Owen Cluer
Before

There was a tsunami in Southeast Asia. There was a tornado in Oklahoma that took out a church. You are watching the aftereffects unfold on television. You used to enjoy this sort of destruction. Now you are looking for something else. You want to see survivors pulling each other from the wreckage, pushing large wheelbarrows full of detritus, raising up crossbeams for new schools. You want to learn from them how to rebuild.

* * *

For a while after Karen dies you watch news stories and documentaries about major disasters. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, the Hindenburg. You have a bottomless well of anger, and watching other humans struggling under mountains of debris is comforting.

Your friends visit to keep you company and help you clean the apartment, which has started to look like one of your disaster shows. You don't seem to notice it, the grime and the rising clutter. Karen was the one who kept the apartment in order. When she got sick, you did it for her. After that, what was the point?

* * *

You hate the young man who hands you the urn. He's not impolite or unprofessional. You just hate that this is his job and that he can do it without the sort of suffering you're going through. Once the service is over, he'll probably pick up a pizza and go home to his girlfriend. They'll talk about his day and he'll list that, at some point, he handed you your dead wife in a jar. But it won't really affect him. They might watch a movie.

You hate seeing the urn, too. Before, there was this faint hallucinatory hope that when you reached the funeral home, Karen would emerge out from behind the desk and balloons would rain down; a camera crew would appear.

But once you put your hands on either side of its cold obsidian shell, and lift it up, and know you are holding the weight of her life, you realize there is no alternative ending.

Her death seems massively unfair. After two years of pain, of hospital visits, of chemo and radiation and surgery.

Her death seems so massively unfair. And you are so angry.

* * *

Karen's liver is failing. You make it a point to not say goodbye, when you are with her, and to not say the word goodbye , which sounds lonely. You only say, "I'll catch you later," because that's what you said to sound cool at the end of your first date. She just laughed at you. She smiles now, as you hold her hands, cool from the IV drip.

"What a lame thing to say! How did you come up with that?"

"It seemed clever at the time, and it worked."

"Yeah," she looks up at the ceiling, "yeah it did."

She is tired. You can see it in her eyes. On your way to the hospital after work, you listened to a program on NPR about the expanse between stars and planets. When you arrived at the garage, you sat in the car with your eyes closed, drawing measured breaths, trying to decelerate. Everything, it seemed, was getting further away from everything else.

"Can I get you anything? Are you comfortable?"

She shrugs, "This is as good as it gets." Her eyes return to you from the ceiling. "I hope your life gets boring after I'm gone. You deserve a break."

You shake your head as she closes her eyes to sleep. The room is silent for a moment before the intermittent beeping of machines crowds your thoughts. Each beep, you realize, is keeping track of the distance between life and death. The distance between you is growing.

* * *

Karen is in the backseat as you drive to the hospital. She had been discharged five days before, after a three-week stay. You watched as the pain began to overpower her, and even the pain pump wasn't enough. Try to be reassuring: "We're almost there."

"I want to die."

Your fingers grip the soft leather of the steering wheel, worn in places from months of white-knuckle driving. Gripping the wheel is reassuring; a reminder of your purpose.

"God-fucking-dammit!" she cries.

"I know."

"You really don't."

"I'm sorry."

There is silence from the back, as you tear through traffic. You glance through the mirror. She is curled up, her thin arms wrapped around her legs. Her blotched face is pressed hard into the seat cushion as a steady stream of silent tears pool around the leather. "I'm sorry," she whispers, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

You think, briefly, about driving into the highway divider.

* * *

They are discharging her. They have done everything they can to stabilize her immune system with steroid shots and Neupogen. They are sending her home with a walker. With flowers, and well wishes, and an intrathecal pump of methadone, which she says is the best gift anyone has ever given her.

* * *

Things You Learn When Your Wife Has Breast Cancer:

That chemotherapy and radiation are two separate things. That chemotherapy is not actually a drug, but a process. That you can fall asleep anywhere, from hard backed hospital chairs to icy linoleum floors. That you can go six days straight without sleep. The record (you looked it up) is eleven. That friends and family do not, despite what you might think, have infinite repositories of understanding and patience. That they too can dry out, over time, like an IV bag. That love, actual love, is not a drug, but a process.

* * *

Sex goes right out the window. Time and again you make a concerted effort, but it comes to nothing. There's nothing physically wrong with you, and it's not simply the idea of sex with her but the idea of sex in general. Faking life in the face of death. It seems like a lie. You try to explain this to her, but you know she doesn't understand.

"They never talk about how no one wants to lay you in the cancer books," she says. "That's deceptive."

You're washing the dishes on a Saturday night. She is lying on the couch with the TV on and the audio almost muted. You try to laugh.

"Really though," she leans up over the couch, "I would make that the title. 'Say Goodbye to Sex: Sucky Things They Don't Tell You about Cancer' by Karen Wilkos."

You've been washing the same cup over and over trying to come up with an appropriate response. You're glad that she can't see your face because you feel your eyes roll involuntarily. You're sure there is something ugly on display.

She doesn't bring it up unless she's in a bad or lonely mood. You hate it when she does because you can drive her to the hospital, you can spend hours arguing with the insurance companies, or going over bills, you do everything you can to make her comfortable, but you can't deliver one of the most important, the most fundamental, of comforts.

When you don't respond, she continues. "I really should write a book. I think I have the right no­BS personality to write an honest cancer book."

"Or a blog would be good." You turn from the sink. "You can always live­-update a blog."

