Glass Wall
By Carol Jeffers
October 18, 2018
My sweet, sweet Stephanie,
I miss you terribly, and can only hope these few words reach you, wherever you might be. Please tell me you are no longer drifting, but safe at last, and resting like Shel Silverstein’s moon bird, cool and comfortable in the peppermint wind.
It’s been three months since we last spoke. Two and a half since I created a small shrine. And now, your birthday is upon us.
I sit in my purple room day after day, waiting for her whisper. But nothing. I am trapped in the silence, fingers quivering, hovering above the keyboard. Why is it so difficult to re-connect? Exchange a few words? My ears hear only the grinding in my bones.
I keep a pair of her earrings in a little satin box on a special shelf in the bookcase beside my desk. Susie gave them to me at the memorial, said she had a matching pair, the two sisters having bought them together. The box is next to the last issue of The New Yorker Stephanie might have read, and a copy of Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, a favorite of hers. My bookshelf shrine, the place I hoped she’d come and we would stay close, soft, wrapped around each other in the prickling night.
I’m hoping you might let me know how best to reach you. Perhaps a text to your old number? An email if you prefer. A handwritten letter on yellow stationery? Whatever you say. Just let me know.
We met in ninth grade, shared a special connection from the start, could always sense each other. “I knew you were going to wear that,” I grinned when she showed up at school in her blue sailor dress with the red tie. Two days later, she pointed at my camel jumper and floral print blouse, declaring “I knew you were going to wear that.” We soothed each other’s angst about our hair, hers “too” curly, mine “too” straight. Stephanie always knew how to pull me out of a funk.
God, I hunger for her now. Need to feel her stir. Give me a sign that says we’ll go on together. Celebrate her birthday tomorrow and every day after.
If the shrine is not to your liking, perhaps you could designate another place we could meet, one more ethereal, less purple, my favorite color, more yellow, yours. Anywhere. In the falling leaves, the last roses of the season, on a buffeting breeze, in a garden wild with buttercups and thistle. Just say the word. I’ll be there. Nothing would make me happier than to be together, cutting your birthday cake. Imagine sixty-eight candles, tiny torches throwing light into the dark silence. We could peer into the past, share memories, re-live the most boisterous of birthdays.
Her fifteenth, will she remember? The party at Richard’s house, downstairs in the paneled rec room, his parents in the living room above. Saturday night. A small group, all couples. Can she see us, girls in above-the-knee dresses, boys in button-down shirts. She and Richard, Gene and me, Mary and Andy, maybe more. Albums stacked on the turntable, blasts of the Beachboys, and we are playing Twister. We spin the dial, place hands on red, spin again, feet on yellow. Spin and spin and spin. Hands, feet, green, blue, flailing, laughing, snorting. Each couple giddy, flushed, wild with hormones, boy, girl, sheets of origami folded together.
You must have a trove of birthday memories. I’d love to hear, see your eyes shine again, feel your warmth, watch it bloom in your cheeks. Hear a chortle, a snicker. See an arched eyebrow, a rolled eye. Listen to you tune your guitar. Hear us sing House of the Rising Sun off-key again.
How about her twentieth in the dorm? Ten of us on the hall crowded in her room, some draped across the bed, others jammed against the dresser or perched on the corners of the desk. Miller, Pork, Roof, Diane, Jeannie-wahini, Smith-berg, Jenny. Does she see us, our long hair and hip-hugger bell bottoms? Excited, clamoring for the big moment. Naimo had a lighter and lit the candle we stuck in the center of a small chocolate cake. We sang Happy Birthday and her eyes shone, her smile dazzled the room. Then the surprise. A black wool maxi coat we all went in on. Her hands flew to her face, she couldn’t believe it. She tried to protest, but Diane shook her head. “Your old poncho isn’t going to get you through the winter.” “Nope,” we chimed in. She was our butterfly, and we needed to protect her from the cold, keep her delicate wings flittering year-round.
