Two Lucky

 
Photo by Yen Feng

Last words

The first sentence Rusty said to me was: ”I’m sorry I didn’t have time to shave, I came straight from the airport. I’m Rusty.” That was how our first date began.

Before Rusty was diagnosed with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, his adult life was a dizzying rush of parties and meetings. He left his size-11 footprint in over 50 countries. He lived in seven of them, among them Germany, Korea and Benin, and he spoke six different languages.

Most of the time, he lived out of a suitcase, packed with plane tickets, appointment books and cell phones. He drank a bottle of red wine every night. “Chilean, cheap and good,” he’d say. He clubbed hopped in Paris, Tokyo, and Sao Paolo; he shopped at Hugo and Paul Smith. He lived life like a meteor. It was dazzling, seductive, and awesome.

And like a meteor, Rusty’s life gave out before we were ready to let go.

In the last three years, Rusty fought a valiant battle against his disease. In the first month of his diagnosis, we consulted five melanoma oncologists, four of whom advised that it was time to “put his affairs in order.”

As partners, we rejected the dispassionate medical opinions and focused our energies on the positive. Hope was always at hand. Passion gave us the muscle to keep fighting. Love was our fuel. Even in our darkest hours, we took comfort in the light that was to be our future at the end of the tunnel. 

His battle was our marathon, and together we strived for the finishing line.

Rusty may have left the race prematurely, but his love for me lives on, through his family, through his friends, and through me. This is the greatest gift he left me, and it may be the greatest gift anyone can hope to give. His love endures, and as I grieve his death, I am kept afloat by it.

Our love was brief, torrential, steadfast, and tender.

I will always remember the arch of his brow, the same that frowned and delighted at my teasing. I will always remember the color of his hair, the color of sun-soaked wheat in an open field. His eyes, deep pools of forest and earth. His laugh, like a river. His kiss, like a cloud.

Most of all, I will remember his touch. The hands that nestled my hair when we woke in the mornings, the hands that clutched my body in the orchard as we stood in the spring rain, the same hands that would search for mine in bed, even in the deep stupor of sleep.

Rusty’s last words were of love. He told his mother he loved her, and then said to me: “I love you,” and blew me two kisses before falling asleep. He hadn’t shaved, and neither had I.

Good night, my sweet prince. You are my hero, and you will always be loved.

Rusty died this morning at 1.30am at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

He was with me, and his mother, and died peacefully in his sleep.

Rusty has been battling melanoma for the last three years. He was a real fighter. Even at the end, he didn’t want to go home, and instead asked the doctors if he could stay a few more days to get well.

Love kept Rusty going for as long as it could. In these short years, we made the best of it. The more virulent the cancer spread, the stronger we loved.

His last words were: “I love you,” and he blew me two kisses before falling asleep. 

Our love was extraodinary in the face of adversity. He is my hero, and will always be loved.

Two funerals are being planned. The first, a graveside service, will be held in Lovettsville, Va, next Thursday, where he was born.

The second, a memorial service in New York, will be held shortly after.

Details of services to come.

Photo by Yen Feng

Rusty’s second post 

Hello all, it’s been ages since I have written anything on my Yenny’s blog, so here goes.

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty weak and tired, but honestly, I can’t complain. Mornings are the best - Yen makes me breakfast while I watch black trannies tear at each others’ wigs on Jerry Springer (My staple of trashy US morning TV, though I do flip to the BBC to come up for oxygen on occasion). Coffee and rice krispies cereal crisping in cold soya bean milk from Chinatown - you just can’t beat it.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been going to the hospital three times a week to get blood, and on these mornings, it’s a long 45-minute trek from our apartment in the East Village to New York-Presbyterian Hospital on the UWS.

By the time I make it back home, it’s already past 4pm. I am normally so exhausted from the chemo, or from the blood transfusions, that just making it up the one short flight of stairs to the apartment takes an eternity.

By the time I make it to the door, I feel like I’ve been beaten half-dead by a very heavy stick.

While I’ve been gone, Yen’s been busy transforming the apartment into a five-star resort.

When I step into the room, I smell faint jasmine. Incense is burning on the window-sill. I hear calm, musical voices in the background. There are fresh rainbow-colored tulips on the coffee table. A plate of cool celery and keen carrots.

What? A tall, icy drink of pina colada? (Virgin, my Yenny smiles.)

What Yen does to this place sets my soul at ease. I am now ready to take a nice, long afternoon nap. This apartment, this home, it’s my castle of comfort, my paradise.

