THE APPROPRIATNESS OF CLOUDS

Once there was a family. Then one summer day, everything changed.

By Eileen McCluskey

The day dawned bright, promising perfect summer weather.

It was Wednesday, July 29, 1998, three weeks since my husband, Tim, and I had separated. Our four-and-a-half-year-old daughter trailed a heady scent of sunscreen as she tromped down the stairs on her way to camp.

The teachers at the Russell Preschool were already filling the small playground pool with water. Maeve stuffed her backpack into her cubby and hugged me goodbye. I drove back to the house to make a few phone calls before my first meeting of the day.

The kitchen door slammed as I dropped my bag and picked up the telephone just before the answering machine kicked in. Leaning against a counter, I wiped at the sweat on my forehead with my free hand, then grabbed a glass of water.

“Eileen? It’s Beth Lown.” I could tell by my family physician’s voice that she was concerned about something. “How are you feeling?”

“Well, I’ve been awfully tired lately, Beth. And you already know about the nausea.” I sipped at the water and considered turning on the window air conditioner, but decided it would be too noisy.

“I’ve got the results of the blood tests we ran on you yesterday. Your liver enzymes are high, Eileen. I want to see you tomorrow, first thing, for more blood work. We’ll do an abdominal ultrasound, too, to see if we can get to the bottom of the weight loss.”

“Right. Okay, then, see you first thing.”

“Eileen.”

“Yes?”

“We’re going to take good care of you.”

“I know. Thank you, Beth.”

I switched on the air conditioner, greeting its breeze with raised arms, and imagined the liver in its dark pocket under my ribs, struggling quietly against the virus. It’s been a long haul, I thought. I bet it’s tired.

The virus, eluding the body’s efforts to oust it, gains ground and multiplies. It takes advantage of the liver’s intelligent structure, its winding pathways of veins. The ruthless virus attacks the liver’s delicate cells, and in a last heroic act they hurtle enzymes into pulsing blood. The exiled enzymes bring the desperate message of a battle turning ugly to the lab. My liver swells, pressing against neighboring organs, warning me of its increasing weakness.

Look at the time—better get moving, I thought as I swiped up my bag and notepad, turned off the air conditioner, and rushed out the door.


The hepatitis C diagnosis had come in 1993 during my fifth month of pregnancy. I’d never heard of the virus, so I read all the literature I could find, met with a liver specialist, and went online to chat with other hepatitis C patients.

I learned the diagnosis is a harbinger of discouraging news. Treatment is effective for only 30 percent of patients, and hepatitis C is the culprit behind the vast majority of liver transplants in the United States each year.

Hepatitis C likely found its way into my body when I worked in a hospital blood lab during the mid-1970s, in the days before universal precautions. No one wore gloves. I handled test tubes filled with blood every day, uncapping them, spinning them down in the centrifuge, and siphoning off the serum for testing.

I didn’t feel too bad when Maeve was a newborn. So I coasted, hoping for the best. And it was a good thing I had the luxury of not thinking too much about hepatitis C, because my husband and I had bigger troubles on our minds.

Tim had been struggling since Maeve’s birth with manic-depressive illness. Every aspect of life seemed a burden for him. He came home from work agitated by injustices, especially the lack of recognition for his brilliance on the job.

I often wondered how his coworkers tolerated his haughty attitude, if indeed he let it show as much at the office as he did at home. He became annoyed with me if I asked him to change a diaper or take a turn holding our baby. I thought it a phase, a time of adjustment while he got used to the rigors of being a parent.

But instead of a gradual lightening of heart as the joys of having a child became more apparent, Tim’s outlook only grew darker. He recognized that he needed help—this was no ordinary mood swing, we agreed—so he redoubled his efforts with medications and therapy.

For all that, and despite what I knew was a lot of hard work on his part, Tim faded from our life together while Maeve was just a baby. Then, when she was three years old, he stopped taking his medicine and within a few months became suicidal.

By the time Maeve was three and a half, Tim needed frequent hospitalizations. He tried the latest antidepressants, rallied, then slumped again. When he was home, he didn’t meet my eyes. He no longer talked with me or played with Maeve. His small daughter gave up trying to get her daddy to pay attention. Now, she ran from him when he came into the room. In response, he’d retreat to the bedroom and slam the door.


I couldn’t believe what was happening. The first years of our marriage had been so different. We had talked about everything. We’d shared our enthusiasm for writing and reading. We wrote love notes. It seemed there were no limits to our capacity to understand and appreciate each other. We had both wanted a child and were delighted when I became pregnant. All life’s pleasures seemed realized.

