JHFARR.COM

I was a piece of work. So much baggage. But all she felt when she laid eyes on me so many years ago was love. “From the very first, I knew,” she said, and repeated it every time she tried to lift me up. I used to get so depressed that she would cry. “You have so many gifts,” she’d say, “I love you, and I always knew…”

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It was in the spring of ’76 or ’77. I’d left Austin a year or so before in my Saab 96 V-4 pulling a homemade camping trailer I’d bought from a redneck deer hunter and headed north to Chestertown, Maryland, because my grandmother’s house was available for a time while she was off in Maine. Lady the Wonder Dog was with me. The little trailer had room for me to sleep and everything I owned in the world, which wasn’t much. An oxyacetylene welding outfit minus the tanks, a few metal sculptures (a moth, a mosquito, and a bat), some books and clothes, a 12-string electric guitar, a Heathkit amp, a bike—certainly no computer gear. I didn’t even have a radio. The back of the thing opened up and made a little kitchen with a Coleman camp stove. I could pull off the road, make instant coffee and a sandwich, and survive. It wasn’t all that hard, except for being terrified.

I had two university degrees and about a thousand bucks. The idea was to find a place to live and be an artist. My Uncle Bob the doctor met me at Granny’s house and gave me a key. He checked up on me every now and then to make sure I didn’t steal anything, but I was cool with that because I thought he liked me. That first month I spent there was kind of like being dead. My clearest memory is of a sinus infection that spread to my ears so I couldn’t hear a thing. That night I thought there was someone shouting outside and walked around the place with a flashlight in the fog, a good a metaphor as any for the time. I didn’t know anyone in town (population, 2,500), got sick a lot, flung the Ching, and wrote sad songs about a woman I’d left behind. God must love at least a few young stupid men or else he’d let the fates eviscerate us. Perhaps the tiny spark of Jesus makes him sentimental. I even had some leather sandals.

Before I ran away from Texas, there were fantasies of Maine. I’d even corresponded with the owner of a farm in northern Aroostook County who was looking for a house sitter. He assured me it was gorgeous and that there were moose and eagles, but the snow was very deep and I would need to gut it out till spring. I sat with this a while until the ember died. It might have been the wolves.

Nonetheless my Aunt Mary lived there, much farther south down by Augusta, hosting her mother for late spring and early summer in a 200-year-old barely restored Cape Cod on 35 acres in the woods. With nothing happening in Chestertown, I thought this might be a clever base for selling metal insects at a string of coastal art shows and resolved to try. My parents were headed there as well, my father having just retired from the FAA. He and my mother had blown up their Oklahoma City lives and hit the road with a pickup truck and knock-off Airstream. All the old man cared about was drinking a glass of vodka at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., riding his bike for an hour, coming back for coffee, more vodka, unfiltered cigarettes, and bacon before fidgeting all day while my mother read Family Circle in the trailer.

I wasn’t up there very long. A purer hell than both my parents, my father’s sister and their mother, together with my uncle Tom by marriage—a retired merchant marine machinist from Brooklyn who thought I should be welding farm equipment—could hardly be imagined. It was drippy wet along the coast, all the art show ladies cared about were fishing boats and lobsters, and I freaked out but good. Granny’s house in Maryland was still available and I decamped. Besides, there was something about Chestertown that appealed to me. It was peaceful, there was water. We used to visit Granny in my childhood, Uncle Bob had been a doctor there forever, and I felt it was my birthright in a way. Who knew what I would find?

[continue reading…]

“Is this John? I’m Kathleen’s nurse at Taos Living Center. I need your permission to send your wife to the ER at Holy Cross. She doesn’t look good at all.”

Me, buying lampshades at fucking Walmart, yanking my mask off to speak clearly into the phone. Everyone has disappeared, the world gone black…

“I don’t understand. I’m supposed to bring her home from stroke rehab tomorrow!”

“Her vital signs are very bad. Pulse rate 25, oxygen 42. She’s declining.”

“Declining? What… Oh God. I’ll be there right away!”

“It may take 30 minutes for the ambulance to transfer her. I’m calling now.”

