NOTE: All persons' names other than Sabine's have been changed to maintain their privacy.
Before you start "watching" this episode['s text cross the screen, delivering visual messages--hopefully], you must turn on your audio and listen to this version of Amy Winehouse's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" NOT the one that is on most of the compilations; this one is in the soundtrack of The Diary of Bridget Jones, a totally arbitrary fact, since I heard it as the lead song on the European press of Lioness: Hidden Treasures, while the U.S. press of that album has a different version I like much less. This one is simpler, not so produced, which fit perfectly into the gentle but good vibe mood we wanted while listening to it over the holidays last year, while we sat vigil by Sabine's bedside.
Here's the correct version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ludxpkyrab0.
Only by playing that version of Amy's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" as you "view" this episode might an ache rise in your chest similar to the one now in mine as I think about my last days with my dearest friend, mentor, and treasure--Sabine. I've written about her before, so you may want to catch up on the story by going to earlier posts--Click on "Sabine" in my labels on the right-hand lower side of my first screen to access those.
Tonight I feel her so strongly, as if I could just reach through this invisible air and touch her hand, hold her hand. So often I feel her, and I know she's there with others I've loved who've gone to whatever comes next, which I happen to believe is in the air around. Air is spirit; spirit is psyche; we begin life as a separate being after taking the breath of life; we leave this life as we know it when giving up the ghost. Air is life--and I believe (as much as I believe anything I don't have absolute proof of) that we breathe in all the others in this world each time we take a breath, and that includes those who have gone before. In that way this atmosphere we breathe becomes the atmosphere of this world--such a shame that there's so much anger and pain in it these days.
The world was far away from us that night in Sabine's new flat, however. I'd spent a week alone with Sabine before she'd taken this last turn for the worst; each morning she'd welcomed the day with curtains wide open and a radio station blasting pop and rock music, as I'd always known her to do. Someone had changed the radio station when Sabine was in the hospital, and I didn't know how to get her station back, but that was probably a bit raucous to play now anyway. I searched through some CDs she'd left by the player; most were classical, and while I love Mozart as much as she--she who'd named a little hotel she'd bought before adopting Zoe The Amadeus--I felt it might be construed as funereal and was happy to find Lioness: Hidden Treasures--what a perfect choice for a woman who was, indeed a lioness, and a treasure, and when Amy's plaintive tones began, the words and the song lodged in my heart as the soundtrack of Sabine's dying, with all the joy and beauty and pain and sadness thereof evinced in a tortured singer's voice: "Tonight you're mine, completely / You give your love so sweetly . . . . " Oh, yes.
After an emergency surgery to relieve a problem causing undue pain, Sabine had spent a few bad days in the hospital until insisting she be brought home to die. Now she lay in a hospice bed brought in for that purpose--an attractive wooden one, not one you'd associate with a hospital--in her living room with its white walls and white curtains and cream-colored floors made vibrant with repetitive Poinsettias of deepest green and red against all that white--and candles burning each evening from the tiny wooden angel figurines painted in bright colors her mother had collected that now held their flaming burdens cheerfully--this one a pair of skiiers, that one a carter, an iceskater, a gardener. Sabine had arranged it this way--she'd always lived in homes full of light and light colors, and this room's full windows and stucco balcony beyond filled the bill in quintessential Sabineness.
We'd sit while she slept in the kitchen near-by--the Germans and one American making too much noise for the liking of the Lithuanians, an interesting cultural struggle that played out against the backdrop of all us defending our fierce love for Sabine, yet not wanting to turn these last days of hers into something any more unpleasant than the reality before us. The struggle might be comical if its undertones weren't so tragic and our emotions so raw and tormented every moment of the day even as we held together in that human community drawn together by a shared love, a ritual shared by human beings through the ages, the deathbed ritual.
I'd done it before, when my mom succumbed to pancreatic and liver cancer, when my friend Deb to a similar cancer, though I don't know exactly which type--does it matter? All cancers are evil--while losing loved ones suddenly with its own ripping pain, such as my dad's massive myocardial infarction (heart attack) proved itself a far better way to let them go, knowing their suffering had been short-lived--
Yet the deathbed has its advantages--we do have our chance to say our good-byes. Oh, I wanted to sit with Sabine for hours, yet Sabine's best friend for many years and I had to fight for our time stroking her hand while she slept--and fighting didn't seem the right thing to do. Sabine and I had grown intimate over ten years of exchanging cassette tapes on which we'd divulged everything about ourselves on just about every topic, including death, and only a month or so before had told me by email she wanted me by her when she died--that I and only one other woman were who she wanted at that time, and no one else. On that email she'd excluded Gwennie, the German woman who was probably her truly closest friend, only because she was known to have a fear of illness, blood, and guts, and Sabine wanted to spare her. I actually share those phobias with Gwennie, but we both overcame them with no trouble at all to help our dear one through her struggle on those few times when one of the Lithuanians needed help or had actually left us alone with Sabine while they sleep.