Stephanie? Are you there? I’m begging. Give me a chance.
Are you angry with me? Have I done something to upset you?
Oh shit. How could I forget. She never made her peace with Richard. It’s sad, he’s a good guy. Would’ve given couples counseling a try. Fifteen years he was in her life, still in mine. Does she think I’m a traitor? Richard never forgot her. Called her his “first love” in the message he sent for the memorial. Did the words ring in her casket when Gene read them to the friends and family huddled in the pews?
Is she angry with Richard and Susie and me, her own mother, all of us begging her to listen to the endocrinologists, let them take care of her fiendish, hyperactive thyroid? Was it too much when Richard the doctor, her mother the nurse, spoke of the damage beyond what the goiter had already done? How distressing was it to hear their prognosis, to know her heart would become enlarged, rhythm off, valves flapping, muscle stringy and weak, struggling, failing to oxygenate her blood?
Did she see us, the mourners wringing our hands at her house after the service, trying to let go of the inexplicable. Why wouldn’t she listen? We shook our heads, wondered how she could let this happen. How did we?
A terrible thyroid storm killed her in 2011. The ER docs brought her back then. And still she wouldn’t listen. Seven years later, the docs couldn’t get her back. Three heart attacks that last night. Three times they tried. But she drifted away, left all the damage behind.
Why, Stephanie? Why wouldn’t you let anyone help you? The doctors could cure you. Why wouldn’t you let them?
December 31, 2018
Dearest Stephanie,
I begin again, knowing I already hate 2019, the bleakness approaching. It will be a bad year, the first without you in it. I swear, Stephanie, I’m about to throw open the window, scream “Stop the count-down.” Rip the night, shatter the glittering ball. My howl loud enough for the red-faced revelers in the streets below to hear. I’ll do it, I will. I’ll snatch their horrid noisemakers. Dump their champagne in the gutter.
They will refuse to listen, everyone drunk, euphoric, looking forward to a sloppy kiss at midnight and a New Year studded with shiny possibilities. I can only cringe, look back, claw at the six months and twenty-four days I still had her in 2018. Time that slipped away when she was already drifting and I should have paid closer attention. Why didn’t I listen to the cries for help she carefully disguised? Why didn’t I see through the months, even years of denial, recognize the bubbles and the slow drowning they signaled? I shall review, gape at the old calendar before its pages are torn out and the relics tossed away.
Susie tried to break through, conference-called in January and February with the cardiologist, and shared the details with me, the stark truth about Stephanie’s monstrous thyroid destroying her heart and rampaging through our lives. “I can’t repair her valves or restore her rhythm until she has the thyroid removed,” the doctor warned even as she plugged her ears, heard something fuzzier, found the gray in his black-and-white. “There’s a special herbal tea that calms the thyroid,” she informed him.
I should have pressed harder, listened to what lay beneath her refusal to have the life-saving surgery. When I tried, she mumbled something about how wrong it was to violate nature, cut out what we had been born with.
“But your thyroid is sick,” I yelled through the phone line. “It’s gone bad, off-the-charts bad, and it didn’t start out that way.”
She said she didn’t want to take the thyroid pills for the rest of her life. “Artificial,” she criticized.
I tried to reassure her. “I took Synthroid myself until my underactive thyroid returned to normal. Six years, it was easy.”
“Why,” she demanded. “Why would you do that?”
“Because my doctor prescribed it, said it would make me feel better. And the doctor was right. I felt so much better. Everything was better.”
Why Stephanie? Why didn’t you want to feel better? Did you believe you were meant to suffer? Do penance?
I should have seen through her ruse, realized there was no logical or medical argument that would persuade her. Richard said he tried and failed years earlier. She didn’t keep the appointments he arranged with the top specialists at Johns Hopkins. “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” she argued.
I wish I had heard the fear in your voice. Were you afraid the surgery would rob you, change your identity, leave you scarred and unable to recognize yourself? Force you to put an alien substance into your body? Afraid you weren’t worthy of being saved? Was there a hint of guilt I missed?