I was almost at the register. Hung up and paid. Out the door and in the car. Old men and fat ladies shuffled by. It was a sunny day. Thirty minutes? I’d better go home first, I thought. I’ll need long pants and a sweatshirt at the hospital. And a phone charger, and my laptop. Maybe a sandwich, change of underwear.

Halfway home, trying to breathe. Am I really going all the way back? The phone rang once again: “Mister Farr? This is [another nurse] at the Emergency Department at Holy Cross. Your wife is declining rapidly. The EMTs just pulled in. We’ll have her here in 30 seconds…”

“I’m on my way!”

What the hell was going on?

Backed into a driveway and turned around, let a pickup truck go by. A slow one, driven by an old guy with a VFW license plate. He crept so slowly over the speed bumps by the little church I almost rammed him. If I’d had a gun I might have used it. Arrived at Holy Cross, parked close, pulled on my mask, and strode in through the plague door. Two people stood up to take my temperature and ask me questions. Oh no, you don’t.

“My wife is dying in the emergency room!”

“I’ll take you…”

So many corridors. It’s just a little hospital. Are they all like this?

“In here. Can I get you anything?”

Just then they wheeled her in and pulled the blanket back. She was in a tight fetal position, eyes closed, mouth open, all her color gone. I was sure that she was dead. Oh God. She wasn’t though. I could see her breathing, and she moaned on every exhalation.

[Shallow breath, “nnnghh,” two seconds, another breath, “annnghh,” two seconds… ]

They took blood and urine samples, hooked her up to monitors, stuck needles in her wrists, taped an oximeter sensor on her finger. Someone else came in and took an X-ray of her lungs. That wasn’t easy. Nurses came and went, glancing at the dancing colored lines. Competent-looking doctors showed up. One asked, “And you are…?”

“John Farr. I’m her husband.”

He flipped through pages on a clipboard. “I’ve been conferring with Dr. [so-and-so], the one who saw her last time.”

He told me that the chest X-ray showed her lungs were massively infected, then turned to his colleague and went on in a softer voice. I made out “ejection fraction, 30%” because I already knew that and I swear they rolled their eyes.

“What happens now?”

“Well, we can send her back to Taos Living Center, and—”

“We’re never going there again!”

“Are you prepared to take her home?”

“No way, no…”

“Then we’ll work on getting her admitted and make her comfortable.”

Say what?

They spun around and left. A nurse showed up with coffee. They wheeled her to another room and closed the door. Shallow breath, “nnnghh,” two seconds, another breath, “annnghh,” two seconds. She had an oxygen mask on now, more color, and was stretched out on her back, but her eyes were barely open and I couldn’t tell if she could hear me. “Nnnnghh,” gasp, then two seconds. I counted every pause. She moved around a little and tried to pull the sensors off.

This went on for several hours. I was freezing in my shorts. A nurse brought me a blanket that I wrapped around my shoulders. Finally they had a room for us down endless corridors. A different nurse hooked up a Tylenol IV, the moaning stopped, and yet another doctor knocked and introduced himself.

The full import of “make her comfortable” hadn’t registered yet, but the latest doctor said it wasn’t bad lungs but a second stroke that cut her down. He recommended morphine. I consented after he agreed to only half a dose each time. I didn’t want her knocked out, see, if we could talk. It calmed her and the gaspy inhalations weren’t so harsh.

Someone from the kitchen brought me food. I wolfed it down. But something had changed from one room to the next. She wasn’t getting nutrients or fluids. No sensors stuck onto her chest, no oximeter wired into a console, no instruments. Just a single IV port, a catheter, a urine bag. Oh no.

God help us, they were only feeding me!

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By Saturday night I was tired enough to wish the whole world dead. No exceptions, either. Nodding off every minute. I talked constantly to Kathy who never shifted her position, breathing in that way that people who are dying do. My sister Mary the nurse was driving up from Tucson with her dog. “Tell Kathy I’m coming!” she texted from Hatch at 3:14 a.m. I did.

Mary showed up in the morning, said goodbye to Kathy, went away, came back. We talked and talked. I hadn’t seen her since forever. All this time Kathy was just lying there, mouth open, breathing like a fish washed up on the sand. Hearing is supposedly the last thing to go. My sister thought it might do Kathy good to hear us laughing, like she’d know we’d be all right. That made me feel a little better, but of course we couldn’t tell.

