I sat outside, waiting. Unlike me, I may even have prayed. Through tears, I saw the department head approach.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We tried to revive her. We couldn’t. Her face was peaceful, more than I’d ever seen.”
He had followed her decline closely in recent months. Tears choked me. For a long moment, I couldn’t speak. Then a cry tore from my heart, a question I couldn’t contain:
“How? How could she give in now, just before the surgeries, before the ray of hope she was waiting for?”
I was asking God, I suppose, but the department head answered: “I think she didn’t want so many people to suffer with her. She just gave up. I think she couldn’t bear to see your suffering.”
“I don’t know if you know, but recently she was preoccupied constantly with her own death,” I murmured.
“I saw the photos of her works. It was clear.”
“We even talked about it. She told me which flowers she wanted on her grave.”
“She was extraordinary in life.”
“You don’t have to tell me – I lived with her. I lived her.”
“Which flowers?” he asked. “Daisies?”
“Yes. That was the flower she loved most.”
“Once, when she felt a little better, she brought me a bouquet of daisies.”
I knew she had a special connection with him. And he with her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned back into the ER.
It was around five a.m. The sun had not yet risen. My brother, her brother, and my friends were all beside me on the sidewalk outside Pioneer Hospital in Petah Tikva. We tried to digest the loss, but couldn’t. The pain was too great. More than anything, I regretted that at night, just before we fell asleep, I hadn’t told her I loved her. Now it was too late. Or maybe not.
Around six, I went with Saul to bring the bitter news to her parents. When they saw us standing at the door, they understood. My brother went to my parents – I knew he could handle them better than I could.
On October 7, 1979, Lily died, just days before the surgery in which she was supposed to receive her mother’s kidney. She was buried in Holon, in the plot closest to that of her aunt Mira, whom she had loved so deeply and admired so much. Perhaps it was that loss, above all, that tipped the scales toward her surrender, her parting from life.
Chapter 59
She Was Mine, Now She Is His
I didn’t want to read the autopsy report. Nor did I go to the clinicopathological conference about her death, held a few weeks later in one of the large hospitals in the center. It was too much for me. David went in my place.
When he called me right after the meeting, he asked if we could meet at the cemetery, by Lily’s grave.
“Bastards! Bastards!” I shouted, tears flooding my eyes. “I asked them to check all the possibilities of uterine bleeding, and that simple thing – that she had a fibroid – they missed. I don’t believe you. She bled to death from a fibroid?”
“That’s what the pathologists said. But don’t forget…”
“David, I don’t forget anything.”
David knew I had asked them to check whether Lily had uterine bleeding, and that they told me in their way not to interfere! To behave like a husband, not like a doctor! Of course I obeyed, like a good boy. And what did they do? Acted like fools! True, she also had another illness, but the drop in hemoglobin could have come on top of the other illness and caused her death. And who knows – maybe somewhere in the world, there was a drug for her underlying disease. Maybe. But now it was too late.
Unfortunately, the doctors were prisoners of their own preconceptions, convinced she had only one illness, and refused to consider otherwise. They were sure the bleeding came from her vascular disease, that damned autoimmune disease. It is known – we always look for one illness, at most a syndrome, a cluster of signs. But I never imagined they could make such a basic mistake. Who decided a person can only have one illness? There can always be another.
“Now it’s too late,” David murmured softly, as he hugged me.
“You’re telling me? I’m already past that.” I rose and placed one hand on Lily’s tombstone.
“I see.”
