Autumn 2021 comes along.

 

Electra and Roy spend almost every morning sitting across from each other at the coffee shop. Roy has a wet cough; Electra teases him about coughing into the Terry Pratchett  book he’s reading instead of his arm, and then entices him into doing a crossword puzzle with her. But she also knows about the handout they got from the doctor about what a wet cough means to someone with heart failure.

 

Electra brings Roy out to see the horse that his deputy director and PCT co-owner Liathana bought/adopted in the last year. Horses love Roy, even though he only learned this in the last years. They nuzzle him and let him scritch them. He feeds them apples. Then the three of them go to the cemetery / dog park which Liath likes to take her dog Skye to, and the three of them talk and talk while the moon rises and her dog Skye runs and frolics and chases squirrels in the dusk and darkness. Electra says, “That was lovely and we should do it every other week.” Roy just smiles at her, not answering.

 

Electra notices something precancerous and worrisome on Roy’s face and mentions he should get it checked out, and he gently brushes her hand aside and smiles at her, not answering.

 

Roy and Electra are able to get to one friend’s wedding where they reconnect with another friend and talk for hours; the site is about 1 hour out of town. It is lovely, and he says, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do something like that again. He sleeps most of the way home, exhausted. 

 

The nephew’s biodad is stepping up, getting his own legal counsel and making sure the nephew makes it to all the criminal assessments and hearings, and is refusing to go along with Electra’s sister’s bizarre restrictive parenting plans. Biodad mentions that no new evidence has been sent by the prosecutor; they’re really struggling to find any evidence at all for that criminal case. Roy says, finally, our nephew seems safe.

 

Electra is able to get Roy to a cousin’s big family birthday dinner about 30 minutes out of town, with a movie after. It is lovely, and he says, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do something like that again. He sleeps most of the way home, and has to rest the next day.

 

We are short on money because of those last legal maneuvers, but instead of her mental health making it overwhelming, Electra goes through the finances and writes a budget and grocery list for the rest of the month despite her dyscalculia, and talks about what work she’s going to maybe apply for next month, or there are possible jobs that could start in January. Medication is helping. She feels productive and organized. Roy says, beaming with love, “you’re doing great! I’m so proud of you!”

 

The cousins invite us to travel with them to Ireland for 10 days in mid November, and Roy stutters something about finances in front of them, but tells Electra at home, I’m pretty sure I would die on the plane, and I don’t want to be that uncomfortable when I die.

 

Person Centered Tech launches the automated app that has distilled Roy’s guidance into something the PCT team can execute or the therapists can do on their own, which was a multi-year process. He is ready on the day of the launch for questions and concerns, but the team has got it covered, and interest is building slowly. He steps back to rest, puzzled and a bit let down. But he feels more and more secure that it will work and will be helpful once people know what it is.

 

Thursday, November 18th, 2021. While Electra house-sits for the cousins who are in Ireland, she convinces Roy to use their hot tub as explicitly permitted, and he finally agrees after declining for half a year of their invitations. She needs to drive him the three blocks to get there. They do enjoy it, talking together, floating in hot water. His shoulders look at ease. It is lovely, and he says, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do something like this again.

 

Then on Friday 11/19/2021, Electra races home from housesitting to join Roy’s latest cardiology appointment. The second one with this doctor, who had said there are at least 10 etiologies for heart enlargement and failure, and the last one he lists is obesity, which is clearly the one he’s thinking of, even though Electra pointed out –yet again– that Roy has had an enlarged heart since doctors had looked at it in childhood.  The cardiologist also says that cardiac rehab is not possible, because Roy has to have been hospitalized for his heart to qualify. Roy asks the doctor after being prescribed one new medicine (but not up to the correct dose of three he started last month), “What will I feel? How will I know the medicine is working?” and the cardiologist cheerfully says, “You won’t feel anything. No lab tests will show anything. We’ll only know it’s working in a year when we repeat your echocardiogram. In the meantime we’ll just change one at a time.”  This was despite Electra talking, yet again, about how poor Roy’s quality of life is and how limited he is. And then the doctor mumbles a recommendation about losing weight. Electra puts on a brave face about how no one seems to notice how bad his quality of life is, and hopes that the friendly personal trainer can maybe get trained in cardiac rehab in record time (as she had offered to do so).

 

Electra and Roy talk a bit about politics in the kitchen after the appointment. The Rittenhouse trial just completed, and the white supremecist teen who traveled across state lines to cause trouble has been acquitted.

Roy seems down, and distracted. Humans are just so terrible. Usually she is the angry one and he asks her to ease up a bit, but today he says he’s angry too. She tries to cheer him up by mentioning some positive news, that Sec. of Interior Deb Haaland is removing racist place-names from national parks. He pauses, noticing Electra just regulated her own emotions out of anger and fear. He smiles at her. She knows he is thinking that phrase, “I am proud of you.”

