I tried not to think about it. I painted my toenails. I listened to Piero’s voice. I went through my aerobics routine for exercise. I endured more moments of stabbing pain, and leaned over, clutching my head, whimpering. I heard Il Volo’s voices in my head, the day they made their appearance on Quelli che il calcio saying, "Arrendersi mai", and repeated it like a mantra. "Never surrender; never give up." Then I cleaned everything in sight, wondering if obsessive cleaning was another one of my efforts to avoid dabbling in reality. It probably was.
My brother arrived from New York, making bad "next of kin" jokes about painting two eyes and a mouth on my ugly forehead lump and taking my corpse along for Halloween, to frighten small children. (What are brothers for, if not to make you laugh when you least expect or want to? I’d burst out laughing at my brother’s bad jokes and then clutch my head in pain, yelling, "Don’t make me laugh!" Whereupon he’d make me laugh again.)
I thought: maybe I need to stop making the negative assumption that my face is going to change for the worse; maybe I need to think much more positively and assume my face will change for the better. Like: I’ll wake up and discover that I look 17 again.
The day of surgery arrived. While I was laying on the gurney beginning to doze, I learned that Blue Cross/Blue Shield had refused to pay for the procedure the surgeon wanted (calling it ‘cosmetic’) and had given me the choice: disfigurement or death. What choice did I have? I had a cancerous lump on my forehead. What was I supposed to do? Hold out for reconsideration of the decision while it grew larger and then killed me? I went with disfigurement.
The last thing I remember was, "This will make you a little sleepy" before I passed out cold. I finally woke back up again about two hours later.
When you’re still under the effects of anesthesia, you’re in what might be best described as a state of euphoria. EVERYTHING is wonderful! I felt absolutely terrific, even with the gel goop in my hair, caked blood on my scalp and a big bandage around my forehead. I was also starving because I hadn’t had anything to eat in well over 24 hours. Jim helped me slap a cap on my head to cover up the damage and he and I went to a restaurant where I ravenously devoured everything in sight. Driving away from the hospital, he made something of a face and rubbed his upper chest. "Heartburn," he said. "Musta been something I ate yesterday." I was still goofy-eyed and silly from the anesthesia.
"You shouldn’t have heartburn from yesterday," I said. Then I glared at him. Back to the New York accent, which the two of used on each other like we had been born and raised on Arthur Avenue. "Jim, I sweadda god, if you have a hahd attack on me, I’m gonna kill yuze!"
By the last gulp of ice tea, I suddenly realized: I wasn’t quite so euphoric anymore, and my head was beginning to hurt – a lot. We returned home. In the short time it took to get from the restaurant to the apartment, I began to clutch my head again. I managed to get a Percoset down my throat and fell on the bed. Blood seeped from my bandages into the pillow and I couldn’t even lift my head up to change the pillowcase. Oh … my … god … my head hurt. I barely hung on for the six hour interval until I could take another one. I was in so much pain Jim didn’t trust me to NOT overdose on the pain pills, so held onto the bottle and doled them out only on schedule, even when I begged for one. It wasn’t until well into the next day that I could shift from Percosets, which were making me nauseous, to Tylenols and not cry from the pain.
By afternoon of the next day I was supposed to change the dressings on my head. The hospital bandages had been placed over some of my hair, so I had a dickens of a time loosening the bandages without ripping hair out of my head. Finally, I was able to lift up the gauze bandages and see what the surgeon had done. My brother came running when he heard me scream in horror.
"I’ve got a hole in my head!! I look like Frankenstein's monster!"
Yes, she had managed to keep my face symmetrical, if you didn’t count the hole near my left temple and hairline. It was stitched closed by a series of X-stitches, and I really did look like Frankenstein at that moment. I was so horrified at my appearance I would have burst into tears, were it not for the fact that it hurt to scrunch my face up.
Jim said, "It only looks like that because your skin is still swollen around the stitches," but I didn’t believe him. While he rolled his eyes, I theatrically announced myself disfigured for life and sulked narcissistically for a few hours before putting Il Volo back on my iPod speakers and eventually calming back down listening to Piero’s voice. (How does he DO that? Every time he opens his mouth, he has the most amazing and immediate calming effect on me .)
