Tending to Endings (sixty-seven)
Louise has been my friend for a very long time. When I lived in San Diego, we would meet in her beautiful backyard and talk amongst the lush greenery and blooming hibiscus. She helped me through so many of my young adult questions and anxieties about relationships and college and career and worries over nuclear war (It was the 1980s). Louise and I both stopped drinking when we were very young with the help of a recovery community, and she is in front of me in age and sobriety years. I have long considered her an important mentor.
We share a love for words—reading and writing and finding precisely the right one for the occasion—and we share quirks like a tendency to overthink and a knack for wanting to solve problems far beyond our scope of influence. No matter how serious the topic, our conversations always include laughter. I don’t mean the awkward, cover-up-feelings kind, but full-belly laughter that comes from a shift in perspective and seeing our own ego-trappings more clearly.
It was 1989, my last year as a California resident, when Louise’s husband Gordon was injured in a car accident causing him to lose mobility and sensation from the neck down. Louise’s post-accident life began in a hospital room where Gordon was not expected to survive long. As a close friend, I had the privilege of seeing parts of their story unfold.
One of the things that continually surprises me about hard stories is that from a distance they seem monochromatic—all tragedy and ending. And in some ways that is the truth—so much is ending—losses like this one are devastating and traumatic. But up close, I see that there is movement and texture and the light casts various hues over every journey.
I noticed this first in Louise. When we talked on the phone, she would start by telling me how horrible and hopeless everything was—Louise is very expressive—at times she’d even say things like she sometimes wished they had both died in that accident. And then a bit later she would come upon a weird thing that one of the nursing aides had said that was funny and that clicked with her and the laughter would return to her voice. And I felt more secure that she would make it through the day.
I was at a loss on what to offer. I was young and self-centered and often afraid. I think I mostly wanted Louise to be ok, for me. She was my spiritual rock. I had not known Gordon well before the accident, but I had had dinner at their house a time or two and got to know his intelligence and quiet sense of humor. When I visited Gordon’s hospital room his helplessness frightened me and I didn’t know what to say. But I was aware of how earth shattering this loss was for my friend. Louise and Gordon had been married 19 years. They were utterly in love. I couldn’t see a clear path through this to any kind of happiness and that made me feel guilty and worried and confused.
After months in the hospital, Gordon suffering bouts of pneumonia and hovering between life and death, the medical staff recommended a long-term care facility. The paralysis was permanent. He would remain a quadriplegic and his doctors did not expect him to live long.
Instead, Louise brought Gordon home. They bought a motorized wheelchair. Friends in our community built a ramp to the front door. A health aide came to help part time. Gordon began a slow recovery, and he and Louise began to learn how to live in these new circumstances.
I moved to Idaho, the year after that accident. Occasionally Louise would send an envelope from their address with a letter from each of them. Gordon could now type on the computer with a mouth stick. His letters were warm and intelligent and filled with details about ordinary life. I thought, He is a whole person! It was a revelation to me that this man who seemed barely conscious when I last saw him and who still could not move most of his body— was whole. I had his full voice in that letter as proof.
I eventually moved again and Louise and I fell touch for about twenty-five years. But I continued to carry Louise’s story with me.
Louise is Episcopalian and I remember once in her backyard she said, “I don’t think God makes bad things happen, but I believe God can bring good out of anything.” At the time this seemed a bit of a demotion for God—I would’ve preferred a higher power that would never ever let my spouse become a quadriplegic. But the years since, in the light of my own losses that sentence has turned to reveal a different hue. What once was: Oh please, not that God, turned to, Thank God I know you can stay sober through that. Your life can re-open even after that.
I thought of Louise often during difficult times—remembered how she continued to be open and honest through all of it. I found myself sharing Louise’s story with others at particular moments. For me it is story that keeps platitudes from being empty, story that acknowledges the texture and emotion and hard-won gains.
In 2018, I was interviewing for positions at San Diego colleges, thinking John and I might move there. During one of my stays, I tried to find Louise, which meant leaving notes with random people who sometimes saw her but did not have her contact information. About a month later, Louise sent me an email. We connected by phone and I heard her beautiful laugh and her stories.
I learned Gordon died of pneumonia in 2008, nineteen years after the accident. He was 74.
“You were his caregiver for nineteen years?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I never really saw myself as only that, so that helped.”
Louise told me she was the liturgist for her church, St. David’s, and she also also wrote (and still writes) a monthly column for their newsletter, which Gordon edited using his mouth stick. They were partners and spouses for thirty-eight years, nineteen before the accident and nineteen afterwards. She spoke of Gordon and their life together with so much love in her voice.
