Almost two years on...

you might not want to read this because it's pretty traumatic

“But you know you’re wrong,” I tell him sharply. “You didn’t vote at all in 2016 because you said you couldn’t abide Hillary and Trump was a fat cat businessman. Then you agreed that he tried to steal Biden’s win and hang Pence in 2020, and that you didn’t vote in that election either. But now in 2024 you’re going to? What changed?”

“You have no idea what it’s like to be a man, Cate. The guys at the VA —,”

“Aren’t respected by this man at all, Paul,” I cut him off. “You know the awful things he said about McCain being a loser because he was a POW. How is that respectful of you or your friends?”

He held eye contact with me as he queued up Spin Doctors’ “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” Nice. I realized, once again, that there was no point in arguing further. I’d known it for a long time, but we still held a strange affection for one another. We’d been living separately for quite some time. We had both been through ugly previous divorces, so neither one of us wanted to deal with the paperwork and pain involved in filing for divorce. We saw each other occasionally. He kept me on his insurance for a while, but then unceremoniously dumped me off of it. We argued about politics and always agreed that we’d retire together someday when we can get our issues worked out. He’d stormed out of couple counselling angrily. Twice.

Paul was annoyed with me because I was moving to Ohio, and I was extremely irritable because I still had to get my husband’s permission to buy property in one of the last dowry states still remaining. I was so confident that Harris would win in November that I wasn’t hesitating to buy a big, ancient house in Ohio in a dark red state. Ohio used to be a swing state, right?

I did not know Ohio at all. The rolling green hills of Appalachia are amazing, and yes, I know some of the locals consider them mountains, but they are not. Not when you’re a fourth generation Coloradoan. (I’m not getting into that Coloradan or Coloradoan debate here; I’m just not. Yes, my usage makes me old. Fuck off.) I can wax poetic about being an outsider in my new home another time.

About a week after that argument, Paul called me from the ER at about 11:30 at night. “I’m hurt,” he said.

“Hurt? Are you in aFib again? Or did —”

“I broke my hu..? Oh…shit. I broke the upper part of my arm,” he said through clearly gritted teeth. “I hate being here. I’m not staying.” He was a notoriously impatient patient. “Mom will get me home.” He lived with his mother, and that is another tale of its own for another day.

“Wait. What? Why are you leaving?” I’d been with him both times they tried to fix his heart. Once with cardioversion and once with ablation after I had convinced him that seeing a genuine cardiologist just might help. It had come back again not long before this conversation. In fact, he’d recently lost his driver’s license because he had developed cataracts due to his untreated diabetes. Why were his high blood pressure, diabetes, and aFib all going untreated? Well, Paul had begun doing volunteer IT work with a pseudo-medical place that claimed to be some extended branch of the VA, but it turns out was decidedly not. They preached the kind of crap that RFK, Jr. does. From them, he learned that diabetes could be fixed with apple cider vinegar, a “Let’s Go Brandon,” bumper sticker, and a red hat. He didn’t trust doctors. They were out to kill veterans. Sigh. He still wasn’t answering the simple question regarding why he wasn’t staying to see an orthopedic surgeon when the hospital said it was going to require surgery. He couldn’t stay. Those places made him antsy. People go to hospitals to die, he said, and he didn’t want their fucking pain killers. He had to get away. I offered to go get him again, and he said his mother would get him home.

Early the next morning, he called me. “Can you take me to my PCP at 10:30?” he asked in a very strained voice, like he was clenching his jaw. I asked why his mother wasn’t taking him, which irritated him because he had to tell me she refused to help due to the fact that he decided not to stay when at the hospital against the advice of the ER staff.

“I have a meeting with —,” I started to say.

“NEVER MIND,” he shouted and hung up.

I called him back, and he immediately said, “Look, if I can’t rely on YOU when I need you —”

“Stop,” I said angrily. “I will be there to get you to your 10:30 appointment. I just have to move a meeting with the title company.” I was going to ask where his mother was, but it wasn’t going to end well if I did. (Turns out it didn’t anyway.)

When I got there he was pale and shaky. He was clearly in a lot of pain, but my Naval veteran wasn’t having drugs, nosiree. He’d spent nearly 10 years in the Navy and did three WestPac tours, and he was tougher than that. When I asked if his blood sugar was okay, he said we could run through a drive-through after his appointment, but wasn’t willing to discuss it further. I wasn’t up for the fight, so I just carefully folded a very injured large guy into my Mazda 3.

Paul winced at every little bump, and we only went three blocks. It was a bitch to get him back out of the car he was so painfully folded into. (Taking his absurdly fast sports car wasn’t possible because of the human origami and the fact that no one else was ever allowed to drive it or any of his other absurdly fast cars he’d owned.) Eventually I got a guy inside the doc’s clinic to come and help me. Paul was livid that I’d embarrassed him that way, but knew better than to complain about the indignity.

It took a while for the CNP to get to us. That’s just the state of our healthcare system. She was kind. She was able to pull up his record from the hospital, and I watched her eyes bug a little at what she was seeing, but she was impressively silent while looking at it.

“Can I ask you why you left the hospital last night, Paul?” she asked gently after explaining that he had broken the humerus on his right arm all the way through.

“I don’t like hospitals. I just wanted to be left alone,” he said in a very weary voice.

“Well, because you left the hospital against doctor’s orders, you were considered ambulatory, and now you have to wait until we can get an orthopedic surgeon approved by your insurance, and it may be a bit before they can see you. It says here they told you that you required surgery. Is that correct?” she asked, looking to me like I was somehow included in this idiocy.

