Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

According to author Christina Rasmussen, “Healing only lives in celebrating the lives of the ones we have lost, not how they died.” That may be true, but this recollection is no celebration….

Five months ago today, my wife of thirty-four years, Jill Rinehart, died. A month ago, I wrote about her last day, which ended this way:

I climbed in bed after I brushed my teeth, and — as I did every night — snuggled up with her a little bit while she fast-forwarded through a [television] commercial. She told me that the medicine she’d gotten, which she’d applied around her nostrils as instructed, made her breath feel “hot.” It bothered her, but it was supposed to be important so she was enduring it.

When the show was over, she said she was a little bit hungry and wanted a snack. But the puppy was asleep on the floor on her side of the bed, so instead of getting out that way she rolled over top of me. She lay on top of me for a second, and we smiled at each other, gave each other a hug and a kiss, and said goodnight. She got out on my side and turned off the light as she left.

That was the last time I saw her alive.

The medicine Jill had applied to her nose was some sort of antibacterial treatment that she was supposed to use until her surgery (coming up in five days). As I understood, it was supposed to reduce the risk of her getting sick prior to the surgery and to reduce the risk of infection. Why it made her breath feel hot, I don’t know.

It was not unusual for me to fall asleep before her. It was unusual for her to still be up before I went to sleep. It turned out that in addition to getting a snack, she also cleaned up the sculpture project she was going to teach the next day, and put the examples she had made in her studio with her art bag, ready to go. Then she came back to bed, but I was already hooked up to my CPAP machine and sleeping soundly.

I woke up to her sniffling and snorting — or so it seemed; I remember only one big snort — as if she had bad postnasal drip. The clock showed that it was midnight. She settled back down, and I thought about the medicine and guessed that it had caused her nose to run.

But almost immediately the puppy came around to my side and started trying to jump up on the bed. I told him everything would be okay and to go back to his bed. He did.

I was perhaps half-awake at that point, and expected Jill to get up (or at least sit up) to blow her nose. When she didn’t, I lay there for a moment wondering if she was okay. I actually wondered briefly if she had just died: I hate to admit that, because in that instant I didn’t immediately reach out to check on her. Why? Because she hated to be awakened in the middle of the night. (She always had trouble getting back to sleep.) So I lay there for another moment — I don’t really know how long, it might have been five seconds or ten or twenty, I have no idea — trying to discern if she was okay.

Finally, I reached out and touched her shoulder. And she did not move.

(One of my favorite pictures of Jill, taken in 1982 at North Litchfield Beach, SC, when she was oh-so-alive.)

The next few minutes blur together in my memory. I shook her, I called out her name, she still didn’t move and she didn’t respond. I knew from CPR training years ago that the most important thing to do was to activate the emergency medical system, so I picked up the phone and turned on the light — but that handset had no power so I had to run into my office and grab another one. I called 911 and put the speaker on. Then, because I know you can’t do CPR on a soft surface, I pulled her onto the floor as expeditiously as I could without hurting her. But the way our bedroom is situated, there is hardly any space between the bed and the wall, so I had to pull her farther into the room. Finally I started CPR, hardly able to speak to the operator or to see what I was doing through my own tears.

A few minutes later (again, I don’t know how long), the dispatcher told me that the responders were approaching the house and asked if the front door was unlocked. It wasn’t, of course, so I had to run downstairs to unlock it. At that point I took notice of the puppy. He must have been pacing around in the room while I was moving Jill and starting CPR, but he had never gotten in the way. Now, he ran downstairs with me and I put him in his crate. I unlocked and opened the front door and ran back upstairs to keep doing CPR.

But it didn’t work.

The next thing I remember, EMTs were in the room, shoving the end of the bed out of the way and pulling me back so they could start trying to help her. I think one of them escorted me out and led me down the stairs and asked if there was anyone I needed to call. At least, I know I ended up downstairs, sitting on the floor in my underwear by the dog’s crate, with my cell phone.

Both of our children live near us, so I called them and they came to the house as quickly as they could. By the time they got there, between the EMTs and police there were probably six or eight or more people in the house. The police were very polite and professional, as were the medical technicians. Stephanie and Christopher helped me answer questions, and at one point I had to go upstairs to show the detective the medications that Jill had on hand. Several EMTs were surrounding her at the time, and I could not see — perhaps because I didn’t want to — what they were doing to her. The young-uns and I answered questions about her upcoming surgery, and probably other things that I don’t remember.

I spent most of my time sitting on the living room floor, petting the pup through the bars of the crate. I occasionally heard the whine of the defibrillator the EMTs had brought in. I couldn’t make out what they said to one another upstairs, and maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to. I guess it was around 1:30 in the morning when they gave up because they weren’t able to get Jill’s heart to restart and keep a steady beat. Since she was scheduled for heart surgery in a few days, they made the assumption that she had died of a heart attack. The police said there was probably no need to do an autopsy, and the children and I agreed.

