The Phone Call

I’ve been joking around, poking around the edges of waning sex, imagining the passion of my youth and the not so long ago time of yearning and desire, before vaginal fluids evaporated and the frustration of lost erections. This week, I wondered if I would need to start using the term “sex” with the same Bill Clinton definition. Oh, and by the way, I didn’t inhale, either. I was talking to myself, that inner dialog that goes on when the questions are too startling to ask aloud for fear of hearing the truth or expressing blame: Will he ever enter my body again? Was that time last month the last time in my life? Do we need to honor or mark the last time as a moment of profundity in our lives? I am mourning my aging and my self as a sexual being.

Every day husband and I have phone chat time, catch up time, how’s your day going time. It’s never predictable about when we’ll talk. Yesterday, he called just before noon and after the usual updates — me reporting how my phone interview went with the prospective job, he telling me about who said what at his office and the routine transactions of life, he announces rather quietly and nonchalantly that the doctor’s office just called with the elevated PSA test results. It’s showing cancer, he tells me, so I’m going to need to go in for a biopsy.

Since this news, the hours of the last day have been a blur. I am stunned. I have a physical explanation now for why we have had to work so hard to sustain an erection. I am feeling sad, disconnected, wanting to support him and feeling this sense of impending loss and fear. Not knowing for several more weeks whether this is an aggressive or slow growing version of prostate cancer, or maybe, it’s a misdiagnosis. Hah. And, I think, this is not about me. This is about supporting him and us, and being in life together living full out for whatever time we have here. Unpredictable as life is.

It is time for me to challenge the traditional definitions of sex, love, intimacy, and find new ways of expression through physical touch and tenderness that will keep us close. That’s all we have together — reinventing our future, mourning our past and letting go.

Today will be life as usual. We will meet at the end of the day for our usual Friday night date. It will be at the Art Museum, and we’ll see what happens next.