughed about this. I would say, “Oh, baby, I want your big fat…” I paused for dramatic effect. “Penis inside me.”
“That’s hot,” Tom would say, sometimes winking at me with his right eye. Unless I had spoken into his left ear, and then he would not respond, prompting me to scurry over to his right to repeat the absurdity.
And then there was the issue of his being oddly disconnected from his body, his penis being no exception. He typically had no idea whether the arousal in his brain was exhibited in his penis—and sometimes an erection seemed to have no connection to anything in his brain. Sometimes, seeing an erection, I asked, “Are you trying to tell me something?” with a flirtatious smile. He responded with confusion as often as he did a salacious leer.
I relished every opportunity for skin-to-skin contact. For the nearly two weeks he was unable to speak because of the ventilator, I spent most of the twelve-hour visiting period each day simply holding his right hand, sometimes interweaving my fingers between his, other times holding his hand in my two, running my fingers over the knuckles and in the valleys between each finger. Over and over, I kissed his palm, his wrist, I breathed in deeply the smell of the skin between his thumb and index finger. I rubbed his feet each night with a eucalyptus lotion he loved, stroking the soles slowly and deliberately, my entire body engaged. When he came home, I continued rubbing his feet at night. After bathing him, I rubbed a different lotion on his limbs and torso, stopping to kiss the small of his back, the crook of each elbow, the base of his cock.
* * *
Our first full day at the hotel begins like many at home. Just after 5am, I wake to hear Tom saying urgently, “Babe, hey, Babe. I’ve got a leak.” The condom catheters are maddeningly imperfect. The adhesive that makes the condom stick to his penis could fail, the condom could break, the joint between the condom and the line to the bag could give out, the line could get kinked, leading to a backup that would rupture the condom, the bag itself could leak. We have experienced all of this.
Still groggy and disoriented, I get out of bed and pull over his wheelchair.
“Let’s get you into the chair so I can change the sheets.”
In my hurry to get him out of the wet bedding, I start pulling him into a sitting position in the bed by his shoulders without first announcing I would do so, which confuses him.
The dogs are alert now, moving around the room with their tails wagging, lingering by the closet where they know their breakfast and leashes are.
“I don’t think my leg is going to hold up,” he says. His left leg is weaker than the right and it is unclear why. Is it because he uses it less since his brain doesn’t register it? Or is it just as strong as the right but he doesn’t trust it because he can’t communicate with it? Or perhaps he has actually injured his leg? Injuries that reveal themselves through bruises and blood are easy to verify; others, not so much.
“Let’s see if you can do the transfer without the brace,” I say, not wanting to take the time to put the brace that supports his ankle on. I hate the thought of him lying in wet bedding for a moment longer than necessary.
I wrap the broad gait belt, designed specifically for assisting someone with walking, around him. “Ready to stand?”
“No, my leg…” he says, but I am already pulling him up. “My ankle, my ankle,” he protests. I swing him around into the wheelchair, where he plops down awkwardly. The dogs look at me with accusation in their eyes. I have done it all wrong—I haven’t worked with him as a partner. I have invalidated what he told me about his leg. I dismiss the recriminations in my head; yes, I did it all wrong, but I had reasons.
“I’m sorry,” I say, wiping his legs and crotch down with a washcloth. “I just want to get you out of the wet bedding.” My mind frantically calculates all that has to be done—get him into his chair, get his wet pajama pants off him, change his Depends, wipe him down, get clean pants on him—that will involve two stands—get clean bedding, make the bed, move him back into bed. The dogs need to be walked and fed, no, fed then walked. Tom needs his drugs. I need to wash my face and pull my hair back before I can think straight.
I call the front desk to ask for a new set of sheets. I realize I’d been on his left and he hasn’t processed that I’ve made the call when I step back into his field of vision and he says, “I don’t know where you’ve been, but I have a situation.” He holds out his phone.
“See what’s on there. I’ve been getting texts all night. This guy Carlos from the mansion needs money.” The mansion was the historic home remodel he worked on as a foreman before the stroke. Carlos was an electrician.
