Knowing What's Real

By Bill Caton

Slightly more than a year ago I sat with my wife, Ann, in a surgery recovery room at St. Vincent’s Hospital. As she smiled and talked I became aware that this wonderful woman was giving me the rarest of gifts: she was simply glad to be with me in that moment.

It didn’t matter to her that she was in recovery after major surgery, that pain surged and retreated from her tired body like ocean waves and that her swollen hands thwarted her repeated attempts to slide her wedding rings onto her finger.

It didn’t matter to me that I had spent nearly 12 fearful hours in the hospital waiting room after a nearly sleepless night.

We talked and told our story to the nurse: how we met, movies we had seen, the travails of picking a restaurant for supper, what our children were doing, and, of course, the grandchildren.

The nurse smiled and asked polite questions. But this conversation – although conducted in the third person -- was not for the nurse. Ann and I were letting each other know we were in the world, we were together and we were in love. In love after all the years, all the illness, all the fear, all the pain. After all the suffering that comes with inhabiting this creation.

Of course, we have done more than deal with illness. Our time together has been and continues to be a time of joy. So, I am hard pressed to think of a more joyful time than those moments when I was first able to see her face after such a long, difficult day

Three weeks after her surgery, Ann asked me if she was talking a lot when she was in recovery. She was worried about what she might have said because she did not remember anything about that time immediately after the surgery. I told her she was fine, she made sense, she responded appropriately to questions.

So, Ann does not remember those hours when she asked for me until the nurse finally relented and let me sit with her. Ann does not remember looking at me and smiling as I walked across that cruelly lit room.

I have often wondered what is real if our perception can be so readily altered by drugs. The drugs certainly hindered Ann’s memory of our post-surgical encounter, but they did not change her. We had that special time together. Ann does not remember it, but that does not matter. The love that has grown between us is elemental, so basic that it defines us. Drugs stopped her from remembering, but they did not stop her from being her.

I struggle to think of our relationship in terms of memories. Somehow this great life seems to have been lived entirely in the present.

And so we come to this Valentine’s Day, which will take its place in a lengthening single file line of such days. I know that this holiday will be the best one.

Because it is this one. And because I know what is real.