Such a Good Brain
Karen Paul
The author’s husband
Word Count 1217
The hospice nurse arrived to clock the time of death, the funeral home came and wrapped his body in a white sheath and took him out, gently, respectfully, to the van. We walked out onto the porch, my children and I, while our neighbors and friends moved towards us in slow motion like a movie set, walking up our front steps and joining us to watch him being slipped into the back of the van and then watched the van drive away to the funeral home where he would be laid on the cold steel table in a basement room where he would rest, with the shomrim – Jewish tenders who watch the body -- sitting with him, never leaving his body for a moment so that his restless soul would know when to fly, when it was time to leave this corporeal earth and be returned to the dust, the dirt we would shovel and pile on his casket, first me, then each of our children, leaving our hands and landing with a thud.
Several weeks earlier, it had become clear that there was to be no heroic last-minute rally, no unanticipated happy ending to the story of the tumor that had entered my husband’s brain nearly 12 months earlier, scattering its tentacles across the lobes and the grey matter, searching for a place, anyplace, to lay in its scaffolding. One morning, when it was clear that we would be spending the next and last phase of our life together preparing for his death, our youngest son, 13 and an empath, was sitting on our bed and, without asking, picked up his phone to call his grandmother. “Grandma,” he said, “Daddy’s here, and he’s sad, and I think that talking with you would make him feel better.” He handed the phone to his dad. Talking on the phone hurt my husband’s head, but he grasped for our son’s phone as if it were a life raft. And for the first time throughout his brain cancer year, he talked with his mother like he was a little boy. “Mommy, I wish you were here to cut my hair.”
My husband’s hair had been falling down on the job for many years by the time he was diagnosed with glioblastoma. He had learned that rather than trying to comb the weak, sparse front end over his pate, it was far more elegant to simply shave his head. But after his head was shaved for his surgery, the tumor 98% resected, and 79 staples closed up the entrance point, leaving a gash like seen in a monster movie, he stopped shaving both his head and his face. He had imbued his hair with the strength of Samson, and I was no Delilah. I would never touch the scrappy, wiry threads that were sprouting out of his head, covering up his rapidly healing scar and propping him up with the vigor he needed for battle. Once the chemo was done, the hair grew in more rapidly, and he relied on it as a barometer of his body’s ability. That morning, when he asked his mother to come cut his hair, I knew that the battle was over.
“He had such a good brain.”
This was my mother-in-law’s way of saying someone was smart. Especially if that someone was her son. In the nearly 35 years I have known her, I have heard that line used to refer to many people – her own husband, my children, her rabbi, her father who was a rabbi, her husband’s psychologist friends. And of course, her son. Many, many times.
But not about me. She loved me, respected me, and read my writing with joy. But she never told me that I had a good brain.
Perhaps that’s because my brain was a little more like hers. More attuned to the emotional side, more likely to ally with my heart. My husband’s brain was walled off in its own fortress, the blood-brain barrier serving as a moat between his intellect and his emotions. My husband’s therapist once told him – having met me once – that I needed chemical intervention for my mental and emotional state. I think she was a bad therapist. But he respected and needed her and so I ignored her and didn’t blow up into one of those emotional states she thought needed to be tamped down. The fact that he didn’t disagree with her assessment spoke to the core of our marital strife.
The year of his illness, my brain flipped, becoming more rational, organized, unwilling to let emotion rule the day. I had to manage every detail of his needs. Conversely, his brain had become, for the first time, more open to letting love in. His friends showered him with an emotional flood he had never before experienced and certainly had never allowed in our relationship. Meanwhile, his wife and his children were trapped within the carapace of a house holding impending death, our own brains on fire and our hearts shutting down to keep the pain at bay.
“He had such a good brain.”
He was the tinman, waiting for his heart, I was the scarecrow, trying to prove that I was smart enough. Perhaps what we really needed was the lion, the very human courage that could have broken through our divergent neural pathways to meet each other in the middle.
His good brain made it so he was often the smartest person in the room. The smartest in terms of knowledge accumulated. Smartest in terms of history and religion. Smartest in terms of directional ability. He never got lost. I was always lost.
I was the smartest when it came to people. To relationships. To emotional intelligence. To creativity. But in our relationship none of my right sidedness seemed to count as much as his left brain prowess.
When we switched, out of necessity, calling on our alternate side brains to cope with the perils and burdens of illness and impending death, we should have found that same lost neural highway in the middle that would lead us back to each other. Instead, we shouldered our newfound, heightened attention to the other side of our braininess alone.
“He had such a good brain.”
And yet, that good brain killed him. That good brain led to us missing each other in our final moments together, missing each other in the wake of the storm of illness. That good brain, secured behind a stronghold, made it hard to forge the thinking-with-one-brain thing that happens to many couples.
But that good brain was also a guide for me and our children … ethical, moral, brave. Loving. That good brain made the decision to suspend all life-extending medication when it was clear there was no more good life left to live. That good brain decided when it was time to say goodbye. That good brain wrote its own funeral statement, imploring our friends to find ways to help do good in the world. That good brain told me, in my husband’s final written message to me, that everything that was kind and loving, and beautiful in our lives was due to me. In its final moments, that good brain at last soldered together our competing brain waves, our divergent neural paths, and made them one.
Karen is a writer in Takoma Park, MD, and the principal of Catalyzing Philanthropy, a fundraising and development consultancy. She is working on a memoir about grief, trauma and widowhood after being a caretaker for a spouse with terminal brain cancer. She has published essays and short stories in numerous outlets, including the New York Times Modern Love column, the Washington Post, Lilith Magazine, Boston Globe, Pangyrus, San Antonio Review, Modern Loss, Motherwell, Red Wheelbarrow, Open Secrets substack, and the two-volume pandemic collection, When We Turned Within. Karen graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts.