From the Moment of his Breath

"Frank, that pipe will kill you!" they kept telling him; but it hadn't done its job. Five years after his beloved Pearlie died, here he was, still desperately trying to join her.

They met more than fifty years ago at the weekly dance in the Parish Hall. They first danced together in the Progressive Barn Dance and it was as though an electric current passed between them as their hands touched. Nothing was said but their gaze never wavered from each others eyes: hers grey green to go with her red hair and lightly freckled complexion and his dark brown and mysterious, accentuating his almost swarthy good looks. She was 18 years old and he her senior by two years. He regretfully passed her to her next partner when the time came but, as soon as the barn dance was over, he braved the gaggle of girls without partners chattering away in the corner by the stage and asked her for the next dance.

That was the beginning of a happy, year-long courtship followed by a short engagement, then marriage. At first they lovingly did nothing to prevent Pearlie having a child and then hopefully did everything they could to ensure she became pregnant but were always disappointed.

"I don't feel like bringing up someone else's kid." she had said, so adoption was out and the scientific types fiddled unsuccessfully with their test tubes until they said she was too old to take the in vitro path. Years later, when smoking had become a health hazard, he wondered whether the pale blue fug of tobacco smoke that always filled the house had anything to do with their problem. But both his sister and Pearlie's brother were prolific breeders so there were always nieces and nephews to come and visit and, despite the absence of any children of their own, it had been a happy, companionable and loving marriage.

Frank had worked for the local Ford dealership. Starting as a junior used car salesman, he retired as Sales Manager, while Pearlie worked first as a sales assistant and then buyer in the kitchenware, crockery and glassware section of the town's largest department store. After they bought their first house -- a little, old, almost derelict cottage, which was all they could afford at the time -- they discovered a shared passion for renovating old houses. Doing most of the work themselves and learning as they went, it had taken five years to get that cottage the way they wanted it. When it was finished they decided that renovating was more fun than sitting around with nothing to do and bought another old, run-down house. They were on their sixth when they retired. It was more like a mansion than a cottage and by the time they finished the work and sold it, they were cured of the renovation bug and bought into Sunlit Waters Retirement Village.

Pearlie was diagnosed with lung cancer just six weeks after they moved into their neat little unit in the Retirement Village. Another six weeks and she was in hospital and a month after that she had gone. At first the other residents rallied round with sympathy and support and the nieces and nephews were frequent visitors. But it didn't last; it never does. He was soon left to his own devices, to sit on a garden bench, to remember the good times and the bad, to grieve for his beloved Pearlie and to smoke.

In their courting days, smoking was seen as both sophisticated and socially acceptable. Ever since they first met, Pearlie had smoked those American mentholated cigarettes. He had been a smoker for nearly sixty years, beginning as a kid during the war by pinching the makings out of his father's tobacco pouch and sneaking off to roll his own and smoke them behind the shed in the backyard. When he started work, he took up smoking seriously, as you did in those days. Following a severe bout of bronchitis, his doctor warned him off cigarettes, and he swapped to a pipe, augmented by an occasional good cigar.

Until Pearlie died, he was never a heavy smoker, but grief, and the hope that it may help him join her quickly, led him to smoke far too much in the last few years. He could usually be found puffing on his pipe in the manicured garden of the Retirement Village. The Rules to be Observed by Residents, to which he had agreed when they took up residence, prevented him from smoking in his unit or anywhere else inside the buildings. Except for a few hours in bed at night, he could no longer go for more than half an hour without a smoke. As a result he spent most of his waking hours on an uncomfortable bench in the garden. -- always called Frank's bench by the other residents -- where he and Pearlie sometimes sat and smoked after they moved in.. When it rained or the night was too dark for him to find his way around the garden, he huddled in a deck chair on a corner of the veranda to smoke his pipe.

On the fifth anniversary of her death, he finally realised that, if he was going to continue living, some sort of change -- any sort of change -- was needed to keep him sane. He decided to give up his now thoroughly unacceptable smoking habit as the first step towards finding new interests. He checked his supplies. One and a half packets of tobacco left. He would go on smoking in the normal way until he ran out; then he would just stop. On his last day as a smoker, he eked out his tobacco so that he had enough left for a few final, slow, and luxurious puffs of his favorite pipe on the veranda before bedtime. Then, to discourage himself from dashing off to the shop in the morning for further supplies, he gathered up all his pipes, including the one they had given him when he retired, and buried them deep under the food scraps in the bins behind the kitchen which he knew would be emptied early the following morning. Now, he thought, he was an ex-smoker and any temptation to relapse had been removed.

He knew it was called going cold turkey but, by the end of the first day, he was quite sure that no turkey, cold or hot, plucked or resplendent in its full plumage, had ever felt as appallingly awful as he did. After tossing and turning in bed for most of the night, the second day was even worse than the first. It didn't take long for the other residents to realise what was going on. They lay in wait for him as he strode vigorously round and round the garden, cheering him on with encouraging remarks.

