NONFICTION
The Wedding
by Jane Davenport
Living in death's shadow, she felt at home in the season of shortened days. The cancer has invaded your skeleton, her doctor said.
Could it be her mind was decomposing along with her bones? That she would submit to being bedridden, to the indignity of adult diapers that made her sweat, that she would forgo her morning coffee and depend on the patchwork efforts of neighbors and friends who appeared daily with thick soups or lukewarm slices of pizza (the meals on wheels, which had come only once, she had sent over to the dog across the street) — such eventualities she would never have entertained.
Eight years earlier when she rejected the regimen of poisons offered her, allowing only a lumpectomy and the tamoxifen that magnified both her hot flashes and her appetite, she informed her doctor in no uncertain terms that when the time came suicide would be her treatment of choice. As the time neared that option became less certain. Though secure in the knowledge of her fentenol stash that she had squirreled away, the energy it would take to author her own death was rarely present. And that righteousness had paled.
Only one year ago she capitulated to radiation for the compressed spinal fracture, until the technician ignored her cries and cracked her ribs right there on the table. She vowed, no more. Her doctor talked her into a bone-building infusion, each drip like a rosary bead. Cloistered on her second floor without a kitchen, she spent the winter watching cooking shows.
Then meeting the spring with Taurus resolve, she added a shot of estrogen blocker to her monthly cocktail and despite the sciatic pain in her leg she crawled down and up the stairs. Who would have believed it? By June she was driving. She adopted the most terrified cat she could find at the animal shelter and fed him solid white tuna. After weeks of wooing, he allowed her fingers to graze the soft fur beneath his ears, while she sang the song she had composed for him, which ended with the refrain "You're getting there; you're getting there."
Hope broke and mended and broke. By the fall crutches replaced her cane and the climb between floors eluded her again. Visiting nurses arrived with their clipboards and questions that made her cry.
The night her femur shattered she sat stranded in the chair between the bed and the bathroom, shivering in the dark with a bursting bladder and more tears streaming down her face.
Deaf to her protests, the hospice nurse ordered a hospital bed and raised its stainless steel bars.
In the space between day and night she dreams she is walking. On the second floor of a hotel, she showers and slips her strong body into an elegant shin-length dress. Merrily, she sits behind the wheel of a car filled with friends. She is on her way to the wedding.
Jane Davenport is a Jungian psychoanalyst in the Boston area. She has published two short pieces of memoir, one in The Dickens Literary Review, the other in Zebulon Nights, An Anthology. In 2003, she placed second in the short fiction contest at the Whidby Island Writer's Conference.
Copyright 2006, Jane Davenport