By late Sunday night, I was so exhausted I thought my heart would quit. Kidneys, liver, something, blood flow from my ears. Maybe I’d lose consciousness and split my skull. Kathy was either sleeping or too far gone to notice. I pushed my recliner up against her bed and curled up in a ball. I was dead already. If she made it through till morning, we could say goodbye, otherwise I’d wake up and find her cold.

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Someone else was in the room. David, the tall nurse, with a stethoscope. I saw sunlight on the windows. He checked her heart and watched the quiet little gasps. “She’s close,” he said, and left. I got up, pushed the chair away, and knelt down by her bed. The next 90 minutes were the most intimate and powerful we ever had.

She was conscious. Her mouth was open underneath the oxygen mask. I saw black patches on her tongue and lips from circulation shutting down. Her eyes were open, barely. Maybe she could see. She might have moaned, I don’t remember. What I do is that she tensed her back like she was trying to sit up. I put my arm around her back and lifted. (My hand knew every bone.) She had one elbow on the bed to give support and reached up with her other arm to pull my shoulder. Her head fell over on my chest and she relaxed. Her breathing got a little softer while I talked. We stayed that way a long time.

I had to lay her down again but slid my arm behind her neck to hold her head so we could see. I’d cried a lot but something changed. Her breathing had become more agitated. I remembered my sister telling me that sometimes dying people need to know their loved ones will be all right so they can go. The gown had slipped from her left shoulder. Her skin was warm and beautiful. All at once I wasn’t worried. The love poured from me like I was on fire. I told her I would be okay, that I would write a book about us, that our love was greater than our bodies and would never die. Her respiration slowed and all was softer. She shot an image right into my brain to tell me where she wanted to be buried. I got down nose to nose with her. We looked right in each other’s eyes and held it. I didn’t talk or cry.

The way it went from there was gentle as can be. The pauses in between her breaths grew longer until I knew to lay her down. I took off the oxygen mask, fluffed her hair some with my fingers, stood up, and pushed the button to call the nurse.

All this time we’d been left totally alone. I told her everything, far more than written here. I know she heard me and she hears me still.

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“Would you like the window open?” I heard someone say. (The nurse, of course.)

“Uh, sure. That would be real nice.”

“People in Taos like to do that when someone passes. You know, to—”

“Yes, I understand.”

The levers for the window cranks had been removed to keep things closed because of covid. She went to fetch one and came back.

“We’re not supposed to, but…”

“I know she’d like that. Thank you.”

How it was and how it is. How it’s meant to be. Forty-four years together, people. The thing that I was born for, plain as day. This time, this place, this woman. Simpler than I ever dreamed it was. If only I had known!

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Dear Friends: A few links…

• I’ve written and posted an obituary here.

• For photos of the last eight years of our life in New Mexico (posted chronologically, newest at the top), see my SmugMug gallery.

• You’ll find hundreds of posts about us at this website by using any search field (“Kathy,” “wife”, etc.) or choosing a Category or Tags to search. Use your imagination. Some of them are in the Top Posts category linked in the menu bar.

• Most recent articles from JHFARR.COM are cross-posted at my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to for free.

• Washington College President Powell’s letter to WC alumni is available here. I urge everyone to read it to learn the full breadth and depth of Kathy’s academic career.

• There’s an email link for me on the “About” page.

Thanks for your comments. I know she’s read them all. – JHF

In the middle of tearing up the joint, attacking piles of dusty junk that’s walled us in after 17 years together in the old adobe. Blow ‘em up, sort the pieces, make more piles in other places while I vacuum. The whole damn shitteroo is worthless if I don’t fill the trash can, though. Has to be done so she can find things after Easter when I bring her home. Hah, “home.” Not the home she wants nor I myself but this is paradise compared to fucking rehab, more about which in a minute while I bitch about the nails.

