Arsenic and All Grace

ARSENIC AND ALL GRACE

A short story by Marilyn Jaeger

Now how does that just happen, anyway? We had not been to a stage play for ages.

In late 2014, my longtime friend Paula invited us to a play at a church in Madison. Her son Rick, a Park Ridge classmate of my son Dan, was playing the dastardly nephew Jonathan in “Arsenic and Old Lace”, Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 play about two sweet old ladies who managed to kill twelve men and bury them in their Brooklyn cellar.

       “How in the world could you do that,” their nephew Mortimer asks.

       “Abby: You know your Aunt Martha’s knack for mixing things. You’ve eaten enough of her                              piccalilli.

         Martha: Well, dear, for a gallon of elderberry wine I take one teaspoonful of arsenic, then add a                      half teaspoonful of strychnine and then just a pinch of cyanide.

         Mortimer: (Appraisingly) Should have quite a kick.

         Abby: Yes! As a matter of fact one of our gentlemen found time to say “how delicious!”

Sunrise was 5:47 a.m. in Wisconsin on May 4, 2016. Jarringly, the phone rang in our loft bedroom. Dick’s sister Jane was distraught, asking “What should we do? They called from St. Paul’s Home and Mom has a great deal of pain in her arm. She doesn’t want to go to the hospital.”

A couple hours later, she saw her doctor who insisted she go to hospital. She ended up having surgery on her arm, and the removal of a blood clot. She was in much better spirits by the end of the day.

Another surgery was going on that day. My youngest son Josh was having brain surgery at 8 a.m. in Columbus, Ohio. Several disappointing MRIs had showed a new tumor, and he realized he could no longer drive. Dr. Barhamand in Downers Grove, Illinois suggested he see an innovative cancer specialist in Columbus who might treat congenital brain tumors, like Josh had combated for twenty-seven years, since age nineteen. His good friend from junior high, Dave Dieffenbacher, gave him a plane ticket for the consult. However, by the time he got to Columbus, he was clearly too sick to return home. Thus, a week later, major surgery. It took all day. They got about 80% of the tumor. Brother Jon was with him. High school and church pal Lauren Pelzer Armani, who lives in Columbus, prayed with him. So did his pastor, who stopped by on the way to his new home in North Carolina. While still in Lombard he and his wife had Josh’s fifteen-year-old daughter Andrea stay with them while he was in Columbus. Josh was surrounded and loved.

The day before, I'd had my second bladder cancer surgery. My brother Greg and his wife Lola came down to be with us. Again there was cancer, but the urologist felt he had removed it all, and the passage to the kidneys was clear. A regimen of chemicals including a tuberculin was prescribed.

So surgeries abounded. And then at the end of that Wednesday came a shocking report. Our well water had a very high level of arsenic. Arsenic in well water is a common cause of bladder cancer. Why did we have our water tested? We had sold our beloved home in the hills of southwestern Wisconsin. It happened fast, almost leaving us breathless!

Back on the last weekend of March, we had flown up from Arizona to Illinois. We were excited about our newly-purchased townhome in Arizona and knew we would be spending more winter months there. But we were returning to Windmill Creak in southwest Wisconsin for the summer. Sure, some changes would have to be made; Dick had had a severely traumatic lawn mower accident the previous September, unwittingly driving the John Deere over a ten-foot wall of the former barn basement, breaking every bone in his face, and several in his neck and back and left wrist, losing an eye, and having his heart stop for six minutes in the emergency room. “You died,” said one of his nurses during the two months he spent in the hospital. “God must have some reason to keep you around!”

So we figured the upkeep of our twenty-one acres with creaking windmill would have to be done by someone else, and hopefully Dick’s miles of meandering paths would still be mowed.

The Saturday of Easter weekend we went to Champaign, Illinois for a family party at Anne and Eric’s place. Then Josh and Andrea drove us up to our farm so I could play the organ for church on Easter Sunday and we could celebrate Resurrection day together.

