The Very Thought of You

I wrote this, intending it to be an entry in the A Song from My Story, a Story for My Song event, but events overtake us, and I wanted it published now.

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April 2020

I look back now, and it all seems so preordained. I thought I had my life mapped out: med school, practice, marriage, kids; but I didn't know there was a clock ticking.

Half of all marriages end in divorce. Lots of people I know have divorced. My parents divorced after I went off to college, and it was ugly. I promised myself I would do better than that. Mymarriage would be a good one. Gwen and I would be together forever.

I found out afterward that most marriages that don't make it die about eight years down the road. More often than not, it's because spouses grew apart. Back then, I wondered how that could happen. How could people be so careless and uncaring? Didn't they see they were taking each other for granted? I knew how it could happen; I had watched it at home. Mom was a high-priced lawyer and Dad was a surgeon. When I moved out, Mom moved into a fancy condominium at City Park. Dad sold the house and everything I had known as my home and family were gone or irretrievably changed.

Me, though? I thought I had it under control but instead, a clock was ticking, and I couldn't hear it. I didn't realize it was there. I did not see the sand running out of my hourglass. The tide was taking my bride away from me. Pick the best metaphor; one of them will fit, maybe all of them. I made a silent promise to Gwen and myself that I would make my marriage work, regardless of life's challenges. To my shame, I failed in the one thing that mattered most.

Crane Beach is four miles of wide, pristine sandy dunes and beaches, just north of Cape Ann. Have you heard of it? Every time someone uses an industrial or commercial bathroom fixture, chances are it was made by Crane. That won't be the case much longer because Crane toilets are a thing of the past. American Standard took over Crane. When they were on top, the Crane family built a seaside estate, mansion, and all. Now, it's open to the public, the same way San Simeon, Hearst's West Coast castle, is. The Crane mansion has 59-rooms and looks out to the Atlantic. In the rear, a rolling lawn sweeps down a half-mile-long Grand Allee to the ocean. It's only an hour's drive from Boston. Back in the day, it was a favorite place for weary med students to recuperate.

Nearby, there was a B&B worth visiting. I was staying with friends for a long weekend in October. My room had a fireplace, and we were close to the ocean. I opened the doors to the balcony to listen to waves hitting the beach. The host had a fire going outside and we were partying with the rest of the guests. Gwen, slender and tall, caught my eye. She was a third-year student on her way to a career in pulmonology. I was on staff as a shiny new ER doc. It turned out we both loved to sail. I had a beat-up 26-foot Pearson moored in Gloucester harbor, just south of where we were. The bar from the Perfect Storm movie was just across the street. Her family had a place between Oxford and St. Michaels, on the eastern Maryland shore, where they kept a 36-foot Morgan. I sat by the fire and listened as she launched into a funny rambling story of how she stole her father's boat, kidnapped her father, her brother Frank, and shanghaied them away to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

The plan had been to sail to Nantucket. Dad had a slip lined up for the boat in the harbor and reservations in one of the local, historic hotels. It was night and Gwen had the helm. Brother Frank was sitting buddy and Dad was below, asleep before his shift. Gwen was on course to pass by Martha's Vineyard and enter the Nantucket sound. From there, her course took her East South East into Nantucket town. Instead, Gwen held her heading past Cape Cod into the Bay of Fundy, with 230 nautical miles to go to Nova Scotia. When her father came up to take the wheel from Gwen, shifting her to his mate and sending Frank below to sleep, they were making good time on a favorable current and fair wind. By now, everyone was listening. The betting was Dad would come about with some holdouts (including me) for going on. But Gwen had it all figured out before she made her move.

They were adventurers at heart, all of them. Trusting in that, Gwen transformed an easy sail into something epic. If her father had turned around, he'd have never lived it down. Their good ship crossed the Bay of Fundy and sailed on. Not long after, they moored on the lakes of the Bras d'Or and drank champagne. They stood on the cliffs at the top of the Cape and looked across the North Atlantic to St. Pierre & Miquelon. They didn't go that far but you could hear Gwen's desire to try, even this long after it had happened.

