| Death |
[Apr. 13th, 2004|11:01 am] |
Some of these news stories I pick up are really short-lived and I want to give them some continued exposure. Not many people come to my site anyway, so who cares?
I hope that I will die on my own terms as well. It's something that we all truly deserve.
Someone else is sitting in her chair. A giant note is posted outside her booth at the Harvey Clars auction house in Oakland. "Sad News," it warns: Carol Connolly -- who has chided wannabe bargain hunters and collectors for bad handwriting and rewarded graceful penmanship with bid cards and her friendship -- is gravely ill.
Just like that, without any warning, Carol is dying.
Doctors gave her two days to two weeks to live. That was 10 days ago.
Carol has refused to fight it. The decision was easy. Surgery was a long shot, and so was chemo. Carol's older brother had died six months ago, hooked up to machines in a hospital. She would not go that way. She wanted to be home, to live out her life.
Carol is spending her final days in front of a picture window facing her beloved garden. As visitors gather from morning till night, she recites poetry, regales them with funny tales, reminds them how special they are, and comforts them when they cry.
"This is it, on my terms,'' Carol tells visitors. "The only part not on my terms is the when. But then, none of us ever knows when.
"If you could choose, may you all be lucky to do it this way. Don't get hit by a bus,'' Carol adds. She motions toward her garden. "I see the sunlight on the trees. I see the sunset. The rhododendrons will be coming soon. The tree just got its blossoms, but I can already see it starting to turn. It's going to be a blazing, flaming red.''
Carol Connolly is 72. With her silver hair and pearls and upright bearing, she looks like that elegant woman of yesteryear, a lady. But as soon as she pats your hand and tells you in her airy voice how glad she is to see you "my dear,'' she reminds you of your favorite old aunt. She really is glad to see you. In her book, you're the most wonderful person in the world. And in her company, you are.
It's a cliche, but like most, it's true: You often don't know how much someone means to you till it's too late. Luckily, friends and co-workers and auction patrons were given a chance this week to tell her. Carol has been getting a zillion calls and visits and letters and cards and flowers. One patron, knowing her love of classical music and her 20 years as an usher at the San Francisco Opera, has gone to her Oakland home to play Chopin on the piano. Another friend arrives in a tuxedo to give her a cello recital. Others are bringing, at her request, lamb chops lathered with olive oil and potatoes au gratin and pate and brie and cake and other sinfully delicious foods that she would not have even looked at before, when she was watching her cholesterol and slim figure. Well, those days of homemade oat bran muffins and beans with rice are over.
"Everything's good for me now,'' she says cheerfully, waving her coffee cup at her son for a refill and tearing off a chunk from a second croissant.
A few weekends ago, Carol was toting a sign and chanting at a peace march in San Francisco. Days later, she was at Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland, where she volunteers teaching piano to the kids. She was walking from the school to her cottage in Redwood Heights when she suddenly felt like she couldn't breathe. She managed to get home, but couldn't bring herself to dial 911. She says she didn't want to upset the neighbors with a loud ambulance, but since "We're being very honest, because we shouldn't lie now,'' she admits she didn't want to be carried out of her house in a stretcher. She went to bed, she says, "not knowing if I was going to wake up again.''
She could still barely walk or breathe the next morning. Typical Carol, she drove herself to the doctor and parked four blocks away to avoid garage fees.
The doctor rushed her to the hospital. It didn't take long to find out that Carol has cancer. She was bleeding internally, and needed blood transfusions and a week in the intensive care unit.
She called a co-worker to say she probably wouldn't be in to register bidders at the auction the next weekend. The news hit the small staff at Harvey Clars like an earthquake. Carol, who took such good care of herself, who prided herself in not even having aspirin in the house, who was always so strong for everyone, was dying -- soon.
Her only child, Craig, 38, flew down from Seattle. Hospice care, paid for by Medicare, sends a nurse and social worker to make sure she is comfortable and not in pain. Friends volunteer to vacuum and run errands.
"It's about time people waited on me hand and foot,'' she says kiddingly. Even now, she's loath to impose.
Between visits, she ties up loose ends. She double-checks her papers to make sure they're in order. She tells her son she'd like to be cremated, her ashes spread on Mount Tamalpais or on a favorite vacation spot, Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound near Seattle. She tries on her hats one last time before passing them on to a friend from work who shares her love of vintage clothing. And there is talk, and more talk, of who will take care of her garden.
"We're talking life and death -- and how much you pay the gardener,'' Carol says.