On April Fools Day, Dick had a teleconference, but he left it to accompany me to Monroe Clinic where I had an eight-forty-five appointment with the urologist. Then Pop! - the rear tire of our Terrain blew. I was the sole driver still, and jumped out of the car, surveyed the damage, and circled the car asking for Jesus to help us. A man in a pickup truck came by and he let me ride in the box of the truck back to the Harris farm a mile west. They have a commercial garage, built partly with the steel panels they removed from our barn roof when it was being demolished after the Easter storm ten years ago. And yes, the mechanic on duty happened to have a tire that fit our car, we paid for it and he put it on. We went merrily on our way. The receptionist at the clinic said, “We didn’t think you would be here so soon!” (I had phoned them on my cell that we’d be very late.) I said, “Jesus helped us!” and the other receptionist rolled her eyes – implying “one of those kooks,” obviously.

Fortunately, Dr. Moore was just back from paternity leave that day, and by 1 p.m. I was in surgery where he removed a fist-sized malignant tumor from my bladder. Wow! Neighbor Skip Marunde had happened to drive straight through from Nebraska getting home at midnight – and he was available to drive us home. And there was Anne, up from Champaign. Her telephone prayers for us were/are anointed gifts, as was her presence at such times.

By the end of that week, we were talking to realtors. Within three days of listing our property, a darling couple with newborn twin boys bought the house, offering more than we were asking. They really wanted it! He was a chemist and she was a novelist who already had had her first novel made into a movie.

Any real estate transaction involves an inspection. On a farm property, that includes well-testing. Now, we had had our water tested periodically and arsenic, a natural element in rock-laden soil, was within safe limits. Not this time. Yikes! We immediately had another test done and hand-carried it up to the state laboratory in Appleton, where, appropriately, Mom was also recovering in the hospital. That visit made us realize, however, that her recovery was to be short-lived. She was dying, and at age 101, that was only to be expected. She was ready, even eager to go Home.

Those two baby boys were on our mind. Arsenic in the water? Not acceptable, in any amount. We put in a water softener, and a reverse osmosis system, so that water into the house would be pure. Furnishings in the house were already diminishing. Son Mark and brother Greg both drove away with pickup trucks loaded with our prized possessions. The old pump organ that had once graced my great-grandparents’ living room in southern Minnesota got rescued by a couple and their children from nearby Mt. Horeb, to eventually be moved back to the former rectory of the church my great-grandparents helped establish. Townspeople came for a “mini-estate sale”, knowing the proceeds would go to the community fund aiding our beloved Pecatonica school. Even our sterling silverware we sold, to be melted down. “There’s just no market for that any more,” we were told.

Then Mom died in mid-May. Family gathered for a funeral at St. Paul Home, and Father Charlie officiated. He walked over to her casket, knocked firmly on it, and said, “Evelyn! It’s that potty-mouthed priest you remember!” Fr. Charlie was sister Barb’s friend and supervisor, and the family had gotten to know him – and his ribald sometimes shocking humor at dinners in Barb and Bill’s home. He got the last word, and then he went to the altar and gave an exalted sermon that he ended by singing “An Old Irish Blessing” for a beloved half-Irish lady.

June arrived, “busting out all over” with the trees in our Sawmill valley overwhelmingly verdant and full. I started weekly chemo treatments. My sister Reeni and brother-in-law Jack came to help us pack a U-haul box to transport to Arizona. Josh’s health was going downhill in Columbus, so Dick and I drove there for a four-day visit, staying with good friends Rubin and Jan Pelzer who live near Columbus. Josh’s hearing and sight were greatly impaired, so we had to shout, but he was with it. At one point I was doing a crossword puzzle. A clue was “game using tiles”, and it was eight letters starting with “s”. I asked Josh, the most expert of all the family experts in Scrabble, what the answer was. “Scoobydo”, he said. He had two other answers, too, and it was evident he was purposely not saying the obvious! We watched as nurses walked him in the hall, all of them motivated by Josh wanting to walk daughter Lena down the aisle July 17. By the end of the week that we were there, however, he was in a coma. We drove back to Wisconsin subdued by knowing God’s grace and power was all-sufficient for Josh and for us. Heck, Josh knew he was going to die young, and he was ready. He was such an optimistic testimony of Jesus being in his life. He’d had an alcoholic wife who convinced him to leave the seminary. He held several good jobs in the computer industry, but eventually lost the last one not wanting to make a family-uprooting move. His house was foreclosed on, he got a divorce, was long unemployed, and continued raising his three children. The perpetual specter of the brain cancer rearing up again – nothing seemed to discourage him. As a result of his first cancer diagnosis twenty seven years early, he had to deal with diabetes insipidus and constant skin cancer surgeries on his bald head. Many colorful bandanas covering his sores was a trademark.