Next thing, we were being asked what funeral home we wanted to use — a question I never envisioned being asked. We picked the only funeral home I had ever been to in Cary, where members of our church had been taken care of, and I think the police detective actually called them. I don’t remember. But some time later, though still in the early morning, two fellows from the funeral home showed up. After a little consultation, they took her away. Because of the difficult arrangement of the stairs in our house, it was not easy for them to bring her downstairs and get her ready to go. The children moved into the kitchen, so they wouldn’t have to see, and I can’t blame them. The only saving grace is that the same faulty memory that keeps me from being able to recall really good things in vivid detail, keeps me from being able to remember much of the details of watching them take her out.

The rest of the day passed in almost as much of a blur as the early morning hours. We called family and friends, church people came over to offer what help they could, Christopher and I went to the funeral home to make the initial arrangements, and my sister drove in from Southport to stay with me. Things were complicated a little bit by the fact that the furnace stopped working that night, and I had to call to have it fixed (which the company was only able to do temporarily).

Since this post is supposed to be about the day she died, and is already quite long, I won’t go into detail about all the activities that went on before Jill’s memorial service a week later. Again, they all blend together in my mind: asking friends to play music or to read Scripture, setting up the memorial fund at the South Carolina Botanical Garden, and so forth. But I need to record one key event from that week, because it was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

In the middle of the week — I don’t remember now which day it was — I had to identify Jill before she was cremated.

I had to go see her in the funeral home.

I went alone, so the children would not have to remember her that way.

The hardest thing I’d ever done was to walk into that room, knowing that she was in there. I don’t remember how long I stayed — an hour, I’d guess — talking to her, holding her far-too-cold hand, kissing her beautiful face and her lovely hands. But, as it turned out, in the end walking into that room was only the second hardest thing for me. Because even though I knew that it wasn’t really her; that she was gone; that her spirit, her soul, was far away; by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done was to walk out of that room again, to leave her alone there. It still breaks my heart to think of it.

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In terms of being unprepared for regret, my biggest regret is my hesitation: my failure to act quickly enough to be able to help her. My doctor and friends in the medical field have told me that it probably wouldn’t have made a difference, but I carry a significant amount of guilt and in a very real way I hate myself for every second that I hesitated. My greatest fear is that she might have wondered, for even a fraction of an instant, why I wasn’t helping her.

Another thing I regret is that I did not remember that Jill was an organ donor, so the technicians could take that into account. I also didn’t remember that both she and I have living wills and she didn’t wish to be resuscitated, but in that moment I could do nothing but try — even though I was too late.

I also regret now not having an autopsy performed, because according to Jill’s cardiologist she could not have had a heart attack. She had gone through an echocardiogram and had a complete workup in order to verify that she was a good candidate for the mitral valve repair surgery, and the surgeon told me that she had no coronary artery disease. Aside from the one problematic valve, her heart was completely healthy. As a result, we believe she had a seizure, brought on by the stress she was under of the upcoming surgery and recovery. (She had had a seizure four years prior when she was under some stress, so it’s at least possible.) I understand that an autopsy would not have conclusively proven a seizure, and may not have told us what happened. Some things, perhaps, we can never know.

One final note: After her first seizure — which was almost four years to the day before she died — Jill told me that as she lost consciousness she thought she was about to die. She said she thought something like, “If this is my time, and this is how I’m supposed to go, I’m okay with that.” As difficult as it was to lose her the way we did, I know that falling asleep in our bed and not waking up was a far better way to go than many other ways she might have died. I can only hope — and, oh God, how fervently I hope, I hope, I hope — that her last thought, in her last moment, was peaceful and that she was okay.

___

Previously in the series:
– Unprepared for Regret
– Unprepared for Regret, Part II: Valentine’s Day
– Unprepared for Regret, Part III: Jill’s Last Day

P.S. If you’re interested, you can read Jill’s obituary here.

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Neither my wife nor I knew, four months ago today, that it would be the last day she would live.

By way of background, Jill was in decent physical shape — she was not ill or disabled or under long-term care for any protracted sickness — except for the effects of a leaky mitral valve in her heart. She had been diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse when she was twenty, and had been under the care of various cardiologists as we moved around as part of the Air Force. They had occasionally recommended having the valve replaced, but she had opted to monitor her condition in hopes that surgical techniques would improve over time. In fact, the latest surgical procedure would repair her valve rather than replacing it, and her cardiologist and the cardiac surgeon both agreed she was a good candidate. In the last few weeks before she died, Jill had had an echocardiogram and other tests to make sure that her heart was healthy enough to endure the surgery and recover from it. All indications were good.

