The J A Jance Casebook by J A Jance

Author:J A Jance [Jance, J A]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A FLASH OF

CHRYSANTHEMUM

(1999)

The year goes out in a flash of chrysanthemum:

But we, who cell by cell and

Pang upon pang, are dragged to execution,

Live out the full dishonor of the clay.

I first heard those words in a college auditorium on a January night alive with orange blossoms and promise when C. Day-Lewis, the English Poet Laureate, came to the University of Arizona to read his work. Baucis and Philemon, one of the poems he read that night, was delivered to an audience made up primarily of English Major, poetry devotees.

Only nineteen at the time, it was hard for me to imagine what those words meant. Oh, maybe my hips and waist would thicken one day, making my figure match my fifty-year-old mother’s, but in reality that possibility seemed remote. In fact, it wasn’t until I hit fifty myself when the idea of aging gained an actual foothold in my consciousness.

At fifty-one and finding myself beset with nights of sleep-depriving hot flashes, it was far easier to imagine what might happen. I could see then how that single troublesome molar—the lower left-hand one that for years had shied away from everything cold—might one day do something so drastic as to simply fall out. Or else have to be pulled. Or that my chins—all several of them—would gradually subside into the suddenly excess folds of skin that now flowed down what was once a reasonably slender neck.

It even crossed my mind at times that fading into what I imagined to be the gentle haze of Alzheimer’s-induced forgetfulness might be simpler, for me, than dealing with either the ongoing battles between my two feuding daughters or with the once-favored son who hasn’t spoken to Ted and me since two years ago last Christmas.

Those ideas came on gradually, creeping up almost imperceptibly over a period of time. But what I never imagined, not in all my wildest dreams—nightmares, if you will—was the appalling reality of what was actually to be. Or what is. No, I didn’t see that coming, not in a million years.

We talked about it, Ted and I, when the diagnosis first came in during those stunned but strangely intimate and innocent days when Lou Gehrig was still a baseball player whose life and death had nothing whatsoever to do with me. We started out by reading all the available books and literature on the subject and by trying to imagine what it would be like. No matter how many books we read though, we weren’t really prepared. Nobody ever is.

In our naiveté, we didn’t nearly grasp the grimly inexorable way in which my limbs would be deprived of all usefulness; how they would gradually give up the ghost while still apparently attached to what passes for a living, breathing body. We reassured each other, saying that we understood and that it would be all right. We were in love and we would get through it together somehow. But now, as my ruined body lies virtually helpless on a rail-lined hospital bed or sits trapped as a strapped-in prisoner in this damnable chair, my mind still roams free.

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