Milo

January morning flashes open, all bright and cutting. Sun is a brittle diamond and a liar—he sheds no warmth. A filet-knife wind works its slender blade beneath skin and between muscles. Windy Gap, the pass into Upper Smith River, was true to its name. A night storm has scattered the icy pavement with conifer boughs. They are separated from their lifeblood, still green but perhaps already knowing they are dead. A Douglas-fir twenty inches in diameter blocks most of the road. Someone has cut a small opening on one side, and I squeeze the truck through. At the Johnny Gunter house a crust of snow crisps the grass, so that the meadow looks like a giant green sugar cookie waiting to melt in the maw of full daylight.

Today is a big football day. Daughter Laurel and her partner Ethan have moved in with Kim for the day to watch the games and feed her chips, guacamole, and distraction. Kim is entering her second week of recovery from having her sternum sawed open, chest pried apart, and heart stopped for an hour while a large mass was removed from her left atrium. It was a myxoma. She named him Milo. Good ol’ Milo the Myxoma. We don’t know how long he had lived in the swirl of oxygen-laden blood returning from her lungs. Probably years. He had nearly outgrown the confines of his chamber and was whopping his head like a tetherball against the valve that lets blood into her left ventricle.

Milo is dead now. The surgeon snipped the stalk connecting him to the wall between her two atria and dragged him into the space above her sheeted torso like a bloody mushroom. We saw his gray-brown carcass in a post-surgery picture (I will spare you that one). He has since been sliced and diced in a pathology lab to confirm the diagnosis. Kim did not ask to view the body. Instead, she is watching football. Since I am not a football watcher, I have been liberated to spend the day working on the Johnny Gunter place.

Everyone thinks I need to get away and think about something other than caregiving. So I crunch to the front door of this decrepit house in the Coast Range. Turn the double door locks. Fire up the woodstove, a newer green enamel Jotul that recently replaced the large and leaky Fisher look-alike welded by my youngest brother in high school metal shop. The new stove does not heat up as quickly. I hover over the solitary source of warmth, trying to gather energy from it, trying to thaw the frozen pipes of my being. Contemplate making another cup of coffee. Decide the morning is too far along to justify it.

The bathroom is in the process of being replaced. I finally install a feeder hose to the new toilet. It flushes rapid fire and refills with a slow burble (the water pressure here is marginal, as are many things). But the main event is replacing the floor that gapes like a toothless smile parallel to the outside wall. This requires replacing the rotten sill plate and end joist beneath the floor and wall, work that must be done from outside. I zip myself into a pair of insulated coveralls that were Dad’s. Stiff khaki canvas covering a quilted red lining. They are a little short in the arms and legs. Yet I feel small. Not childlike. Just small.

The mechanics of caring for a heart patient are reasonably straightforward. Regular meals that appeal to them. Regular liquids. Regular walks, preferably outside. Help with getting up and sometimes down. Being attentive to hazards that might cause a fall. Even though Kim is wired shut, we were coached on “sternal precautions.” Her severed chest will need eight weeks to knit. The bone must momentarily forget what it is and become cartilage again, then re-harden with new calcium and phosphorus. As forest ecologist, writer, and cancer survivor Suzanne Simard once told me, the body is an ecosystem that is meant to heal.  

The mechanics of replacing rotten wood under a house are straightforward, too. Begin with a tree. Mill it into rough-cut 2 x 4s and 2 x 6s. Paint the lumber with a godforsaken chemical preservative in the hope that it will outlast me over years of relentless winter moisture. Trim the boards to size. Remove the rotten lumber. Slip the new pieces into place. Use a kickass cordless impact driver to anchor the wood with self-tapping screws.

So I begin. The old lumber is not completely rotten, and my reciprocating saw blade is dull and slow to cut. I have forgotten to bring spare blades. I’m finally able to pry the wood free in short pieces. The new boards are over twelve feet long, awkward and heavy, and must be schlepped from the garage to the opposite side of the house. When I try to lift them into place, the new boards are even more awkward and heavy. I have cut them slightly too long, and they must be re-trimmed and notched. Now the end joist won’t slide in because old nails impede the space like tiny stalactites. These must be cut off with the dull blade. The saw blade is finally fed up for the afternoon and breaks off. The end joist isn’t flush with its sill plate because the joist that it snugs against in the corner is too long and also needs to be trimmed. I manage to carve off enough of the corner board with another dull blade on my multi-cutter. I am tired. I am a grunting grouchy mess. I am grateful to be suffering in solitude.

Everyone thinks I need to get away and think about something other than caregiving. I think that I do need to think about caregiving. The emotional demands are complex. Feelings swirl like snow, now delicate and pretty, now freezing and fragile, now melting, now dribbling away and singing in a dark canyon-bottom creek. Some pieces fit. Others don’t. Music forces my raw emotional edge to the surface--Beth Wood’s new album Love is Onto You brings me to the verge of tears. A loving email from a long-time but rarely seen friend leaves me sobbing in my office. Watching helplessly while Kim suffered, first in pain, then nausea, then vertigo, was wrenching. Occasionally I lapse into self-pity. All this emotional complexity whirls around a fundamental core of gratitude that she is alive and getting stronger daily. The late Milo the Myxoma could easily have spun off a death-dealing piece of himself or a blood clot. Never before have I contemplated life without her.

The new boards finally settle into place. Don’t read this as a metaphor. I remain completely unsettled. Inside my chest lie deeper layers of complexity. I remember my father in his withered years sitting across the table earnestly telling me that he believed a person should never ask for help unless circumstances absolutely required it. This illusion of independence runs through my family like religion. While I was raised to fit well into the bootstrap mythology of American independence, there are downsides. Asking for help does not come easily. Sometimes I wonder if this has left me emotionally short-changed when it comes to giving it. I’m happy to help in the short run, but over the long haul an off-brand version of impatience creeps in. A feeling that people should do more for themselves. That I should be doing more for myself. My edginess is nothing compared to the emotional Dark Lord it ushers in—self-loathing. For lack of caring. For being self-centered. For not loving hard enough or long enough.

I’m adapting to this new landscape of caregiving by acting in ways I don’t always feel. I trust that the feelings will follow. I recognize the monstrous risk in writing this—that people will stop asking for my help. Like Homer Wells in Joseph Heller’s Cider House Rules, life requires me to be of use. Because being in service to others is being in service to myself. It is the key that frees me from the shackles of my independent upbringing. Helping my wife lift herself from the shadowed depths of this canyon is the best thing that could have happened. She has shed the medical time bomb that was Milo, and I am a small step closer to becoming a whole human being.

I kick the floor joist into something that approximates verticality, then anchor it with a few screws. I’m running out of time, at least for today. I’m also exhausted. Sun is tired, too; he lowers himself gently onto prickly conifers lining the southwest ridgetop in the way that Kim now eases herself into bed. Half Moon hovers in a hardening blue sky that will soon be aching with winter stars. I pick up the tools. Drain the house pipes in anticipation of another hard freeze. Stretch my lower back. Grab a beer from the refrigerator and let the cold tickle of carbonation wash the cling of sawdust from my throat. Climbing into the cold pickup, I retrace the route through Windy Gap.

The fallen tree has been drug from the road.