On her last day — Friday, 18 October 2019 — Jill had her pre-surgery appointment. Her surgery was supposed to be on the following Wednesday (the 23rd), having been pushed back one day because of a higher priority case. Her pre-surgery workup had always been scheduled for the eighteenth.

I had gone with her to some of her prior appointments, like the echocardiogram, but she thought this one would be routine so instead I took care of our new puppy, Twix. She called me mid-morning, later sent me a text while she was waiting for her x-ray, and shortly thereafter sent, “I think I need to relax a little so I’m gonna take just a few minutes to walk at the art museum before heading home. I won’t be too long.”

(Jill’s last selfie, taken at the NC Art Museum on 18 October 2019.)

“If Anything Happens”

Jill got home about thirty minutes before we expected visitors from the church we were slated to join. She told me that she wished I had gone with her to the appointment because some of the things they said had frightened her — she might have said that they freaked her out, but I don’t remember her exact words.

Our visitors were two gentlemen who came as more or less a formality before the Elders voted to accept us officially as members. Most of the interview went unremarkably, as we explained how each of us had come to faith and the degrees to which we’d been involved in previous churches — until Jill said something that arrested my attention.

She was sitting to my right on the couch, looking at one of the visitors to her right, so I couldn’t see her face as she said, “The reason I want to do this now is so that if anything happens my obituary will say I was a member of the church. Because right now it wouldn’t say that, and that’s not me.”

I had never heard her say anything like that before. I was too stupefied to question it.

Our Last Meal Together

The visit ended, and she and I decided to go out for an early supper — not only because neither of us felt like cooking but to see how well the puppy would do in the crate for an hour or so. We ended up at an “Asian fusion” restaurant that we had frequented for years, partly because it was close to the pharmacy where she would pick up the prescription she’d been given.

During dinner, she told me a little more about her appointment: the instructions she’d gotten, the briefings she had had about what it would be like to come out of anesthesia and wake up in ICU, etc. She was very nervous about the prospect of waking up with a breathing tube in her throat, and being hooked up to so many machines, and said that all she could picture in her mind was her mom a couple of years ago when she came out of surgery.

As we talked, Jill thanked me for not questioning her about her obituary comment while the church men were in the house. She said the thought had just come to her that day. Her mood shifted from time to time, from serious when talking about the procedure or the recovery to playful when she asked me if I was eyeballing her dumplings that she was going to take home as leftovers.

After supper, we walked over to the pharmacy and picked up her prescription and a couple of other things. At one point, as we walked around one of the endcaps, she reached out and tapped a deck of cards, looked behind her at me, and said with a grin, “We’ll have to remember to take some cards to the hospital, so we can play something.”

I agreed that we would certainly do that.

Our Last Walk in the Park

We went home, got the dog out of the crate and put him in the car, and drove over to Bond Park — one of our favorite places in the Town of Cary. We discussed briefly whether we would take the pup with us to breakfast the next day (we almost always went out for breakfast together on Saturdays) or try leaving him in the crate again.

Once we got to the park, we walked a path through the woods from the Boathouse, up past one of the shelters and around to the Community Center. We passed a few pieces of exercise equipment, and at one point came upon a balancing platform: a round disk held up by a sturdy spring. I held her hand as she stepped up on it, and she balanced there for a brief moment and then hopped off, laughing. Then, just to show off, I stepped up without reaching out for her. She chided me for that, but we laughed together as I struggled to step up and then step off without hurting myself.

From the Community Center, we walked parallel to the big field by the levee and then down toward the baseball fields. We stopped at one and watched part of an inning of a youth league game, and Jill wondered when our friend’s son’s next game would be, for us to go to it.

As we walked on, twilight was fading and we entered a more woodsy area. Jill asked me to shine the flashlight from my phone on the path in front of us. I made some remark about being able to see fine and she scolded me again, with something like, “Okay, if you want to step on a snake, go ahead.” We laughed, but I did turn on the flashlight until the woods thinned out again.

The path took us to the base of the levee, and we walked up the steps until we could look at the lake. At the top, she asked if we could pause for a moment and slow down, because the steps always made her out of breath. I said of course we could, and we did — and I made some remark about how nice it would be once she had her surgery and wouldn’t get out of breath when she was walking.

We eventually made our way down the length of the levee, back to the Boathouse, and home.

Our Last Evening

There wasn’t much on television that Friday night, and Jill had an art class to teach the next day, so she went upstairs to her studio to work on example sculptures to show the children. When she was done, she took her bath and started getting ready for bed.

After I shut off everything downstairs, I went up to my office to check my email and found one from the assistant pastor saying the Elders had met and we were officially accepted as members. We would go through the formality of joining the church in the Sunday service. By then, Jill was finished with her bath and, as she did most every night, was watching a recorded episode of House Hunters International. I told her about the message, and we agreed that we would have to figure out how we were going to handle the pup Sunday morning.