As she sits on her chaise longue in the garden room, it seems like everything is OK. But there are reminders of her frailty.
The other day she went to the garden to get some cuttings. No sooner was she back in the house than the doorbell rang. She stood there in a halo of sunlight from the open door, in a white satin nightie and silk kimono, barefoot, cradling her jasmine and lilac. She looked ethereal.
She laughed at her visitor's startled expression. It was all becoming so melodramatic.
"It's starting to be a stage setting. I can hear it now: 'Nothing in her life became her like the leaving of it,' " she says, paraphrasing Shakespeare.
She reminisces, but mostly to be polite to guests. She was born Carol Herrmann in New Haven, Conn., in 1931, at the onset of the Depression. She was the youngest of three children, and is the last surviving. For most of her childhood, her father was an unemployed watch repairman. Her mother cleaned rich people's houses. World War II brought them out of poverty when her mom got a job at a wire rope company.
Her parents saw work as a way to make a living, but Carol wanted more. In her 20s she became a career girl, with an office job as a sales rep at Bethlehem Steel. With her big salary she traveled often to Europe. She learned about designer clothes and fine music and art, and read the great literature.
When she was about 30, she got a job transfer to San Francisco where a girlfriend lived. It was the '60s, and the city was a giant cocktail party, especially for a pretty, leggy, single woman.
"Those were the glory days,'' she says. "You've got money. You've got all these phony friends and you're phony yourself, but that's OK because you're young. The parties, the opera, the clothes -- it was all symbolic of another life that I never led.''
In her mid-30s she met a man down the hall from her Pacific Heights apartment. They were married within a year, and soon had a son. Bethlehem Steel was folding up in San Francisco, so after 14 years with the company, she stayed home to be a mother and wife.
Although women were not encouraged to go to college back then, Carol always wanted an education. She took night classes for years and finally, at age 45, got her bachelor's degree in social work from what became San Francisco State University. She worked in the field of aging for the next five years, but got burnt out. Carol became certain, after that experience, that she did not want to die in an institution.
Around this time, in 1981, her 16-year marriage was coming to an end. She then landed a job at the University of California as a temporary secretary in the president's office. Before long, she was writing grant proposals.
At age 61, after a decade with the university, she retired. She spent her free time running to thrift shops and auctions with friends. She so enjoyed her time at Harvey Clars that around eight years ago she asked if they needed any part-time workers. They did, and she's been there ever since.
But now her life beyond her picture window all seems so long ago. This week has been "surreal,'' she says. Here she is, dying, but she can't remember a week that's given her more pleasure. The weather has been glorious, sunny and warm. Her garden is as happy as flowers in spring. Friends she hasn't seen in years, from as far away as Los Angeles and Washington state, have come to visit. So, too, have customers from the auction house who know her only casually but still cherish her.
"This isn't happening to me,'' she says. "I'm discovering such wonderful friends, such an outpouring of affection.''
In looking back, she says she has few regrets.
"I have finally become the woman I wanted to be,'' Carol says. "I always was a romantic, always talked an awful lot about love. At the end of my life, I'm melting with love ....
"There is a wonderful world out there. There is art. There's music. There's beauty. There's joy. I'm so grateful I realized how precious life is.''
She's ready. But she worries about her son.
"It's hard to miss somebody the rest of your life. But it gets better,'' Carol says. "That's the price we pay for this wonderful life: We have to leave it.''
As visitors get up to go, she insists on walking them to the door. She gives them a big hug. Then she gently pushes them toward the door.
She stands inside the screen door. This is the last time we're going to see her.
"Au revoir,'' she says.
"Adieu.''
"Ciao."
"Buona fortuna.''
She says everything but goodbye.
-Marianne Costantinou
(article from SFGate)
THE STORY CONTINUES:
Doctors told Carol Connolly in March that she had less than 10 days to live. She went home to die -- and waited. And waited some more.
Five months later, Carol is back at her part-time job at an Oakland auction house. She's gardening. Attending the opera. Traveling. And enjoying her second lease on life, thanks to a new cancer drug. Next month, on Sept. 25, she will celebrate her 73rd birthday. She expects to be around to vote in the presidential elections. She has renewed her passport, plans to get a new car (or a newer one) and has even ordered her Christmas cards. And she will get to see the red maple tree in her beloved garden -- which was just starting to bloom when she got sick -- change into its blazing fall colors.
"I sit here everyday and think: 'This would have been going on without you.'