I took a break to feed the birds, assuming they could beat the squirrels. There was snow all over the ground because that’s spring at 7,000 feet. All I did was walk a foot into the brush pile to poke some poor dead yellow roses in the heap and brighten up the scene, then ouch goddammit as a broke off twig thing stuck me in the ankle. No, not that. In the bottom of my left foot, right through the beat-up Eddie Bauer moccasins I’ve decided are my winter shoes, the longest rusty nail I’ve ever seen, poking from a little four-inch piece of wood I never saw in all my life but there it is and now it’s jabbed me. Pull that sucker out like movie cowboys do with arrows shot into their thighs. A little blood. Oh God, the snow is full of nails! What a metaphor for Taos.

Driving to Urgent Care to get a tetanus shot was oddly fun. This is where it gets a little weird. The day was cold and gray, my wife imprisoned in the idiot shop, I’d just stepped on a rusty nail, but I could grab a mask and get a shot and be all right. Taking control in the avalanche of shit was rousing. The heater in the Dodge pumped gobs of air, the Fat Possum Records sampler I’d crammed into the stereo jumped in with an obscene Hasil Adkins track, and for the time it took to get inoculated and drive back here the world was fine and dandy. I found a cut with slide guitar and cranked it. So…

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Now about that clinic. The first thing is, you don’t get sick in Taos. Holy Cross Hospital is a healing place, but all the rest is scary. La frontera has always been where hardy souls shut grandpa in the shed until the banging stops. You need a root canal or dermatologist, you go to Santa Fe. For anything that kills you, there’s a $50,000 helicopter ride to Albuquerque. The purpose of a “rehab clinic” in a county with 14 souls per square mile is for Medicare to pay for salaries and help some people if they can. Training costs a lot of dough. I’ve met ferociously smart and dedicated staffers there, and then there are the ones I hear while my wife is on the phone who talk to her as if she’s stupid. She isn’t deaf or insane, she just had a stroke. Hello??

I realize everyone is doing what they can. But you can read about aphasia or the other common consequences of a stroke and know you have to hang on just a minute. This morning for example when I called my wife, she sounded almost normal, then happily informed me that “I actually drove myself to Chestertown this morning.” In Maryland, where we used to live. Oh boy.

“I don’t think so, honey.”

“Oh, right. Of course…” [she gets it though]

“But never mind all that, how was it?” [lightly spoken, better maybe]

“Just beautiful…” [okay, fine, excellent]

Then I told her I’d been texting with an old friend of ours in Maryland last night who had a lot to do on this Palm Sunday with her church job. A little bit of long-ago passed through the ether, maybe, in the midnight hour, and my honey picked up on it. For all I know she tried to say (or thought she had) that she’d been thinking about our old home town this morning, but it came out that she “drove” there. In any case she did recover [see above] and we shared a happy memory we have in common. Healing, brothers and sisters—can’t do this in a cold white place where no one knows they’re dealing with a lifelong musician, classical pianist, performer, college professor, and adventurer with three degrees, the brightest loving spirit I have ever known.

This entire process has smashed my face into the mirror, or the mud. The mud and blood. The fucking spiders underneath the bed, the lies I learned so long ago. No “what ifs” any more, I’m in the moment. The brain, it crackles. My heart is torn apart and bursting. I thought it would be worse but so far not. No strategies, no planning. I was born for this somehow. I have the wildest dreams of women, locomotives, music, houses with a porch and flowers. Just blew Sunday.

Back to work.

UPDATE 3-29-2021: I just talked to my wife and she sounded much better. Keep thinking good thoughts! (They work.) Home by Easter. – JHF

What the everloving hell? She turned and flopped and flailed her arms. This was crazy. “Honey, what’s the matter?” I pleaded in the dark at 3:00 a.m. No answer. Flop and spin, limbs slapping me all over, no words. Good God. I turned on the light: my honey was contorted, head turned to the right, eyes and mouth wide open. Breathing, couldn’t talk or move her eyes. Holy Mother of God. I wasn’t hysterical, though. This had to be a stroke or snakebite. I grabbed my phone and dialed 911. The EMTs showed up 15 minutes later., two guys wrestled the stretcher through the narrow doorway, scooped her up in the bottom sheet, loaded her in the back, and split. I followed in her car down the dark and empty road. It was freezing cold. The flashing ambulance lights were so bright I had to shield my eyes. They hit 65 mph on the main road heading for the hospital. Until then I’d been all business, only now it slammed me: “KATHY!!! STAY WITH US, HONEY!!!” I yelled, sobbing as I drove. Stupid husband trick, following the ambulance in the dark, all helpless like a fool.

