SURFIN' SAFARI SUMMER THREE - DAY FIVE - June 19, 2021

The ocean does sadness very well. Limpid tiny waves swishing the shore are melancholic; whirlpool turbulences conjure those things that upend our lives…

On Saturday I did a Surfin’ Safari to Marina del Rey for sadness.

About six days ago, around the time of Surfin’ Safari Summer Three, Day 3, Anna refused to take her meds. Lips taught she said, “No. I don’t want to.” And she did not want to bathe, either, or drink water or change her clothes.

This went on for five days, Wesley and I hoping it a phase, while she only got worse. Her pants were wet and she would not remove them. She began to smell like a barn. Finally, she became mean, something she was not capable of in what was her life. She had no malice in her, the reason I agreed to marry.

On Friday night, her condition had deteriorated considerably and she was taking modest swings at Wesley and I, spitting curses, casting a venomous eye, slashing our hearts to shreds. It was the moment I knew The Good Gift, The White Witch she had always been to me is gone now and that I am truly without her. Alone.

It was 3 a.m. and she would not go to sleep. She was yelling about her father in the bathroom mirror and emptying out all the shampoo and bubble bath containers. She was beyond control, dangerous, and I had no idea as to what to do. Slowly, I realized that she was at-risk, in peril and calling an ambulance was justified.

It arrived by 3:30 a.m. I gave the EMTs her Kaiser Permanente card and they then strapped my internationally acclaimed fashion designing, fun-loving, real-life Hollywood wife into a gurney and rolled her away babbling and weeping.

She has been in the hospital ever since. They are running tests and there doesn’t appear to be any infections or organ failures affecting her, which means this is who she has become and they are loathe to let her out into the world as that person.

We may have reached the end of the line and the last of the Surfin’ Safaris because Anna has seen her last and she was always the better half, the interesting story, as she was throughout our life together.

It is her journey, not the surfin’ struggles of middle-aged man, that people were keen to read here.

I did the Saturday Safari to remember someone who slipped away imperceptibly, through the hands like water.

When I first started surfing we went to the Marina all the time. It worked for us because I could chase waves while she and the tow-headed boy hunted crabs and shells and the greatest small creatures.

And I’d smile wide from the water and project dreams and lives upon them that did not come to pass.

We know how this story ends and it does so before its writers had polished a first draft. She, and this little family, are just a chapter in my life rather than the better part of the whole story, as anyone would hope.

And that story exists in my head, unshared, alone. And the work she created, the accumulation of life experience...it is as if she did it all for nothing and had no right to sit quietly in her olden days and savor those experiences.

I surfed to remember those times, because she cannot (I have asked her) and to deny this awful disease a chance to rob me of anything else good and dear.

As planned, I stopped by the hospital. I think because she got aggressive with staff they have Anna in a room way apart and all alone. There's that word again. Each of us married and yet...

You try to get a handle on this life and it slips through your hands like water, too.

She was drugged out. I tried to shake her, but there was peace in her usually tortured face, so I slipped away.

Tomorrow is another day, if not always and forever.