Rear Guard

Sunday 29 April afternoon

Lara and I slept well together in the same room, different cods, and I managed to wake up twice at the precise moment she needed my help. We brought it off without a hitch, with assistance from the garde-malades.

Lara hasn't given up, make no mistake. She is still fighting as we would expect her too. "Give me anything that will make me better", she said this morning, whether it be food or medication. She insisted on a list of everything they are giving her with an explanation of what effect it was supposed to have on her.

Point is that the rest of us have kind of fallen into her trap. Take the distribution of her clothes, bags and jewelry. What other interpretation is there than that Lara was expecting an imminent demise? In actual fact, what probably drove her is that the distribution game was another manifestaion of her will to control things. (Have we ever known her any different?) She wanted to make sure that the process went off the way she wanted, down to the last detail. Also, she wanted to take the burden away from me of having to divvy up the spoils of her life afterwards, in a moment where sadness and grief would take a maximum toll on the one she loves most of all.

Similarly, the long parade of visitors filing by her bedside - in the hospital and even more so here at home - had the character of definitive goodbyes, of one last adieu. You extrapolate them and you find demise. The friends sitting by her side and stroking her hands, assumed the poise of a death wake, unwittingly preparing her for a place where she was not yet ready to depart to. She enjoyed the ministrations, as balm to her soul, but not at all the direction they were taking her. I am not dead yet, she reminded us. 

For it doesn't mean that Lara is resigned to die - even if she might. She will do anything to stay alive and be together with her loved ones for as long as possible. True, she looks diminished in the big hospital bed. A shadow of what she once was. My eyes go over the photos of hers that adorn our walls, reminding me of more prosperous and happier times, and I just want to cry. A vivacious, blossoming, vibrant woman, while now, by contrast, her eyes lie deep in their sockets and her face is marked by abrasions from the other night. Her shoulders are nowhere near the athletic frame of the fine swimmer she was.The giant oxygen mask with the white plastic bellow hanging down from it, obscures most of her face and muffles her voice, weak as it has become already. Then again she still musters the twinkle in her eyes from time to time, or dishes out a sample of her morbid wit.

Yet, she may bounce back; we have seen it before. She certainly aspires to. We are giving her homeopathic products and pills that may enhance the formation of healthy cells. Even if they remind us of rearguard skirmishes, we are proud to fight at her side.