I would’ve been there holding your hand, stroking your hair when they took you to the OR. I would’ve filled your hospital room with sunflowers, adjusted your bed so you could see a world gone yellow welcoming you back.
Instead, I resolved to march up and down the stairs every morning one year ago. Sixteen steps up, sixteen down. Fourteen minutes of breathing hard, oxygenating my blood, building up my heart, making it strong enough to beat for both of us.
But it was useless, I couldn’t re-set the clock, buy more time to listen, figure out how best to connect with her. Convince her.
When her mom died in March, I felt even more helpless. Stephanie was getting sicker and weaker, and now, devoted her time and energy to grieving. I hated being three thousand miles away, tried to call and text more often to check on her. It was always the same.
“How are you doing today?” I texted every Monday. “I’m doing great,” she texted back with a string of emojis. “Red heart, purple heart, yellow heart, cat with love-struck eyes.”
Another text on Thursday, “How are you feeling today?” “Much better,” she texted back throughout April, same emojis. I didn’t know what to make of that. Better than what?
I wish I had followed up, asked how she really felt, and why she was holding me at bay. Maybe I should have seen the waves of grief breaking in the sub-text. Up, down, ebb, flow, that’s what grieving feels like, how well I know now.
She used our Tuesday phone calls to talk about the coursework for her online Ph.D. program. Used our conversations to trick me every time, made me believe she needed my help with the weekly papers she had to write. She didn’t.
Why wasn’t I stronger? Why didn’t I re-direct our talks, tell her how capable she was. Maybe I could have helped her focus on life after her doctoral program, the one I thought she wanted to live as “Dr. Stephanie Evans, consultant.” A life I thought still lay ahead.
By May, the coursework was complete, time to move into her dissertation research. But she no longer had the drive. Her research question was not compelling, and her access to data collection was limited. She didn’t want to talk about her program anymore. I knew she was in trouble, careening off the academic track. I was casting about, trying to find the way to steer her back. Get her to believe in her program again. Her goal. Get her to find purpose. Believe in herself.
By June she was spinning. I wish I had realized how deeply depressed she was, saw no reason to go on.
Why didn’t I listen more closely when you finally told me about the near-death experience you suffered in 2011? Why didn’t I ask if it had changed you. Your voice was so flat, like it didn’t belong to you.
I should have asked about the golden throne in the golden room you saw when you floated out of your body. What do you think it meant? When you described sitting on the throne, getting up to go toward the darkness only to be stopped by a glass wall, how did that make you feel? Were you thwarted? Were you still grieving for Matt, more desperate than I ever knew to join your lost child? Did you not want to come back?
Three weeks into July, and you were gone, leaving me to worry about our truths, wonder where the splinters had been strewn. Would you show me if you knew? Would I have dared to see? Wanted to know what questions rippled through your exhausted being? About any guilt you felt over Matt’s death? Could I have taken it in if you had?
September 15, 2019
Hello Stephanie,
Did you see me in mid-August? Maybe you called out, moved in me on that Thursday afternoon when the EMTs ran me into the ER? They say I was unconscious. Unresponsive, with Glasgow scores of three. Were you there among the beeping monitors when my brain stopped and I was drifting away? Did we whisper together, speak a language only spirits understand? Please, Stephanie, share what you know. Tell me you were there during the three days I was lost to both worlds.
I saw nothing, never sat on a golden throne, felt no movement toward a glass wall. It’s still a blank. I have no awareness of any sensations or surroundings, nothing re-captured even now, one month after I nearly died, thirteen after Stephanie did. I am trying but need help to piece together what happened. All because of a fucking colonoscopy prep gone so wrong. It wiped out my electrolytes, dropped my blood sodium and potassium so low the ER docs were surprised I was still breathing, heart still pumping. And here I was just trying to do the right thing, take care of my five-year screening for colon cancer. The last thing on my list after the mammogram, bone density scan, thyroid ultrasound, flu shot, Prolia shot, shingles shots, metabolic panel and complete blood count. The things I’m supposed to do, according to the medical industry, for good health.