Electra talks about how she needs to pack for a trip to see her brother tomorrow in Seattle. Roy is stricken. “That’s tomorrow? So soon.” he says in a quiet voice. She doesn’t notice his face when he says that. She is trying to be brave for him.

 

They hug, as they usually do, for at least 20 seconds. He goes back to work. She goes to buy those super cheap budgeted groceries and pick up his new medicine which won’t feel like anything.

 

Roy talks to his deputy director, Liathana, about the launch, but she asks him about the appointment.  He looks down, not meeting her eyes through the webinar camera. They end the call at 3:40pm, after Roy told her to make sure to keep meeting with Electra to hang out with her horse and to walk in the cemetery. Liath says, Of course, but you’ll be there too. He doesn’t answer. 

 

When Electra gets home at 4:10 or so, her groceries drop to the floor because the cats are rigid and quiet, staring into the hallway.  Roy’s body is in the hall, mostly face down. There are medical signs that he has died, but Electra has never actually seen a real dead body, and when she flies to his side, he is still warm.  Nothing in the apartment is out of place. Nothing is disturbed. He’s just there. Maybe he fainted? But the signs... She starts screaming, No, no, no, baby no. Roy, wake up. Wake up. Help me help you. Somebody help me, please! even while part of her retreats into her mind, saying to herself, he is already gone.

9-1-1 dispatch recommends getting a neighbor to help because, as she feared, she isn’t strong enough to turn him over in the hallway, as his back keeps hitting the wall.  Neighbors she has only met once come immediately.  And, as she feared, she is unable to give him CPR because he is so strong and sturdy. His head wobbles with no muscle tone when she tries to give him rescue breaths, and there’s no diaphragmatic resistance. She’s still screaming. And shaking. And crying. The husband of the neighbors tries, but he’s never been trained. The wife of the neighbors has only learned to do it on children, so she goes to the door to guide the paramedics/EMTs into the apartment.

Eight men take over CPR on Roy’s body. They move him out of the hallway and Electra is guided to the kitchen. She is still shaking and shuddering. One liaison paramedic gets her to tell what medication he is on, which she can recite exactly, thanks to that cardiologist appointment an hour ago. The liaison offers for her not to watch, but she has to watch. The neighbor hugs her.

She looks up into the kitchen, near the light fixture. She hadn’t felt very “intuitive” at all in years, but somehow she knows that Roy’s soul is there, invisible, near that light. She asks him if he could maybe stay, for her. He points out that his body is dead and unable to be inhabited. The EMTs are still working on him, and if they didn’t declare it too late, who is she to do so, but she can’t ask Roy’s soul to go into a dead body.  Out loud, she thanks the men for working on him.  

She calls Liath, who might be able to watch the cats if she needs to be in the hospital for a while. Liath’s voice sounds absolutely wrecked when Electra stutters out that Roy has collapsed, and Electra almost says Never Mind. But Liath agrees to come.

She calls her brother. Harder to speak now. Explains that Roy has collapsed, has no pulse. Going to the hospital. Can’t visit tomorrow. Has to repeat herself.

She calls her aunt. Please come. I am alone. I need help. Roy has collapsed. Meet me at the hospital. She has to repeat herself again. Her aunt and uncle leave immediately to meet her. 

 

The liaison catches her attention and asks if Roy had a DNR. Her eyes widened because Roy had intended to get one, but we never got around to it, so she says No. They watch the CPR for another interminable time. He approaches again and says, “You have made all the right choices. He is getting all the same care, the same medicines, that he would be getting in a hospital, but I need to talk to you about the rates of survival with CPR.” She says to him in a steady voice, looking him straight in the eyes, “I’m a physician and trained in CPR. I know what the survival rates are.” Which is to say: very, very, very low.  He nods. He looks back to the people doing CPR. He tells her, “You made all the right choices.”  He gives her his name and says a crisis response volunteer is going to meet her at the hospital. Does she want to ride along in the ambulance?

She says, “I have to find my cats. They might have gotten out. If they are hurt or lost……… I can’t even…… I can’t lose them tonight, not when…..” so her neighbor says she’ll drive Electra to the hospital.  The paramedics check three more times if she is coming before they leave. But Roy’s soul doesn’t leave. And she has to find the cats, who were his only companions when he died.

Liath arrives when Roy’s body is carried to the ambulance.  He is not being neglected, here.

