Diary of a Bad Year, continued

Marriage, or a long-term partnership, is in part a power relationship (see Marriage post), and ours was emblematic of how that power shifts and flows through the many years of individual and relational change. For some crazy reason—part masochism, part curiosity, I guess—I started reading a book by Rafael Yglesias called A Happy Marriage that was a fictionalized account of his wife’s cancer death. I’d read Yglesias many years before, and I must have seen it on the new bookshelf at the public library, but what possessed me to pick it up at that stunningly complex moment I don’t know. Once I started, however, I couldn’t put it down, and while I faced the latest manifestation of Mark and my relational shift I became intimately involved in the details of Yglesias’ topsy-turvey marriage and their descent into cancer hell.

Although we arrived there along different paths, Yglesias’s marriage and my partnership had settled into a less confrontational pattern, where jockeying for power had receded in the face of a need for peace and calmness between us as we came to terms with diminishing returns in the rest of our lives: less intensity in our political work, less need to prove ourselves artistically, and less parenting as our kids were fledged. We, like they, looked forward to some time to do things we hadn’t done in awhile, like work on projects for our own enjoyment, visit our friends more, see some places we had never seen (albeit for us on a marginal income). But then we entered our separate reality, which manifest in both spacial and temporal terms.

As Mark’s illness progressed, the past, present, and future took on entirely new meaning. He couldn’t look forward to anything (no becoming in Nietzchean terms). To look back was an exercise in too much painful nostalgia. So his life became the present, which meant a focused attention to the details of his health/illness with little room left over for attention to much else. He had to center every fiber of his being on his being. I began to lose him incrementally as the intimacy of our relationship, in which we shared a common history and a current engagement, began to recede. While he was very solicitous about my health and the burdens placed upon me due to his illness, he really had little interest in anything that didn’t relate to being in his illness.

Everything we did, and everything we took into consideration, revolved around what was possible for Mark. He didn’t want to see anyone but family and a few close friends. I had to diplomatically erect barriers between him and everyone else who wanted to see him or help me or at least demonstrate their concern. To minimize direct contact but maintain some connection I set up a list-serve where I periodically posted e-mails letting folks know how Mark was doing, being careful to supply just the bare facts about the latest results of a CT scan, another trip to the hospital, or the onset of diabetes (once his pancreas was compromised he couldn’t produce insulin): a supply of information that didn’t invade a privacy that was never explicitly outlined to me but that I implicitly understood. What he thought and felt and experienced with me and the kids was not for public consumption. I had to restrain a friend from setting up a Caring Bridge web site for Mark, something definitely not in sync with who we were and how we wanted to be in the world. I’d seen too many sites that elicited too much tortured comment that perhaps filled the needs of those doing the commenting but would certainly not fill ours.

A couple of weeks before Mark died I sent this e-mail to the list-serve, apologizing for the long time between postings: “I find it’s increasingly difficult to write these updates. It’s almost as if Mark and I are in a separate reality (I use the term ‘reality’ in all its subjectivity, although as a pragmatist I have to assign some meaning to it). Illness, and cancer in particular, does this to people’s lives. Although I am by profession a writer, I haven’t really wanted to write about what it’s like to face Mark’s terminal diagnosis or the day to day details of his decline, partly because it’s already been dealt with by so many other writers and partly to protect Mark’s privacy.” Now, four months later, I am writing, but I hope that what I deem is “for public consumption” means something to my readers and respects the dignity of Mark’s life and death.