Bring Bellflowers to My Funeral

The first thing I heard was not my own heartbeat. It was the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum, a sound that peeled me off whatever dark surface I had been floating on and dragged me toward a light I did not want to see. I could not open my eyes. My lids felt like they had been sutured shut. But the sounds came through clear enough, layered and strange, as if I were listening from the bottom of a swimming pool. A door slammed. Something metal clattered to the floor. A woman was crying, and past the crying, someone was counting. "One, two, three, four..." That was not a prayer. That was chest compressions. I tried to say wait. I tried to say I am here, I am still here, but my mouth would not move. Only my hearing worked, and it worked too well. Every beep, every scuff, every breath from every person in that room arrived with terrible precision. Then I heard my mother. "Caroline! Caroline, answer me!" She used my legal name, the one she had given me and then spent the next two decades correcting because she thought Caroline was too formal for a little girl. Hearing it now, screamed in that broken voice, hurt worse than anything else. "Ma'am, you need to step back," a man said. Not a doctor. Security, maybe. "Please, we need the space." "Don't touch me. That's my daughter." A different voice cut in, smooth and commanding, the kind of voice that expects doors to open before it reaches them. I knew that voice better than my own. "Let go of her. Everyone, step back. Give them room to work." Julian. My husband of six years, standing somewhere to the left of my head while someone pounded rhythm into my chest. I wanted to picture his face. I could not. All I had was his voice and the memory of the way he said let go, and I was not sure which of us he meant. "Doctor, what is happening?" That was my mother again, lower now, gasping. "Mrs. Ellery, your daughter went into cardiac arrest," a woman said. The doctor. Young, maybe, by the sound of her voice. Confident but careful. "We've been running the code for four minutes. We're going to keep going, but I need to talk to you about what outcomes we're looking at." "Outcomes." Julian said it like it was a word he was testing for flavor. "What does that mean." "It means we need permission to continue," the doctor said. "Your wife's heart stopped. We've been able to restore rhythm twice, but she's not sustaining it. If we can't stabilize her, we may need to consider how much further to intervene." The room went quiet except for the monitor and the compressions and the beep beep beep that I was starting to think would be the last thing I ever heard. "Continue," my mother said instantly. "Continue, whatever you have to do, don't stop." Julian did not speak. "Mr. Ellery?" the doctor pressed. "You're her medical proxy. I need you to confirm." The silence stretched. I counted. One second. Two. Three. Four. And then my husband said, "How long has she been without oxygen." "Four minutes. We've had two rounds of epinephrine. She's still not breathing on her own." "And if you do bring her back." "Mr. Ellery, we can discuss that after." "I'd like to discuss it now." There was no cruelty in his voice. That was the worst part. There was only a terrible patience, the kind a man uses when he is about to say something reasonable that will destroy someone. "She signed a living will four years ago. I was there. If there's no meaningful recovery, she wouldn't want machines." My mother made a sound I had never heard a human being make. "Julian." Her voice cracked on his name, which she had never once spoken without politeness. "Julian, you cannot stand there and tell me my daughter would rather die. You cannot." "I'm telling you what she told me." "She's thirty-four. She has a whole life." "I know." "You say you know and then you stand here and talk about machines like she's a car you're ready to scrap." The doctor cut in. "This isn't a decision either of you has to make in the next ten seconds. We have time, but not a lot. I'm going to keep the code running. Mrs. Bennett, if you'll come with me, I can explain the prognosis." "He's not her next of kin," my mother said. "I'm her mother." "The legal proxy is the husband," the doctor said gently. "But your daughter has rights, and so do you. Come with me." Footsteps. A curtain dragging on a rail. Julian's voice, low, directed at someone who was not my mother: "Call the office. Tell them I'll be unreachable for a few hours." The office. He was calling the office while my heart was learning how to stop. The compressions continued. A rib cracked, and I felt the sound of it more than the pain. Somewhere in that underwater dark, I made a decision I could not yet articulate: I was going to wake up. Not because I wanted to live. Because I wanted to know what my husband meant. The beeping changed. Someone said, "We've got her back." Another voice said, "Pressure's rising. She's stabilizing." And then, because the universe has an impossible sense of timing, I heard my mother's voice again, farther away now, muffled by a curtain and a hallway and a grief that would not sit still. "Don't let him near her. Don't you let that man near my baby." I woke in pieces. First my fingers, then my throat, then the terrible knowledge that someone had intubated me while I was gone. I could not speak. I could not move my head more than a few degrees. But when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the clock on the wall, and it said three forty-seven in the afternoon, and I understood, with a clarity that made my chest hurt worse than the cracked rib, that whatever had happened in this room, the people in it believed I had not heard a word. So I kept my eyes open and said nothing. I learned to move my fingers before I learned to move my voice. I learned to track the nurses' rotations, the shift changes, the pattern of when Julian came and when he did not. I learned that the machines beeped in different tones depending on what my body was doing. And I learned that my mother sat with me every single day, usually in the chair by the window, usually not speaking, sometimes