So I wanted to believe Tim might one day re-emerge. He would turn to me, his blue eyes brimming again with intensity, and tell me of the darkness lifting, of the color flooding his heart. He would hold me again; we would weep and celebrate, and pick up where we’d left off.

But he didn’t come back. I plodded through my days like a foot soldier on an endless march, hungry for rest, thinking only that I had to hold our family together. Although I felt a mounting pain in my right side, I pushed any thoughts of hepatitis C away. I increased my work hours because Tim was unemployed, having lost his last job after repeated hospitalizations.

Eventually, Tim’s new medications seemed to lift him out of the darkest pits. He secured a job and kept at it faithfully. But he left much earlier in the morning than his job required, and when he came home at night he still didn’t engage with Maeve and me.

My belief that he would return eroded, then washed out completely. I became convinced that, illness or no illness, Tim no longer loved me. I was weary of trying to talk with him. My attempts at conversation yielded nothing but faint, annoyed murmurs. After spending many wrenching evenings holding my head and crying my despair, I told Tim we must separate.

Without putting up much of a fight, he took a weekly rental room in nearby Somerville. We agreed he would come every Wednesday to put Maeve to bed, by way of building a relationship with her over time. And we decided to see how we felt about our marriage after a three-month separation.

Once I was alone in the house with Maeve, I took stock of my own health. My weight had dropped significantly over the past year; my right side constantly throbbed. A flu-like achiness, nausea, and a heavy exhaustion had settled in my body like a cold mist. I knew all these symptoms could be attributed to advancing disease.

And so on July 28, as the relentless sun burned out the morning’s silvery clouds, I dropped by Beth Lown’s office and grabbed a lab slip that ordered a liver-enzyme check. I walked down the hall to the small lab with the fat green chair to have my blood drawn. The cheerful phlebotomist drew bad news into vials, carefully recording my name on the labels.


I’m glad today is Wednesday, I naively thought the next morning as I slathered my daughter with sunscreen. Tim will put Maeve to bed tonight. I’ll go to the library when he arrives, finish writing that story for the Harvard Gazette.

I sometimes think of myself that morning with a feeling akin to jealousy: That lucky woman knew nothing of the tragedy that would flood her life before the day was out, didn’t even know yet about her escalated liver enzymes. Soon enough, I would discover Tim couldn’t keep his promise to me that night.

But, at any rate, the July day did. The sun shone ridiculously strong all day, like some annoying neighbor who gabbles at you about how great life is now that he’s retired. Meanwhile, you’re rushing to pull a few weeds out of your ill-tended garden in the few minutes you have before your daughter stops digging in the dirt and asks you to play another game.

And while the sun pounded my study, battling the air conditioner for dominance, this day gathered all the heavy moisture it could hold. As evening approached, it dropped its burden on houses and streets.

My burden, too, grew heavier as the evening wore on. As if the grim news about my liver enzymes wasn’t enough, Tim didn’t show at 6:00 as we’d planned. I called him at 6:45, while I stood by our front-porch door watching for his arrival.

I left a message saying that Maeve had just fallen asleep on the couch, that I didn’t think it was fair to make her wait any longer for her nightly story time. “Please call me when you get this message, Tim, so I’ll know you’re okay. I’m starting to feel a little worried about you.” Then I gently woke Maeve and told her that Daddy couldn’t come tonight, so I would do story and bedtime.

“Oh, good,” she said sleepily, as we trundled off to her room.

I listened for the phone as I snuggled with Maeve in her bed. After we’d finished reading stories and I’d kissed her good night, I called my mother to complain about Tim’s silence. As I explained to her how the evening had unfolded, I suddenly realized that all this sounded suspicious.

“I don’t like being the only one who knows Tim is out of contact tonight,” I said. My mother and I decided it might be wise to call Tim’s sister Kathy, to see if she had spoken with him that day. Kathy lived nearby, and though she had a hectic schedule, she always came through when Tim’s illness required hospitalization. And I was beginning to wonder if this was one of those times.

Kathy agreed we should try to locate Tim. She offered to stop by his house after she left work. When I went to bed, I was worried but not alarmed. Making sure the phone was close by in case Tim or Kathy called, I fell into an exhausted sleep.


Later that night, in one of Somerville’s many triple-deckers, a small fan with a broken handle droned on in the window of a modest room rented out by the week. Kathy and her friend Betsy wondered where Tim could be as they walked to the front door of his temporary home.
Their hearts began to pound when they saw the fan whirring in the darkened window of Tim’s room. It was too early, at 10:00, for him to be asleep. Another roomer answered the doorbell. He said he hadn’t seen Tim that evening and assumed he was out.