“What do you mean he needs money?” I ask, glad I froze his credit cards.
“I think he’s running for president… in Venezuela maybe? He needs money.” I look at his phone. There are no new texts, nothing from anyone named Carlos. I search to see which apps he’s used recently. Instagram. I open it—there’s a video posted by someone named Carlos at a street protest. I don’t think it’s the Carlos Tom knows. I try to explain to him that the video isn’t of his friend.
His right brow furrows. “Please, Babe, I need you to trust me on this. Carlos needs money; he’s in trouble in Venezuela. And I’m worried about my leg. There’s nothing left in it and it’s still early.” His agitation escalates suddenly. “Call the front desk about the bedding.”
“I did,” I snap. “I was on your left. You didn’t see me.”
He doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve said anything.
“Well then where’s the goddamn bedding?” he finally says.
Before I can answer, he says, “Call the front desk again. They forgot about us.” The dogs pace and eye me warily.
“It’s only been like five minutes,” I say, but he cuts me off.
“They fucking forgot about us. Call them, tell them to hurry.”
I don’t respond. I feed the dogs and go to the bathroom. I look at my face in the mirror—frizzy hair, splotchy skin. I haven’t had a haircut since the pandemic began and am six months overdue. I shake my head and sigh, pulling my awful hair back into a ponytail and splashing cold water on my face. I can’t change my appearance. Like many things in my life right now, it is what it is.
The sheets finally arrive and I change the bedding. “Do you want to get back into bed?”
“Yes,” he says, his voice flat with exhaustion.
* * *
I get the dogs leashed up and out—130 pounds between them of antsy, pent-up energy. With the pandemic, the streets are eerily empty. The sidewalk is uneven, with things my low vision doesn’t pick up randomly scattered. I struggle with differentiating items of similar colors—a black metal fence in front of a black building is invisible to me. I find myself kicking paper cups and discarded masks. Excited by the smells, the dogs pull at their leashes, barking and lunging at the occasional chunk of food on the sidewalk. My mind is blurred in panic. Is Tom’s confusion and anxiety what the future holds? What if he can never again get out of bed or put on his shirt without my help? What if it’s all on me for the rest of our lives? How can I possibly take care of Tom, the dogs, myself?
Something tangles around my foot, and I lurch awkwardly into the grass. The dogs bound over to me. “We’re not fucking playing!” I bark at them. My heart thumps in my chest—what if I had actually been injured?
I haven’t even had any coffee yet.
I need to talk to someone who can pull me back from this ledge I feel like I’m on. My mind cycles through who I can call. With the pandemic, it seems everyone’s life is in chaos and I don’t want to add to it. My sister has enough on her plate, suddenly homeschooling her son. I call my friend Lunden; she answers immediately. I’m crying as I tell her I don’t know how to take care of Tom or myself.
“Of course you don’t, honey. You’ve never had to do this before. You were thrown into this. But you’re resourceful and smart. You’ll be okay. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”
She reminds me to breathe, to take things one at a time. I tell her the Venezuela thing is Tom’s reality and she says, “Okay, so humor him. Tell him you’ve emailed the guy with support.” She makes it sound so simple.
The deep breaths help. It will be okay.
I take another deep breath. I chant nam myoho renge kyo, the Buddhist expression of the mystic law: suffering can be overcome through faith in karma. I chant for love and strength for Tom and myself. I close my eyes and say out loud, “I trust the universe.”
By the time I get back to the hotel room with the dogs, I feel calm. Tom is drowsing in bed, but when he hears us come in, he calls out, “Hey, Babe, can I get some coffee?” I don’t know if he remembers the chaos of earlier. I make us coffee and help him sit up and swing his legs around so he’s perched on the edge of the bed. He spent weeks in PT strengthening his core muscles so he could hold himself upright in this position.
“What’s on my dance card today?” he asks. His physical therapist is coming to the hotel for a session with him. I participate in all of his PT sessions so I can learn how to help him walk, sit, stand, and balance between sessions. After PT, Tom is wiped out and sleeps for hours. I manage to rouse him for dinner, which he nibbles on before falling asleep again.