 

Liath and her neighbor help her find her cats who were safe and hidden in the apartment, and feed them, and get to a safe room, and pick up some medical detritus and take out the trash, and then drive to the hospital. While caring for the cats, Electra had noticed Roy’s phone was just lying on the counter top in the bathroom, a few feet away from where Roy fell. She also noticed that the cat litter box looks like it had just been cleaned but was dropped a few inches. The neighbor will drive Electra, but Liath wants to drive herself in case she needs to come back to take care of the cats. She promises to drive safely. Electra can’t lose anyone else tonight

 

The hospital calls on the ride over, tells her how and where to get in. She is met by two social workers and the crisis response volunteer; the security guards say that only one person is allowed in per party, and the social workers tell them, Let Everyone In. Barriers fall. Electra is in a room with Liath and her neighbor, and soon her aunt and uncle, and two social workers, and the hospital administrator on call. But for a moment, she’s alone with just friends and family. Liath asks what happened. Electra says, I think Roy was dead before I even arrived home. I’m 75% sure of that. But 25% not sure. I simply can’t say he’s dead unless someone tells me he’s dead. Then we are joined by all the staff, and now three physicians. Electra recognizes the format the resident is using for the talk. It’s called SPIKES and it’s for delivering bad news.

 

They ask her what she knows, and she explains with medical jargon the signs she saw when she got home that he was not alive, and the signs during CPR that he was not alive.  The resident nods, and declares his time of death to be 5:15 which is when they stopped trying.

Electra asks if they have any ideas about his cause of death. She has to know if it was sudden, like a blood clot, or longer, like if he was choking or something where he suffered. They tell her that they don’t have any ideas at all. [editor/widow: This is foreshadowing.]

 

Electra works with the hospital administrator to authorize an autopsy. She has to know not just about a cause of death, but potentially whatever all those neglectful doctors missed when they told him to just lose weight. He gives her other handouts about what her next steps are. Her aunt stands beside her, and Liath holds her hand.  The administrator leaves and she cries for the first time. Not screaming, just crying.

 

In a few minutes, his body has been prepared to be viewed. Her aunt goes with her and stands in the corner.  His hands aren’t tense any more from typing and gesturing, and his nails are clean and perfect. His forehead is relaxed, his eyes are still clear but won’t be soon. His neck and shoulder muscles aren’t tense any more from struggling to breathe. His favorite shirt that made his eyes look green is bunched underneath his torso, and she’ll never see it again. His wedding ring is in a medical urine sample bottle, tossed between his legs. She steps into the hallway and is escorted back. The crisis response volunteer gives her a little magazine of resources. Liath, who had been working by his side for 6 years, goes to see Roy’s body in repose as well.

 

The attending doctor wrote on his death certificate that his cause of death was obesity. They asked too little, spent too short a time, and had no follow up questions. But Electra wouldn’t learn this for two more weeks.

 

Electra was put into a chain of custody: first her aunt and uncle stayed with her into the evening; her brother drove down that night from Seattle and stayed the weekend instead of her going to see him, and then her cousins flew back from Ireland; their first plane had taken off on the day Roy died, and he had known he would have died on that plane.

 

While her brother is in town, they go for a walk and Electra starts piecing together all the things she noticed and immediately remembered. Based on the state of the apartment (nothing out of place), his body’s position and state, the phone placed on the bathroom counter, the litter box being slightly disrupted, and the conversation Liath told her about after the visit with the cardiologist, this is what Electra thinks happened. 

 

November 19th, 2021 3:45pm was the pivotal moment when Roy’s future life would be so overwhelmed by pain, by untreated disability, by increasing poverty and insecurity, and by his growing contempt for what humanity had in its future, that it would have overshadowed the brightness and light and strength he had brought into the world. Electra is ready, his nephew is safe, PCT is as self-sustaining as it can be. She will be home in a few minutes rather than a state away for a whole weekend. 

The only thing that is needed now is that the cats need some care. 

So he set down his coffee cup and secured his work computer, used the restroom himself, then emptied the cats’ litter box. As he knelt to replace it in the hallway, his soul simply stepped backwards out of his body, and his heart and breath stopped. 

It doesn’t matter what the autopsy says about the actual cause of death. He died a good death, quickly and without pain, before things got worse. His soul stepped away when all the things he worried about were still limned with hope, and when he and Electra had made all the right decisions and could have no doubt that though his death could have been different, it couldn’t have been better. 

 

Electra’s brother helped her find a funeral home which could facilitate aquamation, or alkaline hydrolysis.  Roy loved baths, and the ocean. Now most of him will be one with the ocean that held him as a child, just water salts and proteins and fats, phasing back into new life or perhaps becoming the bedrock sediment layer of the world to come. Maybe that part of him will become some shimmering bioluminescence, light as a gesture, swirling in the night. As water, he can hold up other children. He never needed to learn to swim because he became the water. 

 

It almost didn’t happen because his recorded weight was right at the machine’s tolerance cut off, but the funeral home we chose made sure it would happen. 

 

Finally he got enough, for the right amount of time, until the end.