Page 36 of All the Way to the River

A s the first weeks of the new year went by, Rayya was often in such deep pain that she could not sleep for more than an hour or two a day.

The rest of the time, she was manic with distress, full of needs and desperate demands.

Nothing could settle her—not painkillers, not prescription weed or alcohol or sleeping pills or food, not stories or prayer, not listening to music or watching her favorite TV shows.

Whatever doctor had promised us at the beginning that pancreatic and liver cancer would allow Rayya to “live life like a normal person” right up to the end, after which time death would come “fast and easy,” had been either a liar or totally delusional—or else they had never met someone like Rayya.

Whoever had predicted that Rayya would die within six months of her diagnosis had already been proven a fool.

Because here it was a full year after her cancer had been discovered—and my beloved partner kept, in her own words, “not fucking dying.”

There were some good days during that time.

Some friends threw Rayya an exquisite birthday party, and she and I had a commitment ceremony in front of our loved ones, complete with flowers and rings and beautiful wedding clothes.

But most of the time, we were in torment.

Rayya was vomiting all day—sometimes vomiting up shreds of her stomach lining—and she was often in so much agony that she would cry out in Aramaic to her dead grandmother to come and get her and bring her the mercy of death.

She could not bear to be alone in her anguish, and because she didn’t sleep, I didn’t sleep.

All she wanted to do was talk and cry, so I would rouse myself again and again to comfort her—but all my acts of comfort were failing.

If I dozed off while she was talking to me, she would become furious, and I would wake up to hear her sobbing, accusing me of abandoning her.

Or she would wake me up to tell me, “I just want to go back to bed and cover my head and sleep.”

“Okay, baby,” I would say. “Let’s see if we can tuck you back in, then.”

“You just want me to die. You just want to get rid of me.”

Then she would go into fits of self-attack and start talking about what a failure and loser she was, what a crybaby, what an asshole, what a weakling.

I understand now, having read her journals, that these were the dark and demonic fears she had always struggled with—that they were baked into her unrecovered addict’s consciousness.

But back then, I still thought I could fix it all by just loving her even harder.

Early in the spring of 2017, I wrote in my journal: “Last night she went into a hell of suspicion and self-brutalization again, and she simply could not settle and could not believe me when I told her how much I love her and how good she is—and there was nothing I could do to help her. I tried to sleep in the other room, but that didn’t work, either.

She came after me and curled up with me in the little guest bed helpless and needy and scared and manic, and so I went back into her bed with her.

And still I couldn’t calm her, and finally I fell asleep.

I woke up filled with weariness and a sense of deep failure: I had not been able to go into the cold, dark, and lonely place with her, and rescue her from there.

I feel so guilty! Because she always rescues me , when I am in the cold, dark, and lonely place.

I am a failure. I am fucking exhausted. And she isn’t going to be getting better, so we can only expect more of this.

If I am falling apart already, how can I take care of her later?

But why do I need to sleep? Why can’t I just stay up with her, and be with her while she’s in hell?

She woke up in a kind of hell, too, after her one hour of sleep last night …

full of shame and defeat. Nothing we are doing is working.

I used to be able to take her pain away, just by touching her with my hands. That doesn’t work anymore.”

One night around that time, delirious with pain, she woke me up to tell me that her heart had just left her body—that she had watched it leave, she said, “like a small pet running away from me.” She wept and begged me to chase after it, to get her heart back and bring it home to her, but of course I did not know where her heart had gone, or how to retrieve it.

Nobody slept a minute that night—not one minute.

Feeling like I was about to have a psychotic break from sleep deprivation, I begged Rayya to allow me to hire night nurses to come and stay with us in the evenings so they could take care of her—better than I could—when she was having episodes of extreme pain at night.

My hope was that these nurses would afford me a chance to catch a few uninterrupted hours of sleep as well.

We tried that a few times, but Rayya hated the nurses and resented their presence just as much as she hated the hospice volunteers who were part of her care team now.

She was surly with them and kept instructing them to wake me up because she needed me .

The same thing happened when I tried to set up a rotating roster of friends to sleep over.

Our friends were more than happy to volunteer for shifts, but Rayya refused their help, often marching right past them when they were sitting vigil on the couch and coming into the guest room to wake me up and demand my help and attention.

“I don’t want them,” she would say, crying and furious. “I want you .”

Soon we were both shredded—she from physical pain and fear of death, and both of us from sadness, exhaustion, and lack of sleep. She was resentful of me for needing rest, and I was resentful of her for denying me rest. Something clearly needed to be done.

That’s when morphine was recommended.

And whyever not ?

Everyone knew that Rayya had once been an opioid addict, but nobody was worried about addiction now—because she was a terminal cancer patient on a death watch, after all, and her medical team had predicted that she could not possibly live another two months.

Anyway, as one of her doctors explained, “the relief from unbearable pain is what these opioids are for , Rayya. And your dosages will be controlled. It won’t be like back in the old days, when you took drugs recreationally.”

At which point Rayya had smiled ruefully at the doctor and said, “Dude, I can promise one thing—I never took drugs recreationally .”

But what else could we do at this point to settle her pain?

“I mean, what’s it gonna do— kill me?” Rayya asked. “Who gives a shit at this point?”

“Let the dragon roll one more time,” she said when she finally put that first morphine pill in her mouth.

And indeed the dragon rolled itself awake.

The dragon opened its yellow eyes and lifted its leathery, powerful wings and flew on silent gusts through Rayya’s bloodstream. And instantly, magically, my beloved’s suffering was erased—just as her suffering had always been erased by opioids.

I remember how quiet the apartment felt that afternoon, once that first morphine pill dissolved into Rayya’s system.

All was peace, all was gentleness. I remember how Rayya seemed to return to herself, how she became my person again, so strong and calm and reassuring.

How she gathered me up into her arms, saying, “I’m so sorry, baby, for how hard this has been on you.

Everything will be easier now, I promise.

I just want to be here, alone with you. I can’t open my eyes right now because I’m so tired, but I need you to know that I love you.

I can feel your heart again. The portal between us is open.

I don’t care if I die, as long as I can die in your arms. I need you to know that the happiest moments of my life were with you.

Do you know that? Do you understand that?

I just need you to know that. You are the happiest thing that has ever happened to me.

Stay with me, baby. Don’t go. I love you so much. ”

All my anxiety settled in the warmth and sincerity of her embrace—because Rayya’s strength and reassurance had always been my morphine.

But as for Rayya’s morphine?

Well, that would be morphine itself.

And when I asked her, in the blessed silence, what it felt like to have opioids back in her system after all these years, she just gave a slow, sleepy-eyed smile and said: “It’s like Hello, old friend .”

Oh, yes.

Hello.