Despite my trusting the universe, there will be no hot sex today.
* * *
“I can’t find my goddamn wallet.” Tom is talking in his sleep. I ask him what he’s talking about, but I’m lying to his left and he’s sound asleep anyway.
In the morning he tells me, “I had a dream about going to one of the diners around here for a burrito, but now I remember that I can’t do that.” He’s been dreaming of walking.
Hot sex will have to wait: Today we have timed-entry tickets into the art museum a block away. Because of the isolation of COVID and my thinking that getting out and doing things will help us acclimate to Tom’s physical limitations, I got the tickets to force us out.
I notice there’s hardly any liquid in his pee bag. He’s dehydrated. When he was in the rehab unit, the staff explained to me that the battery of a person who’s had a stroke runs down quickly and every little thing that goes wrong—disrupted sleep, dehydration—plus expended effort and cognitive load run it down faster. I try to remember if he drank his usual amount of fluids yesterday. I wonder if he held back because of the catheter blow out. I’ll push fluid today.
I am intimately aware of his body’s every nuance. His urine output, his bowel movements, his talking in his sleep, where the sweat collects on his body, the spot on the bottom of his left foot that is susceptible to the pressure of his shoes and turns red by the end of every day.
Tom grumbles when I tell him it’s time to start getting ready to head to the museum. Since the stroke, he is perpetually cold and getting him to go outside always involves me promising and reaffirming multiple times that I will bundle him up. It is fifty-five degrees and sunny, but he insists on long underwear, adding ten minutes onto our routine. I get him into his wheelchair.
“Where’s my super sweet skull cap?” he asks. He wants the warmth but also to hide the jagged scar that marks the wedge of skull that was removed to give his brain room to swell after the stroke.
Because of COVID, the museum is strictly limiting entry. They check our tickets before waving us into the lobby. This is the first time we’ve been somewhere with Tom using the wheelchair beyond a doctor’s office or hospital. It’s uncharted territory. First the hotel, now a museum! Nothing can stop us now!
Except that when we get to the portrait exhibit, the doors into the gallery are not equipped with an automatic opener, so I have to hold the door open with my butt, turn around to face Tom in his wheelchair, and pull his chair forward.
The gallery is dark—the walls navy and the lights low with each portrait illuminated by its own light. Because of the carefully modulated entry into the museum, there are very few people in the gallery. I can push Tom’s wheelchair slowly, with the portraits to his right, and he tells me when he wants to linger over a piece. I am grateful for our slow pace because it is so hard for me to see in the gallery. I have to walk right up to the placards on the walls to read them, my nose just a few inches away, sometimes using my cell phone’s flashlight for extra illumination.
We have camped and rafted together a hundred times but looking at artwork together is new. The same pieces get our attention. The first piece we gravitate to is Andrea Soldi’s portrait of the gentleman Thomas Sheppard. It’s a large oil painting from 1733, nearly five feet tall, in an ornately carved gold frame. Sheppard sports an extravagantly embroidered velvet topcoat over a gold silk waistcoat, his powdered wig extending beyond his shoulders.
“A man could really strut his stuff back then,” Tom observes.
“It reminds me of your Willy Wonka Halloween costume,” I say, remembering his purple finery, and he nods.
An even larger oil painting, a family portrait by Thomas Hudson from 1742, transfixes us next. A massive eight feet tall and thirteen feet wide, it shows the Radcliffes and their children, decked out in decadent eighteenth-century aristocratic fashions. Despite their restrictive clothes, the children are shown playing with toys and each other. The best part, way over on the left, is a brown and white spaniel with his paws on the lap of a little girl in a splendid dress.
“Oh, look at the dog!” I say.
“What dog?” Tom asks, and I realize it’s too far on his left for him to process. I reposition his wheelchair so the dog is directly in front of him.
“Oh, look at the little guy! He’s a member of the family,” Tom says with glee.
