Shedding the Body

Yesterday I received the gift of being present in Denver (by coincidence) on a day my former husband Jesse Choguill was in the process of shedding his body. Clearly he’s finished with this body, which has failed him, but his spirit and personality are far from finished. They shone through the cadaver-like physical shell in which he is momentarily still trapped.

His sister has put him in a beautiful hospice in Denver, where she lives, and when she heard I was coming up there for a meeting she invited me to visit him. Jess is 81, has had a number of health setbacks over the past two or three years, and is now dying of cerebral vasculitis. He’s probably about two days from death.

I say her invitation was a gift because she has enough on her plate to have ignored my visit to Denver for a client meeting, but instead actually picked me up at the airport and drove me to the hospice. This despite the fact that I’ve been divorced from Jess since 1971 and both of us have remarried, me three more times.

I have had the good fortune to be present at the death beds of the three of my five former spouses who have left their bodies. Each time, I have seen virtually the same thing and I offer it as a constant lesson to all of us: when you are finished with this current body, it does not mean that you are finished in spirit.

Jess, when I saw him, was already unable to speak. He was lying in bed, a hollow gaunt remain of the burly athletic man I’ve known all my adult life, a man who loved to drive and restore sports cars, hike Squaw Peak, and escape to Skaneateles to his lake house in the summer. A man who loved to drink beer and laugh loudly and make incredibly articulate and clever jokes.

Although he couldn’t say anything, he clearly knew I was there and he was even more clearly happy to see me. In his eyes and hie body language were the remnants of the man I knew and loved for his fierce spirit. He reached for me and parts of him smiled that I didn’t know were capable of smiling.

I met Jess in a bar in Syracuse New York, where I was getting my Ph.D and he was…well, drinking. I was fresh off my failed first marriage, and his sense of adventure and humor were a welcome relief from my sense that I had now failed at what women of my generation were supposed to do — marry a doctor and have children. I did marry a medical student, but couldn’t stick it out until he became a doctor, because he abused me by being unfaithful right after I lost my dad, so I had to throw him out.

Jess was my savior. He was also the man who brought me to Phoenix, where his mother had a winter home, and I’ve built all my businesses and my adult life. We came on a lark. I’d never been to Arizona. Our marriage didn’t last the move, but our friendship did, since he later married one of my former students. That was Stephanie, and I wrote about her when she died two years ago, too.

So you can see why I’m grateful to him and why I wanted to say goodbye.

If you are ever privileged to be at the deathbed of someone you once loved, swallow your reservations and go.