Intimacy and Endings

The woman who lives across the street called to tell me that D wasn't doing well. D is in palliative care now, she says. D has a couple of days, maybe a week to live, she says. I don't say much. Our dinner guests go home so that we can cry and share these uncomfortably intimate details with our children.

D is a neighbour. She and her partner have two burly Chow Chows. D and A are a quietly gregarious couple, which seems like a contradiction, but isn't. They limit their impact to those who welcome it. Think of them this way: like rainbows dressed in light-weight trench coats, buttoned to the neck.

D's front garden is a meticulously plotted piece of land the size of a hospital room, with playful iron frogs and a small goldfish pond covered tastefully with wire to foil neighbourhood cats. It’s a gift to the street, our tiny paradise with a winding walkway. Last spring, D’s garden was on the City Tour. The kids on the street sold lemonade outside our house that Saturday. They made a killing.

I keep typing D’s full name and then deleting back the letters, D…. to D. I don’t want to reveal her name, and I don’t want to know that she is dying. It’s more than I should know. Yes, we have made meals. Yes, we have talked about the C word and shared chatter about the kids (she loves one daughter’s singing voice – and she knows from voices - she heard her singing on the way to school. She loves the way my other daughter faces the world – there’s something about her, she says. She loves the way this street welcomed her and A. The last street they lived on wasn’t so welcoming to two women with two dogs with black tongues.

I find myself wondering whether D is fighting or finding peace among her good friends and her beloved, or struggling hard against the end. Other neighbours will visit, but I will not. It seems wrong to go, an invasion. Instead I lie in bed and send her blessings. Sometimes I cry. A had to put the older Chou down at the end of last week. I wonder whether she told D, or if a fresh secret loss now hangs between them, a body in a hammock. Does the haunting intimacy of death allow secrets? Only if there is time.

The day after the phone call, the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. I watched videos. I could watch the force of water, the crashing power of mother earth. I allowed myself to watch movies. That reckless large-scale devastation was mythic - and therefore at first - less than real. I watched as a single car was swept into a crashing channel of rushing water. The lens was close enough to see the make and licence plate. The windows all rolled up. No one inside. I thought. But just before the car smacked against the other shrapnel and pitched down, the back windshield wiper make one last sweep across the glass. That small mechanical gesture joined us, the invisible human in that car and me - in the aching intimacy of death. I willed it to.

I think D is still alive. My ten year old says the Chow Chow, (Rita Mae) needed to go ahead, to get things ready for D. Maybe she’s right. I cling to that – the story of a dog and a rainbow walking some place where no one gets tripped up by cancer or natural disasters. And I wonder who is getting things ready for the 10,000 souls (maybe more) caught off guard by the shaking, combative earth and angry releases that followed.