Who knows what the hell they did to her as soon as we arrived. Probably every scan and test you ever heard of. Her mouth stayed open, her eyes began to move a little, and then she moved her arms. I spent the next five hours wrestling with her to keep her from yanking out the tubes and wires. Every 30 minutes a different nurse or doctor came by to tell me they were working on getting her admitted. Someone brought me coffee I didn’t have a chance to drink. I had her purse with me in case they wanted her Medicare number but no one ever asked me anything. Finally they wheeled her into a room on the other side of the building, far away down a forever corridor. There was a motorized recliner for me so I could stay there with her. The door closed, and that was it for us for three whole days except for constant interruptions taking vital signs, blood and urine samples, doctors, nurses, people to “counsel” me and hand me pamphlets that I haven’t even opened five days later. It all went just like that, ka-boom.

She got better, sort of, but was still a wreck. Crying, disoriented, wanting to go home. This became a theme. Her memory was shot. At one point when it wasn’t, she wanted to know just what had happened and I told her. More shock and disbelief before she slipped back into the fog. I fed her half a dozen spoonfuls of puréed mush three times a day and gave her lemonade and water. A couple times we staggered to the bathroom after midnight with her diaper falling down so she could pee. (I never wiped my wife before but add this to the tricks.) Feeding her was almost holy. When the nurse came in to change her once, I helped to turn her on her side. The skin on her back, her butt, the back of her legs was perfect. Where had all the stretch marks gone or had they ever been there, really? She glowed smoothly like a teenage girl. I thought it was so beautiful. The warmth, the love, the light that shone within.

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The next stage needed to be rehab. She sure wasn’t ready to come home, and home was in no shape for her. Piles and clutter wouldn’t do. Medicare would pay for 20 days in the clinic adjacent to the hospital. She’d get four hours a day of speech, physical, and occupational therapy, and maybe I could get the house in order. The people we talked to at the hospital were certain the draconian “no visitors” rules had been relaxed, since all the staff was vaccinated and my wife would be in quarantine for two weeks anyway. I figured I’d be there for several hours a day, watch the therapists, and get an education as her coach. You know where this is going, right?

Five days ago they dropped the bomb on us:

With just one hour’s notice, they told us that she’d be discharged and taken next door to the rehab unit, but I couldn’t come. No visiting hours, ever. Period. The rules in fact had not been changed or relaxed in any way. We were devastated, terrified, in shock. I’d been reassuring her that I’d be there to see her every day, bring her things, and ease the pain of isolation every minute they’d allow me—which turned out to be zero. I watched the nurse wheel her down the hall next door, terrified of how she’d manage.

Not that well so far. The FaceTime visits haven’t really worked, not for someone who’s just had a stroke. This afternoon I found a message from two days ago I’d missed somehow, just her crying in the dark: “I need you, John. John? John???” but there was nothing I could have done. She has to stay, just two more weeks, except I worry that her mind is going, going, wandering like she is, up and down the corridor, the stroke and what that does inside the brain. There’s another issue, too: they found a blood clot in her heart and saw it wasn’t pumping like it should. All this tears at memory and reason. Forty years together and she has to pull out of the fear and madness on her own until she’s here and I can feel her warmth and lie that everything will be okay.

Don’t get sick in a pandemic. Do not, do not ever, ever, ever…

Sunday morning before we knew she’d be discharged on Monday, I looked out the window. It was gray cold spitty day. Suddenly a big brown coyote trotted out of nowhere to sniff around a patch of dry brown grass between our building and the rehab clinic. At that exact moment my wife said that she’d just had the thought that “everything was over…” I thought I heard some irony in how she said it, as if her words were less a statement than a proposition. The coyote was still there like he was listening, maybe 30 feet away, until he turned and vanished in the sagebrush. The goddamn trickster, plain as anything, but where’s the joke? That she was right or she was wrong?

Or that it’s just a big brown dog-thing in the grass?