Rusty’s birthday 

We are at the hospital again for Rusty to get his weekly blood transfusion. In recent weeks, his platelet count has kept falling; the last time we checked, it was 3,000.

The average healthy adult’s platelet count ranges from 150,000 to 450,000. If platelet count falls below 20,000, spontaneous bleeding will occur and is considered a life-threatening risk.

In a few minutes, Rusty will receive two bags of platelets and a bag of hemoglobin. The entire transfusion will take about five hours. As the nurse read Rusty’s personal particulars off his medical wrist-tag, she let out a little yelp.

“Patient 51777248, Rusty D, 4-16-… oh! It’s your birthday today!”

Rusty, newly 33, grinned, and even in the stupor of painkillers, managed an exaggerated wink. I smile proudly.

After the transfusion, we ride back home in our towncar for a quiet evening. I make dinner, a fresh couscous salad and cream linguini with bay scallops, rock shrimp and crabmeat.

Rusty has four small bites, and it is more than he has eaten in the last two days.

We eat with the television turned off, deciding instead to listen to the easy patter of rain outside. A few infrequent cars drive by, echoing faint solos of short, rumbly instruments.

Even with the windows closed, sitting inside, I smell the road’s wet tarmac, and the rain’s refreshing, crisp wind on my skin.

In a few hours, Rusty will ease into a feathery sleep, and when he does, I will turn down the lights, pull the covers over his body and kiss his forehead goodnight.

Then, holding his hand, watching the window, I will fall asleep too, thinking of the sun out tomorrow, and all the spring flowers waiting to bloom.

Becky surprised me again with her uncanny intuition for sizing up human emotion as I walked her to the door.

She said: “It must be so difficult for you, not to be able to spend anytime with Rusty alone, with visitors coming in and out all the time, and Peggy having stayed with you for so long.”

I do not want Peggy to leave, so perhaps I will go instead, for a few days, or just one day. I can sleep over at a friend’s apartment. I talked to Ma yesterday, and she told me I must not resent Peggy for being a mother.

It sounds paradoxical, to want to leave and to want to be alone with Rusty at the same time. Perhaps what I really want is just some quiet.

There is always someone in the room. All our friends and family members who lean over us with their kind words and deli-bought flowers. Even when I leave the room, I imagine their faces talking, looking at me, searching for a visual cue - a downward glance, the hint of a tear - to dispense a comforting word.

In the end, I hold myself together. I don’t cry, but instead tears brim on my fingers, my skin, and my feet. This wet sorrow. Meanwhile, the room teems with distracted, polite conversation.

Outside, there is an angry wind and grey skies. It’s April, but the trees are still bare. There is a little discussion on which umbrellas are more functional, compact or full-sized. We wonder aloud if it will rain or snow tonight.

Week in review 

Since the surgery, Rusty’s condition has deteriorated. He is so weak, in fact, that Dr Kaufman has refused to continue with IL-2 therapy; he said the drug’s severe toxicity may actually kill him.

So today, we sought the opinion of another doctor, a colleague of Dr Kaufman’s, Dr Sherman. His prognosis, simply, is that the tumors in Rusty’s liver are growing too quickly.

“You’re carrying too much disease. Must be 10lbs in there,” he said.

We grasp at straws. “What about a liver resection?” Rusty asks. Dr Sherman shakes his head. I push on: “Abraxane? Avastin? Gleevac?”

“No, no, and definitely no.”

This cancer continues to pick at our lives like a vulture.

At home, Rusty is in constant discomfort. He eats like a bird, yet vomits bagfuls every night. Walking down a block is impossible. Whether in the day, or at night, he drifts in and out of sleep, in a cycle of painkillers. 

I wonder if there isn’t a moment that he wakes up, and for a few seconds, forgets that he is dying.

For the survivor, forgetting is a difficult conundrum. In wanting to capture every moment, what one recalls in searing detail only renders the loss more acute. Though love and pain make poor partners, each is inextricably twined with the other. Love gives pain comfort. The latter legitimizes the former.

How do we forget one without the other?

I cried hard today in the town car on the way back from the hospital. It did not last long, probably for less than a minute. The tears stopped as suddenly as they had come. It happened soon after we got into the car, when Rusty took my hand and said to me: “I am so happy to be with you.”

Week in review 

In New York, Rusty and I were having a rough time together.

In the last couple of weeks, we barely spoke to each other, and when we did, it was rarely pleasant. Much of it had to do with the stress and pain that had built up in recent months, particularly during his last IL-2 therapy.

