As word spread that David was in hospice, more friends came to visit.  Admission to hospice coincided with warmer weather, so friends worried about COVID could arrange to sit with David outside, on the pergola-shaded patio.  I tried to remember to warn friends that the outside keypad required a different code from all the others, but I suspect that I wasn’t the only person who had to knock on the door and shout. 

David enjoyed the short breaks from indoor life, and sometimes he perked up.  No sooner had we found shady spots on the patio one day than a lawnmower started up.  “Yikes,” I said.  “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to hear you over the lawnmower racket.  Maybe that person won’t be mowing for long.”  David, who was facing the mower, arched an eyebrow.  “Turn your head and I think you’ll be able to assess that for yourself,” he replied.  I loved the moments when he summoned a wry remark and it came.  He loved my delight.  Always, though, the pull of the desk was strong.  Fifteen minutes into a visit with our friend Rachel and her young daughter, Sarah, he told her that he was sorry, but he had to get going.

Between the moments of clear, quintessentially David language were long stretches of talk I couldn’t decipher.  I still had the deaf-eared person’s advantage, the remote mic, so I could often hear the sounds of his speech.  But it was as if his mind had shifted a letter or two from the home keys on his verbal keyboard, as if he meant to say “I ate a sandwich” and it somehow came out “O sye e dsnfeovj.”  Sometimes inflection was enough to distinguish a question from an expression of frustration.  And sometimes, after minutes and minutes of sounds I couldn’t decode, his speech would shift back to the home row and he’d say: “so I decided not to play the trivia game this morning.” 

The first few summer weeks went by, and Fiona and I stayed braced for – we didn’t know what, exactly, we were braced for.  David’s weight remained stable; he even regained a couple of pounds.  His oxygen level, blood pressure, and resting pulse were fine.  Would he be discharged from hospice? we wondered.  After years of uncertainty about the progression of his disease, admission to hospice had seemed to mark a clear stage in this disease without stages.  But after the dramatic weight loss, the only changes we could see were subtle or fleeting changes. 

Occasionally a nurse would call with a report. David had fallen and had a slight skin tear on one hand, and they were using fingerless elbow-length gloves to protect his hand while it healed.  He’d spilled something hot, but they were checking his skin every hour.  The pinkness had already faded, but they were ordering a bowl with a suction cup on the bottom.  He was upset, and it wasn’t quite clear why, so a CNA had sat with him and looked through his photo albums with him.   His skin had looked grayish and felt clammy early in the morning, but he had pinked up and had eaten well.