Chapter 18

March 12, 2007

In the morning, everyone came by early. Don’s other brother showed up, too. We told the nurse we wanted to talk to a doctor, and eventually a young doctor, presumably an intern, came in.

My brother-in-law asked him what Don was dying of.

The intern hemmed and hawed. He suggested several possibilities, but the eventual answer boiled down to the fact that he didn’t know. “I’m sorry,” he said apologetically. “He’s not my patient.”

“If we could talk to another doctor about it…” I said.

“Sure.” He looked relieved to be let off the hook. “I’ll make sure someone comes by.”

Not too much later, a very nice female doctor came in. She smiled at us, and Don's brother reiterated the question.

She listened carefully to Don’s chest, then faced us. “What’s happened,” she said, “is that his left lung isn’t functioning at all. It has a big tumor, it was scarred by the pleural effusion, and it hasn’t reinflated. And his right lung is compromised by blood clots and invading cancer. His lungs are failing.”

“How much longer?” I said.

She frowned down at Don, who looked terribly exhausted.

“Not very long, I’m afraid.”

I heard my mother-in-law sobbing and realized she really had hoped I’d misunderstood the doctor yesterday. The poor woman.

I wished for everyone’s sake I’d misunderstood, too.

The doctor didn’t think Don’s death was imminent, so I decided to go home and get the kids before they moved Don to Palliative Care. I figured I could hold myself together well enough to drive.

But on the way home I heard the Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” and as I drove down the interstate, I cried.

*****

Palliative Care was pretty, as hospital wards go. There were butterflies everywhere, and Don got a private room. I was glad, because dying seemed to me to be something that ought to be shared with one's family, not with strangers.

When the kids came crowding into the room, our younger daughter said brightly, “Hi, Dad!” and he responded with a weak, “Hey, kiddo.” It was what he always said to her, but I was starting to see him fading out, as if he was retreating into a place deep inside himself, or perhaps beginning to lift out of his body.

Like the butterflies that decorated the ward, I thought, he was beginning to transform into something wholly different. Before long he'd break out of his cocoon entirely, leave us behind, and fly away.

He no longer had a lot to say. It was as if he was responding with automatic responses that were deeply graven into his brain. If I told him I loved him, he’d answer, “I love you, too,” just as he always did. But he wasn’t generating many words on his own. I was pretty sure he was starting to slip away.

Even so, it was nice that he was aware of us. His aunt and uncle arrived that afternoon. Now everyone was around him—his brothers, his parents, his aunt and uncle, his kids, his wife. At least he wouldn’t die alone.

We all talked, quietly, and he mostly snoozed. I sat next to him, holding his hand, feeling the bones and the tendons and the warmth of his skin, trying to burn the reality of touching him into my mind, so I’d never forget what it felt like to hold his hand.

Every so often I stroked his hair. But it was clear that he really didn’t want to be touched. He was uncomfortable. Not in agonizing pain, fortunately, but he couldn’t draw a proper breath, and it was clearly starting to bother him a good deal. He sat up in bed and leaned forward, over a pillow, struggling to breathe despite the oxygen tubes in his nose.

Throughout the day, he seemed to slip further and further away from us. By the late afternoon, everything coming out of his mouth seemed to be random, unconnected to anything that was going on around him, and I was fairly certain that he was no longer truly aware of us.

Late in the afternoon, everyone else left for a little while in order to give me some privacy with my husband. They all trooped down to the lounge down the hall, and Don and I were alone in the room.

He was still draped over the pillow, struggling to breathe, but after a few moments of the unaccustomed quiet he lifted his head and stared intently at something in front of him.

“Hey,” I said, squeezing his hand gently. “What are you looking at?”

He spoke quietly, but with great intensity. “Quantum fluctuations in the fabric of reality."

It wasn’t an odd thing for him to say, really. Don had always loved science fiction, so the idea that his subconscious might churn up such a phrase wasn’t terribly surprising.

Even so, a chill went down my spine. Not for the first time, I wondered if the dying could see things the rest of us couldn’t, and if perhaps as Don began to break free of his earthly body, he was able to see some hint of the way the universe was put together.

Or perhaps, more cynically, he was merely hallucinating.

Eventually the family came trooping back into the room. My older kids were, I think, anxious about why Daddy wasn’t really tuned into the world any longer, and hopeful that before long, he’d snap out of it and start talking to them again. Eventually I took the girls aside.

“Look,” I told them gently, “I don’t think Daddy's going to be talking to us again, not really." I paused, trying to marshal my thoughts, struggling to put an explanation to the inexplicable. At last I went on, "I think… I think his spirit’s already gone on. His body just hasn’t caught up yet.”

Read Chapter 19 here.