A Way of Dying

ANONYMOUS

1

THERE is a new way of dying today. It is the slow passage via modern medicine. If you are very ill modern medicine can save you. If you are going to die it can prevent you from so doing for a very long time.

We cannot inquire from the dead what they have felt about this deterrent. As they fight for spiritual release, and are constantly dragged back by modern medicine to try again, does their agony augment? To those who stand and watch, this seems like a ghastly imposition against God’s will be done. Apparently there is no mercy which the family may bestow at such a time. Only in an entirely hopeless situation may doctors desist in their effort to preserve life.

Enter the sickroom and sit with your beloved, and endure the long watch while this incredible battle between spirit and medicine takes place. It may continue for weeks, sometimes for months. But the victim is going to die. It is just a question of time. Every new formula, all the latest wonder drugs, (he tricks and artificial wizardry, are now prescribed and brought to bear. The dreary dreadful days and nights proceed. “We are doing all we can,” say the doctors. The patient, however, is too far from us already to tell us in what way he is doing all he can.

He came out of surgery alive. He had not succumbed to this first ordeal. Could I let my tears fall now and then rush in to hug him? Could I tell him there would never be an end to us? Could I tell him he had won this fight against all odds, that he was brave and fine? I went to his room and found that he was just barely there. The intensity of quiet held me spellbound. Thus they return from contesting the inevitable. How desperately he must have tried to gain his reprieve. Softly I let the waves of my love pass over him, believing their spiritual balm might somehow help him. And then I left, as they told me to do, and went home.

On the surface one soon becomes accustomed to the rhythm of hospital routine. The early morning telephone call, then the visit, away for the lunch hour, back to the hospital in the afternoon. Sometimes a return there at night, but in any event a final telephone call. This becomes a regular schedule. At home one goes through a kindred round of activity. Any activity in order not to remove the armor. One laughs too much mirthless laughter and drinks with the realization that this is the hour of strain, when respect for the stricken demands that one carry on, achieve it how one may.

The intravenous feeding globes showed yellow and white, while the patient’s arms were red and purple from so many hours of this treatment. He lay pitifully upon his pillows watching the liquid drain. I sat in the chair by the window endlessly, but he did not care. He did not want to waste his strength in talk. He must have known it was too late for that. Sometimes, very rarely, he would ask a question, wondering what had brought him there. Then I would tell him about the emergency operation, and he would thank me, saying he was so glad to get it straightened out in his mind.

No one thought he could survive a necessary second operation. This I could sense, but the formula called for hope and a language communicating merely that “the patient is holding his own.” What does that mean exactly? Is it like lying back on your oars and taking a last look at some beautiful aspect of color or scenery that you wish to inscribe permanently upon your mind? Does it compare to enjoying the swell of the ocean as it rocks one gently before assuming its surf form and careening up the beach? Or can it be that a very horrible interlude occurs, a space of time and place where one is lost, a no man’s land where one creeps and crawls about in twilight, calling and searching for some clue that is recognizable. An agony of trying to reach shores unseen because the fog is thick and mystifying and the bodily pain so terrible that all one is really crying for is death. “Where is my end?” must be the constant chant.

One afternoon I arrived at the hospital to make my usual visit and found his room empty. Surprised, I asked the reason at the corridor desk. “Your patient is up in surgery. There was need for some repair” was the answer. I was afraid, and I was proved right to be so, as the wound was raveling. But not until the assistant surgeon came into that sad little waiting room and talked with me could I have guessed the dreadful ordeal which had just occurred. It had been necessary to perform this operation without anesthesia. I am not brave about physical pain and I began to feel the nausea of fear creeping over me at this news. “There is no use going in to see him,”said the doctor; “he will not know you, and now that it is over we are going to give him some sedative.” I knew that I must see him. There would never he any aspect of him that I would not want to know. And now, if we were nearing the end of our time together, I must memorize every detail of this scene. Perhaps I would need to draw on it for courage some day when I should be riddled with pain and bereft. He was sitting bolt upright in his bed. They had put the metal bedsides up so that he would not fall out. His eyes and face were wild and he was declaiming, though one could not understand him. Ihe long thin arms were still all bruised, red and blue. I choked with anguish and horror, and the spectacle was written into me with a raw indelibility. My heart swam in a stream of pity, and the thought that I could do nothing to help him nearly maddened me.

Then came a morning when his delirium passed. There had been three savage days when he would call for me and cry out to have the sights removed which were disturbing him. He was being tortured and torn by imagery that was not present in the room. He could not be left alone a moment. He would try to arise. And once I had to throw myself across his chest, his poor sick desperate body, until the ringing of the bell brought help to me. But on this morning there was a change. He was quiet and absolutely conscious. His face was flushed and he was not enunciating too well, He told me he had something important to tell the doctor.

When the assistant surgeon came I rose as usual and stood behind the screen at the doorsill. I heard him clearly, every word, and it wrung my heart and sent my soul spinning. “I can stand anything you have to tell me. Doctor,” he said, “and I realize how badly off I am, but you must give me help, real help. I can’t pull myself up by my bootstraps any longer.”

He lay back, I waited. The doctor told him they would do for him what they could, and left. I reentered.

“There you are,” he said, “they just don’t care.”