As it turned out, through default or rather a passionate sense of entitlement or believing they knew best what Sabine wanted, most nursing duties were handled by the Lithuanians, who had put themselves into that role and were, truly, doing a loving and marvelous job at it. We knew Sabine abhorred the indignities of being so ill and would prefer the fewest number of us fussing over her, so that worked well. What didn't work out so well for Gwennie and me, though, was that we were not given as much time by Sabine's bedside during more quiet moments--this too, they claimed as their right--and this did rankle. More on this in a moment.
The other issue was that, apparently, Lithuanian culture has a far different approach to these bedside deaths than the Germans and Americans do--or at least that was the case in this small case study. We knew they meant well and had only Sabine's best interests at heart, but they wanted to keep the rooms entirely silent all the time. These were two women who had become extremely close to Sabine while she lived in that country, and they were solid-gold good people, the kind that Sabine always surrounded herself with. But one, a "girl" in our old ladies' eyes of something like 30, had just lost her mother the year before. Her mother had wanted complete silence while she lay dying, and Daina (I'll call her) was insistent that Sabine would get the same.
Now, both Gwennie and I knew this is not, unequivocably not, what Sabine wanted as she died. In fact, I had that in her exact words on an email. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn't just pull that out and show it to these women, but I guess I saw that as petty. Yet maybe it would have been the right thing to do so that Sabine would have had things as she wanted them. But things worked out okay without my having to do that.
Gwennie, whose daughter lived a mere block away and whose own home was only a half hour's drive away, had seen the writing on the wall and decided to room in at Sabine's flat along with Daina and me. That was a blessing beyond belief. Not only was Gwennie the perfect foil to Daina, this was my chance to get to know Sabine's "other" best friend--oh, she had myriads of best friends--I can name about six other German women, a few U.S, Lithuanian, Albanian, and other best friends as well--but I'd like to think that Gwennie and I were near or at the top of that list. I'd meet several of the other "top" friends I'd hear about on those ten years of cassette tapes, and I'd gone to Paris with one of them many years ago on my first trip to Europe--to visit Sabine, who'd just moved back there from the States after her marriage to an American soldier broke up.
Gwennie quickly took charge and didn't let Daina shoo us away or make us stay silent, since she knew as I did that Sabine wanted sounds of life around her while she slept. How many times over the years had Sabine told me she loved to fall asleep to the sounds of humans communicating since she was a child falling asleep in her parents' home, or to stories being told or read to her--NOT silence. And how she loved it when she woke through the night to hear those same sounds; they gave her a sense of security, of not being alone in the world, of others "out there" taking care of things while she slept. And that was what Gwennie and I were determined to give her, while of course recognizing those times when silence was, indeed, the proper atmosphere.
One incident that Gwennie and I laughed about afterwards--we had to laugh to keep things from getting serious and petty and angry, which of course were not what any of us or Sabine wanted--was when an alarm went off in the bedroom of Sabine's 11-year-old daughter Zoe (name changed for her privacy) where I was sleeping. While I visited Sabine that month, Zoe was staying most nights with the wonderful couple Sabine had asked to take care of the child after she was gone--they were also the daughter and son-in-law of Gwennie and her American soldier husband Gary and lived a block away from Sabine's flat, which she'd moved into about six months prior so Zoe and her new family could become even closer than they'd been Zoe's entire life in preparation for the dark day we now were so close to.
We'd celebrated Christmas Eve at Anne and Manfrit's home the night before. Gary's gift to Zoe was a rocket ship that actually blasted off when the alarm went off--great gift for a kid who, like me, loved to sleep in! Zoe had brought home her gifts and had left this one on the shelf behind her bed. She must have set the alarm because we were in the living room/kitchen area--Gwennie, Daina, another Lithuanian woman who spent a week or so there named Grazyna, and, of course, Sabine, who was sound asleep. I ran into the bedroom and couldn't figure out how to turn the thing off, eventually hitting the right button to make the noise stop. I was afraid it would keep doing that at that time of night and tried to figure out how to dis-arm the thing, but couldn't do it, so I took it out to the kitchen to see if Gwennie might be able to figure it out.
