I Still Have Her Meds

My wife has been gone for six months now. Conscious magical thinking has turned into internalized magical thinking. Early on, it was as if she was just in the other room, or was on vacation and would walk back into the house at any time. I knew this was not correct, of course, but the feelings were still there. As I write this, I know that six months is still “early on” but things do morph. One of those things is that it no longer feels that she is on vacation, or just around the corner. It feels like she never left, but just isn’t here.

It is so embedded in me that she is part of my soul that when I watch a movie, it is as if we are both watching the movie, instead of just me. Or that the room should be in a certain way because she likes it that way. Or that she will need her clothes. I just don’t want to be final about this. It is less conscious now than it was at the beginning that she is really gone.

Back when Jenny still had her transplant, one thing that became a ritual before we left on any trip was to be sure she had her medicines. When you have a transplant, the drugs you have are the drugs you need, and you cannot screw it up. And, they are not off-the-shelf. We once went to Canada, and Jenny didn’t bring a key medication with her, and it was a big problem to get her covered. So, we put in a requirement that before every trip, no matter what, we had her meds. We can get anything else on the road, but meds are sacrosanct.

The medication list for Jenny was extensive – thyroid meds, stomach meds, prednisone, and a whole litany of anti-rejection meds. The horrible thing is that these same meds ended up killing the kidney they were supposed to protect. Once your kidneys go, your life is not normal ever again – even with a transplant.  After years of being on these meds, her adrenal glands were burnt out. As a result, she was on a litany of drugs even after the transplant failed. They were awful, but they were required. Therefore, even after the loss of the kidney, her meds were first on the list of things to bring, always.

Jenny had a pink pill box she had since I first met her. It is a box that has four compartments per day, with sliding covers that opened allowing access to each compartment. Since she had AM and PM meds, each day’s slots contained two sets of AM and PM meds. Every two weeks she spent some time filling it up with the correct dosages for each slot. I still have the box, and it has the remaining dosages.

I also have one unopened package of Creon, an expensive medication that we regularly fought with our insurance company to cover properly. We have bottles of heparin, which is used in dialysis to thin the blood so that it does not clot during treatment. Jenny has a rolling med/dialysis cabinet with the jars right there, at the ready, along with alcohol wipes, some needles, and some paper barriers, at the ready. We have bottles of “binders,” which are drugs she took to reduce phosphorus, since dialysis does not remove phosphorus from the blood.

Within a week after Jenny passed away, we removed all the dialysis equipment and supplies from the house. The unit picked up her machines, the dialysis chair, and the boxes of dialysate, and cartridges, and fluid warmers, drain tubes, and all the rest. I knew I had to remove it asap and try to reduce the reminders as much as possible, this for my son’s sake, since nightly dialysis was so much a part of our lives. Having the dialysis machine in the living room gathering dust awaiting a person who would never return – no, that was not an option.

But for some reason, the medications were different. These were such a lifeline, in a different way than the dialysis machine was. We could always go to the unit or the hospital and dialyze if needed, but the meds were joined at her hip. To not have them was risking illness or death. Jenny has been on overnight trips without her dialysis machine, but never without her medications.

On her night stand was the unopened package of Creon. The bottle was in the pharmacy bag, the bag stapled shut. A few days ago, I happened to glance over at it, and I realized: I need to let go of this. The insane feeling of “this needs to be here, because she needs it” is hard to not feel. It’s involuntary. Looking at the rows of heparin bottles – they were a life line. They were part of her survival kit. Now, they are all scaffolding to save a life that is no longer in need of saving. It’s like looking at an eggshell from a bird that has hatched. Or like listening to an alarm blaring out from a building that has already been evacuated. The alarm is for no one – or rather, for a person who has already escaped.

Yes, I still have her clothes, too, and shoes and glasses and make-up, but they are not the same. These are things I can donate or give away to friends and family. These are completely different from her medications. If I got rid of all that stuff, and she walked back into my life tomorrow, we could always go and get more at the store. But if she walked in tomorrow and those meds weren’t there, she wouldn’t be able to stay. I know that that is crazy, but it’s true. I also know that it is not true.

It feels true, though. These medications were her lifeline, and now they are acting like a lifeline for me – a lifeline with no one on the end, because she’s the bird that flew away, leaving the nest and the broken egg shell behind, in unopened packages and nice neat rows of jars.

This last weekend, I started cleaning out the room. I got a bag out to put her meds in so I can take them to the pharmacy for disposal. I put in the bag the unopened package of Creon. I’m going to keep her pillbox.