Tuesday morning after we had been home three days, Jon called to say Josh was dying. Jon, his older brother, had faithfully made a number of trips to Columbus to be with him. But this week he couldn’t leave his law practice. And I couldn’t go there either; I had another chemotherapy appointment Wednesday morning.

Then the call came from my urology nurse. I had a urinary tract infection. News to me! But I couldn’t have my chemotherapy as a result. By three o’clock in the afternoon, I was agonizing, needing to be with Josh – and now, thank you Jesus, I could go there since I was free from that appointment! Daughter Anne had taken off immediately from Champaign to be with her brother. Dick got on the phone, got a plane ticket, and by three-thirty I was packed and we were on the way to Madison for a 5:30 flight.

Anne and I slept in Josh’s hospital room. We talked to him, sang a little, prayed over him, watching as each breath was labored. She went home on Thursday to her husband and five kids, knowing there was nothing else to be done. With almost every breath Josh was coughing, trying to clear his throat. At noon his oncological surgeon, Dr. Findlay, came back into the country and said Josh’s deep sleep– encephalitis – was a real but rare side effect of one of the carriers of the chemo he got, and that it was temporary and reversible. Dr. Giglio was much more skeptical. I then had the excruciating decision to upgrade the “do not resuscitate” from “comfort only” to allowing an antibiotic and water. I got Jon on the phone and we debated, but decided to try. Jon was rightfully angry and I regretted giving in to a little hope too. The move to another hospital floor, the three bags of fluid, specialists all over the place, emergency being called, just prolonged his painful, dire circumstances. Later in the afternoon, after it settled down a little, it seemed like Josh was drowning, and I requested that the extraordinary efforts be stopped: go back to “comfort only”.

By Friday morning with my permission the nurse gave him an infusion that eased his pain, and a little later, we decided to pull the oxygen tubes from his nose. He could still breath but that would no doubt hasten his death. Palliative care specialists came in, and we vetoed hospice care. They said they would send in a chaplain. With Jan there Thursday and us praying healing and Scripture, I didn’t think it necessary. But Friday morning around eleven Marlea, a lovely graduate of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, came in. She too had a son named Josh. She asked what Josh liked, and I told him of his love for music and his S2L2A3 – “Songs to listen to again and again” – that he got the whole family into. She asked who he particularly liked, and all I could think of was Miles Davis. Josh played the trumpet all his life, and he even named his son after his hero: Tilo Myles. She found him on my YouTube (Oh? I have that on my phone??) and placed it on Josh’s pillow. With mellow trumpet softly in the background, Marlea prayed a beautiful home-going prayer, we hugged and she left. I dozed and when the 55-minute album was done, Josh made a tiny sound in his throat. I found another Miles Davis album and after that he again made that little sound.

I went out for lunch with Jan and Rubin, and came back to Josh’s room. The door was closed. I went in, he was lying flat on his back, peaceful, quiet, dead. Shortly Dr. Giglio came in, and the nursing supervisor to make arrangements which really had to be done by the next of kin, his nineteen-year-old son Tilo. As I got things together to leave the room, I gave one last goodbye kiss to Josh. He had a smile on his face. Really! He was home.

Mellow trumpet again sounded, this time at the memorial service for Josh in July, as a trumpeter played “Amazing Grace” for the processional and then we joined in singing.

“Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come; ‘tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”

As the year wanes, and those three momentous months become more distant, I walk early in the morning in the canyons around our Green Valley, Arizona home. Looking up to one condo, I see various metal crosses attached to patio walls. It daily makes me sing that old hymn, “Beneath the cross of Jesus” and the words to the second verse are:

“I take, oh cross, thy shadow, for my abiding place.

I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of His face.

Content to let the world go by, to know no gain nor loss.

My sinful self, my only shame, my glory, all the cross.”

All the cross. All grace. All the time.