Talk History Remembering a Relationship, One Talk at a Time
Clark and I met on the Thursday before Labor Day, August 30, 2007. I don’t know exactly when we very first said I love you, but the very first email exchange containing the phrase, which he casually includes before signing off, is dated October three of that year.
Almost four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me. The way we spoke to each other about what I’d bring home for dinner or whether it was a PBR or a Grolsch kind of night. In almost every conversation, there is something that releases the pressure from my chest by forcing a giant laugh.
Me: yes i had soup and chips but whatever someone else has smells delish
Clark: k just as long as you ate something
how do you spell Bodasifa?
from Point Break?
it’s a buddhism thing
I can break down Clark’s illness into one diagnosis (metastatic melanoma), one prognosis (inbetween four and fourteen months to live), three surgeries, three clinical trials, seven hospital stays, three doses of chemotherapy, and five weeks of hospice care. The very first surgery, a deep lymph-node dissection of the left groin, and its subsequent days-long hospital stay, spanned the very first week of April 2008. The 2nd surgery, which eliminated the cancer’s recurrence from underneath the tender skin of the very first, was June 11. He was hospitalized from November 11–19 and again from December 1–6. On February 20, 2009, he had emergency surgery to eliminate a tumor the size of a baseball from his gut. He embarked chemotherapy on April 15.
Me: i am sorry i wigged out last night.
Clark: oh baby do not say sorry
Me: i truly was just fatigued! that’s visible.
Clark: I totally understand
i know you were so tired and I know that you want
to make sure I’m going to be okay and safe
and indeed makes me want to sob
Clark: i feel the same way about you
I want to always want to make sure you are safe
and warm and convenient
Clark: and I didn’t mean to yell but you are so stubborn
haha SO ARE YOU, for the record
Clark died two months later. He was 33. I was 25.
I spent a lot of time after his death looking at photographs of us camping, at a friend’s wedding, with my family at our very first Thanksgiving. I listened to “The Ocean” by Sunny Day Real Estate, the song he heard when he imagined me walking down the aisle at our wedding. I cried when Archers of Loaf, the one band Clark insisted make an appearance on any playlist, announced its reunion tour. I observed YouTube movies of his band, Statehood, scanning for hints of what his voice sounded like, afraid I’d already forgotten.
The memories of my life as Clark’s caretaker hum in the back of my brain at a low hum. Two years ago, I was on autopilot when I switched his diaper or scrubbed the smell of urine from the armchair he sat and slept in. I didn’t question how I found the strength to support his crumbling framework as we hobbled to the bathroom. Without even thinking about it, I’d roll my jeans halfway up my calves and get into the bathtub to pull him up. I shaven his face and gave him his painkillers at ideally timed intervals. I dressed him.
Now my breath quickens when the response to a clue in my crossword, “Body fluid buildup,” is “edema,” the condition in Clark’s left gam that caused it to erect and dwarf his right. My eyes nibble as I read a newspaper article describing the latest probe to come out of a cancer conference, which involves a drug trial that Clark was too sick to participate in. I slink off to the bathroom with my head down, overlooking my friends at the bar, when I catch a peek of his obituary, which drapes on the back of a door at the Black Cat, the bar where we met.
I go looking for evidence of our partnership that’s not tied to a memory of me sleeping on two chairs shoved together next to his hospital bedside. My Gmail is a priceless hoard of us making plans, telling inwards jokes, calling each other “snoodle” and “bubbies.” I type his name into the search field and come in a world of the unscripted dialogue that packed our 9-to-5 existence. I become immersed in the coziness of our union. In hundreds of talks automatically saved to my account, we express our love for each other readily and naturally in our own private speech. This is a history of our relationship that we didn’t intend to write, one that runs parallel to the one authored by his uncontainable illness.
well, I’d say we have a problem because I
your love might clash with my love, resulting into
a shitstorm of unicorns, babies, puppy dogs, and
couples ice skating
it could get ugly
and tandem bikes
I reminisce the pharmaceutical names of his medications—amitryptyline, Zoloft, methadone. It’s only thanks to my archive of our Gchat conversations—me from my work computer, he from our apartment’s couch or his hospital bed—that I recall that we called gabapentin his “Guptas.” They were brown, like the skin of Dr. Gupta, his kidney specialist. The Dilaudid pills he took for breakthrough ache were “hydros,” a nickname for the drug listed on the label, hydromorphone hydrochloride. He’d imitate a surfer when asking for them.