The whole time Gwen told her tale, I couldn't take my eyes off her. It was the way she so enjoyed regaling us with her acts of "piracy;" I was entranced. We were married shortly after she graduated. Against all odds, she matched at my hospital as a new pulmonology resident, and life could not have been better.

In the first two years, we worked hard but we played hard, too. I pulled strings to make sure my time off matched hers. There were quick trips to St. Maarten and Old Quebec. We tried to start a family, but that stayed a work in progress. I made a career change that, looking back, didn't help. It was a wedge that eventually would split us apart.

My strength as a medical scientist is diagnosis. ER medicine requires strong diagnostic skills, so I gravitated there. While I enjoyed the front-line satisfaction of saving patients, my real interest was more academic. In addition to treating injury and illness, I wanted to study the cause of illness and what it did to the human body. When I was considering specialties, Infectious Disease had been an option, but it didn't seem "hands-on" enough. When I was approached by the head of forensic pathology to join her team, I gave it serious thought. It was hands-on and it lent to academic research.

My hours changed with my new duties and I traveled more. Consultations and conferences increasingly took me out of town, and I picked up teaching duties at the University. Gwen was a superstar in Pulmonology, and everybody loved her. It seemed as if overnight she was on this committee and that panel. Four years later, Gwen was named Vice-Chair of the facilities planning group. Life was good. We enjoyed each other's company and sex was still fun. We took vacations but not always together.

I did get a hint that things might be going off track but didn't see it for what it was. We're were doing July 4that her parents and Dad asked me how the hospital's modernization program was going. Usually, Gwen would take over and give a better presentation than I ever could. This time, she didn't; instead, Gwen gave me a smile and nod to take the lead. That just wasn't like her. I talked about HEPPA filters, UV-C light scrubbing, and delivery dates, but Gwen knew this better than I did. She was Vice-Chair of the committee that approved all of this. Was it just not important to her, or was she letting me show off? I had no answer and it nagged at me.

Our eighth anniversary was coming up and I made reservations for a long weekend at the Chateau Frontenac, leaving on Thursday to return the following Sunday night. I was sitting on the deck when Gwen came out, a glass of wine in one hand and an envelope in the other.

"Greg, I'm sorry this is at the last minute, but I don't want to wait until tomorrow. I won't be going with you to Quebec."

I looked at her, puzzled. "Why? Something at work?"

"No, not really. Work had a part to play but it's about us. I want a divorce."

I rocked back, not capable of absorbing what I had heard. Where was this coming from? We had it all and suddenly Gwen was walking away. It made no sense.

"I'm not getting this, Gwen. You cannot be serious. No warning, no chance to talk, no chance for counseling. No trying to work things out..."

"I know, Greg. I'm not handling this well. I put it off when I should have known better. Greg, it's time. You have your career and I have mine. We have already gone our separate ways. We haven't stayed in touch with each other. Mostly, that has been my fault. I became caught up in management and that was on top of my duties with patients. There just wasn't time for you and when I drifted away, you let me go."

"Gwen, isn't divorce a little drastic? You've only now put the issue on the table." I was frantic at this point and desperate we did nothing rash.

"Look, Gwen, let's not do this right now. Let's see someone. Let's get professional help and find some common ground. We can build our marriage up again." I was fighting to stay married, but Gwen wasn't meeting me halfway.

"Greg, read my letter. I told my lawyer to be more than fair. We'll split 50/50 and I'll pay all the costs, even your legal fees. Our accountant did the math, so give him a call."

"Greg, I'm sorry, but things are what they are, and I need to move on."

Ninety days later, I was single again. Perhaps I should have seen it coming. I told myself I never had a chance but was that true? Gwen was frequently getting home late or going away for a long weekend at a medical conference. Had she been cheating on me? If only I had followed up with her that day, confronted her, and demanded to know why she had stopped showing interest in me and what I was doing, would she have told me there was someone new? Instead, I ran away and stuck my head in the sand. Later, when I found out that was no one else, no handsome young intern taking my place, it felt worse.

