The Last Prayer

All Dale and I wanted was to go home. Compared to the other things we had prayed for, this request seemed small enough to be granted. We would not be winners of the cancer survival sweepstakes. There would be no story of recovery so improbable that, when we heard such tales told of others, we would weep and wonder, could that happen for us?

No.

As the tumor grew, we scaled down our prayers, hoping that their shrinking size would make them more acceptable.

Could we have five years, a fraction of what we once expected and planned for?

No.

Could we have a year, so Dale could see both twins marry?

No.

A half year, to hold her first grandchild?

No.

We prayed for these things to the same God whose countenance we had once felt shining upon us. His answers came not from mountain tops or a prophet’s lips, but in PET scans and blood tests. Sometimes the answer, like the disease stalking us, was elusive. It had to be teased out of a thicket of jargon in a medical report. One report went organ by organ, and bone by bone, repeating “unremarkable, unremarkable, unremarkable.” We were almost giddy at this litany of averageness. But then, following that long train came the phrase “…other increased hepatic metastases.”

No, no, no.

The repeated rejections of our prayers reminded me of a rabbi with a puckish sense of humor who once said: “God answers every prayer…only sometimes the answer is no.”

Now, with her life span measured in weeks, we were down to our final prayer: let us out of the hospital, so that Dale could spend her last hours at home. As one of the doctors treating her said to me, “The hospital is no place to die.”

Dale and I sharing happier times

He had a point. The beeping, buzzing machines, the whispering nurses hovering like spirits over their patients in the dead of night, the young residents posing their questions to the groggy and confused on their early morning rounds—the hospital is not the place for rest, least of all one’s final rest.

We hadn’t planned to be at the end of a long hallway filled with difficult cases. This chapter of the story began a week before, when we went to see the oncologist in his office. The reason for the appointment—we thought—was to start a new round of chemo. But the doctor said Dale was too weak and urged her to check into the hospital across the street. “Once you’re stabilized you can go home,” he said. That sounded straightforward, but it was the moment a trap door opened beneath our feet. We hadn’t been home since.

Now, getting her there would be the last act of love I could perform for her. So I went to work, making arrangements. And I prayed.

Dale’s room overlooked the East River. She had always wanted to live by the water. Sometimes, when she fell into a drug-induced slumber, I’d watch the ripples on river’s surface going this way and that, resembling Grand Central commuters scrambling for their trains home. White caps formed, rode the currents briefly and disappeared, evoking the many who had come to the City, shined briefly in their fields, and then vanished.

On our sixth and next-to-last day in the hospital, the doctor told me it was too risky to send Dale home. Our journey would end in the hospital room with the river view.

When he left, I took my seat by the window. Enveloped in a protective numbness, I sat listening to the cawing sea gulls. Several swooped past the window, gliding on unseen currents. They seemed as joyful as students leaving school for summer break, or as souls freed from the burden of material existence. Outside a lone brown barge moved along at a stately pace, as if leading a funeral procession.

Photo by yukari harada on Unsplash

Looking back, I see that Dale and I had been living out our own, scaled-down version of an epic. Like Odysseus and Moses, we had been striving mightily to get home. Wily Odysseus made it. Moses, teacher and lawgiver, did not.

And yet, Moses was granted a final mountaintop view of the land he could not enter. It was a view that turned into a vision, a vision which sustained him in his disappointment and loneliness. The idea that even the hardest “no” might be softened by an unsought “yes” gave me strength. Perhaps my last prayer had been answered when Dale’s pain ended and a new journey began. I recalled those gulls, gliding high above the sun-dappled water, and realized that this time the answer had been “yes.”