Carolyn Roberts' Seizure and Hospitalization

Carolyn Roberts' first seizure, occurring on the same day Ralph witnesses Ed Deepneau's violent road rage, marks the decisive turning point in her illness and forces Ralph to confront the reality of her impending death. The event shatters the fragile denial Ralph has maintained since Carolyn's diagnosis, plunging him into a nightmare of medical crisis, emotional devastation, and the first clear perception of the deathwatch that will haunt him.

Causes and Background

Carolyn Roberts had been diagnosed with a brain tumor months earlier, following a period when Dr. Litchfield initially dismissed her symptoms as tension headaches. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1992, Ralph accompanied her to conferences with doctors, evening runs to the hospital, and trips to other states for special tests, spending much of his travel time thanking God for her Blue Cross/Major Medical coverage. By July, the worst midsummer heatwave since 1971 had settled over central Maine, and Ralph first heard the ticking of the deathwatch, understanding that Carolyn's slim chances had become no chances at all. He began taking increasingly long walks through the hot afternoons and twilit evenings, returning on many occasions too exhausted to eat, relishing the heat mostly because the ringing in his ears sometimes drowned out the tick of Carolyn's deathwatch. On one of these walks, he first became aware that something had gone very wrong with Ed Deepneau, his neighbor from up the street, when he witnessed Ed's violent road rage attack on a pickup truck driver near the airport service gate.

What Happens

Ralph returned home from the airport confrontation in Trigger Vachon's laundry truck, soaked by the sudden summer downpour, to find the front door of his building standing ajar. Bill McGovern leaned over the upstairs rail, his face pale and worried beneath his Panama hat, and called down that Carolyn was having some sort of seizure and that he had just dialed 911. Ralph ran up the remaining stairs and found Carolyn lying half in and half out of the kitchen with her hair in her face, a detail that struck him as particularly horrible because Carolyn refused to be sloppy. The skin beneath his fingers felt as chilly as his feet inside his soaked sneakers. Bill explained that he had wanted to put her on the couch but she was too heavy for him due to his back. Ralph slid his arms under Carolyn and picked her up; she did not feel heavy to him at all, but light, almost as light as a milkweed pod ready to burst open and disgorge its filaments into the wind. He put her on the couch and knelt beside her, hearing the ticking in the walls so loud that even the thunder could not blot it out. Her respiration was fast and shallow, and her breath was terrible, but Ralph did not turn away from it. He picked up one of her hands, kissed it gently, and told her to hang in there, that everything was fine, though the ticking sound meant that nothing was fine. When he heard the warble of the approaching ambulance, he began to cry.

Consequences and Aftermath

Carolyn came around in the ambulance as it sped across Derry, the sun already out again and the wet streets steaming, but at first she talked such gibberish that Ralph was sure she had suffered a stroke. Just as she began to speak coherently, a second convulsion struck, and it took both Ralph and one of the paramedics to hold her down. Dr. Jamal, the neurologist, met Ralph in the third-floor waiting room that evening and told him in a low, soothing voice that Carolyn was stabilized, that they would keep her overnight, and that there would be new medications. He did not come right out and tell Ralph that Carolyn was going to die, but he came as close as anyone ever did during that long year, saying that the tumor was spreading in spite of everything they had tried and that motor-control problems and deterioration in eyesight might show up next. Ralph spent the night in a chair beside his sleeping wife, listening to the ticking that was not in the walls, thinking that someday soon he would be back in this room with her. He fell asleep a little after midnight, and when he woke the next morning the air was cooler than it had been in weeks, and Carolyn was wide awake, coherent, and bright-eyed, seeming hardly to be sick at all. Ralph took her home and began the not-inconsiderable job of making her last months as comfortable as possible. It was a long while before he thought of Ed Deepneau again, even after he began to see the bruises on Helen Deepneau's face. As that summer became fall, and as that fall darkened down toward Carolyn's final winter, Ralph's thoughts were occupied more and more by the deathwatch, which seemed to tick louder and louder even as it slowed down. About a month after Carolyn's death, Ralph began to suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life.