I have felt such anger bubbling up, hot streams aimed at the gastroenterologist who never followed up after Gene called to cancel the procedure, told the doc he was taking me to Urgent Care because I threw up the last of the prep, couldn’t get my words or form a sentence. Couldn’t remember anything.
I feel gratitude, too, a gushing geyser’s worth for the doctors and nurses who pulled me through, for Gene and my girls who took care of me.
I feel shaken, Stephanie, and so vulnerable that I’m left to crouch, tiptoe around my own little house. I am a shell, a tiny puppet in a giant theater where Mortality controls the fraying strings and Grief sits at the piano playing Mozart’s Requiem.
Did you feel like that, after the glass wall stopped you, and the ICU team brought you back? A complete re-set, hubris gone. Confusion supreme? Nothing left but bobbing in an empty sea, searching for reasons?
Do you sense a new closeness, each of us understanding what the other has been through? Are we together now?
Gene and the girls have shared details, recounted as much as they can about what happened. Maybe you can verify what they saw, maybe offer insight clear and deep.
Was she flittering above me when the results of the first blood draw came back from the lab and the doctors winced? Did she hear Gene gasp when they said “Sodium 111,” hear him explain that I usually tested in the low-to-mid 130s, already the low end of the normal range.
Was she there when the docs ordered an emergency CT scan to see if my brain was swelling? Did she see the two orderlies, one on either side of the gurney, roll me to the elevator, only to race back a minute later with a team of eight residents and nurses, some suctioning the blood spewing from my mouth, others injecting anti-seizure drugs?
Did she witness the alien force take over, thrust my jaw forward, lock it down, drive my teeth into my tongue, and purple it with bruises? Did she note the moment when the vice-grip pressure broke two teeth, chipped several more? Was she on the gurney with me, calm, gentle, invisible, holding my gyrating body, trying to stop its shuddering?
Did she move aside when the team rushed to insert a port in my left arm? Run an IV of 3% hypertonic sodium wide open? Did she perch on my shoulder, fold her yellow wings and wait with Gene hoping the results of each blood draw were higher than the last?
“One fourteen,” the doctors reported.
“One eighteen.”
“One seventeen.”
“One twenty.”
“Moving in the right direction.”
“Not out of the woods yet.”
Did she see Gene holding my hand, holding on, watching the monitors all night? Did she hear him call my mom, my siblings, give them the scary news. Tell them the doctors weren’t sure.
Was she still there when the docs scrambled again, their own jaws tight, concerned the sodium level had plateaued.
“Run a line of potassium. Stat,” they shouted. Did she see the team exhale when the sodium climbed to 124. Then to 128, and I was transferred to the ICU after twelve hours in the ER.
Did she see Elizabeth on Friday evening, come to stay with me, cover me with my favorite blanket, brush my hair? Send Gene home to shower and get a bite to eat?
Was she there when Jennifer and Graeme drove up from Seal Beach with a huge bouquet of sweet-scented purple and lavender flowers which the nurses intercepted. “Not permitted in the ICU.”
Or when I kept trying to pull the pulsoximeter off my finger, the oxygen tube out of my nose? Did she hear the docs comment “Her oxygen is 98 consistently. Pulse steady. 72. We can take the pulsox off and the nasal tube out if they’re bothering her. She has an impressive heart-lung function.” “She does a lot of stair-climbing,” Gene told them. “Aerobics every morning.”
Did you hear the doctors yell in my face trying to wake me up? Did you laugh when I wouldn’t, even as I moaned, grunted, then found the word “Stop.” Did you see Graeme get into it with the docs when they persisted. Apparently told them “Back off, man. She told you to stop.” My son-in-law defending me, still unconscious, against the well-intended doctors and their best practices.