Clark: man, my left gam is worthless
I indeed hope this chemo helps
I can scarcely use it anymore
Clark: figure I’ll notice there very first
Clark: when are you leaving?
can I get a nap in?
see you in like forty five minutes snoopy
Clark: cause i can’t seem to think of when I can get a nap in BEFORE practice cause when you get home I just want to string up with you
Me: i will get gatorades and ensures. and be right home. love you.
It was winter two thousand eight and Clark was taking part in a trial, his 2nd, at the National Institutes of Health. It involved a drug called high-dose IL-2, which stimulates white blood cells to grow and divide in an attempt to overtake the cancer. The treatment has
a slender chance of success but it’s one of the only regimens approved specifically for melanoma by the FDA. Patients are typically bedridden with dizzying flulike symptoms and are uncharacteristically irritable or moody. Clark was no exception.
He had a high fever and soiled the bed again and again during his 2nd IL-2 treatment. One time, after I held up his assets so that the nurse could switch the sheets, he shit as soon as I placed him down. During this stint at the hospital, the fourth dose of drug sent him mentally over the edge. He screamed at me and called me a bitch. I left the hospital in tears.
It was the only time during his illness that I elected not to sleep next to him. When I arrived at my friend Alyson’s, I had a text message from him that said, “You left me, so I’m leaving you.” Two hours later, he called me sobbing, apologizing. He slightly remembered specifics the next day, but I still get a lump in my mouth when I think about it. We had this conversation three days after we returned home:
Clark: you make me so glad
everyday is wonderful with you
I’m just playing with your emotions
In December 2008, Clark called my mother to apologize for the fact that I wasn’t going to be home to spend Christmas Day with them. I know it’s not uncommon for people my age to be away from their families during the holidays, but my mother, brother, sister, and I had never spent a Christmas apart. Clark and I opened presents at his mother’s house that year. My mom told him not to worry. “There’ll be slew of other Christmases,” she said.
“Come on, Mom,” he said.
She told me this after he was gone, and it haunts me. Did he always know he was going to die, or did he think there was a chance? Did he believe me when I told him stories of the people whose tumors had shrunk to nothing, seemingly by magic? It was lighter for me to play cheerleader; I wasn’t the one shitting the bed and gritting my teeth through the agony.
Clark: babies, did they say the next treatment is rough? like IL-2?
Me: the one they want to do to you?
Me: i don’t think anything compares to IL2.
but i think it is semi rough. i think it’s less puking, pooping, ill feeling and more feeble, tired. however, IL2 has a truly low success rate, the other treatment has a high one.
i was reading testimonies of people who have been cured by the treatment, this was a few months ago, and the one boy wrote that absolutely nothing compares to IL2.
its hard to read the computer
we are going to do it baby
Chemotherapy was our last-ditch effort to hit back the cancer. There was the tiniest chance that it would work. If all went according to plan, the chemo would shrink his tumors to manageable levels, and we’d come back to the NIH to participate in a different clinical trial, the one with the best success rate.
Clark: I would go to my mothers
u can embark having a life again
Me: baby, my life is being with you and fighting this cancer
that’s what it is
i do not resent you, and i never will|
i love you and we’re in this together
After three weeks of chemo, it was clear we were losing. Cancer had eaten away at his hip, attacked his spinal cord, and created a blockage in his large intestine that necessitated a colostomy bag. We then chose to stop attempting to wipe out his disease and concentrate only on treating his agony. He lasted five more weeks.
um, the message said that she understands our concerns and thinks they are still able to provide us the original treatment and just dreamed to talk to us more about it
Clark: um, she still wants us to keep the appt. on Tuesday
I close my eyes and hear him tell me through exhaustion and tears how much he’s going to miss me after he dies. How beautiful I look sitting by the window of his hospice room.
they’re going to do it
Clark: whenever Kitano does something totally rad i play that “Are you ready for the lovemaking girls” song from Vengeance of the Nerds in my head
Clark: i should make her a mix gauze
Now I live with my best friend, Cella. Some days I go to send her a message, searching for her name and the colored dot that accompanies it. I’ll attempt her even if she shows up offline, because I need to tell her I’ll pick up coffee on the way home or ask if I can open the wine she left in the fridge.
And there it is: his name is right under hers. I stir the cursor over it, and the thumbnail pops up with all of his information. His address, clarkstatehood@gmail. com. His icon, a photo of Patrick Swayze from Road House. A little gray dot, just like the one next to Cella’s name. As if he’s just not available to talk at the moment.