We’re taking him to the hospital.’ ‘Anschutz Hospital,’ I inserted.
Swedish Hospital was four miles away.
I had moved past ordinary grief into something denser and more airless: a self-reinforcing, ruminative loop.
He was not going to refund our money as he’d promised Charles, that was crystal clear.
Yes – mostly about the things I didn’t do, the tender words I left unsaid, the presence I failed to offer.
The phone rang five times, and then it rang some more. I was calling from Charlotte, North Carolina – wedged into the cracked-leather passenger seat of a friend’s Honda, my suitcase still exhaling the recycled-air odour of the airport – trying to reach Charles at home in Denver. It was eight in the morning in Denver, long past the time he’d normally be stirring raisins into his oatmeal, waiting for his toast to brown.
Six rings. Seven. Eight. Each one twisted something in my chest.
We’d had words that morning as he drove me to the airport – one of those marital skirmishes that feels urgent and forgettable at the same time, but leaves a residue.
On the 10th ring, there was a clatter – the sound of the receiver being knocked, fumbled, dragged across the nightstand. Then Charles’s voice, dry as autumn leaves: ‘Hello.’
Even through the phone line, I could hear the sleep thick in his throat. I apologised for waking him.
‘I need to cancel my appointment this morning,’ he rasped.
‘Don’t worry,’ I countered. ‘I’ll call. Just go back to sleep.’
I told him I loved him, hoping he heard an apology tucked inside those three syllables – a white flag folded and slipped between the words – for my role in the dustup. He said something I couldn’t quite make out. Then the line went dead.
Charles was having three kinds of days then: good days, not-so-good days, and what he called ‘soldiering on’ days. I couldn’t tell which this was, but he was fine when I left, and we’d agreed I should make this trip. We’d bought tickets to California for the following weekend – relatives in Lodi expecting us. He’d also rented and paid a full month’s fee for a condo in Palm Springs for the following month.
But nothing was normal. Charles was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and though he seemed to be tolerating the treatments most of the time, his determination to get well had a quality I recognised: the same straightness of spine and iron resolve he’d maintained through one family crisis after another.
Seven years earlier, we’d sat in a small examining room painted institutional green. With clinical precision, Han Myint, the oncologist, delivered the diagnosis of mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma: ‘You have two choices. Do nothing, and you’ll live less than a year. Or do a stem cell transplant, and you’ll have two, maybe three years.’
I sobbed so violently the chair legs stuttered against the tile floor
Charles didn’t blink. He sat straight-backed on the examining table, absorbing this news the way he’d absorbed everything else: his first son Mark’s paranoid schizophrenia and subsequent suicide attempts over a decade; the day Mark bought lighter fluid, walked to City Park, doused himself, and struck a match. Then came the second son, Douglas – another diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, another series of treatment failures.
I had no such resolve. I bent double in my chair and sobbed so violently the chair legs stuttered against the tile floor.
What followed was an exhaustive campaign. We interviewed doctors, toured cancer centres, compared treatment protocols with the forensic attentiveness of detectives. We settled on Anschutz Hospital at the University of Colorado Medical Center, and Charles began the regimen: three rounds of chemo, then a month hospitalised for the stem cell transplant.
For a while, it seemed to be working. Then his platelet count plummeted. His balance tilted. His memory became unreliable.
Still, we didn’t talk about death. We talked about the next infusion, the chest port installation, the small-print protocols of infection prevention: no movie theatres; no handshaking; wearing a mask everywhere. We were living in the present tense – the grammatical tense of hope deferred: if we could just get through this treatment, when his platelet count improves, after he recovers.
All that day in Charlotte, I tried calling him again. With each ring, the knot in my stomach squeezed and roiled, until the phone kicked to my own recorded voice: ‘Sorry, no one is available at the moment…’ By late afternoon, alarm was coiling through my chest like smoke. I called the neighbours. ‘Would you please use the garage code and enter the garage?’ I started, after Dean answered, trying to keep panic from seeping into the edges of my voice. ‘If Charles’s car is gone, everything’s fine. But if it’s there, would you please go inside and check on him?’
The next five minutes felt like 50. When my cell phone rang, Dean’s voice had that careful flatness people use when delivering catastrophic news: ‘He’s here. In bed. Unconscious. We’ve called 911.’
We stayed on the line until the EMTs arrived. One of them, Brad, took the phone and began rapid-firing questions. Then: ‘He’s unresponsive. We’re taking him to the hospital.’ ‘Anschutz Hospital,’ I inserted. ‘The 11th-floor cancer ward. They’re expecting him.’ At Brad’s hesitation, I added: ‘Those are his doctor’s instructions.’
