Wait for Me

I once worked on a committee writing church history with a man in the community—Jimmy-- whose wife, Trudie, was nearly comatose with late-stage Alzheimer’s. I ran into him a few years later at the post-office and he asked would I be available to help him write his memoirs. My encounter with him seemed providential because earlier that same day a Hospice friend had expressed to me how concerned people were about him. Trudie was clearly “on her way out,” yet Jimmy refused to believe she was dying. He clearly needed help “letting go”, but refused Hospice help. When Jimmy approached me in the post-office about helping him write his memoirs, I instantly recognized that I was in an ideal position to be a kind of “undercover” Hospice volunteer. His house was a stone’s throw from the college where I taught, so I could stop by easily and regularly to help with both the memoirs and the situation with his wife.

The situation I encountered when I first went to visit Jimmy was indeed as worrisome as had been suggested to me. Jimmy had set up his writing office in the bedroom where his wife lay rigid and unresponsive in a hospital bed, propped up on pillows, her white hair brushed and glistening across a pillow, her milky eyes fixed on something beyond this world. There was a caregiver, a kind of nurse hired to bathe and tend to Trudie’s bodily needs and to prepare meals for Jimmy, but she was generally delegated to the kitchen, while Jimmy held a vigil at his desk by Trudie’s bed, consulting her about the things he was trying to write about their life together. His efforts to write were, however, undermined by the fact that he could hardly make his bent, arthritic fingers strike the keys.

We resolved that I would stop by a few days a week during my lunch break, so the nurse could run errands and I could take over the typing of the stories that Jimmy narrated to Trudie. I was deeply touched by his dedication to his project and reticent to express my concerns about his holding Trudie hostage to it. At the same time, I also felt operating in me some vague Hospice mission to help the couple overcome an apparent deadlock in their relationship. Wasn’t it imperative that Jimmy learn to accept his wife’s parting and let her go so she wasn’t forever imprisoned in her limbo state?

Jimmy spared me from having to broach the topic by announcing, early in our alliance, that he was fed up with people telling him that Trudie was dying and that he had to let go of her. He knew that she was waiting for him to die and that he would die before she would, but he wanted to finish his memoir first. There was no hurry, really. She would wait for him. She always had during the marriage, during the war, during that time he went land prospecting in Florida and left her for months to square things away before she came down to join him. What a fiasco that venture had been, as I would soon hear, in the book we were writing. But not to worry, he knew he had to strike out for heaven and prepare the way for her. She would hang on until he was ready. She would wait for him.

At the moment Jimmy first told me this, I felt a deep sadness for him. It was clear that he was nowhere near death. He was a robust 86 year old man who had lived his life on a Georgia plantation—an outdoorsman, a farmer, lean and healthy as they come. His only physical complaints were the arthritis that bent up his fingers and an unsteadiness in his feet that probably warranted a cane but he was too stubborn to use one. He hurled his lithe body through space with confident enthusiasm, losing ballast now and then in a way that was momentarily worrisome, but he never actually tripped or fell or endangered himself. His blue eyes sparkled with health and intelligence. He had plenty of life left in him, while the poor woman lying next to him day in and day out, barely nourished from the food the nurse was able to spoon feed her, seemed poised at the threshold of departure. I gently suggested to Jimmy that I could not imagine Trudie outliving him. Shouldn’t he at least consider what he would do with himself should she decided to go first? He wouldn’t have any of it: “Nah…she won’t leave until I’m gone.” And he would not let me call in Hospice. Trudie was not dying. She was waiting.

Jimmy and I worked together on his memoir for the better part of a school year, my stopping by his house a few days a week to call forth stories that became chapters. During this time, very little changed in the living situation. Trudie lay there as though in a thrall, the nurse bathing her, powdering her, brushing her hair, turning her body every other hour, Jimmy talking to her as though she were fully sentient, engaged, and capable of loving every word that he recited to her from his ever-evolving story. He reminded her of the births and antics of each of their children, of the men who’d worked the plantation, of the dogs they’d had and lost. He did indeed tell the story about getting swindled out of a farm in Florida, about other business mis-adventures, about his own sense of culpability when one son had fallen from pine to wind up forever paralyzed and how that same son had lost both wife and child in a fluke accident and yet had spiritually survived. I’d find him always at the computer, cursing his bent fingers, which seemed to always hit the wrong keys. I would take over the typing—a kind of dictation—and do the daily quota of pages. He’d read them back to Trudie. She’d lie there as though dead. Sometimes I’d even check to see if she was still breathing.

By February, we reached the end of the book and sent the manuscript off to one of those self-publishing companies that offer all sorts of perks like posters for the book signing, internet promotions, and so on. We organized a reading and book signing at a local bookstore for the 18^th of March, a date we chose because I had plans to visit my son in New York for his birthday, March 20^th. There was a good turnout at the reading. Jimmy hammed it up as he read his favorite parts. On the slick professional book-jacket, there was a picture of a boy-Jimmy on horseback, wielding a pistol. He was delighted with his accomplishment, and told me, as I said good-bye to him before leaving, that Trudie was, too. Absolutely thrilled.

I did not hear about Jimmy’s fall until I got back to Georgia a dozen or more days later. My father announced the news, but did not seem too concerned about him. I ran into the preacher at the post-office and asked about Jimmy and he did not seem to think the fall was serious, but he was in the hospital. I went from the post-office to the hospital and found Jimmy’s four children standing around his bed. Jimmy was unconscious. The fall had been serious. They were concerned that he would never wake up.

And in fact, he never did wake up, but neither did he die, for awhile. The family set up a hospital bed next to Trudie’s hospital bed in the room where Jimmy and I had worked on his book. The couple lay there in twin comas side by side with the nurse whom I’d befriended during my months of frequent visits sitting in a wing-backed chair in a corner. Since she no longer had to cook for either one of them (by now they were fed intravenously), I offered to come by and sit with them for an hour on my way home from teaching summer school so she could run out and get a bite to eat. I would sit there for an hour and sometimes read or talk primarily to Jimmy. I believed what is said about people in comas hearing and knowing when another is present. I believed it important to talk to them. But beyond that I was simply confronted with mystery and the extraordinary peace and love I seemed to find when I was in the presence of these two souls in their unfathomable predicament.

At the end of my summer school, I was heading to Italy for a conference. At the time I did not realize that I would be offered a job while there and move to Italy permanently. I thought I’d be gone for a month. I stopped by Jimmy and Trudie’s house for a last visit. I was in the habit of talking to Jimmy. I stood by his bed, holding his hand, explaining that I was going back to Italy for awhile, but I’d be back come September. I kissed his forehead and studied his face for awhile, again in awe over his strange slumber.

And then the most astonishing thing happened: Trudie opened her eyes, looked right at me and said, “We’re going to miss you.” This momentary waking so startled me I found myself telling anybody who would listen about it. No one really seemed to believe me.

Jimmy died two days after I arrived in Italy. My father called to tell me. Trudie held on another few weeks before catching up with him.