A Death & A Deliverance - Part VII
The first time I met Jinny, I couldn’t stand her. She was the gushy, chatty girlfriend of my son, Julian, and she walked around radiating almost unbearable positive energy despite the fact that, at 32 years old, she was terminally ill. It was almost too late before I began to see her in a different light.
THIS IS PART 7 of a SEVEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Jinny, during the ritual Julian held for her
I had never been to a vigil before. Jinny was the central person in the room, lying still as a piece of glass on her narrow hospital bed. She was still breathing, but unless you went up close, you could barely see any movement in her chest. She had a handful of devoted friends, girls she’d known since high school who’d studied Buddhism with her mother. These were the girls who administered to her, doling out meds, wiping drops of moisture from her nose, patting and loving on her.
But the rest of us loved on her, too. There must have been forty people in the room, each one of them lingering at Jinny’s bedside to pay her homage. The vigil lasted a week. We sat in Julian’s living room, waiting for the final moment, the moment Jinny’s heart stopped beating. She was in a coma, but we knew she could hear our words and sense the emotion behind them. On the Sunday, there was a Buddhist service for her, probably not a conventional one, with a lot of odd murmured sounds and clicking of tongues. Special candles were melted over both Julian and Jinny’s feet, hands and foreheads. After that, it was very peaceful.
I had been the last person to talk to Jinny while she was still conscious.
At the time, she was in a nursing home, with a beautiful green tree spreading its branches outside her window. She was very active that day, insisting we walk up and down the hall, stopping at the nurse’s station to ask for snacks or to see if perhaps they’d found Jinny’s phone, which she was constantly misplacing. We walked that hallway at least six times. In the empty common room, she put her hands on my shoulders and told me how much she loved me. Then she hugged me hard, not letting go for a long time.
The next day she went into a coma. Three days later she was sent home for hospice.
In the week that she lay dying, friends and family stayed with her day and night. There wasn’t much talking, but we consumed many cartons of pizza and sat around hollow-eyed, not knowing quite what to do. I wasn’t there when she breathed her last breath. Julian made his own rituals and placed coins over her eyes. Later I was told that she’d had shitty health insurance, and that things might have been different if she’d had better doctors. Whatever the truth was, a light went out when that young, exuberant heart stopped beating. We were all diminished. But inside my head, I still heard that sweet, chatty voice saying, “I’m going to beat this.”
Julian & Jinny
Throughout her illness, especially when Jinny began to spiral downhill so swiftly, Julian had been her main (in fact, her only) caregiver. For the whole last year of her life, he was afraid to leave her alone for even a minute, which meant he rarely left the house. He worried, for instance, that if Jinny attempted to descend the stairs to the kitchen from her bedroom, she would fall and break a limb. And he couldn’t trust her, because, despite her sickly condition, she would insist she was perfectly capable of doing housework or cooking a meal. (She wasn’t really.) As her sole caregiver, Julian couldn’t even leave her long enough to go to the store. He was exhausted. But he had no choice — he had to put one foot in front of the other, and keep going. Jinny grew him up, turned him into a mature, responsible adult. Before his life with her, he’d been as free as the wind, often making terrible choices that got him in trouble. But here he was with a partner who was terminally ill and needed every single ounce of his care and protection. And he did it. He stepped up to the plate, a 32-year-old man who had to grow up quickly and assume the wisdom and maturity of a person much further along in life.
I am so proud of both of them, the one who stayed, and the one who left.
I can truly say that Jinny changed our family, made us stronger and more understanding – hopefully a change we will be able to build on as the years pass. I doubt any one of us will ever forget her.
In loving memory of Jinny, who forever changed our lives