"That's the way, Frank."

"Stick to it, Mate."

Far from encouraging him, these well-wishers only served to spark his newly developed short temper.

"Why don't you lot mind your own bloody business!" was his only response.

On the second night the cold sweats and the dreams began. They weren't really nightmares but bore little relationship to normal dreams. Most were just flashes of light and colour but in some he found himself cast as Orpheus in that classic tale, bare-chested in a tunic and sandals, clutching his lyre and roaming the endless dark passageways of the Underworld, not searching for Eurydice but calling his beloved Pearlie and singing her favourite songs.

In the morning he remembered the dream. The memories and the sadness came flooding back. A few days before she left the Village for her final trip to hospital, he and Pearlie had watched an opera on television about Orpheus and Eurydice. When the applause broke out and the credits began to roll, she finally admitted to him, and perhaps to herself, that she knew she was dying.

"Frank, will you come looking for me like that... after I've gone."

"Well, not like Orpheus. You know what a terrible singer I am. But don't worry, I won't be far behind you."

He felt guilty that he had failed to keep his promise.

By the fourth day of abstinence, it was all he could do to sit on his bench, hunched over in the fetal position, sweating profusely, with his head full of dreams that had become more like hallucinations. It was there that Dr. Wilson found him after visiting old Mrs Patrick, who asked, "Doctor, could you please have a word with Frank on your way out. He's trying to give up smoking. He's out there all hunched up on his bench in the garden and we're all worried about him, but he won't talk to any of us."

"What's your problem, Old Chap?" the doctor asked, "I'm Dr. Wilson."

"It's none of your bloody business, but if you must know, I've given up smoking and it's a bit rough at the moment. I'll get over it."

"Yes, you'll get over it eventually if you can stick it out long enough. Are you using anything?"

"You mean heroin or something like that?" Frank asked indignantly.

"No! No! I mean nicotine chewing gum or patches to give your body a small dose of nicotine without you having to smoke. I've never been a smoker but people who have tell me it's a lot easier to quit using something like that." The old doctor rummaged in his bag and produced a couple of nicotine patches. "Here, try one of these now. This is the starting size. You use one a day for about six weeks, then get down to smaller sizes. Go and stick one on now and pick up a supply from the pharmacy tomorrow."

Frank was in the mood to try anything and did as he was told. With the aid of the patches, he was beginning to feel much better by dinner time the following evening and lined up at the dining room with the rest of them. The food soothed some of his internal gripes, but he still couldn't trust himself to speak politely to anyone. As the days went by, the measured dose of nicotine delivered by the patches and his strong will and determination kept the cravings under control; but he was having problems knowing what to do with his hands now that they weren't holding a pipe.

"I have a spare set of rosary beads," old Mrs Patrick volunteered.

"Thanks very much, but I'm not a Catholic," he replied laughing for the first time in weeks.

"Why don't you speak to Julie, the occupational therapist who comes on Wednesday mornings? She may be able to suggest something."

He found Julie in the craft room and she suggested basket making and set him up with the materials he needed and a book of instructions. He became a diligent if not enthusiastic basket maker - or basket case he sometimes thought. To keep his hands occupied at other times he used a ball of plasticine which she gave him. He kept it in his pocket and, in moments of stress, would work away at it with his fingers.

He had been sorely tempted to celebrate the completion of the course of patches with a couple of good cigars but his resolve held firm. The next hurdle he would have to surmount was the day that should have been their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The chance discovery at the back of a drawer of an information sheet from a packet of patches with its dire warnings about the risks of nicotine overdose and the possible serious effects of smoking while using the patches or of using more than one patch at a time finally solved his problem of how to celebrate this special day. On that anniversary morning he went shopping for what he would need. Locking himself in his unit after dinner he unpacked his purchases, retrieved the champagne from the fridge and began his preparations.

The following morning Mrs Patrick went in search of Sister White, the Village manager.

"Sister, I'm worried about Frank. There's a strong smell of cigar smoke outside his unit, and Betty Erskine and I pounded on his door but he wouldn't answer. Could you come, please?"

When they arrived at Frank's door, Betty Erskine was still hammering on it and a small crowd had gathered.

"Wait, let me unlock it," the Sister said, "I have the master key."

The onlookers crowded around the open door only to draw back with a sharp intake of breath at the scene that confronted them. Frank sat slumped in an armchair with a half-smoked cigar still clamped between his lifeless fingers. On the table beside him were an ashtray with the stub of his first cigar, half a glass of flat champagne, an empty champagne bottle and his favourite picture of Pearlie. He was clad only in his underpants and his body, which had begun to run to fat when he stopped smoking, was festooned with nicotine patches.

He was smiling. He had gone to join his beloved Pearlie but, unlike Orpheus, he had no intention of coming back.

* From When we Grow Older and... by Australian poet Gary Hekimian. Used with the author's permission.