Well, Grazyna, who I really do like and who, I think (without looking up the email) is the other woman Sabine said she'd want by her bedside while dying, freaked out. No other way to put it. I won't say she yelled at me, but she attacked me verbally for bring the thing into the room, as if it had been mine in the first place, I guess. Now, I'm not totally stupid--I was pretty sure the thing wasn't going to go off again that moment, and I was shocked that she'd talked to me that way, so I guess I responded in kind, and when I get riled I guess I am kind of scary because she backed up when I spoke back to her--though I didn't yell, either, and I hope Sabine heard none of this as she was on the other side of the fireplace that separated the kitchen from the living room and had been sound asleep. I don't remember what I said but I indicated that I wasn't a complete imbecile and was only trying to get the thing de-activated so it wouldn't be a problem, and then Gwenne--God love her--chimed in, "What do you two think of us? That we want to swing from the chandeliers and party in here?"
Aish. No one likes conflict at such a stressful time, but we did have to stand up for ourselves! Gwennie and I had a good laugh about that, a sort of tension reliever, though that being said I do know both of those women had Sabine's welfare in mind with everything they did--their style was just so different from ours, and, we firmly believed, Sabine's.
And we had evenings when we all came together full of love and prayed together.
Will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?
Now, hearing this song, I'm right back in Sabine's flat, and I know it's a good evening. Sabine has asked for music. The candles are flickering on the marble windowsills, the beer and wine are flowing, the cheeses and meats brought in from the village are spread before us, stories are being told, all of them with Sabine--in all her facets--the star, as she always was. As Gwennie said and I concur, Sabine taught us to live, and now she was teaching us how to die. She had raged, raged against the dying of the light, but now she had accepted another heading and was moving slowly toward it, but not without continued resistance. She had loved life like no one else I've known; she loved her adopted daughter as fiercely as any mother has ever loved a child; and she did not want to cross that last border to leave that little girl alone. She'd often said, "I have cancer, but cancer doesn't have me."
And cancer doesn't have her anymore. She's here, with me, and she's there, with Zoe, and with Gwennie, and with Gary and with Daina and and with Anne and Manfrid and Grazyna and with everyone who ever loved her, and that is a wide circle filled with good people from all over the world. And she is still teaching us how to live. Breathing in her spirit every day, I can face my declining health as full of as much life as I can muster, and when that inevitable day comes for me as it will all of us, I know she will help me across that horizon just as she did in life--she gave me Europe, and by doing so she gave me India, and now she waits at another port, and I've no doubt I'll find her there.
Before you start "watching" this episode['s text cross the screen, delivering visual messages--hopefully], you must turn on your audio and listen to this version of Amy Winehouse's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" NOT the one that is on most of the compilations; this one is in the soundtrack of The Diary of Bridget Jones, a totally arbitrary fact, since I heard it as the lead song on the European press of Lioness: Hidden Treasures, while the U.S. press of that album has a different version I like much less. This one is simpler, not so produced, which fit perfectly into the gentle but good vibe mood we wanted while listening to it over the holidays last year, while we sat vigil by Sabine's bedside.
Here's the correct version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ludxpkyrab0.
Only by playing that version of Amy's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" as you "view" this episode might an ache rise in your chest similar to the one now in mine as I think about my last days with my dearest friend, mentor, and treasure--Sabine. I've written about her before, so you may want to catch up on the story by going to earlier posts--Click on "Sabine" in my labels on the right-hand lower side of my first screen to access those.
Tonight I feel her so strongly, as if I could just reach through this invisible air and touch her hand, hold her hand. So often I feel her, and I know she's there with others I've loved who've gone to whatever comes next, which I happen to believe is in the air around. Air is spirit; spirit is psyche; we begin life as a separate being after taking the breath of life; we leave this life as we know it when giving up the ghost. Air is life--and I believe (as much as I believe anything I don't have absolute proof of) that we breathe in all the others in this world each time we take a breath, and that includes those who have gone before. In that way this atmosphere we breathe becomes the atmosphere of this world--such a shame that there's so much anger and pain in it these days.
The world was far away from us that night in Sabine's new flat, however. I'd spent a week alone with Sabine before she'd taken this last turn for the worst; each morning she'd welcomed the day with curtains wide open and a radio station blasting pop and rock music, as I'd always known her to do. Someone had changed the radio station when Sabine was in the hospital, and I didn't know how to get her station back, but that was probably a bit raucous to play now anyway. I searched through some CDs she'd left by the player; most were classical, and while I love Mozart as much as she--she who'd named a little hotel she'd bought before adopting Zoe The Amadeus--I felt it might be construed as funereal and was happy to find Lioness: Hidden Treasures--what a perfect choice for a woman who was, indeed a lioness, and a treasure, and when Amy's plaintive tones began, the words and the song lodged in my heart as the soundtrack of Sabine's dying, with all the joy and beauty and pain and sadness thereof evinced in a tortured singer's voice: "Tonight you're mine, completely / You give your love so sweetly . . . . " Oh, yes.