There were muffled voices, an exchange I couldn’t hear, then Brad was back. The weather in Denver was bad, he said. Roads were impassable. ‘We’re only authorised to take him to the local hospital,’ he concluded. Swedish Hospital was four miles away. Anschutz was 10.
The first United flight out of Charlotte the next morning got me to Denver by 10 am, and I drove straight to Swedish, still in yesterday’s clothes; still carrying the low-grade static charge of panic.
Charles lay in the critical care unit, his skin the chalky-white colour of copy paper, connected to an octopus of machinery – tubes and monitors that rhythmically wheezed and beeped. I looked anxiously for something in his handsome face that would give us possibility.
When I asked to talk to his doctor, a nurse slid her eyes away from mine and told me he had a ‘care team’ that made rounds ‘very early’ each morning. No specific doctor. No one I could meet with, she added. When I asked about transferring Charles, she replied only that his medical records from Anschutz had been requested.
His first words were: ‘I want to go home.’ Instead, he was transferred to a rehab
On day four, I learned that the computerised record systems of Swedish and Anschutz weren’t compatible.
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On day five, Charles regained consciousness. His first words were: ‘I want to go home.’ Instead, he was transferred to a rehab. There he contracted MRSA. Standing beside his bed, holding his hand, I watched the monitor numbers falter and drop – 92, 89, 85 – as his chest heaved for breath. He went into shock. They ordered me out of the room, gave him a tracheostomy, rushed him to critical care. He died several hours later.
The regrets started immediately, a relentless, punishing drumbeat: I should not have gone to Charlotte. Why didn’t I scream into the phone demanding the EMTs take him to Anschutz. I should have had his records immediately couriered to Swedish. I should have insisted on transferring him to Anschutz the moment I arrived at Swedish. I should have assembled a home care team, checked him out of the hospital, and taken him home. I should have said ‘I’m sorry’ for my role in our airport-ride dispute.
It was too late. I was guilty. I was a very bad person.
What I was experiencing has a clinical name I later learned – one that researchers have spent decades untangling from grief itself. Rumination: the mental habit of repetitively focusing on the causes and consequences of distress without moving toward resolution.
The immediate mountain of death logistics required laser focus – the funeral home, the casket, the flowers, the military honours, the graveside burial. After the taps at the graveside service, I placed a single red rose on the coffin; came home to an empty house. Making it as far as the den sofa, I collapsed, unable to will myself to do even the simplest thing or stop the parade of negative regrets.
Nights were the worst. I’d stagger to bed well after midnight, then wake at 2.30 am to accusations that marched through my mind until dawn. During the day, I didn’t answer the phone. Didn’t keep appointments. Didn’t finish notifying people. Didn’t file death certificates.
After three months, in desperation, I signed up for a grief class at church. Eight of us sat in a circle of folding chairs while a facilitator asked us to name what we had lost. I couldn’t stop at one thing. The class didn’t slow the spiral – it deepened it. I had moved past ordinary grief into something denser and more airless: a self-reinforcing, ruminative loop. Misery, it turns out, is a learnable skill.
Regret can be a compass if you let it point you toward a specific plan of action
One night I stood in the shaft of the medicine cabinet’s overhead light and counted out Charles’s leftover pain pills. Thirty. I held them in my hand. What brought me back was Charles – his unambiguous sense of right and wrong. He had fought for a refund clause in the Palm Springs rental contract, insisting on it with the same care he brought to everything he wanted to protect. Honouring that felt like honouring him. This was something I could do. Must do. Here, at last, was a possible path back. I returned the pills to the bottle, walked to my desk, and wrote in my Day-Timer: ‘Call owner at 2 pm tomorrow.’
Then I slept.
The next day at 2 pm, the owner didn’t answer my call. Then he ignored my follow-up emails and phone calls. When I did finally get him on the phone, he suggested brightly that perhaps I’d like to come stay by myself now. It would be a good change for me, he said. He would change the lease dates. He was not going to refund our money as he’d promised Charles, that was crystal clear. I filed a complaint, showed up, pushed back. Each concrete step felt like a cable pulling me, hand over hand, out of rumination.
Do I still have regrets? Yes – mostly about the things I didn’t do, the tender words I left unsaid, the presence I failed to offer. The missteps are easier to carry now. But I learned something durable: regret is not a verdict. It can be a compass if you let it point you toward a specific plan of action. Asking ‘why’ questions – the endless, recursive circling through the same worn grooves – is rumination, and it deepens its own channel the more you travel it.
But the questions that matter are different: What can I do? What, specifically, will I do tomorrow at 2 pm? These interrupt the pattern. The next time regret comes – and it will, as reliably and certainly as a change in the weather – I know how to say yes to it, to find my way back.