"I've been resurrected,'' she adds. Then, realizing how heavy that sounds, she jokes: "I wonder if Lazarus thought 'I've got to pay the bills now.' ''
A story in The Chronicle in April described how Carol, an ordinary person who was special to those who knew her, was facing death with grace and humor, all the while watching her garden outside the picture window of her home in Redwood Heights. Letters and e-mails poured in from readers touched by her story, and were still arriving as recently as last week. Lately, though, the notes included apologies for what the writers felt was an indelicate curiosity: Whatever happened to that lady?
Well, the lady has got a message for well-wishers: "Tell 'em I'm still here -- and loving it.''
Coming so close to death, she says, has made her appreciate what she hadn't even realized she had. She has learned to take one day at a time, and take no time for granted. At this very moment, she is on a mother-son road trip to Yosemite with her only child. They rented a convertible, she says, "to feel the wind in our hair and be free."
Carol's second chance is due to two things: the internal bleeding that was expected to immediately kill her suddenly stopped, and a new drug designed for leukemia had recently been found to be successful in treating her type of cancer, a rare form called gastrointestinal stromal tumors.
After a lifetime of diet and exercise, Carol found herself in the hospital in March, diagnosed with cancer. A CAT scan showed spots on her liver and on a lung, but the worst damage was to the duodenum, the uppermost part of her small intestine. The tumor had penetrated the duodenum, causing the bleeding.
Carol spent a week in the intensive care unit at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Oakland. She received blood transfusion after blood transfusion. Then, a team of surgeons visited her. Chemo and radiation were long shots with her type of disease. Her best chance was surgery to remove the tumor. But it would be a risky and complicated operation that, at best, would leave her in the hospital for a long while and would likely compromise the quality of her life.
Carol's brother had died only months earlier in a hospital, at the mercy of tubes and machines. She had sworn then that she would not go that way.
"I've had a wonderful life,'' she told the surgeons. She would go home to die.
Divorced for many years, and with her son living in Seattle, Carol arranged for hospice care and went home, expecting to die very much alone. But as news spread -- to old neighbors in Berkeley where she had lived for decades, to old colleagues at UC Berkeley where she had spent a decade as a grant writer, to patrons at Clars Auction Gallery where she had registered bidders, to fellow opera buffs and just plain strangers -- Carol found herself on her deathbed having, what she would later call, "one of the best times of my life."
Folks dropped over from early morning to late at night. They serenaded her on her piano and carted over musical instruments to give her private recitals. They hauled over gourmet food -- a no-no when she was watching her cholesterol, but now, it was brie and chocolate all day long. And when they cried, Carol comforted them and told them to be brave, reciting poetry she had memorized for solace.
On the day Carol had been discharged from the hospital, a young doctor she didn't know had looked over her chart before signing her release. As she was walking away, he yelled out after her: "If you stop bleeding, we have something for you.''
Carol didn't even bother to turn around. But weeks later, when she called her internist to report that her bleeding seemed to have stopped, her physician told her about a call she had gotten from that young doctor. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine less than two years earlier, in August 2002, had reported surprising success slowing her type of cancer with a drug called imatinib mesylate, which goes under the trademark Gleevec.
Carol began taking four of the tiny brown tablets once a day. Five weeks later, she had another CAT scan. The radiologist's report at the end of June was pure poetry: Her growths were "stunningly stable.'' The only side effect of the drug is edema, or water retention and swelling, "to my beautiful legs, '' her one vanity.
As she got stronger, she started going out and about, to the old routines and places of her life. The reactions, she says, have been hilarious.
Old pals and acquaintances stare at her, mouth agape, as if seeing a ghost. Others can't help but blurt out: "I thought you were dead.'' And from several men, the oddest reaction of all: They asked her out on a date.
Obviously, she says with a smile, "They don't want a long-term commitment. ''
Though she tends to romanticize some things and wax poetic before mocking herself with a joke, life these days feels a lot like it felt before she got sick.
"The sky isn't any bluer, the grass isn't any greener,'' she says. "And there's still the grocery shopping.''
Though she might feel better, the reality is that she still has cancer. She can try to ignore it and go on with her life. But it won't ignore her.
"I think about death all the time,'' Carol says. "I do not delude myself. This can end tomorrow.''
But so, too, can it for any of us.
"I've been given hope, that intangible word, hope. It doesn't assure you of anything. It's not a guarantee. But it is hope.''
-Marianne Costantinou
(article from SFGate) |
|
|