After an emergency surgery to relieve a problem causing undue pain, Sabine had spent a few bad days in the hospital until insisting she be brought home to die. Now she lay in a hospice bed brought in for that purpose--an attractive wooden one, not one you'd associate with a hospital--in her living room with its white walls and white curtains and cream-colored floors made vibrant with repetitive Poinsettias of deepest green and red against all that white--and candles burning each evening from the tiny wooden angel figurines painted in bright colors her mother had collected that now held their flaming burdens cheerfully--this one a pair of skiiers, that one a carter, an iceskater, a gardener. Sabine had arranged it this way--she'd always lived in homes full of light and light colors, and this room's full windows and stucco balcony beyond filled the bill in quintessential Sabineness.
We'd sit while she slept in the kitchen near-by--the Germans and one American making too much noise for the liking of the Lithuanians, an interesting cultural struggle that played out against the backdrop of all us defending our fierce love for Sabine, yet not wanting to turn these last days of hers into something any more unpleasant than the reality before us. The struggle might be comical if its undertones weren't so tragic and our emotions so raw and tormented every moment of the day even as we held together in that human community drawn together by a shared love, a ritual shared by human beings through the ages, the deathbed ritual.
I'd done it before, when my mom succumbed to pancreatic and liver cancer, when my friend Deb to a similar cancer, though I don't know exactly which type--does it matter? All cancers are evil--while losing loved ones suddenly with its own ripping pain, such as my dad's massive myocardial infarction (heart attack) proved itself a far better way to let them go, knowing their suffering had been short-lived--
Yet the deathbed has its advantages--we do have our chance to say our good-byes. Oh, I wanted to sit with Sabine for hours, yet Sabine's best friend for many years and I had to fight for our time stroking her hand while she slept--and fighting didn't seem the right thing to do. Sabine and I had grown intimate over ten years of exchanging cassette tapes on which we'd divulged everything about ourselves on just about every topic, including death, and only a month or so before had told me by email she wanted me by her when she died--that I and only one other woman were who she wanted at that time, and no one else. On that email she'd excluded Gwennie, the German woman who was probably her truly closest friend, only because she was known to have a fear of illness, blood, and guts, and Sabine wanted to spare her. I actually share those phobias with Gwennie, but we both overcame them with no trouble at all to help our dear one through her struggle on those few times when one of the Lithuanians needed help or had actually left us alone with Sabine while they sleep.
As it turned out, through default or rather a passionate sense of entitlement or believing they knew best what Sabine wanted, most nursing duties were handled by the Lithuanians, who had put themselves into that role and were, truly, doing a loving and marvelous job at it. We knew Sabine abhorred the indignities of being so ill and would prefer the fewest number of us fussing over her, so that worked well. What didn't work out so well for Gwennie and me, though, was that we were not given as much time by Sabine's bedside during more quiet moments--this too, they claimed as their right--and this did rankle. More on this in a moment.
The other issue was that, apparently, Lithuanian culture has a far different approach to these bedside deaths than the Germans and Americans do--or at least that was the case in this small case study. We knew they meant well and had only Sabine's best interests at heart, but they wanted to keep the rooms entirely silent all the time. These were two women who had become extremely close to Sabine while she lived in that country, and they were solid-gold good people, the kind that Sabine always surrounded herself with. But one, a "girl" in our old ladies' eyes of something like 30, had just lost her mother the year before. Her mother had wanted complete silence while she lay dying, and Daina (I'll call her) was insistent that Sabine would get the same.
Now, both Gwennie and I knew this is not, unequivocably not, what Sabine wanted as she died. In fact, I had that in her exact words on an email. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn't just pull that out and show it to these women, but I guess I saw that as petty. Yet maybe it would have been the right thing to do so that Sabine would have had things as she wanted them. But things worked out okay without my having to do that.
Gwennie, whose daughter lived a mere block away and whose own home was only a half hour's drive away, had seen the writing on the wall and decided to room in at Sabine's flat along with Daina and me. That was a blessing beyond belief. Not only was Gwennie the perfect foil to Daina, this was my chance to get to know Sabine's "other" best friend--oh, she had myriads of best friends--I can name about six other German women, a few U.S, Lithuanian, Albanian, and other best friends as well--but I'd like to think that Gwennie and I were near or at the top of that list. I'd meet several of the other "top" friends I'd hear about on those ten years of cassette tapes, and I'd gone to Paris with one of them many years ago on my first trip to Europe--to visit Sabine, who'd just moved back there from the States after her marriage to an American soldier broke up.