When it was over, I felt tired, depleted, and loveless. He felt cheated, sick, and abandoned. We were both angry with ourselves, and with each other.

So while a vacation away from New York seemed like the perfect solution to two stretched souls, it also seemed to me the worst thing we could do for our relationship.

I needed to be away from him, and all that he had come to represent in recent weeks: medical appointments, pills, IV tubes… to be on my own was what made sense to me. I sought decompression, craved solitude. In part, I knew I had to recover my identity other than a cancer patient´s care-giver. Going on a trip together, where I would still have to dole out his pills, watch for his safety, and keep emergency numbers handy; in other words, continue to be so close to the cancer, didn´t seem like it would help.

We have been away for almost a week now. Nothing, and everything, has changed. Nothing, because I know that deep down, I am still angry and terrified. Everything, because I have recovered my strength; I no longer feel tired. It is as if the world had suddenly righted itself, found its gravity again.

The turn was immediate, unexpected, and perfect in its ordinariness.

We were sitting in the lounge, on separate day beds, each with our own books. He was reading Sarah Dunant´s The Birth of Venus, and I On Writing Well by William Zinsser. After an hour, Rusty asked me to come sit by him. I agreed. It was not long after that we were both lying in a comfortable tangle of limbs - his legs stretched over mine, my arms wrapped around his thighs.

Resting so, we continued to read, my head slack on his stomach as his fingers caressed the side of my head. Once or twice, he catches me biting my nails, and smacks me disapprovingly, but gently. We continue to read like this for two uninterrupted, beatific hours.

Hello all of Yen’s blog readers. This is Rusty. I figured I would write at least one entry on here - we’ll see if he lets me write any future ones.

To be honest, although I have of course known about Yen’s blog for the past few years, I have not visited the site, since I was worried that some of the material on here might make me sad.

Yen is such a gifted poet, and I know that having read many of his poems, most of them have me a bit downbeat. Even though they are so well written, so many of them are about death, and graves, and well, you get the picture.

I am writing from the Florida Keys. Yen and I are here at an extremely gay Bed & Breakfast, and my father is in visiting for a few days from Mississippi. It’s been a while since I last saw him. With his hairy chest and beer belly, I think he actually fits in better here than Yen and I do, since this is really more of a 40+ bear crowd.

I’ve been feeling so-so since we got here. I was sick all day yesterday and as a result, just sort of sat there during dinner, only able to eat half the bowl of potato soup I ordered.

This once again is contributing to Yen becoming more and more frustrated about everything.

Hell, if I can’t even enjoy a decent meal with him, then it’s like he’s taking care of an invalid, isn’t it? I am just hoping this surgery that I have coming up in about 10 days will take out a lot of tumor and make me feel better.

Everyone keep your fingers crossed!

Thanks to everyone who reads Yen’s blog. He’s such an amazing person that I wish everyone of you could meet him in person. I’m so proud to have him as my boyfriend.

To prepare ourselves for the next round of therapy, and to escape the winter, Rusty and I decided to go on a short, one-week holiday.

We arrived in Key West, Florida, this afternoon. We will stay for three days, and then fly to Mexico for another four days of rest at a resort 20 miles south of Cancun.

As I step off the tiny plane into the sun, I feel immediately more relaxed. The locks fly open, my heart fills with the openness of the sky.

It is not long before we check into Big Ruby’s Guesthouse and find ourselves ensconced in the breezy comfort of the Conch Republic.

On the city’s bustling Duval Street, youth is spent like easy currency under the balmy sun. Shacks spill laughs, live music, breasts, and tout day-long Happy Hour, conch fritters, fish tacos and other colorful Caribbean flair, all in the same breathless stupor.

When night breezes in, one inroad off Duval has been cordoned off for an impromptu Oscar Night party. As golden statues get handed out on TV, college students trade iconic, rainbow-colored Mardi Gras beads on the streets.

Two doors down, a homeless Albert Einstein lookalike serenades passers-by with a broken, inelegant violin.

Here at Key West, my trained New York sense of self-important busyness is exposed discombobulated, sunless and naked. Slow down, stop, and have a mojito (”Or two - we have 24 different flavors,” our waitresses chime together).

In the end, we finally take our place on the island when we sit down on the steps of a Kohr Bros frozen custard shoppe. Holding a cone of old-fashioned vanilla custard between our hands, we take turns and eat in silence, like two well-schooled children.

In that moment, I briefly forgot my anger and smiled at Rusty. In that moment, sweetened by the rarity of street dessert, the same light that first revealed his face to me, shone in my heart again.