But it’s a tiny piece that really gets our attention: a small oval not even a foot tall. In the middle of a ring of stained glass with fleurs-de-lis and geometric designs is a bearded man’s face, with downcast eyes that remind me of Tom’s left eye. The note hanging on the wall next to it says it is from fifteenth-century England.
“It looks like you!” I say and turn his wheelchair so he’s facing the piece head on.
“Look at that!” Tom says.
I put my face up to the placard to read it. “It’s called Head of a Bearded Man, possibly Jesus.” I emphasize the possibly dramatically. “It’s possibly Jesus. It could be anyone, but they put that possibly in front of Jesus and now you can’t argue with it.”
I read him the placard description: “‘This piece of stained glass is composed of a head thought to represent Jesus.’” I emphasize the speculative part of the description. “I’m going to take a picture of you and call it Picture of a Bearded Man, possibly Jesus.” I hold up my phone and Tom poses, doing his best to look regal. “There, you’re possibly Jesus in a mask.”
“And you’re possibly Mary Magdalene,” he replies, his low gravelly voice slower since the stroke but still able to stir something deep inside me. We went as Jesus and Mary Magdalene to a Halloween party a few years ago. Waking up the next morning and observing our torn costumes strewn about, Tom said, “If there was a god, we’d have been smote last night.”
I look at Tom’s masked face in the low light, the smile crinkles showing only around his right eye and the left eye fixed in a neutral gaze. I put my hand on his right shoulder, feeling the heat of his body even through all the layers of fabric. He places his right hand on top of mine and looks at me, then puts his right hand out in front of him. I place both my hands in his, his one hand large enough to envelop both of mine. This has always been a gesture of love for us. My two hands protected within his. My breathing shifts and I feel my face flush.
* * *
Outside the portrait exhibit is a mezzanine, the walls covered with Shantell Martin’s exuberant line drawings. The swooping, energetic doodles, full of loops and undulating lines, mesmerize us. One wall has FIND WHAT MAKES YOU YOU INSIDE in giant, capital letters. Tom points to it and asks what it says. I read the words aloud and he says, “Take my picture in front of that.” He poses, giving a thumbs up with his right hand.
The floor on the mezzanine is smooth poured concrete and pushing his wheelchair is easy. As we glide toward the elevator, I do some loops and squiggles, mimicking the lines of Martin’s work.
I push the down button and we wait in front of the two elevators. When one opens up, a small group hustles into it quickly. I am shocked. We were there first! They just took an elevator from a guy in a wheelchair!
“Those fuckers took the elevator possibly meant for Jesus!” Tom exclaims. But moments later, the other elevator opens and we realize we’ve scored. Unlike the first one, which was just a plain old elevator inside, this one has Shantell Martin’s drawings covering the walls and ceiling. As I roll Tom in, he says, “Oh, yeah. Those fuckers missed out.” I take a picture of him looking smug with the energetic squiggles behind him.
“I call this one Man in the Elevator Possibly Meant for Jesus.”
When the elevator delivers us to the ground floor, Tom says, “Let’s check out the gift shop.” As I wheel Tom around, he grabs things from shelves and displays, piling them on his lap: bookends, an origami kit, coasters.
We leave the museum shop with all of Tom’s booty and head back to the room. The afternoon is already spoken for. Tom has OT and speech therapy. The afternoon and evening pass in a happy, relaxed glow.
After I get him into bed, I curl up against him. I’m on his left, but my arm drapes across his body and I nestle my hand into the warm soft space between his neck and shoulder. “Can you feel that?” I ask.
“I feel your hand, Baby,” he says. “Today was a good day.”
We are possibly the happiest people in the world.
* * *
Tom wakes up the next morning still glowing. After he drinks his coffee, he announces, “Give me a couple of those little blue pills.”
I give him the pills. An hour later, I’m working at my computer and hear a clatter. I turn to see he’s dropped his phone.
“Leave it,” he says. “Come here.”
I walk over and his big hand catches my wrist. Before his stroke, he could hold both my wrists with just one hand and use the other to pinch my nipples or finger me. Now he has to choose.
