She Talked to God Every Morning n the Shower

Prompt: Write about a character who develops a special ritual to cope with something

She Talked to God Every Morning in the Shower

                                                                        By Holly Redell-Witte

Those waning days of her marriage were the hardest days of all, harder than the days of the years she waited for him to marry her, harder than the days after he lost his job, and they were always late with their rent or paying the bills. These final days were nearly impossible to bear because they both knew, everyone who knew them knew, that he was dying.

The days were not only hard with all there was to do in a household in crisis, and in trying to make sure he knew until his last breath how much she loved him, she also had to swallow the engulfing feeling that she – they - were being punished for how they had gotten together in the first place. It might have started as an office affair, he told her all he could offer her was a little affection, but the truth was they immediately both knew they had each found their mirror, their witness. Still, they were guilty of causing pain to others.

After the love settled in, they were inseparable even during the hours they were apart until that cold Valentine’s Day morning when he showed up at her brownstone apartment with a suitcase and the rubber chicken his daughters thought would be a funny Valentine’s present for their silly Dad, whom they all adored. After that, they were inseparable until they were not. It was his mother who said they couldn’t walk past each other in a room without touching.

Their bedroom in that first little apartment was so small there was space only on one side of the bed for each to crawl in and out. His suitcase doubled as a dresser. Sharing the tiny bathroom so they could both get off to work in the mornings, not able to share the one-person kitchen, made them move as soon as they could. The next apartment they rented was spacious with an entry foyer, two bedrooms and two baths, kitchen with a window and large living room that would have accommodated two of the tiny apartment.

After nearly two years and having gotten to the courthouse steps twice before, his wife finally allowed the divorce. They waited on the platform in Grand Central Station when the train pulled in from Connecticut, found the third car and the conductor who handed them a large envelope containing the divorce decree. Feeling as if they were in a 1940s movie, they headed downtown to get a marriage license and, three days later, were married by a judge in her chambers in the presence of parents and daughters. They were married on the 21^st birthday of the oldest. The middle went back to college a few days after the wedding. Within a few weeks, they found out they were going to have a baby and the youngest daughter announced she wanted to move in with them. They decided to expand the apartment, somehow talking the building management into letting them steal a room from the vacant apartment next door, turning that into a large studio, giving them a dining room and dividing the living room so that each child would have a separate bedroom.

Nine months later, to the day, after their marriage, their little boy was born. Life was good.

She and the little boy would stand at the kitchen window, the one on which she grew one pea vine in an old wooden crate one year and watch for the bus that rounded the corner and would bring him home. When they spied Daddy, the day felt as if its natural rhythm had been restored. 

Pretty soon there were two dogs, a funny girl Beagle the daughter wanted who ate through phone coils, and a yellow Lab who had been abandoned in front of a store tied with a rope to a parking meter.

The little boy loved to sit on the floor and smash a wooden spoon into the dogs’ water bowl. They were sure that the two grandmothers suspected the child ate dog food from time to time and he probably did.

All of that mattered and none of that mattered after he got sick. Or to be exact, after the sickness that had been lurking and festering in his body for probably twenty years made its way through his system and showed up in a lump under his arm.

He had been sick for a long time, but they didn’t know about it until the spring of the year when an occasional pain he had in his back became so unbearable that he would pound the arms of a chair in agony and anger. Pain meds touched it but took him away to some foggy place. Diagnosis came on July 31^st after “exploratory” surgery. She waited in his room, her eyes moving over the sterile terrain in the same pattern over and over, making her think of someone stuck in a prison cell who had no hope of ever looking at anything but those grim walls and gated window. Look at the door, look at the empty bed next to the door, look at the railing over the bed that held the hooks that held the faded green and tan striped curtain that could be pulled around into a u-shape to give a sense of privacy. After a while it was like looking at nothing, looking but not seeing. No one came in to tell her how things were going in the surgical suite somewhere in the middle of the maze of a hospital. No one paid any attention to her. Finally, after hours of looking at nothing, a nurse came to tell her they were bringing him back. She asked for information. The nurse deflected the question saying the doctor would have to tell her that, a surgeon whose old-world office on Park Avenue was lined with shelves filled with books that had deep brown and green covers and seemed dusty, as if not having been read in a long time.

Thirty minutes passed. No husband, no doctor. She went to the phone at the nurse’s desk and called the doctor’s office. He seemed remote when he answered. as if he didn’t want to talk to her. Finally, he said “It’s very bad, it’s what we call the black cancer. The surgery went very well, though.” And then the conversation was over, or she was in such shock that she just put down the phone, walked around a corner and back into the room, dazed. She cried for a long time and loudly because a nurse came in to ask if she was all right.

No, she was not all right. Nothing was all right and never would be again. She was inconsolable. They had a six-year-old together and three daughters, now 28, 26 and 18, whom they loved together. How would she tell them? Who would help them?

