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Sunday, December 17 |
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Monday, December 18 |
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Tuesday, December 19 |
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Wednesday, December 20 |
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Thursday, December 21 I was sitting in the meditation room this morning, doing the "peace to all beings" practice. I had decided to include Jnani in the list of people I feel remote from and angry towards, and tried to visualize her specifically and wish her peace and freedom from all anxiety. I was nearing the end of the meditation when the telephone rang. It was Jnani. "I'm surprised to find you at home," she said. "I want to clear up the question of the note." She said she hadn't written it. "Based on my experience as a nurse, only someone on the medical staff could have put it in his chart." "That's what Dr. Remen said, too" I said. "But Dr. Doherty said it would be completely out of character, outside her usual practice to single someone out like that, unless Dr. Remen specifically told her to do so." "Maybe it was V's case worker. What was her name?" "Debbie. No, Debbie didn't put it in there. She was as surprised to see it as I was. She was willing to speak to me until she saw the note. Then she wouldn't tell me anything, not even the day Don would be discharged." "But he told you, didn't he?" "Yes. And he discussed his treaments with his doctors in front of me. But he wanted me to look up what he was getting as medication on the Internet because he was worried about the side effects. That's when I found the note. Debbie wouldn even give me information on what we could do as a couple once he got home. I had to write to the American Heart Association to get that." "Wow." "I guess it doesn't matter now. It's just another unsolved mystery, like what happend to the tissue samples that were removed at Santa Rosa. Do you know where they went?" "No." "I remember you wanted to have them tested for vasculosis, but I guess they were never sent." "There were people who were going to look at them," she said. "Did they?" I asked. "No." "Well, they can't be found now. And there's no report from the follow-up angiogram he had in May of 1999. Another lost piece of history." I sighed. "Even the note that says I can't see his records is gone now, so there's nothing to be done." "It wasn't clear to everyone how completely Don had taken you into his heart," Jnani said. "It was clear to Don," I said. "He was introducing me as his partner to people in Kentfield. As soon as he could tell one day from another, he was doing that." "Yes," she said. "I remember him talking about you before the hemorrhage, how good it was to spend time with you. He said there were only two things that made him hesitate. One was, would you be there for him? And the other was, would you like his friends? Because most of his friends were women." I was very hurt by this. If Don had been thinking these things, if he had been having these doubts, why hadn't he expressed them to me when I got back from my Grand Summer Adventure of 1998? It was during that long walk on the Palo Marin trail that I told him I had decided he was the one for me. I know we talked about many things, including who our friends were and what kind of sex we like. I remember telling him I was fond of anal intercourse, and I remember him telling me, "I haven't had much experience with that, but I would trust you. That won't be a barrier for us." I felt then that he had put his life in my hands, and I had put my heart in his. That is, after all, what love is. We wanted a relationship that is "transparent," without hidden feelings, pretensions, unexpressed fears, or resentments. So it seemed unlikely that Jnani's expression of Don's doubts was accurate. Perhaps it had been something he had said before our long, intimate walk along the coast. Even though I was writing him nearly every day of my trip, sending postcards from various European capitals with poems I'd written especially for him, he still had a vivid, recent, and very disappointing history with Waz. That could have led to him mistrust what he hoped for with me. And it was true that by summer of 1998, Don knew that I had almost no female friends. We talked about that on our trip to the Russian River in June. But why would he say he thought I wouldn't like his friends? I hadn't met any of of his friends except for his housemates, Shankari and Bo, and I liked both of them. I knew about Rachel Remen, of course, and I didn't have a good opinion of her. Based on his descriptions, she had tried to be more than his boss at Commonweal. She kept trying to interfer in his life, as if he needed a mother to take care of him. He was especially annoyed with her tendancy to call him up in the middle of the night and expect him to carry on long conversations with her. I remember him telling me he had had to be quite sharp with her, telling her that such behavior was inappropriate for an employer. "I had to get her out of my life," he told me. I didn't think from the way he talked about her that he regarded her as his friend. I certainly wouldn't have. But all the rest of Don's circle, all the people who called him "Vivekan," were completely new to me. I had scarcely heard of, let alone met Jnani, Annie, Sara, Leah, Katherine, and Jessica until we were all interwoven in our grief and concern at the intensive care unit in Santa Rosa. Mahalakshmi, Diana, Dawn, and all the Commonweal people I didn't meet until later still. How could I not like people I hadn't met? It would be unlike Don to prejudge me on behavior I had not had a chance to exhibit. I felt that - once again - Jnani said something that put me on the outside and her on the inside. Once again, she had questioned my legitimacy, my right to be who I claimed to be. As always, I was astonished by the rawness of this rejection and angered by my own defenselessness against it. But what to do about it? I decided there was nothing at all I could do about it. Maybe it was the "peace to all beings" meditation I had just been practicing, or maybe I was just tired of this game. But I decided Jnani's past and mine were irreconcileable. She believed Don had doubts about me even in Santa Rosa, when I said I was his partner. I believed he didn't, that we had both gotten way past those barriers to trust and transparency. I liked my past better than hers, so that's the one I lived with. All this cogitation takes place in a flash, of course, and in the meantime the telephone conversation seems to be winding down. Then suddenly Jnani asked, "Have you had any visits from Don?" "Yes," I said, and I summarized the three dreams I'd had in the meditation room. "He's pretty much told me to stop mucking around in those emotions, to stop recalling how difficult the last few days were. I should stop worrying about if he was feeling frightened or alone or was in pain. He's told me to stop dwelling on it. Get on with it." "Huh." There was a slight pause. "You know, V was my closest friend, and I was wondering if there was anything of his you think he might want me to have. Something you might otherwise have no use for." "You're not the first to ask," I said. "I've said just about the same thing to everyone. I can't bear to go through his things right now. I've given away one or two things, but it's very wrenching." "I understand," she said. "Do you have anything with his voice on it?" "Just the videotape, and it's not really his voice." "I had a message from him on my answering service, but after thirty-one days, it gets deleted automatically. I was very sad when that happened." "It's things like that, isn't it?, that get you. I couldn't bear to cancel his cell phone." "Oh, yeah." "And taking his name off the credit card, cancelling the account, it just felt like I was erasing another part of him. I think when someone like Don comes along, it's God's way of saying 'Pay attention!' Not everybody could." "I guess not." "I still talk to him every day, in the meditation room. And sometimes people I've known for years, or have just been introduced to me, call me Don." "How does that make you feel?" "I like it. A friend of mine in the chorus did it just last week. When I pointed it out to him, he said, 'That's because you two were a "we," not a "him and me."' I like that. It makes me feel that he's still here, still in me. You know, we had this agreement. He said the hardest part of dying was having to leave me. So I said he could go, but he had to take half my soul with him, and he had to leave half his soul with me. That's how it feels. I think that's why sometimes people call me Don." We brought the conversation to a close after that. She wished me a happy holiday, and I thanked her. It wasn't until later - I don't think it was even later this day, but sometime in the following week - that I realized I hadn't asked if she had had any visits from Don. I wondered if she had, and what they had been. I wondered what kind of de-legitimizing I was guilty of practicing, and whether or not she felt it. I did send her something: one of Don's hand-made cards. I came across a small cache of them while rearranging his papers. I think they were among the last ones he made. I remember him sprawled out on the livingroom rug with his Exacto knife, glue stick, and cutting board, patiently cutting the images from magazines, sorting through his card stock to find the right background, and flattening the picture with the edge of a plastic triangle. I hoped she like it, something from his own hands. |
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Friday, December 22 |
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Saturday, December 23 |
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