Exactly one week after the day of my surgery, my beloved brother, the brother who had taken care of me through all of these surgeries, all of these medical disasters, my best friend in the world - dropped dead of a heart attack.
*******
Denial. His beloved daughter, my niece, is the poor soul who had to call me, and because we had always communicated via Jim, the second I heard her voice, I said, "What's wrong?" I was already back at work. First she told me he had had a heart attack, and I said, "No. No, he didn't. No he didn't. That's not possible." And then she said, "He didn't make it." and I doubled over, in the middle of the office, wailing, "No, he didn't die. He didn't die. He's not dead, he's not dead." and all of my co-workers came running to my cube from everywhere in the office at top speed.
The shock and the pain was so intense, I covered my head with my hands and leaned over in a silent scream. My mouth was wide open; nothing was coming out. My eyes were wide open in agony. I knew something was wrong and I hadn’t made Jim turn around and drive the 500 yards back to Salem Hospital to have them check his heart. How big of a road sign had the universe handed me? And I’d ignored it. I knew something was wrong, I knew it. And because I was so narcissistically obsessed with my own surgery I’d murdered my own brother, the best friend I ever had. If I’d had a pistol at that moment I would have used it on myself without hesitating, the self-loathing was that powerful and that intense.
One of my co-workers, Luisa, grabbed the headset from me, and talked to my niece, writing down her phone number and explaining that I had collapsed. I hadn't, really, but I was useless. I was rocking back and forth, still doubled over at the waist, my mouth still wide open in a silent scream, tears streaming down both cheeks. I kept thinking I should apologize to people, thinking, I shouldn't be acting like this in the office, but I couldn't stop. I heard Luisa say "Her brother", and everyone knew my brother had been my life saver through all these medical disasters and a few of them had even met him in person at the hospitals I was in, or talked to him on the phone. I heard people gasping, "Oh, no!" at the realization that I had just lost my only sibling and I don't really remember much after that. I do remember thinking, "They don’t know I killed him or they wouldn’t be so nice." But I couldn’t even vocalize that much.
After the funeral, I was riding the commuter rail between Golden's Bridge and Grand Central. I did not want to go back to Massachusetts, because I didn't want to leave my real home - Westchester County - where Jim and I had grown up and spent most of our lives; where he had died. I no longer remember which phrase became stuck in my head, but whatever it was demanded to be written down, so I pulled out a notepad and did so. I didn't know why, and I didn't know what else to do, but I kept writing. Those first few phrases became the first words in the first sonnet cycle I'd written, and which I found thankfully distracting in my first few weeks back home. Each sonnet in that cycle was like pulling a toxic little splinter out of the rough wooden plank lodged in my chest. I knew something was going wrong with me, emotionally, anyway. I couldn't get the headphones off of my ears. Well, of course, I occasionally removed them to shower or pull clothes over my head, but for the most part, I never took them off, as much as I hated the dead accusatory silence that surrounded me when I did. I would start to shake whenever I took them off. The second thing that was going horribly wrong was the irrational and abnormal obsession with Piero Barone, which, improbably, had gotten even worse.
I couldn't even explain it to myself, at first. I would burst into tears, wailing, "Stop it! Stop it!" at being unable to stop listening to him. He was so much younger than I was, I invented time-traveling fantasies, where the two of us would end up at some distant point in time, and be together away from the pain of this lifetime, and this moment. We would go back to Ancient Greece, or to the Republic of Venice, a white sandy beach at some point in the future, to my childhood when Jim was still alive, or any number of places.
But Piero would always be there to talk to, even if he didn't speak English. Italian was fine. I knew I was losing my mind. But I simply had to listen to his voice, listen to him sing, or listen to him talk in the breathlessly soft Sicilian dialect of his, or the pain in my chest would become too vast to endure. He was the only being whose voice could calm me down from the high-pitched hysteria in my head.
Everything else I had been doing, thinking, dreaming - stopped in its tracks while I huddled at the bottom of a chasm of grief and guilt and self-recrimination and obsession the likes of which I'd never experienced. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't talk to anyone. Except for my imaginary Piero, I was alone. I should have been able to get past the intense grief, but I couldn't. I kept writing sonnets. I kept watching him on You Tube as he toured South America with Il Volo and tearfully thought about how beautiful he was. I berated myself continually for doing it. I couldn't stop.
(To be continued)
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