Gene and Elizabeth thought it was funny when I started hiding my arms under me as soon as I heard the phlebotomy cart start down the hall to make yet another round of blood draws. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I sensed what was coming. They weren’t laughing when I had had enough of the jabbing needles. “No,” I said. “No.” Apparently, I meant it, and put up a good fight. They had to hold me down. My own husband and daughter. How could I take purposeful action and have no memory of it? Can you help me understand, Stephanie?
When I woke up on Saturday, I had no idea where I was. Was that how it was for her the first time she died?
“You’re in Huntington Hospital,” Gene tried several times. “In the Definitive Observation Unit.”
I listened as carefully as I could before nodding off again. But how could this be? I felt rested, refreshed. Wonderfully well. Maybe a canker sore under my tongue, but still energized, ready to stroll through Henry Huntington’s gardens, not lie in his hospital bed for the rest of the day. It took me a while to realize there was a hospital bracelet on my left wrist, a catheter between my legs, a port on each arm, and five leads on my chest hooked up to monitors at the nurses’ station outside my door. To accept I would be staying a while longer.
I remember a doctor coming in to ask me if I knew my name. Assessing cognitive function, I thought. I felt alert, confident, proud to tell him my full name.
“What day is it?” he continued.
“Saturday,” I said with no hesitation.
“What month?”
“August.”
“What year?”
“2018.”
He paused. “So it’s not 2019?”
Trying to trick me, I thought. I shook my head, repeated “2018,” sticking to my truth. Why would I do that, Stephanie? The only explanation… I didn’t want it to be 2019, knew all along it would be a bad year. I had to cling to the last year we shared, at least for six months and twenty-four days. Precious time when we were fully present to each other, inhabiting one world. But it is 2019 after all, and where are we? What did we share for those three days in mid-August?
We were always so close, so much alike. First-borns in big families. Born three weeks apart. Oldest daughters whose mothers expected a lot. “New girls” arriving several weeks after ninth grade had started. Met our boyfriends, Gene and Richard, in 10th, married them in college. Both of us teachers, both pursued Ph.Ds. Add near-death experiences.
Why didn’t I float into the quiet splendor of a golden room? Break through the glass wall to meet you on the other side? Help me Stephanie. I feel so dislocated, need to know we are more than ships in the night. Tell me you came back, saw it all. Make me believe this strange venture into the netherworld has not pulled us further apart, left us stranded on either side of a great, unholy divide
Stephanie? Why won’t you say?
So much uncertainty, reconfiguring, and I’m too afraid. Not strong at all, not a fighter like Gene thinks. You and I, I’m afraid we’re not alike, but more like opposites. You’re the yellow to my purple. We exasperate each other, demand answers to black-or-white questions that jab and leave us bleeding.
My fingers cramp, feel paralyzed. They refuse the keyboard sizzling with words unspoken. Too many questions left unanswered. I am afraid of what screams in the night.
“Why didn’t you listen to your doctors,” my frustration rages in the purple room.
“Why did you listen to yours?” I hear in her judgmental tone.
“It almost killed you,” I shout. “And then it did.”
“It almost killed you,” she shouts back from the bookcase shrine. “And it will.”
There is a slender moment when a yellow butterfly lights on a purple flower. Each gets what it needs from the other. Such magnificence. I’ve seen it, Stephanie. At Huntington Gardens. We can find each other there. In the gardens, purple and yellow are everywhere. Not opposites, but complementary. Colors that dare to enhance and complete each other. Enhance and complete in any world.
Farewell, my beautiful friend.
Carol Jeffers has published The Question of Empathy: Searching for the Essence of Humanity (August 2018). Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including Wordgathering, Persimmon Tree, Connotation Press, Entropy and Wild Roof, and received an honorable mention in Streetlights 2020 writing contest. She is currently working on the novel Blueprint. More: www.CarolJeffersWriter.com