He holds my hand to his face and takes one of my fingers into his mouth. He slowly draws it out and does the same with another. I feel myself getting squirmy. He has always been irresistibly magnetic to me. I know that after his stroke, most of the world sees him as someone in a wheelchair, a phrase I hate for how it renders him a load to be pushed around. The wheelchair is a tool—he uses a wheelchair.
As he moves my fingers in and out of his mouth, he makes steady eye contact with his right eye. I feel myself melting.
“Let’s go to bed,” he says. I wheel him over to the bed and he says, “Take my clothes off.” I do and get him into the bed, doing my best to get him close to the middle, which involves scooting his shoulders over, then his hips, and repeating that process until he’s moved over a bit. He’s not really in the middle, but I’m wary of exhausting us both before we get to the fun part. He tells me to take off my own clothes.
The dogs make themselves scarce. They remember how this goes from before the stroke.
I climb on top of him, my hips over his. I bend down and say softly in his right ear, “Tell me what you want.” I smell the musk of his neck, his old smell of sawdust and motorcycle exhaust replaced by soap and lotion. I feel the heat radiating off his body and I begin rocking my hips against his.
“I want your nipples in my mouth,” he says slowly. I sit up and arch forward. He sucks my left nipple, flicking it with his tongue, before I shift the other breast toward his mouth.
“I don’t know exactly how this is going to work,” I confess. He says, “Neither do I, Babe. We’ll figure it out.” Sex has always been the one part of our relationship we don’t have to work at, but now even this is work.
I straighten up and begin grinding against him. He plants his right foot on the bed, doing his best to grind against me. “That feels good,” he says and I feel his cock respond. Like the rest of him, it is muted, but there is something.
“Am I inside you?” he asks. I don’t want to risk making him feel like anything less than the sexy beast I love.
“You feel so good against me.” I am breathing hard, moaning. My answer seems to satisfy him.
“I want to taste you,” he says, his voice thick and low.
I move forward on my knees until I am kneeling over his face. I hold onto the headboard to steady myself. His tongue probes my folds and then his fingers are inside me. I spread my legs farther, my left knee perilously close to the edge of the bed and my other one by his left arm, which lies still and I carefully avoid. I am panting.
I feel clumsy and unsure of what to do until Tom says, “Turn around.” I know what he wants. I want it, too. I take his fingers into my mouth, tasting myself on him, and calculating how to turn around without hurting him. My arms and legs shake with the effort as I carefully swivel so I am facing the end of the bed, my hips hovering above his face again. I bring my face down to his crotch, breathing in his musky smell, rubbing my face into it. He moans softly and I bring him into my mouth.
His lips are gently grazing my inner thighs and then the flat of his hand is between my legs. I sit back a bit, shifting my weight into his hand, letting him feel my wetness.
I shudder involuntarily, moaning from somewhere deep inside me, and Tom says, “That’s right, Baby.”
After a deep breath, I return to sucking him. I want him to feel like the sexiest, most delicious man in the universe, my man, my strong brave man. There is nowhere I’d rather be than on top of him, running my tongue along his length, coaxing him to let go completely, to allow himself to be so close to me we are one. We have never been so tender with each other.
He moans softly, almost whimpering. The brief tightening and release I am used to doesn’t happen, but my mouth fills with his warm, salty stickiness and I swallow it. The pungent smell of sex permeates the room and I gingerly extricate myself from him so we can nap.
He loves to feel the sun on his skin, but his eyes are sensitive to light now, so I arrange a washcloth over his eyes. We fall asleep, me on his right so he knows I’m there. I hook my top leg around his legs to keep from falling off the bed. My head rests where his chest meets his shoulder. I want to whisper to him how much I love him, but we are both exhausted from the effort and drift off into sleep, the sunshine pouring in the window, illuminating our tangled legs. The insides of my thighs are still sticky.
Something shifts in the way we touch each other after this. We are not touching to possess or capture but to invite, to explore. To share.