I climbed in bed after I brushed my teeth, and — as I did every night — snuggled up with her a little bit while she fast-forwarded through a commercial. She told me that the medicine she’d gotten, which she’d applied around her nostrils as instructed, made her breath feel “hot.” It bothered her, but it was supposed to be important so she was enduring it.

When the show was over, she said she was a little bit hungry and wanted a snack. But the puppy was asleep on the floor on her side of the bed, so instead of getting out that way she rolled over top of me. She lay on top of me for a second, and we smiled at each other, gave each other a hug and a kiss, and said goodnight. She got out on my side and turned off the light as she left.

That was the last time I saw her alive.

___

What regrets was I unprepared for about that day? First and foremost, that I didn’t go to Jill’s pre-surgery appointment with her. Yes, it would have required us to put the pup in “doggie daycare,” but I wish I could have been there to hold her hand, to comfort her, as she listened to the doctors and nurses explaining what was in store.

Beyond that, I regret not having the presence of mind to suggest that we postpone the surgery, since she was so scared. Even if she refused the suggestion — and she probably would have, because she had been dealing with the effects of her condition for so long — I wish I had thought to make it.

But more than anything else, I regret not holding her closer and kissing her longer. We had no way of knowing, of course, that those would be our last hugs and kisses. We thought we would see each other in the morning, that we would go to breakfast, that she would teach her class, and that we would have more opportunities to talk and laugh and show each other that we cared. But we were wrong. We had probably said “I love you” two or three times that day — it was, thankfully, a common refrain in our lives — but I wish I had said it ten times as much, and hugged her tight every time.

___

P.S. If you’re interested, you can read Jill’s obituary here.

Previously in the Series:
– Unprepared for Regret
– Unprepared for Regret, Part II: Valentine’s Day

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(To read the first entry in this occasional series, see Unprepared for Regret.)

Valentine’s Day is special for many couples, but for my wife Jill and me it was particularly noteworthy because it marked the beginning of our serious relationship.

We had met in the Fall of 1979, when I was a sophomore and she was a freshman at Winyah High School in Georgetown, SC. She and her friend Evelyn were equipment managers for the football team, and I first met them when I stood at the counter to get my shoulder pads and helmet. It was the closest I’ve come to “love at first sight,” but she didn’t have quite the same reaction.

In the Spring of 1980, we ran track together. I first held her hand on one of the bus rides home from a meet, and I used to stand on the infield and “catch” her when she finished her races. I came to like her very much — truth to tell, I fell in love with her very quickly — and she liked me, too … but not too much later she told me she only wanted to be friends.

With Jill on the front steps of Winyah High School in the Spring of 1980 — before she told me she just wanted to be friends.

By the Fall of 1981, we were still friends. We had both had other relationships that hadn’t worked out, and I had seen her once over the summer and jokingly told her that if five years went by and neither of us married anyone then we should just marry each other. I think she laughed at the idea … but I don’t have much memory for the details of events in my life, so I can’t be sure. Anyway, that Fall Jill agreed to let me sponsor her for Homecoming, and to take her to a Halloween party and a football awards banquet, but we were not “dating” in any serious sense.

And then came Valentine’s Day of 1982.

We both went separately to the dance in the high school gymnasium, and late in the evening I asked her to dance a slow dance with me. I was never a very good dancer, but Jill was — I was always intimidated when dancing with her, and might not have had the courage to ask her if I hadn’t been just a little bit drunk (and, yes, I admit that I was a few months shy of the then-legal age of 18).

During that slow dance, possibly fueled by that same liquid courage, I said something along the lines of, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think I will always love you.”

And, to my surprise and delight, Jill said she loved me, too.

I feel certain that we kissed, and I wish I could remember it. A short time later, she had to catch a ride with her friends back to her house, and I recall being a bit unsure that she had really said she loved me. I had wanted to hear her say it for so long, I couldn’t quite believe it was real. But it was.

Ten weeks later we went to my Senior Prom together.

With Jill at my Senior Prom in May 1982.

We were married three years after that. We had some ups and downs, before and during, but our marriage lasted 34 years and change — and every Valentine’s Day was special because they marked the first time we both admitted (or, agreed) that we loved one another.

___

Postscript:

About two months after Jill died, I went home to Georgetown and walked our puppy around some of our old haunts. At one point I stood in front of the old, run-down, tawdry gym and thought about that Valentine’s dance. I wished for a clearer memory of that night — of the song we danced to, of what she wore, of the smell of her perfume, of her face in the low light — but my brain is built to remember what happened more than how it happened.

That defect in my memory — that it is “declarative” rather than “episodic” — is something I deeply regret, something I was unprepared to deal with in terms of grief, and something I dearly wish I could overcome — because I want to remember Jill more clearly, and to recall more vividly the good times we had. But I can’t … and as a result my life without her is sadder and more empty than it might otherwise be.

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