reading out loud from a paperback she had bought in the gift shop. On day three, I could move my right hand enough to press the call button. On day nine, they extubated me. My first words were not thank you. My first words were "Where is my husband." The nurse, a woman in her fifties named Denise who had been kind to me in ways I had not asked for, hesitated. That hesitation told me more than Julian's voice ever had. "He's been in and out," she said. "Your mom's been here almost the whole time. She went down to the cafeteria. I can call her." "Don't." She looked at me. "Honey, you need your people right now." I needed information. I needed to know what my husband had said about machines and living wills and how long I had been without oxygen. I needed to know what he had meant when he told the doctor to consider outcomes. And I needed to know whether the second morning of my life, the one I had been pulled back into, was going to be spent recovering or investigating. On day eleven, Julian came. He came in with flowers that were not flowers I liked, a cellophane-wrapped bundle of pink lilies from the gift shop, and he sat down in the chair my mother usually occupied and took my hand like a man who had practiced the gesture in a mirror. "Caroline," he said. "You scared the hell out of me." I looked at him. I had spent eleven days reconstructing his face from memory and the reconstruction had not matched the reality. He looked older. Tired. Handsome in the way the magazines liked. And there was something in his eyes that I could not name, something that had not been there six years ago at the altar and had been there in the room when he told a doctor to consider whether I was worth bringing back. "Tell me what happened," I said. My voice was a stranger's voice. Thin and scraped raw. "You had a pulmonary embolism," he said. "They said it was a clot. It came out of nowhere. One minute you were fine and the next you weren't." "Where was I." "At home. You were in the kitchen. I found you on the floor." I remembered the kitchen. I remembered a Saturday morning and a coffee cup and a phone call I had not finished. I did not remember falling. "You told them to stop," I said. Julian's hand tightened on mine. Just slightly. Just enough. "What?" "In the room. When they were doing compressions. You told them to consider outcomes." He was quiet for a long moment. Then he did the thing I had been afraid of. He looked sad. He looked reasonable. He looked like a man about to explain himself with complete sincerity. "I was trying to protect you," he said. "You told me once you never wanted to be kept alive by machines. We talked about it. Remember? After my father died. All those tubes. You said you'd rather go." "I said that when I was twenty-six and we were talking about your father." "And I took it seriously. I still do." He leaned forward. "Caroline, I watched them c***k your ribs. I watched them put a tube down your throat. I was looking at my wife and not recognizing her. If you had come back as someone else, if you had come back without--" He stopped. Swallowed. "I was trying to make the call you would have wanted." I said nothing. Because the truth was, I had said those things after his father died. I had sat on the edge of our bed and told him I never wanted to be a burden and he had nodded and held me and I had believed, in the way you believe things at twenty-six, that we had agreed. But I had also heard his voice in that room. And it had not sounded like grief. It had sounded patient. "Who is Andrea?" I asked. The name had surfaced on day six, when a nurse's aide had written it on a slip of paper and left it on my tray, and I had looked at it for an hour before folding it into the pocket of my hospital gown. Julian's face did not change. That was the thing about Julian. He had spent his whole life learning not to flinch. "Andrea Roth is a colleague. Why?" "No reason. I heard her name." "You heard a lot of names. You were in and out." "I was." He stood up and set the lilies on the windowsill, where every visitor who came in would see them and think what a devoted husband. "You need to rest. The doctors said no stress. I'll come back tomorrow." "Julian." He paused at the door. "If I had died," I said, "what would you have done with the house." He turned and looked at me. And for half a second, half a breath, I saw the patience in his eyes turn into something else, something that was already calculating, already arranging the answer. "That's a horrible thing to ask," he said softly. "Why would you ask that." Because your voice in that room was not your father's voice, I wanted to say. Because you told a doctor to consider outcomes like you were reviewing a contract. Because I have been lying here for eleven days listening to the machines beep and trying to remember the last time you looked at me the way my mother looks at me. But I said nothing. He left. And on the windowsill, the lilies sat in their cellophane like an apology for something I had not been given the words to name yet. That night, I asked Denise for a notebook and a pen. She brought me a small one with a black cover, the kind you buy at a drugstore, and a cheap ballpoint, and she did not ask me what it was for. I wrote my mother's name at the top of the first page. Then Julian's name below it. Then a third name I did not recognize, which I had heard in the code, from someone on the phone outside my curtain. Then I drew a line across the page and wrote: Thirty days. Find out what he meant. I did not yet know where the thirty days came from. I only knew that when the doctor had talked about my recovery, she had used a number. A chunk of time. A window in which anything could still go wrong. I closed the notebook. I looked at the clock. It said eleven fifty-two at night, and outside my window the hospital parking lot was mostly empty, and somewhere out there Julian was driving home to a house that was half mine, to a life that was half mine, to a set of plans I was beginning to suspect had never included me in the version of the future he had been building. I had come back from the dark. Now I wanted to know why.