The Night Before

This entry from Viola.

I’m looking across the room at a photograph taken during our first summer. He’s so handsome, smiling his unselfconscious wide smile. I know Alice is taking this picture, as we sit on a bench in Langley, Washington after great plates of Swedish pancakes at the local breakfast joint. It’s before you could tell that she had a rare nerve disease; the camera is steady and trained perfectly on us. I look thinner than I remember, totally infatuated, happy beyond words.
There’s a certain lightness in this photo that I try to recapture as I stare. For a couple of years, Peter and I have felt the weight of all mankind on our shoulders. Deaths, family matters, responsibilities, a new college degree (for him), retirement (for me) a new career (for him) and so much else. I let the image burn itself into my heart. The photo was taken on one of our first excursions, to the Pacific Northwest, where we made love in a log castle in late afternoon sun as the wind whipped across Puget Sound, making the windows rattle.
As I think about tomorrow, the beginning of chemotherapy for Peter, I try to go back, back to that simple time when our lively happiness meant we might hike for the morning, or bend deep in a forest to inspect a tiny fern, or eat sloppily from metal bowls of muscles in a honky tonk close by. We had each seen a lot of sad things before this photo, and yet, we seemed young and untouched. In another photo on this blog, we strike a similar pose at the top of the Eiffel Tower in a drenching, freezing ice storm. Happy as we look then, the cancer was growing in him.
I’ve tried to prepare for his chemo—I’ve made sweeping shopping trips into town for soft foods and a thermometer, selecting hard candy for a bowl by his chair, batteries for emergencies and trash bags and sanitizing products and special soaps. I’ve had blankets cleaned and bought soft sheets for the futon in his office if he decides to sleep there in the afternoons. I’m trying to get into the 20-second hand washing routine before and after I touch him.
I can’t keep my hands off him, of course. It’s like I’m afraid he will suddenly jump on a train to a distant destination, and we will be rudely separated. We know we are lucky and his prognosis is good, but it’s going to be hellish, nonetheless. I watched as he shaved his head in preparation for tomorrow, looking back at me in the mirror as he did. I know that, no matter what we do, we will never be prepared.
The sun is going down and it’s time for me to come in from the yurt. Before I do, I tear my eyes from the photograph and look outside at the beautiful Mayacamas in a strange, fiery dusk. We are lucky in so many ways, I tell myself again. Lucky enough to live in beauty, lucky to have each other. And now, I make my way through the wintery garden to our wonderful, simple home in Kenwood. Night has fallen and the nightingale wails.