This time last week, I was lying in bed with my husband--snuggled close, with our arms around each other. We weren't vacationing in some distant locale or just lazing about after seeing in the new year--we were in a hospice house, where he had come to die.
He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2009, and the disease was relentlessly aggressive as it spread throughout his body. Doctors don't start screening for prostate cancer until age 50, but my husband ("Bunny" to family and friends) was only 47 when he was diagnosed. For nearly three years, we'd fought through radiation, chemotherapy, hormones, hair loss, surgeries and ever-worsening pain. He had managed to pull through every insult to his body, assisted by narcotics and humor and love. In the last five days, though, tiny fingertips of the cancer had invaded his brain and made it bleed.
Rather than take the aggressive route and undergo brain surgery that might (or might not) stop the bleeding, he chose to let nature take its course. If he was meant to survive, the bleeding would stop and he would recover. If not, he would go quickly, having had some say in when the end would come. His doctors, one by one, agreed that his decision was wise, particularly given his overall prognosis.
When he was first diagnosed, I had promised him that I would fight with him as long as he wanted to fight. "We're Team Bunny!" I'd said, drawing family members and friends into the team and making tee shirts. He latched onto the phrase as a rallying cry, a mantra. I also promised that, when he was ready to stop fighting, I'd fight as hard as I could to make sure he had the death he wanted. I kept my promises to him, and he delighted in my battles against various policies that were geared more toward convenience than for the patient's well-being.
My nickname was Deaux--a female rabbit is a doe, but we spelled it the way we did in Louisiana, where we were born and raised. Geaux Tigers! We'd been married for 25 years, having dated for only 11 months prior. Our hometowns were less than 10 miles apart, and we'd actually gone to elementary school together for two years. In fact, he sat directly behind me in sixth grade. He annoyed me even then, confessing later that he'd had a crush on me. We met again as adults and hit it off immediately. I came with what some men would have considered excess baggage--a son from my first marriage--but Bunny embraced my child and raised him and considered him his own.
The last few days of his life were, in a way, the best of the last two and a half years. All the emotional and physical barriers he had created crumbled away, and he was as loving and sweet and funny as he'd been before cancer. He graduallly became unable to speak, but he filled a whole notepad with scribblings before he lost the ability to write. He always had a lot to say, and he took advantage of the captive audience of his gathered family and friends. We talked and wept openly, taking advantage of the opportunity to say good-bye.
For all the grieving I'd done over the last few years, the day before he died was the hardest for me. I knew his time was short (I've been a nurse most of my life), and the thought that I would finally be without him was overwhelming. Tears flowed unchecked whenever I was out of his room, sometimes stopping as quickly as they started and sometimes giving way to huge, gulping sobs. I was going to miss him so much! We had hugged more in the last few days than we had in the previous two years--first because of his emotional state (he'd gone through several of the seven stages of grief at least twice) and then because he was in pain so often that hugging actually hurt him. Now, heavily medicated, he sought affection with abandon, and I happily kept him supplied.
So, exactly a week ago, at about 8:15 p.m., he drew his last breath. I didn't know it--I'd fallen asleep in his arms, exhausted. "Just like The Notebook," my daughter-in-law observed. My son woke me to tell me that his dad wasn't breathing, and I sat up to see my Bunny, no longer living, but with the most peaceful smile on his face. I didn't feel sadness initially, just gratitutde for the last few days we'd had and for the knowledge that he was no longer in pain.
Now, my journey from Deaux to WiDeaux would begin.
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