Heart Attacks

“Ed, you break my heart.”

My delight that Norma is able to utter a complete sentence is somewhat tempered by the content of the sentence.

We're sitting shoulder-to-shoulder facing the TV, and I've just made the social gaffe of nodding off after having had a copious three or four hours of uninterrupted slumber the night before.  Norma is the smoke alarm to my furtive dozing. She just won't have it.

Apparently, I'm breaking her heart by refusing to take her somewhere.  Anywhere. She's not specific. She just needs to move. I would do it to pacify her if we hadn't just gotten back from a drive into town two hours earlier to have coffee with our daughter Erin.  Besides that, it's getting dark. There wouldn't be much for Norma to see except the dashboard.

I never know when one of her bleak moods is coming on or what causes it.  She's never effusive, of course, but some days my antics, jokes and wide-ranging ineptitude keep her smiling.  Today began like that. I read her my blog about her stubborn resistance to taking pills, and it had her rocking side to side and chuckling out loud---at least in places.  I'm happy to report that after scratching her back (a near orgasmic experience for her) and subjecting her to my improvised dialog for “Law & Order: SVU,” she was back to her semi-amiable self.  As long as she's in the forgetting business, I'm hoping she forgets I've broken her heart.

When someone you've been close to for a long time loses memories, so do you. All those events and sensations you both used to resurrect and relive during long drives, late dinners and lovemaking are now yours alone to save from extinction.  Who can you turn to and say, “Remember when . . . ?” Who's there to add color, perspective, details and brightness to all those things that were for so long joint treasures?

Norma has never been my “plus one.”  She's always been the other one—as deeply into discovery, creation and mischief as I was—the personality when I was just the wallpaper.  And, Jesus, was she radiant!  

There was the time I was teaching at a small junior college in Kentucky and the drama instructor—one of our good friends—got pissed off at the student playing Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker” because she hadn't shown up for dress rehearsal.  So he dismissed her from the production and somehow talked Norma into taking the role, even though she'd never read the play before. She wound up doing the whole damn play in front of an audience while reading her lines from a script held plainly in her hand. It wasn't great drama, but what colossal nerve she had. Life being as headlong as it is, I never got around to talking much to her about doing the play.  I wish I could now so we could pass on the story fully fleshed to the kids and grandkids. But all I'm left with is the towering admiration I felt for her.

There is so much of the us I miss. I miss her joining me in memories of her teaching me to drive (when I was 25 years old), of our mutually surprising first kiss, of the 1955 Jaguar that became our gorgeous albatross, of our barely affordable love nest in an 8- x 35-feet trailer, of our leading a student rebellion that took down a college president a full year before the Free Speech movement was launched at Berkeley, and of our distinctly different joys in welcoming Erin, Chris, Jason and Rachel into our lives.  She always saw things I didn't and felt things I was too self-centered to notice.

So you tell me—whose heart's being broken here?