The Coffee Pot

My master blog team is on the road and I just cleaned the coffee pot. I no longer drink coffee, but pull it out when someone is here who does. It is a simple drip pot that brews good coffee, ground coffee. There are no fancy knobs and valves, just coffee. It has a unique feature, though. The brewed coffee is collected in a double boiler. It keeps the coffee from burning and tasting rancid. The pot turns itself off after two hours, so there probably isn’t much of an advantage to the double boiler design, but it does keep the coffee fresh-tasting.

My wife and I bought it while distracting ourselves from bad news. She had received a diagnosis of metastatic cancer. The MRI lit up all over her body. She had multiple tumors in her lungs. The physicians who delivered the news were beside themselves. One of them thought it might not be cancer, but a fungal infection. Another was realistic that she would have to have surgery. The tumors in her lungs were serious.

So we proceeded to absorb the news. She sucked it up. I totally broke down, went to the basement and cried for hours. I didn’t want her to see me and I couldn’t support her at that time. She knew what I was doing, but let me be. I cry now at the remembrance of that time.

We were at a high point in our lives. I had just finished building her a beautiful home. Business was flourishing. Things were under control. It was just that she started having some difficulty with breathing and needed to have it checked out.

She had been handling our finances. She gave me a quick lesson in bookkeeping. What categories were, where everything was located in the computer program, when taxes had to be paid and how to ensure bills didn’t become overdue. I am not a numbers person, so the lesson was overwhelming, let alone her medical condition.

There was a business to run. She went to work. I went to the basement and cried for days. I couldn’t face going into an office and facing workers. I don’t know what she told them about her condition or about my absence. I just knew she stood strong and set up conditions with them for the day that she would have surgery.

I finally got myself under control and tried to give her the support she needed. I thought if we both got out of the house, it would be somewhat of a distraction. So, of course, we went to Walmart and there was the coffee pot. It came in a 12-cup or a 10-cup model. She said, “Why don’t we buy the 10-cup” because she wouldn’t be around to drink that extra cup of coffee.

I bought the 12-cup version.

I see it now, sitting on the counter, black and proud of itself for delivering multiple cups of coffee over many years, taking up huge amounts of counter space. I will put it away after it dries out from my cleaning. It will come out again when visitors who are coffee drinkers arrive.

My wife had the surgery for removal of the tumors in her lungs. As I sat in the waiting room, desperately trying to figure out how I was going to provide care for this love of my life, and how I was going to survive her passing, I could think of no way to cope with any of it.

The surgery took a long time. The surgeon finally came out to talk with me. I steeled myself for the terrible news. She said, “She doesn’t have cancer. I don’t know what she has. What she doesn’t have, at least in her lungs, is a terminal condition.”

As it turned out, upon evaluation at a major medical center, the metastatic spots were hot spots that showed up on her MRI as spots of inflammation from arthritis.

The 12-cup coffee pot paid off.

She lived with me and loved me for many years, drinking coffee from that pot.

Now she’s gone and I have to put the pot away. Little Dog has come over to comfort me. I need it.

Let me know how you are doing. I care.

Contemplation: What kind of units are available to measure bravery?

Sincerely,

Lynn Brooke

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Photo Credit: © 2023 Rachel Gareau