Free The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic by Nora Gallagher Page A

and discarded them. I could not shop. Our beautiful and spirited cousin, Claire, got engaged to her Matt, a steelhead biologist, the exactly right man for her. I missed both the small family dinner and the larger celebration.
    I was off the intravenous steroids and on the pills. I looked at the bottle every morning with distaste and then swallowed six round tablets, which rapidly puffed up my cheeks and made a small hump on my back. I had never had to take a prescription medicine for more than a few days. I had never had side effects. I felt old and ugly.
    Vincent was the merest distance away.
    One Saturday morning, over breakfast, I said to him offhandedly that I’d read somewhere that when men got sick, their wives took care of them. And when women got sick, their husbands left.
    “I’ll be leaving in a few weeks,” he said, not looking up.
    “Thank you for the warning,” I replied, same tone.
    “I thought I would leave before Christmas,” he said, “because then you could forget about it and go to Paris.”
    “I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”
    “No problem,” he said, using the phrase common in California, a phrase we had often discussed: did it mean “thank you” or “don’t mention it” or “yes, it was a problem, but I can cover it”?
    We went on with the day as if no conversation had taken place, and in the afternoon Vincent proposed that we go together to buy a Christmas tree. I agreed, but before we got in the car to go to our usual lot, we sat down in the dining room.
    I said something about how I was beginning to understand the value of the present. I could catch, without his having to say anything, that this was not a conversation he wished to have, but I kept on going in an effort to reach him, across the gulf or the twelve inches that was between us—it did not matter how large or long—me on Saturn, he on the planet Earth. I would make a tether with words, I thought, but the only ones that came out of my mouth sounded, as I heard myself speak them, like those from a New Age fluff head. “The present,” I said, “is all we have.”
    He was lying on the window seat. I was sitting at the dining room table.
    I said, “It has been a drag … but the present is … full.” I ground to a halt.
    Vincent said, “The present isn’t great for me. I’m getting nothing from this. I’m completely exhausted, and all I want is to go and get a damn tree.”
    I took this to mean that he really planned to leave me.
    I remembered how I had felt when he got his right hipreplaced. (His hip ball had never really developed, causing him pain throughout his life.) I had to leave at five a.m. to drive from a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills to the hospital in Santa Monica—he wanted me to be there as he woke up. The traffic always stalled me, and he was always hurt because I was always late. Once we were home, I helped him put on his blood-clot-prevention stockings every morning, got his breakfast, brought him the newspaper. I put everything I could think of at counter height the day I left for New Mexico for three days because at the same time my brother was dying of cancer in Socorro. I discovered how hard it is to be a nurse, and how even the smallest things (helping someone with stockings) become too much to bear because they are on a list with ten other things and your own full-time life, and how exhausted you are, how there is no “gift.”
    Fighting back tears and fear, I tried to say something about understanding what he must be feeling (which sounded like something out of
Marriage Counseling for Dummies
), but soon I began to rant about how I was the one who’d had to go to all the doctors’ offices and have a temporal artery biopsy and would possibly lose my sight. (We would call this, later, “playing the sick card.”) I stopped.
    When we first moved in together, in that state of passionate love that made everything, even traffic jams and moving boxes, into bliss, we got all