Sugar Time

One version of a good ending.

Tuesday morning, Richard’s blood sugar dropped so low I couldn’t pull him back. Before an EMS team arrived, there was a moment when I thought he might die. It was a fleeting moment, one of those image bubbles you picture of dented cars and flashing lights on the side of a road. He would die on the floor, where he had slipped to. He would stop breathing, and it would be my fault for not acting more quickly. It would be my fault, and I would not be able to go on living, because I would have caused his death, and I can tell you honestly, nothing anyone would have said about it not being my fault would have changed my mind. During the moments I wondered if he would die, for a second, when his eyes were closed and I didn’t see him breathing, I thought he was already dead, and time stopped. For all intents and purposes, I disappeared. It was a feeling I’ve never had before.

Is that love? You know as well as I do the word love, as a word, has only the fuzziest meaning. Is the moment I disappeared a way I know love exists?

A few years ago, I lost a gold ring that belonged to a friend. In time, I also lost the friend for reasons I don’t know, except love comes and goes. Perhaps my friend fell out of love with me. Falling out of love isn’t something that happens to me often. Falling out of love is like falling in love, in that they are similar brain states of heightened awareness and a radical repositioning of yourself in time and space. Falling out of love is the peaceful version of this, or it can be, if you don’t factor in that you may be causing pain to another person. Recently, I fell out of love with New York City, where I was born and where I lived with excitement for most of my life. When I fell out of love with New York, I felt free, and the city couldn’t have cared less.

One night, the missing gold ring appeared back on my finger by magic. It happened during a concert in an open-air theater, and in the dusk I saw the ring glowing on my hand. The return of the ring didn’t confirm for me that the supernatural exists. It confirmed for me that some things would remain out of my grasp. I would die with a mystery unsolved, and weirdly perhaps, I felt this tied me to humans in general, and I felt less alone.

After Richard was revived, I told him I’d feared he would die, and he said, “That’s something everyone understands. Every parent has that feeling a zillion times. If a kid doesn’t come home when they’re supposed to, you go into a panic and think they might be dead.” I believed him but felt something different had happened to me. Years ago, while I was at an artist colony and Richard was in Arizona, I couldn’t reach him for a number of hours, and I began to see myself sitting in a chair in a room without furniture. I would be in this chair in the middle of the room, and I would never leave the chair. That was how I knew I loved him, or whatever you want to call the thing I am talking about.  

The EMS workers were cheerful and quickly attached an IV to Richard’s arm that delivered fluids and glucose. Once he could sit up, he was asked a series of questions he afterward told me were hard. One was, “Where are you?” He said, “My office.” Also, “How many quarters in a dollar?” He told me, “I reasoned I was in the US and hazarded the guess, “Four?” He describes these recoveries as “reconstituting” himself. He says it feels like “congealing,” and I picture Jell-O setting up. Words are difficult for him at first. In a very low sugar like this one, he loses speech.

I sat with him for the rest of the day to make sure his sugar stayed in the normal range. He was in his leather armchair, covered in four blankets we call wolves. The blankets look like wolves, although they aren’t made of fur. He was covered in four blankets because he was shivering. He was shivering because in a low sugar, your body pours out sweat.

How did this happen? Richard figured out the cause after he was fully back. That morning, I’d helped him insert a new sensor into his arm. The sensor reads his blood sugar level every five minutes and sends the information on a blue tooth signal to his insulin pump, which is now advanced enough to turn off the delivery of insulin—this part worked!—when his blood sugar sinks too low. Normally, too, the pump would have sent Richard alarms that his sugar was dropping, and he would have had time to act. In this case, his sugar level fell during the time the new sensor was warming up, a period of two hours, and Richard’s pump couldn’t send him an alarm. Once Richard senses he’s in a low, it’s usually too late for him to do anything but sit there sweating.  

That morning, he’d come up to our bedroom to write with me and change the sensor. He brought coffee for the two of us, and I wrote on my computer while he sat on a chair. Then he went to his studio and a few hours passed—the hours during which the sensor was warming up and neither of us knew he wasn’t getting alarms. I came down to throw a bath mat in the washing machine, and when I poked into his studio to say hello, I saw an alien dripping with sweat. His hair was matted. He had those burning, pinwheel eyes that swirl around in the eyes of cartoon figures and you think can’t be real but are real in a really low sugar.