I buried myself in my work (no shock there) which, for a while, was all about redesigning the pathology lab, morgue, and how biological material was stored, handled, and destroyed. Gwen had become a senior partner in her pulmonology group, and she had contributed a chapter to an important new textbook. We rarely saw each other and then only at hospital functions. I asked after her but didn't push it. Cowardice on my part, I see that now.

Hospitals run on gossip. Gwen was ambitious, they said. She wanted to be the hospital's next president and then jump somewhere bigger. That was the "big secret" floating around. Gwen played favorites. She flattered her superiors, but no one had ever suggested she slept around. What I heard was that Gwen shot down anyone foolish enough to make a play.

Still, I could not lie to myself. Our relationship had become stale and I had done nothing about it. I had locked myself away with work and allowed Gwen to drift off. Had she ever reached out to me? If she had, I would not have known. I was too busy talking to contractors about liters-per-minute airflow.

I read the divorce petition many times, expecting the next time I read it I would find the flaw that would bring Gwen back to me. I met with my lawyer and our accountant. I commiserated with friends who comforted me, but I soon realized they were only placating me. I was the fool who had shit the bed. When I finally signed the divorce papers, no matter how badly it hurt, I was again taking the path of least resistance, just as I had done with everything else in my life.

I attended a pathology conference in November. There was a rumor circulating that something "hot" was cooking in China, but no one had details. It was a virus, maybe a coronavirus, which supposedly had jumped to humans via a reptile vector. That caught my attention. To my knowledge, that had never happened before. The information I was getting was second hand, so perhaps it was exaggerated or wrong.

There had been deaths. It wasn't SARS or an H1N1 bird-flu virus. There were claims that the virus was novel but that was shot down as speculative. We had seen this before. China had always been a hothouse for viruses. This virus, too, would be bottled up over there. CDC and WHO would smother it in its cradle. They'd get samples and work up a vaccine. Another victory for public health would go in the books.

The next thing I knew, my hospital was filling up with cases of all ages, sexes, and races. They arrived complaining of sore throats and fevers. Too quickly, patients decompensated into pulmonary distress and had to be ventilated. Nine out of ten of those patients succumbed. Other, more terrifying symptoms began to emerge. The virus caused blood clots to form and patients suffered strokes. We suspected structural heart damage among survivors and subsequent research confirmed this. Sometimes there was neurological damage. Some children showed a total body rash that was extremely painful. Unbelievably, one child demonstrated myocarditis on admission, attributed to the virus. Later, young athletes showed the same symptoms with some succumbing to acute cardiac infarctions. There were many deaths and worst of all, the death rate was increasing exponentially.

I stopped practicing medicine and, for a time, became the hospital's resident undertaker. Early on, we had realized the morgue would be overrun. No one had experience with managing patient remains on a wholesale level and hospital president Bill Morley wanted someone he could trust to handle what would be highly scrutinized work. Morley and I planned for refrigerated trailers to take the overflow. I got a call late one night and hurried to the morgue. Standing on the loading dock, Bill and I inspected trailers. Most were acceptable but we rejected those whose refrigeration units concerned us. We insisted the trucks carry backup generators and an extra generator be installed at the hospital waiting zone. My job was to see that, with zero mistakes, the dead were gathered, prepared to travel, and timely sent to their next destination.

I remember that there were about 150 local deaths one day in mid-March and thought that was a huge number. On March 10, the number was 2120 across the country. By March 30, it was 6,132. A couple of days later, I learned that 6,378 people died in one day. Here in New York, on February 29, there were 11 hospital cases. By March 15, there were 189 but by March 23 there were 1,036 people hospitalized with COVID-19. I cannot describe our shock and terror at what we saw racing towards us. On April 1, there were 1,595 people in hospital and 447 patients died. Our staff was becoming infected, some were sick and, word was, some had died. Patients were treated on gurneys in the hallway. I was called back to the floor to treat patients. Protocols had been developed for accurate, respectful shipping of patient remains and that work was turned over to residents. Sometimes, the treatment plan was to do nothing and make patients comfortable for what little time they had left. It was happening too often.