* * *
That night, Tom’s leg spasms are epic. He is often woken up by intense muscle contractions. If I sleep with my head down by his feet and my arms wrapped around his calves, I can soothe the spasms a bit. Once one starts, I grab his foot with both hands, pressing on the top and bottom at the same time. The spasms stop almost immediately for a few minutes, but they don’t stop coming, so we end up just waiting for the next one to hit.
Despite the tough night, Tom is in fine form for OT and PT that day.
As the session nears its end, the PT makes an offhand comment: “You’ll never use the left hand the way you used to, but you might be able to gesture.” Tom doesn’t react and I wonder if he heard her. No one has said this to us before, and although it seems obvious that his hand will never be what it was before, I had been telling myself that with hard work, anything is possible.
After the PT leaves, I ask if he caught what she said about his hand. He says it was news to him and his tone is flat and the expression on his face inscrutable.
After a light dinner, Tom goes to bed with the dogs. I slip out of the room and go to the lobby where there is a sculpture of a horse by Deborah Butterfield, made completely of driftwood. The horse is maybe eight feet tall and appears to have a fish in its belly. The smooth, almost shiny pieces of driftwood tantalize me. I want to reach out and touch them, run my hand down the curves of the pieces that make up the horse’s neck. The horse looks rugged and graceful, despite being made of wood that has been tumbled and stripped of its texture and grain. The horse presents in its sparest form, just bone, no flesh or muscle to protect it.
We are driftwood, I think, being tossed about by tumultuous waters, not knowing what shore we may wash up on. Our sharp edges are being softened, rounded. Possibly our scattered pieces will be reassembled into something new and beautiful if we trust the universe enough. I think about Tom’s big, rugged, beautiful left hand, now swollen with edema. I had thought we were working hard to regain its function, but now I see that we are just treading water, working this hard to stay in place, to not lose more ground.
I look again at the beautiful driftwood horse, its neck arching gracefully, the fluidity of the legs.
I feel a gentle relief at the realization that drifting takes less effort than treading water. Nothing will ever be the way it was before. It may be better, it may be worse; all we know for sure is that it will change.
* * *
Our final days at the hotel are filled with PT and orthotist visits. On our last full day, Tom takes a sound afternoon nap while I grade student work. After a few hours I wake him up and make a charcuterie platter. I prop him up in bed and sit in the chair to his right, with the platter on the bed between us. I tune into a livestream concert a musician friend of mine is doing. She sings jazz tunes with piano accompaniment. Tom is radiant and upbeat.
“Delicious dinner, Babe,” he says, popping a cube of cheese into his mouth. Although he’s usually too tired to do anything after dinner, I decide to push my luck tonight.
“Do you want to take one more spin around the neighborhood? I’ll bundle you up.”
I get him dressed and into his wheelchair. From the hotel, I push him a block or two west. It’s dark out now and with my vision impairment, I wonder whether this was a bad idea..
“What’s that?” Tom asks, pointing to a building off to our right. There’s an alcove behind it with low lighting.
As we get closer, we see stone benches and planters with late fall grasses and a stone sign indicating this is a peace garden. “It does feel peaceful,” Tom says and reaches his hand out for mine. I kneel and put my head in his lap. He pets my hair. His hand feels impossibly gentle. This tender side of Tom is unfamiliar and disorienting to me, but I feel safe with my head in his lap.
Tomorrow I will shower Tom and we will go home to fresh white walls.
Elizabeth Kleinfeld is a writer, professor, Buddhist, and optimist living in Denver, Colorado. She is writing a memoir about being her husband’s caregiver for the year before he died. Her essays about grief have been published in The Boston Globe, Herstry, Bright Flash Literary Review, and in an anthology about the 2020 pandemic. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Drawing from her experiences as both a caregiver and widow, she offers support to terminally ill patients and their families as a certified end-of-life doula. She directs the Writing Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her academic work focuses on disability justice, rhetorics of oppression, and writing center pedagogy. She is currently completing certification in therapeutic journaling to help others process grief and trauma through writing. When not writing or teaching, she can be found dancing rumba, traveling, or experimenting with new recipes in her kitchen. Through her blog at elizabethkleinfeld.