Gwennie quickly took charge and didn't let Daina shoo us away or make us stay silent, since she knew as I did that Sabine wanted sounds of life around her while she slept. How many times over the years had Sabine told me she loved to fall asleep to the sounds of humans communicating since she was a child falling asleep in her parents' home, or to stories being told or read to her--NOT silence. And how she loved it when she woke through the night to hear those same sounds; they gave her a sense of security, of not being alone in the world, of others "out there" taking care of things while she slept. And that was what Gwennie and I were determined to give her, while of course recognizing those times when silence was, indeed, the proper atmosphere.
One incident that Gwennie and I laughed about afterwards--we had to laugh to keep things from getting serious and petty and angry, which of course were not what any of us or Sabine wanted--was when an alarm went off in the bedroom of Sabine's 11-year-old daughter Zoe (name changed for her privacy) where I was sleeping. While I visited Sabine that month, Zoe was staying most nights with the wonderful couple Sabine had asked to take care of the child after she was gone--they were also the daughter and son-in-law of Gwennie and her American soldier husband Gary and lived a block away from Sabine's flat, which she'd moved into about six months prior so Zoe and her new family could become even closer than they'd been Zoe's entire life in preparation for the dark day we now were so close to.
We'd celebrated Christmas Eve at Anne and Manfrit's home the night before. Gary's gift to Zoe was a rocket ship that actually blasted off when the alarm went off--great gift for a kid who, like me, loved to sleep in! Zoe had brought home her gifts and had left this one on the shelf behind her bed. She must have set the alarm because we were in the living room/kitchen area--Gwennie, Daina, another Lithuanian woman who spent a week or so there named Grazyna, and, of course, Sabine, who was sound asleep. I ran into the bedroom and couldn't figure out how to turn the thing off, eventually hitting the right button to make the noise stop. I was afraid it would keep doing that at that time of night and tried to figure out how to dis-arm the thing, but couldn't do it, so I took it out to the kitchen to see if Gwennie might be able to figure it out.
Well, Grazyna, who I really do like and who, I think (without looking up the email) is the other woman Sabine said she'd want by her bedside while dying, freaked out. No other way to put it. I won't say she yelled at me, but she attacked me verbally for bring the thing into the room, as if it had been mine in the first place, I guess. Now, I'm not totally stupid--I was pretty sure the thing wasn't going to go off again that moment, and I was shocked that she'd talked to me that way, so I guess I responded in kind, and when I get riled I guess I am kind of scary because she backed up when I spoke back to her--though I didn't yell, either, and I hope Sabine heard none of this as she was on the other side of the fireplace that separated the kitchen from the living room and had been sound asleep. I don't remember what I said but I indicated that I wasn't a complete imbecile and was only trying to get the thing de-activated so it wouldn't be a problem, and then Gwenne--God love her--chimed in, "What do you two think of us? That we want to swing from the chandeliers and party in here?"
Aish. No one likes conflict at such a stressful time, but we did have to stand up for ourselves! Gwennie and I had a good laugh about that, a sort of tension reliever, though that being said I do know both of those women had Sabine's welfare in mind with everything they did--their style was just so different from ours, and, we firmly believed, Sabine's.
And we had evenings when we all came together full of love and prayed together.
Will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?
Now, hearing this song, I'm right back in Sabine's flat, and I know it's a good evening. Sabine has asked for music. The candles are flickering on the marble windowsills, the beer and wine are flowing, the cheeses and meats brought in from the village are spread before us, stories are being told, all of them with Sabine--in all her facets--the star, as she always was. As Gwennie said and I concur, Sabine taught us to live, and now she was teaching us how to die. She had raged, raged against the dying of the light, but now she had accepted another heading and was moving slowly toward it, but not without continued resistance. She had loved life like no one else I've known; she loved her adopted daughter as fiercely as any mother has ever loved a child; and she did not want to cross that last border to leave that little girl alone. She'd often said, "I have cancer, but cancer doesn't have me."
And cancer doesn't have her anymore. She's here, with me, and she's there, with Zoe, and with Gwennie, and with Gary and with Daina and and with Anne and Manfrid and Grazyna and with everyone who ever loved her, and that is a wide circle filled with good people from all over the world. And she is still teaching us how to live. Breathing in her spirit every day, I can face my declining health as full of as much life as I can muster, and when that inevitable day comes for me as it will all of us, I know she will help me across that horizon just as she did in life--she gave me Europe, and by doing so she gave me India, and now she waits at another port, and I've no doubt I'll find her there.
No comments:
Post a Comment