“Yes, they told me,” he said. She went on to write him an additional prescription for Vicodin that he said he’d have his mother fill later. I doubt she did, but he probably wouldn’t have taken it. She didn’t even try to remove the sling and examine him at all, saying it would be much too painful and he really needed to see an orthopedist right away. They’d send in the referral, and if he didn’t hear from anyone at the orthopedist’s office by afternoon, he should start calling them.

I folded him painfully back into my car and took him through the Sonic drive-through for a cheeseburger.

“I’m sorry I’ve been a shitty husband,” he started to tell me as we waited for his combo meal.

“Stop it,” I cut him off. “I haven’t exactly been perfect. I love you. Let’s not do this right now. We need to get you home, and I need to get to my closing. You’ll come out and visit me, and maybe you’ll like it. Don’t worry about that stuff right now.” In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t been so dismissive.

I got him back to his house, painstakingly helped him struggle out of my car, and got him indoors. He was sweating profusely and looked awful. He remarked that he couldn’t wipe his own ass because he’s right handed.

When we went back in, I got him situated in as comfortable a position as was possible, then went to visit the bathroom. On my way, I passed his mother’s room and saw her laying on her side, snoring softly. She must have been up late with her son, and I felt a wave of compassion for a woman I wasn’t particularly fond of after so many other things.

When I went back into the living room, he was on the phone with his (very conservative) boss, and the phone was on speaker.

“Well, I’m really disappointed, Paul. We need you in the office. It’s policy. Work from home isn’t something we include and you were allowed to do it longer than most because of your eye thing. You’ve got to find a way to get in here.” I was furious and started to say something, but Paul gave me a severe look that clearly said, “Shut the fuck up,” and I did because I didn’t live with him or have to deal with his boss. Paul told him the CNP and hospital had both told him he’d probably need to take temporary disability for a little while anyway.

“You would try to do that?” his boss asked. I began to sputter angrily and went into the kitchen.

When he got off the phone, I said, '“Look, I have to go. My closing is a good 45 minutes from here. I’ll call you later. Take the fucking painkillers, Paul. You’re tough, but that’s not the kind of injury that calls for just being tough. You heard them at the doc’s and the hospital.”

He sighed heavily and we kissed goodbye. No hug, I knew it would hurt him. I told him I loved him. I remember that. “Will you come back later?” he asked.

“If you need me,” I said. I wish I hadn’t said that. He hated admitting he needed anything from anyone ever. The reasons why aren’t my story to tell, but I’m the only one to tell that story. Perhaps another time.

So I got in my car, went to my bank, went to the closing and called him when I was on my way back to the house in a western suburb of Denver that I’d already bought, but would be leaving with my daughter and son-in-law. (That is also a complicated tale not for this particular moment.)

“Are you doing okay?” I asked him, knowing full well he wasn’t.

“Yeah,” he probably lied to keep me from lecturing him. “ Mom picked up the drugs. I took one.”

“Is it helping any?”

“Not really. I’ll talk to you later. Don’t forget about me, okay?”

I assured him I wouldn’t, but I sort of did. I had a lot of packing to do. I’d just closed on a house in Ohio and was moving in a couple of weeks. I was stressed. My son would be there in a week to help with some of the packing and all of the physical moving. That Friday was the last time I talked to Paul. We exchanged a couple of text messages that were mostly me being glib and trying to make light of his situation because he didn’t like things to get to serious. I regret those now.

Sunday night, just before midnight, his mother called me. She NEVER called me. I picked up the phone. “Yvonne! What’s up?”

She was screaming. “He’s gone. Paul’s gone. He’s gone.”

“What? What do you mean gone?”

“He’s dead,” she wailed. I knew in my bones she wasn’t just worrying. I felt it.

“I’ll be right there!” I said.

“No! No. Stay there. Someone from my church is coming to be with me. You need to talk to the police officer.”

“The what?” I replied.

“Ma’am?” said a man’s voice.

“Yes,” I replied dumbly. No one calls me ma’am.

“Ma’am, I need to talk to you about your husband’s death.”

Tears were streaming down my face and my German Shepherd had planted her face in my lap like she always did when I was stressed. When did that happen? “Oh, fuck. Why is he dead? Why?” it was an existential question. I knew the how and the why in my bones.

“He killed himself, ma’am.”

“Of course he did! “ I shouted. “He’s a veteran and he took that goddamned 9mm to his head, didn’t he?”

“What would make you say that ma’am?” he asked.

“Because that’s what veterans do, officer. “ Statistics will bear me out on that, go ahead and look it up.

“Has he been threatening suicide?”

“Not lately. Not when I saw him Friday. Ask his mother. I don’t live with him. But when he got angry, he would always tell me he was going to die from sudden lead poisoning as if it was a funny thing to say. So I guess he was serious.”

The officer said something polite and concerned and asked me if I had someone there for me, and I lied saying yes, while knowing that my daughter wasn’t going to give a shit. Ten minutes later, she actually said those words. Her husband took me to the funeral a few days later.

Now it’s two years on and and I look at the things that I think I should have said and done. The tarot spread I did just hours before he died. The way he talked to me. They way he tried to apologize for being a lousy husband. Could I have stopped it? Should I have stayed there at his place to take care of him, knowing his mother? Why didn’t I tell him to just stay in the hospital Thursday night. Insist on it. Go up there. Make him stay. Why was I so glib? Why was I not having much of the usual bullshit that day and made it clear that I had things I needed to take care of because nobody else had ever taken care of me?