Louise has never been one to sugar-coat, and she continued to express how hard things had been, saying, “A lot of the time we lived suspended between crisis and chronicity!” Mostly, though, she told poignant, quirky, and happy stories about what clearly was, and continued to be, a full life. Louise was still Louise.
It was a few months after our visit that I went to help care for my mom during her decline into cancer and Alzheimer’s. My dad and I would take turns going on a walk each day while the other stayed with my mom. Often, I would call Louise as I walked the ocean path outside of my parents’ Maui home, and I never had to pretend everything was ok. Louise understood that it was not ok at all. I could spill all of my fear and utter disbelief—that my mom had to go through this painful and confusing and traumatic end—and there was so little that we could do to make anything better.
Louise’s story was different than mine. She was a caregiver for nineteen years for the love of her life. But I knew there were things she could hear that few others would know about in such detail. That we were reunited just when I needed, not only her story, but her? That was my idea of a Higher Power bringing something worthy from the rubble.
Where I was going when I started writing (what I thought would be) a short anecdote about Louise, was a reflection, maybe even an explanation, about why I share stories. Even the personal ones, and often while I am still living them and don’t yet have answers or know the way through.
John and I are now six weeks from moving into temporary housing in Salt Lake where we will await a call from the hospital telling us there is a liver that matches his blood type on the way. The prognosis is good. But we have a formidable story ahead with many unknowns. I have been sharing this journey often when I talk with friends, and occasionally here, and also on CaringBridge, a social media site designed to help families communicate during a health crisis.
Readers often mention openness as a quality of my writing, maybe saying something like, “You’re so honest!” Sometimes they are expressing gratitude and other times I am pretty sure I’m making them uncomfortable. I get that! Sometimes I make myself uncomfortable!
Even for me, the question of what to share and where is sometimes complicated, and I don’t take it lightly, especially when it involves other people’s stories.
We started the CaringBridge site originally because John—who is famous for his ability to tell stories, particularly those in which he the protagonist—got tired of telling the story of his cancer by the time he got through all five adult kids. He wants people to know and to stay in communication with family and friends, but he prefers that I write it out so they can at least have the basics before he jumps in with whatever is going on today. I am incredibly blessed to have a partner who likes my writing even when I am writing about him.
And while, yes, I tease him about his Johnny West Lore, I know we share a belief that living through hard times a bit more openly can sometimes be helpful to others, too. Not because we have answers, but sometimes it helps to see some of the terrain up close ahead of time. If so, then that helps us to feel useful during a time that can be very self-absorbing. And of course, our main reason for sharing on CaringBridge is because we want to stay connected to our community of support.
As for me, I’ve been a sharer my whole life. Over the years, I have learned to accept this quality as well as try to avoid some of its pitfalls. I question what is over-sharing—either because it’s self-centered or not relevant or too much vulnerability for the context. Or because it’s someone else’s turn! I’m sure I don’t always make the right call.
Writing is my favorite form of sharing because it slows me down enough to see the nooks and nuances of a story, the hue cast by the current light. I have a journal and loved ones like Louise and John who get my first drafts. And then sometimes, after reflection and a prayer in the form of a question–Is there anything here for someone else?–I go to the page and write as honestly as I can, usually spending an unreasonable amount trying to find exactly the right word for the occasion. Sometimes it turns into something.
I share because I enjoy it and it feels a more natural way to live for me. And to untangle confusing thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict. And as a counterweight to cultural habits that seem to isolate people unnecessarily during times of need. I share to invite others, who are so inclined, to do the same.
Louise’s story reminded me—when the details and the longevity of it rose into view—of what I have gained from the stories of others, and how they have accompanied me through some of my hardest times. It is not an exaggeration to say that the stories of others have saved me.
Louise and I talk regularly these days—I usually call while I walk on the trails behind my house and she is in her kitchen or sunny back room. John met Louise over zoom at the beginning of the pandemic and in 2021 we went to San Diego. We ate take-out Mexican in her backyard and visited next to the hibiscus blooms and the statue of St. Francis I remembered from my college years.
And then, this summer, because there is a six-month waiting period before John receives the MELD points for cancer that will move him high on the Transplant List, we were able to spend time doing things we love which included a family reunion in Mission Beach. This time, we met Louise for lunch at a restaurant on the boardwalk with windows looking out onto the Pacific. I don’t even remember what we talked about that day—we talk so often now—only that it was so very good for the three of us to be sitting around a table together.
I share to remember what matters, and what lasts. I share so that when the details of our stories overlap, even miles apart and years later, we can find each other.
Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name an email below and it will arrive in your in-box about once a month. You can leave comments below, and you can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. Thank you for being here. Laura