I took his hand. “I promise you, my darling, that I will stand in that hall until your surgeon comes by, and insist that he give you what you want.

Later in the day the sedatives had their effect. He appeared drowsy and relaxed. When the nurse went to supper I fed him his ice cream. God . . .

I thought; ice cream when one is kneeling at the threshold! I kissed him good night but he was not really there.

2

I HAD been asleep only a short time when suddenly I was awakened by the rasp and ring of the telephone. A step at my door. “The hospital is on the wire,” the voice said. At the telephone I heard: “Your husband went into a coma at eleven o’clock. We are doing all we can. We do not know the reason for the coma.” I said Amen as I dragged on my clothes.

The glaring, merciless rays from a powerful ceiling light displayed what was a human form, now portrayed in ghastly hue, in hunched position, with two tubes one in each nostril, eyes half open, breathing a noise of horror, while the oxygon tank at one side bubbled, bubbled merrily, and the nurse stood counting the heartheat, taking the pulse. I saw, I reeled, I froze to my depths. I managed somehow then to leave. We sat in that same little waiting room hour after hour after hour. We stayed there sixteen hours.

Many times I tiptoed down the hall and looked again into that dreadful room. It was always exactly the same. They brought us coffee in the night. We talked and sometimes we dozed. At 8 A.M. the place began to come alive. I stirred. I went out into the morning, I walked about the garden, I stood beneath his window’ and I shook my fist at God. “They can’t do this to you any longer. I must put a stop to it,” I cried. I wanted to sob but I did not dare. When the first doctor came on duty I accosted him and begged that they cease this torture. He explained that except under the most unusual circumstances they had to maintain life while they could. Very well, I thought, if it has to be so, so be it.

We had breakfast and time dragged on. I went down the hall to the room again. I called on all my courage and I went in to stay. The day nurse whispered to me that his pulse was very poor, that he could not last much longer. I stood at the side of the bed with my hands clenched together, a little behind him so that I could look down upon his still beautiful head. And when I wanted I could look out the window at the clear blue morning sky. I stood and watched with my beloved while he attempted to cross the great divide. The oxygen bubbled merrily, it sang of its false gilt of life. “I am a fake,” it hissed and sang and purred. My own heart was pounding at such a pace I thought it might burst. It almost shook me. I have never been here before, I thought, and I am very much afraid. How difficult it is for him to gain the flood tide, and how can I assist in this perilous crossing? I was growing faint. I knelt down and put my arms and head on the side of a chair. I prayed a constant and continuous chant of “Please, God! Please, God!” I tried my utmost to help him. I was utterly lost in a paralysis of effort when — bang — the door burst open and with noisy footsteps a nurse had intruded on the scene. I sprang to my feet and faced her, and my distress was real. I wanted to kick her tray of medication and knock her from the room. She was here to snare him back just as he might have reached the other shore. I asked her why. “Doctor’s orders,” she replied. “I am to give him a hypo.” I staggered out the door; there was nothing else to do

For a long while I walked about the garden with my son. I picked up an oak leaf already turned red and put it in my handbag. It will always be somewhere in my room, saying, “On such a day you lost your love.” It will solace me to see it because on such a day I was still doing for him what I could. It was hard not to weep, not to submit to anguish. The fine young man who walked at my side doubtless helped me retain my poise. What good being old if incapable of setting an example? We went back inside to the waiting room. It was Sunday, and the room was noisy and crowded with visitors. A woman in a wrapper came to me and said, “I’m glad your husband is better. He was quiet last night. I know because I am opposite his room.”

I could only nod and hope that the armor would not fail me. The afternoon nurse came on duty. By now I was seated in the hall and my son sat on the floor at my side. So much fuss and noise on Sunday, I thought; how dreary it is in a hospital. Finally the medical doctor appeared and addressed me. “Well,” he said, “he’s rallied.” I remember feeling almost no emotion when I replied, “How horrible.” So, after sixteen hours, we went home to sleep.

I was sleeping hard when I felt a cold draft, and I got out of bed and shut my window. I was just climbing back when the ring of the telephone caught me. I knew. He was too quick for them. He had come to me directly and placed his lover’s hand on my shoulder. He had said good-by to me in his own way and reassured me that his spirit would always be at my side. “My darling” was all I could say. Of course we went directly to the hospital, driving without panic or unnecessary tears. I was calm knowing that he deserved to be released. I asked my son to step to the door of his room for a moment and render homage; then I went in and stood beside him. How unbelievable that you are gone! I kissed his forehead, which was still warm; I laid my hand on his; I let the scene permeate my being so that it would leave its indelible mark. That was all. Quite quietly I tiptoed out. We gave our instructions and went home.

I say “Hello, darling” to the night sky, the moon, the stars; to the daylight creating a vivid brilliance; and to the sunset so various in beauty stirring in me the wish to touch that distance and fathom it. When I say hello at these times I have a desperate desire to weep, feeling so poignantly my loss, but knowing also that such weeping would be to no avail. One must live out one’s life. That is all there is to do. That is all there has ever been since the day that one was born. Struggle to fulfill oneself by living to the utmost. Efface ego and be at peace.

I am the emblem of a love affair that was important because it saw, and felt, and held great beauty. Through sickness and health, for richer for poorer, there remained always a magic bond until death did us part.