Ginne – After, Despite, Because

     After we jammed my stuff — her drafting board, marbles from Italy, screens from Japan, and rugs from Persia into her rented house, after buying the oldest structure in Sausalito — a century plus converted four-story water tower nestled between the Alta Mira Hotel above and the Blue & White Ferry below, after I cleared the half-acre of six foot anise weeds with four foot tap roots and she converted the property into a garden wonder, after we terraced the southern end to grow tomatoes, broccoli, red and green peppers, rows of lettuces, arrugula, carrots, radishes for fresh salad every evening, after we cut down the twelve foot Texas privet hedge that kept the sun out, after we planted three bleached birches in the middle of yellow daffodil beds, after she selected six tons of rocks, each chosen because it had some moss, or some color, or some shape she liked, after each stone was liberated from the quarry hidden behind the bushes off Highway 101 in Corte Madera and coached into it's final resting place in our front yard by my son's and my bleeding hands with two-thirds of each stone underground so it would look like it had always been there, after we repaired, revarnished, repainted and reupholstered, after she disintegrated the basement floor with a jack hammer to create an office haven for me with a deck on the lawn, after she refused to let any "boy furniture" into the house except for one wooden chest and two antique bowls, after she stripped my old sofa, designed and commissioned a manly-yet-fashionable light tan suede couch built on its skeleton — to this day my body's favorite spot, after I found my red, yellow, and green golf pants in the Goodwill pile because she felt the social risk was too high we might take separate cars and she'd meet me somewhere wearing them, after the Martian and the Venusian discovered, discussed and debated John Gray's tapes on every ride to the ranch, after spending four years waking to the sunrise through 24 feet of fourth floor window which spanned 270 degrees from mid-San Francisco to Richardson's Bay Bridge, after three years of sneaking down two flights of uncarpeted wood stairs every Sunday morning to grind coffee beans and make her a foaming latté — grabbing the Sunday paper and a cold diet coke for me, after spending hours in bed talking, reading, touching, playing, after hiking almost every weekend with good friends and then wiping that healthy slate clean with a high cholesterol, high calorie combination of bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs made with California jack cheese and pancakes made with rich vanilla ice cream, after running together almost every morning on the bike path into Mill Valley or up hills and down to the Coast Guard station at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, after climbing up the cascading stream one Sunday when her left side suddenly went limp and it took two of us an hour to get her safely down the mountain, slipping, sliding, swearing, supporting, we discovered Ginne had glioblastoma Level IV — terminal brain cancer.

     Despite emergency surgery the next day, despite the shock and grief and terror that swept her father, husband, brothers, daughters and friends who, when the surgeon shared her sentence, filled the waiting room with disbelief, then sobs, despite thirty days in convalescence surrounded by nice people who were mostly dying or had already left their personalities in the care of fading photographs and children's memories, despite six weeks of daily radiation doses which killed her hair and sucked the energy right out of her, despite chemo treatments that dripped and spread fire for an hour through her veins, despite enough drugs to open her own pharmacy, despite a virulent tumor trying to multiply in all directions until it destroyed its host and therefore itself, the cancer was beaten into temporary submission and she wasn't.

     Because a four-story house wasn't a good place for a runner who could no longer walk, because we'd made an offer, just a week before we discovered she was sick, on a house and a half-an-acre of country three blocks from Sonoma Plaza with an all-year creek bordering two sides and a cottage framed by twin hundred foot tall Douglas firs, because it was a place she could sit in the sun in her wheel chair and supervise the construction of another Town and Country garden using me as the hired help, because she had a nurse during the day and her husband as a para-replacement every night, because our new kitten spent ten hours a day curled around her head, her paw gently covering the place where the tumor slept, because the Independent Woman was now forced to rely totally on a man who loved her and discovered that was okay because he didn't feel the power and she didn't feel the dependence, because I learned that I could get as much nurturing from giving love as I could from receiving it, because we spent every evening for two years laughing at sitcoms, remembering times together and discussing new projects we knew we'd never build, because she was in bed all the time, because she had to be wakened and changed at 2 AM every morning, because the doctor said it was better not to give her food and water once the tumor woke up and raged on, unchecked and uncheckable, because I spent the last week with her on her bed and held her hand that evening she finally stopped breathing, the best and worst of my life was entwined with this beautiful person.

     I remember Ginne most every day. I remember her in people's smiles, in her grandson's eyes, in a beautifully designed kitchen, every time I hike, every time I see a horse, every time I sit on my manly-yet-fashionable big suede couch.
     One of her girl friends used to describe her as having "legs to Bakersfield". This morning I saw those legs wrapped in black tights like she used to wear, running along the vineyard trail behind our house in Sonoma. It's times like that when I hear her laugh, just as she did one night when I put on my serious face and told her there was to be no dating in Heaven.
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(This article was selected as the Grand Prize Winner and was published in the Summer 2008 issue of "Memoir (and)" magazine .)