"Yeah, but a book has an ending. Then people who read it can feel better because at least I lived long enough to finish it." She leans her head off the back of the couch to look at you upside down. "Blogs don't have an ending, and what if I die? It'll just read 'My organs are failing, what a bummer!' and then nothing. I don't think people would feel good about that, do you?"

"No. No, they wouldn't."

"A book would be better."

You nod. A short wave of anger rises in you and then dissolves into fatigue. She has taken to casually mentioning her death to better prepare you for it.

"Is there anything I can get you?"

"Off?" She looks at you with a sly smile.

You nod apologetically, "I think I'm going to bed."

"What?" She looks at you.

"I'm tired, I think I'm just going to sleep."

"Fine. I'll be in later," she says in a quieter voice, sliding back down the couch so she's not looking at you anymore.

Before you close the bedroom door you look back at her on the couch. She is staring at the ceiling, the glow of the TV illuminating her pale skin and dry scalp; her wet eyes full of shifting light.

* * *

You emerge from St. Vincent's to a cold February sun. Karen pauses to pass her fingers through her hair. When she brings them down, twisted amongst her fingers, are many fine black strands. She holds the them in her palms carefully.

When a gust of wind comes, she extends her arms and opens her fingers. The strands take off and you watch them float on the air into the distance.

"I needed a haircut anyway," she says after a while. "Yes you did. You look better."

"I won't very soon. I'll be bald."

You are silent for a while. You feel her turn to look at you.

"Will you love me when I'm bald?" she asks in a singsong voice, beneath which you can detect a serious note.

You wrap your arm around her and smile through a cloud of insecurity. "Of course I will. I might love you more."

"Oh?"

"Your hair won't be all over the shower." She punches you in the shoulder.

* * *

You kneel by the toilet and hold her hair as she vomits. You joke about the times you've held her hair like this. When she first joined you in the city for school and you'd go to the parties of a friend of a friend, and get drunk and walk back, dizzy in the snow.

"I thought I left all this behind me in college."

"Think of it as a skillset you haven't used in a while."

"I can't even remember the last time this happened."

"That's probably a good thing."

Despite her being sick, despite being spread out on the bathroom floor, this is the most the two of you have laughed in a long time.

* * *

You are outside the radiation room with Karen's sister. Beth has brought knitting needles and is assembling something vaguely Christmas colored. You are transfixed by the knitting, the seamless weaving of one thread through another.

"How long does this usually take?"

You look up from the needles. "Not long, half hour or so."

"Oh that's not so bad." Her voice rises like a sparrow's sharp chirp.

Your therapist says you need to empathize with others who are upset because they might "manifest grief" differently than you do. You find other people's grief to be unhelpful. You are now trying to empathize with Beth like empathy is the Force from Star Wars.

You are starting to resent the friends and family who visit. They look like politicians who volunteer at the local soup kitchen for a day and then wave goodbye, smiling, shutting the door and leaving you behind.

When Karen emerges she is massaging the imprints of the radiation mask out of her face. She smiles weakly.

"Oh babe, you don't look so hot." Beth embraces her sister meekly, not quite touching her back. "I also got you food, it's from Joe's, that place we used to go to with Harold."

"Ah," Karen looks at the bag. You see a faint wave of nausea pass over her face that she defeats with another smile, "You know, I think I'll just save it for later. I'm not quite feeling up to it now."

"It's much better fresh. But you were always a picky eater," Beth laughs, petting Karen's arm. Karen nods helplessly.

* * *

When she first calls you to tell you about her voicemail from the doctor, you try to appear calm and reasoned to the point of sounding dismissive.

"It doesn't always mean what you think, every message from a doctor seems scary. He probably just wants to see your breasts again."

"Jon." She tries to laugh, but what comes out is full of lead. "I don't think so. I don't think that's what it is."

Panic begins to descend on you like heavy snow. The moment you hang up, you walk into the bathroom. You sit on the side of the tub, staring at the grout and the tiles. After a moment you close the bathroom door. There is no one else in the apartment. You just want some modicum of distance, a place to hide from intruders, like in the movies.

* * *

You drop her off at the hospital for a mammogram. While she's there, you're going to pick up a pizza. You might watch a movie later.

* * *

"Will you still love me when I'm old, and have hip problems, and nag you all the time? About your medication and bowel movements?"

"Yes," you say. "Because then I can take out my hearing aid."

"Touché," she smiles.

She rolls over in bed and you lean down to embrace her.

You were married four months ago, after dating for six years. In the end, you got married because that's what all your friends were doing, and it seemed like a good excuse for a party. But you were certain, long before you selected a ring, before you said "I do," that there could be no alternative.

Sometimes at night you lie in bed and try to come up with some projection of your lives together:

What if she can't have kids, or doesn't want to? Will you cheat on her? Will she cheat on you? Would it destroy your marriage or bring you closer together? How long will you live in this city?

You view all of these thoughts passively, knowing that whatever may come into your lives could be dealt with, could be absorbed and expunged through your collective will. As you hold her and breath her in, you believe this could be the very beginning and end of eternity.

_ _

Owen Cluer is a graduate of Emerson College, and earns a living as the manager of a boxing club while he works on his fiction. In 2014 he was named winner of the Myriad Editions New Writers Competition. He once came close to owning a pair of low-top double upper plaid/olive Chuck Taylor All-Stars—essential for any card-carrying member of the indie movement—but the opportunity, alas, slipped away from him before he could land the catch.

>> Back to Issue 18, 2015