When he was returned to her, groggy but looking so sweet, he asked her what had happened. They were always honest with each other, and endless conversation was a hallmark of their marriage. “It’s cancer,” she told him and saw him shrug with his lips, giving up. Later, the woman who was his primary doctor told her she should have said that the doctor hadn’t talked to her yet. She wished that someone had given her a roadmap for how to deal with the worst possible thing she could ever hear in her life; someone should have prepared her.

Other doctors became involved, including one, the only one, who took time to get to know the little family before he started a course of chemotherapy and cobalt radiation.  The thought of cobalt so targeted it could pinpoint the deep center of the pain, gave them a bit of hope to hold onto, at least to undo the pain.

The days became the same. They might have been the same before, filled with the routine of their lives, filled with the comforting rites of family love – sending a child off to school each morning on a half-size, yellow school bus he called the peanut bus; planting bulbs in fall on that kitchen window sill to bloom in spring; visits with daughters growing up and beginning their paths; dancing alone in their kitchen late at night….life.

Soon the days were filled with hard needs of a household in crisis, helplessness, and ragged emotions. It seemed every moment, including the ones overnight, held need. She found out she could sleep in only the top of her head, listening to the radio with earphones but in just one ear, to make sure she would hear her husband if he needed her. All night she would hear voices that became familiar and the same commercials over and over….shop at Trader Horn’s, where nickels would be dollars.

That was when she started talking to God. She had this prayerful conversation with God in the shower because it was the only place where she was guaranteed a little privacy for a few minutes. She would stand there under the stream of water lamenting that she didn’t know which way to turn, that she didn’t know how to make the choices and find the answers she needed.

One day God answered.

She was praying the same prayer; I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what to do. She meant, please save my husband, take over, save my husband and my little family. Suddenly her body was suffused with a voice holding her from the inside. I am the only answer. She felt protected for those few seconds God spent with her, as if this weren’t senseless or pointless; someone had a plan. She told no one and the feeling came and went after that, leaving her wondering what exactly God meant.

Once, on a Sunday morning, after her husband had been back in terrible pain for days, she went to a nearby church. While her neighbors followed the rituals of their Sunday service, she sat in the back and silently asked God to relieve the pain. When she got home, he was pain free.

Is that what God had meant? For her to merely ask? Or did it mean she didn’t even have to ask, He knew what to do. Or did it mean, He knew what was happening and so did she, nothing would change but her husband would land in God’s arms. She felt a little crazy.

Other times a solution to a particular problem seemed to come without God’s help. The chemotherapy was so brutal that he refused to go through it again after the first debilitating course. The kind doctor told them that marijuana would help the side effects and suggested asking a friend for some because, in those days before it was readily available, getting permission from the federal government would take longer than the entire course of the chemo.

She, who had never held a joint let alone smoked one, thought about who might have what she needed. She identified a friend she thought she could trust and, sure enough, she was invited to collect a little bag of what looked like seeds and twigs. She walked away with a plastic bag tucked into her purse, slung around her shoulder, sure she had a giant M on her forehead just like Hester Prynne’s A and certain she would be spotted by the police.

Then she had to figure out what to do with the stuff. She knew about brownies so got out a favorite recipe and added marijuana to it, adjusting the recipe to accommodate the addition, now ground to a fine dust. She was sure, as it was baking, that the odor would attract attention, just the way it had once when she forgot about baby bottles and nipples sterilizing in a pot of boiling water on the stove and let the water boil away, the smell of burning rubber clinging to the air in the building’s hallway for days.

This time she got away with it, though, and they took the brownies to the next chemo session where he ate one before the session, one in the middle and, for good measure, decided to eat a third on the way home.

By the time they got home that day, a beautiful autumn day, the already weak man could just about gently ease himself into a big white chair where he sat for the next many hours, so immobile she periodically checked on his breathing.

Later, he told her that he had heard not only every word and every syllable of whatever she and their son had been talking about, but also every letter. She had overdosed her husband. 

Was God in that decision or had she ignored his message and made things worse by taking matters into her own hand?

Things got progressively worse from there. He broke his arm on his birthday, falling because his legs were unable to hold him up. He withdrew, barely able to have a conversation and never talking about what they both knew was coming. He did have one conversation with a neighbor, a neurosurgeon, who came to visit one day. After they spent a half-hour together, she asked the doctor what they had talked about. He said her husband asked him what it was like to die.

Her conversations with God continued until the very last day. God never answered her again. It wasn’t all right afterwards because she lost the love of her life after only seven years of marriage and her family lost its father.

She doesn’t talk to God in the shower anymore, but she does keep a little space behind her heart where she wonders about God’s message she doesn’t quite understand. She says a little ritual prayer from time to time. If God answered her once, maybe someday He might explain.