To protect other patients, the hospital sealed off the emergency department where I worked. The doors that connected us to the rest of the hospital were permanently closed. Sheets of plastic, duct tape, and temporary wood support sealed the seams and gaps. Friends, and sometimes family, often showed up at those doors. I tried to give those lucky people some privacy but sometimes we'd peek and wish we were talking to someone we loved. People stood in the street and held signs. Opera singers came one night. They stood on the back of a flatbed truck and sang arias. I never knew there was opera karaoke. Bands played. People did everything they could to support us. It was the USO coming to the front lines to keep the medical staff in the trenches going. They will never know the spiritual and corporal impact of the acts of mercy they visited upon us.

Inside, we fought back. One of our MedTechs figured out that the back wall of our Storage Room "D" fronted a corridor on the safe side. Our quarantined side found some thin Plexiglas and mounted it on that wall and sealed it airtight. The other side, the safe side, got word of what we'd done and cut away the wallboard; we could see and hear each other. People on both sides lined up. There was jostling in the halls as people switched places. There was always a line and you got 5 minutes, strictly enforced. We were communicating in the only way we had. We said goodbye and good luck. I listened to a couple have "phone sex" that way, telling each other all the things they would do the "next time." No one objected; it was a prayer to live. We were whispering through a crack in the wall. We played Pyramus and Thisbe as the Red Death danced through our hallways.

I was doing the intake diagnosis on an elderly woman who had been transferred to us from a nursing home. She was age 97, very frail, dehydrated, infected, and terminal. I signed-off for palliative care and moved on. I noted her name, Lillian Best, and wondered for a moment about the life she had lived, the things she must have seen. At least her life had been a long one. I said a prayer and hoped she had known only good things. I did not leave her casually; we fought for every life. Recently, we had lost a child and both doctors and nurses were bitter. I had moved on because we were running on fumes and needed to pick our fights.

About an hour later, Sally Watts, our head nurse on the shift, took me aside. I had come to know and like Sally but oddly not through work. Her parents had owned a small apartment building that Sally had acquired after they passed. It was a five-minute walk from the hospital. After the divorce, Gwen moved there. Sally would pass me word about what Gwen was up to, but it never amounted to much. Sally explained that there was an elderly gentleman who had arrived with Lillian. They had him in the break room, being attended by whoever had a moment.

"Mr. Best... Mr. Best... How are you doing, Mr. Best?" He didn't seem to notice me. Charlie Best was his name, Sally told me. The nursing home sent his file along, but it didn't say much.

Charles Best, born in Atlantic City, NJ in 1922. Married in 1943 to Lillian Best né Walker. Diagnosis: Dementia secondary to Alzheimer's; AFib; fall hazard. Prior history of malaria, a gunshot wound, and burns. How did that happen?Non-smoker. No children. No known relatives. Not surprising at his age.Occupations: singer, salesman, real estate broker, retired. Medicare. Oh well, I needed a break. If I could get a moment, maybe my internet mojo could scare up someone to call.

I stepped back in to see how he was doing. A group of nurses, ending their break, moved and I took a seat as they left.

"How are you doing, Mr. Best? Are you okay? Can I get you anything?" He looked at me and I got the impression that he was conscious of me. He started to talk.

"The nurse was very nice. I don't remember her... Did I meet her before? I need to write her name... in meh..." Charlie fumbled at pockets that were empty "...little pad..." Charlie was fading and looked lost. "Nurses take care of you," and he fell silent.

I stepped out and asked Sally to join me. I stepped back into the room and Charlie started speaking again.

"Can you tell me when my wife is coming back? I've been sitting here... the nurse said... she sat there, the nurse..." Charlie trailed off again.

I raised my voice a little this time. "What did the nurse say, Charlie?" I didn't take Charlie literally. Any female was likely to be taken for a nurse in his confused state.

His head came up and he responded. "She talked to me. She was nice... she said, my wife... Her name is Lillian... my wife is Lillian... on my pad," his hands unconsciously searching for the note pad he no longer kept, "...so I know."

"Charlie, my name is Dr. Greg. Think you can remember that? Dr. Greg. I'm Dr. Greg." Charlie nodded and waved a quavering hand but stayed silent. I doubted he understood.