This low looked a little different from the other lows I’ve pulled Richard out of during our seventeen and half years together. He’s been a diabetic for 50 years, and he’s gotten this far because he knows how to take care of his body. A few times when he was in Arizona and I was in New York, I had to call a neighbor to help him or call 911. If I couldn’t reach him, I’d know something was wrong.

When I found him the other day, it didn’t occur to me the usual fixes wouldn’t work. I fed him a spoon of chocolate fudge. I got dried apricots, grapefruit juice, and glucose tablets. I urged him to chew and swallow, and I thought some of the stuff was going down and in a little while he’d come around far enough to remember how to swallow without coaching. In very low sugars, before type 1 diabetics pass out and drift toward coma, they become as strong and belligerent as zombies with the strength of gorillas and the table manners of giant, irritable babies.

He wasn’t coming back, and I was afraid he was sinking farther and farther down. At one point, I injected him with an emergency shot of glucose and tried to coat his lips and mouth with sugar. When, hours later, he was back, he wondered why his hair was stiff and sticky. It looked good. It made decent product.

After trying to revive him for an hour, I called my neighbors Mary and Lou and asked if they could help me get Richard to the hospital. He had slid off his chair and was on the floor. They were over in a flash, and we all thought it best just to call 911. A few minutes later, two EMS workers were in the house.

As I sat with Richard that afternoon, I wrote about what had happened to us. I wrote about it joyfully because relief gives you freedom. As I was writing, someone on social media quoted the famous line by Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I found myself questioning what she meant. What kind of stories do we tell ourselves in order to live? True detective stories? Bodice rippers? Clone stories from the top MFA programs in creative writing? We forget about death in order to live? That kind of story?

I wrote a story of sorts quickly, almost as it was happening, because it had a good ending. The story was how it ends, unlike life, over all. In that story, I moved quickly past the fear and dislocation I started with today. I started with the fear today because it kept coming back to me as the days passed. It kept coming back because some day it will be real for one of us.

The other morning, when Richard and I were writing before his sugar dropped, he commented on a remark made by Henri Bergson that time is actually distance. Bergson meant we measure a day by the distance the earth revolves on its axis as it also makes its way around the sun. Richard wrote, too, about “the exhibitionary complex” and made the point that road signs, interpreting the space where cars travel and towns connect, are examples of things you could compare to a museum, where objects are interpreted and organized to point you somewhere.

Alan Tudyk in “Resident Alien”

The last few nights, we’ve been streaming the series Resident Alien (Netflix), about an alien visitor sent to Earth to destroy the human population. The alien, played with comic gusto by Alan Tudyk, assumes the human form of a doctor in Nowhere, Colorado. The show has a cozy Northern Exposure vibe, mainly so the alien can fall in love with what humans are at the same time he is slowly changing into one. Humans are creatures that feel connected and, once connected, feel protective and weirdly unprotected from slipping into each other’s skin. It’s a condition the alien can only attach the vaguely understood word love to, a word and set of feelings that don’t exist on his planet and inside his species.

Most of the comedy spills from Tudyk’s performance as an awkward child. He’s an awkward child, learning everything for the first time, because he’s entered a new state of being and of consciousness. He is starting life all over again. Richard and I think something like this is happening to us. At every new stage of awareness, you rethink what came before and start again.

Prompts and Zooms

Some prompts for the prompty people. Please do not post your writes in comments here. They are for you to play with in your practice.

1. Reverse the notion that we lose ourselves in anonymity. In anonymity, might we slip the knot of convention?

2. The rescue is in the catastrophe.

The next Zoom conversation about writing craft is on SATURDAY MARCH 23 from 3 to 4pm EST. The Zooms are for paid subscribers. To be placed on the list for a link, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I will confirm your request in an email. If you don’t receive a confirmation from me, it means I didn’t get your request so please send me a direct message to let me know.

Here are some things we might consider at the next Zoom, prompted perhaps by today’s post:

In “writing from life,” what kinds of emotions, both comfortable and uncomfortable, do we want to arouse in readers?

Are we supposed to wait for a certain amount of time to pass to make this kind of storytelling—which can mix comedy with moments that stop your heart—more easily distanced and perhaps more palatable? Mainly, I’m always asking: Where is the most freedom for writers and artists to express what they want to express?

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