Kathy knocked on Tim’s door. There was no response. Her heart constricting, she tried the knob and found it unlocked. She and Betsy walked in, and immediately saw in the dark a still shape on the floor. With trembling hand, Kathy turned on the light.

Tim looked as if he had decided just to take a nap there next to his bed. Kathy bent down and gently shook his shoulder. “Tim, wake up. Oh, Betsy, grab a blanket—he’s so cold!” She straightened, backed away. “Oh, my God.”

He lay on his back, arms drawn stiffly up to his torso. His curly salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed; he was dressed in khakis and a blue T-shirt. The single bed where he had lain before slipping onto the floor was barely mussed.

Throughout the room lay the evidence of careful attention to detail: papers neatly piled on a small desk, laundry clean and folded in a green plastic basket in the corner. His medicine bottles stood in a tight row on the dresser—as he emptied them he had carefully replaced their caps and turned them upside down. Tim had made coffee that morning; then he had washed the percolator and tucked the electrical cord inside it, perhaps so it wouldn’t be lost in the confusion he would leave behind.

When Kathy came to my house that night several hours after finding Tim’s body, she told me repeatedly that Tim looked peaceful. She said it looked as if he had slid off the bed long after he’d fallen into his final sleep, that he hadn’t collapsed there.

I didn’t believe her. I wanted to, but it was already too much to contemplate that Tim was dead. I imagined vomit, blood, terrible second thoughts, a groping toward the telephone to call for help. I grilled Kathy about the details. “He didn’t throw up?” I choked out. “Did he bleed? Do you think he was in pain?”

In the end, I accepted the images of Tim’s suicide as both a comfort and a torture. There wasn’t any sign of a struggle because there had been no struggle. There was only the evidence of his determined swallowing of hundreds of pills.

Tim consumed those pills in the middle of a bright Wednesday, when no one suspected he was even thinking about suicide. He didn’t leave a suicide note, this man who had written a novel, never finished, and many snippets of stories, started and set aside. The absence of a good-bye note was like a slap in the face: I felt he was punishing me by leaving in silence.


The sun rose again the next morning, perky as ever. Beth Lown’s glasses and medical files dropped to the examining-room floor when I told her of Tim’s death. She hugged me, picked up her glasses and the scattered papers. We had to get down to the business at hand. I needed help with the hepatitis C; that much was clear.

But even though we knew I was headed toward treatment, we decided to delay it until I recovered from the initial shock of the suicide. Interferon—one of two powerful drugs used to combat hepatitis C—is notorious for causing clinical depression, and right now I was a prime candidate for that side effect.

The world tumbled around me in a jarring succession of events. Medical tests to determine the cause of my weight loss. Family members arriving from New Jersey and Cape Cod. The wake. The funeral. My brothers-in-law took one look at me and rushed out to buy a case of Ensure. I wanted nothing but to die. At the same time, I feared I would.

Maeve was the sole reason I rose every morning. Only she could convince me anything in life was good or worthwhile. I promised myself she would not lose me; she would always know how much I wanted to be with her, to take care of her and love her.

The doctors carefully monitored me for nine months after Tim’s death. When symptoms and viral load signaled rising danger, I decided to take the drugs that might kill the virus. Treatment wouldn’t guarantee success. But I had to take the chance. I couldn’t let the guilt I felt over Tim’s suicide dictate despair. I wouldn’t let Maeve down.

I was determined to stick with treatment, even though I’d read the side effects could be brutal. They were, especially the nausea and fevers. Gradually, the injections became routine: Three times a week pinch a thigh, feel the burn of the interferon as it eases into the muscle. The itchy red patches on my legs where the needles went in, badges of a body fighting for life.

The interferon and ribavirin worked, though the odds were against it. A year after I finished treatment, there were no traces of the virus in my body, and my liver enzymes were normal. I do not take this for granted. I know the world is fragile, that even if we tend to our loved ones—and our own selves—as well as we can, we can’t guarantee the whole thing won’t disappear like a dream on awakening.

The sun rises every day as if to contradict that. Have faith! its irritating brilliance seems to say. But though I’ve lost whatever cheery optimism I had in my more innocent days, I do at times give in to surprises of great joy.

In these unexpected moments, it suddenly seems clear that it is precisely life’s strange delicateness that gives it such beauty. Maeve and I hold hands as I read to her at the end of the day, our fingertips exquisitely sensitive to the knowledge that we are here, on this bed, right now. “Good night, darling.” Rising to leave, I lean down to kiss her. “See you in the morning.”

Eileen McCluskey, MBA’86, is a freelance writer who lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. She regularly writes the featured article in this magazine’s “Recruiting Employees” advertising section.