She is in intensive care, her frail body covered by a sheet. With her are several dear friends. Cape Cod Hospital is housing her husband, who has dementia, in a room on the ground floor. Her name is Saralee Perel and she is one of my dearest friends in the world. Many of you will know and love her from her columns in this newspaper… 30 years of befriending her readers and opening her heart to them month after month.
It started quite harmlessly with an email in which she wrote that she had a sore throat and couldn’t talk on the phone. Did she have COVID? No, she didn’t. The sore throat developed into pneumonia. Then a heart attack, then edema and organ failure.
Saralee’s cheerful hairstyle is gone. She is heavily sedated and has been on a ventilator for eight days. Her IV contains a phone book of various medications. I gently place my hand on her forehead and she is barely there.
The hospice and others who should know tell us that hearing is the last thing to go. I tell her quietly that I will understand if she has to go. But I hope she doesn’t have to, and I tell her so. Her nurse, Victor, asks if I will give her Reiki, a spiritual version of what medical professionals call “therapeutic touch.” It’s a kind of laying on of hands, a prayer without words.
His compassion reminds me of a nurse who cared for my dying brother, whom I lost two weeks ago. She turned him on his side to ease his bedsores, and he groaned in pain. I thought I saw tears in the corners of her eyes, and asked her if she needed a hug. She did. Wrapped in the hug, she began to cry. Between you and me, my brother could be a difficult person, so I wasn’t sure if her tears were for him. They weren’t. They were for her father, who had died of cancer last week. My brother’s pain reminded her of her father’s.
So I’ll take a quick detour to bow our heads in gratitude and admiration. Just days after her father’s death, this nurse was back on duty, battling her own grief and tending to the pain of others. And some people say there are no angels. Hospitals are full of them.
Saralee was one of the angels in my life. She is a licensed social worker and one of the most compassionate listeners I know. In recent years we would have breakfast together at the Marshland Restaurant in Sandwich. When her husband Bob developed dementia, she shared with me not only her anguish at watching the love of her life slowly and steadily disappear, but also her guilt – that her care for him was occasionally interrupted by her own bouts of grief and outrage. They were married for nearly 50 years.
Sometimes we’ve had philosophical discussions about whether soul and spirit ultimately mean the same thing. But even if he can’t remember her name, the moment she tries to get up from her chair, he reaches out his arm to support her elbow. He tells her all the time that he loves her. I think that’s proof that such enduring love goes down to the cellular level. He loves her with all his heart, even with his whole body, his DNA. He just can’t love her with his whole mind anymore. He has so little of it left.
Why did critics like her? For the same reason that so many of us do. She is bitingly honest. She is fearlessly personal – confessional, even. And she had that Yiddish humor that finds the absurd even in the midst of tragedy. And finally, she had the literary gift of being able to put all of that into prose that is worth reading – and has done so for 30 years.
Saralee’s readers may not know that she is an award-winning columnist. The New England Newspaper Publishers’ Association has voted her best columnist for 15 years in a row. Being a good friend, she persuaded me to enter for the first time in 38 years as a writer. In Olympic terms, I won bronze – which was fine with me. She got her 15th Gold. She is the GOAT
We will not see Saralee in the Times again. Now she is so frail she is almost birdlike, and her mind is medicated into a stillness even deeper than that of her husband. There is… has been… no one like her.
The cascading organ failure has brought Saralee – all of us – to her knees. Her pain and our guard are at an end. Heavy doses of morphine are added to the mix; her ventilator is turned off and her autonomic nervous system takes over. Some of us have a sneaking suspicion that Elvis has left the building, although this automatic breathing continues. Hours pass and finally Saralee has died of exhaustion.
When a ninth-grader lost her grandmother many years ago, she wrote the following: “If there is a heaven entered by angels, surely all would turn into radiant halos to behold such a soul.”
Meanwhile, Bob was in a small room in the emergency room. Bettina and I visited him every day. He was unaware of his wife, the tubes and the beeping monitors two floors above him. We hug him. Fighting back tears, I offer him another and he takes it eagerly, rubbing my back as I hold him. “This is wonderful,” he says.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email to [email protected].
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