The Snowfield – II

Reflections on dying from the relative safety of middle age. Part II of II.

The Snowfield — II

Lives have a bureaucratic inertia that doesn’t easily let go, and I’ll leave months of the same middle-class headaches behind that every other middle-class person leaves behind. The kids will struggle with the accountant resolving annuity questions. They’ll call the IRS for their mother. They’ll track down signed copies of death certificates from the county coroner’s office.

If I go “second” they’ll be even busier. They’ll have to sell the house and decide who gets the piano and the Kevin Beers paintings and the red Chinese chest with the gold-edged swans. Sifting through my things, one of them will smile and remember dad’s repetitive old joke: “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

It will help if I manage some of this before I head off to the hospital for that first major surgery. I’ll know I should work through the attic boxes, itemize who gets what, write up notes, and orchestrate gently from the grave. Because pretty much no matter how bad it is about to get, if you’re not dying then and there of some trauma or a heart attack there can be an interval of productive free-fall.

You’re not a patient yet. Your spirit hasn’t been bled into a sharps bin. Your bed sheets aren’t littered with blue and white wrappers from the vital force drainage tubes.

Maybe you’re not going strong, but you’re going. You have a few days of regular life left. A few weeks? A month?

(“No, probably not a month. We should get you in before then. How’s Friday?”)

“This Friday?”

*

You can still walk into the hospital reception area with dignity. You’re pleased that the attractive woman at the desk can’t tell right away who’s checking in among the arrival party. You can still make a woman smile, even this busy young woman who started out all business and then softened.

Yes, you can still start your small fires, but while you are admiring yourself in the wizard’s mirror, she prints out a grey identification bracelet and lets the folks in the bell tower know that you’ve arrived.

Now it is too late to clean up the attic. You missed it.

Now you are in a ceremony where you do almost nothing, and nothing is demanded of you. You are one of those characters in the odd ballet who does not dance himself but simply walks about the stage as if in a dream, Don Quixote taking in the whirl, arms delicately extended in his nightdress.

The other dancers – the real dancers – dance around and about you. They catch your eye with small secret smiles as they skim and sweep and file lightly past you on their long stage trajectories. They are elegant, oblivious, and mute. You cannot hear their music.

Someone else, a close friend, a relative, is driving the car for you, pulling around front, finding a parking spot, helping you whether you need it or not. You let them. Someone else is holding your house keys, your wallet, your slippers, your plastic bag of wires. You don’t know anymore who has what. Everyone gathers and collects, races ahead and about.

It’s all been arranged like a wedding day, but the bride has been hidden from you.

*

I’m scared that I will be awful. In fact I know that I will be awful.

I will sit there in the hospital bed after my surgeries and greet my visitors. I’ll struggle to focus on the “great” pictures they are showing me on their phones, the ones of me cranked up against the automatic bedding or the ones with two or the three of them leaning over my pale blue pillows and putting their arms around me unreciprocated.

They’ll whisper and tiptoe into my room with their reception area gift-shop books of maudlin poems and sunset lighthouses and grey, recycled paper word find books (“intubation” running down diagonally and backwards). A solicitous handful will present their mega-pastor salvation guides.

They’ll busy the silence telling me why they picked what they picked. I’ll get the drama of the checkout stand and the downpour and the Range Rover that took up two spots. They’ll let me know the receipt is in the bag in case I want to roller-skate over to Barnes and Noble’s on my tethered IV stand to exchange it. 

Without being rude, they’ll probe for who’s shown up and who’s yet to come. If I muster a burst of conversational energy, they’ll be too responsive, over-pleased, and their eagerness will drive me back into silence. I’ll remove myself from these interactions by clicking irritably on my red nursing bell and my Fisher-Price pain button.

(“If you have any discomfort or pain, let us know. You never need to be in pain.”)

I’ll get territorial with the grandchildren touching things on my nightstand, my last personal territory. This even with these grandchildren that I adore, have adored, who have filled the last few years with so much joy, who I travelled so far to see and so often. And now I want them to go, to be out of here; they’re too much. They’re too wild. I don’t want their television programs blaring at me.

And I’m even growing impatient with own children, wincing involuntarily at them telling me to eat more or drink more or at their forced, even selfish optimism expressed in surreal conversations about the future and the things we’ll “all” do together soon. We will never do these things.

(“You need to try to relax, dad. Are you uncomfortable? Should we call one of the nurses?”)

*

Through the open angle of my hospital room door I hear those nurses arrange lunch breaks and weekend plans and day care pickups at their work station. But when they pass each other at the threshold of my room they downshift, I know they are signaling to each other with eyebrow lifts, flashing the mood updates, the news, their secret status on me.

Their body movements become crisper and more efficient around me. They talk to me in baby voices that rob my dignity. They ask me how I’m doing this morning when they already know because the night shift told them I was impossible. I’m suspicious and defensive with them, and then I try to apologize, to right the torpedoed ship, but they pretend I’ve done nothing wrong, a counter-attack that confuses me. I can no longer make contact. Not as an adult and certainly not as a man.

The cold-hearted scold me like I’m a child for the things I’ve done wrong, because I moved when they said hold still, because I threw up and didn’t tell them immediately. They’re irritated with me. They’re mad at me. They’re frustrated. Their mouths are tight and disapproving. So I apologize like a child. I’m terribly sorry. Sorry they are so disappointed in me, and then I’m tearfully sorry to prove it.

(“No, it’s fine. You’re doing great, Mr. Nathan.”)

*

And then I hate.

I hate my cowardice and my crucifixion groans. I hate my body tapped, the tangle of my catheters, my curdled-blood body ports and my IV rigging, my lifeless genitals, my wasted thighs trembling on the toilet seat, my exhausted forehead against the bathroom wall tile.

And yet I want to be touched – I am dying to be touched – in some last place where I am not in pain. I am so desperate to be comforted I’m a hair’s breadth away from surrendering myself into the arms of a stranger, some somebody who knows nothing about me, with whom I have no history and no identity, someone who happens to push my wheelchair or hold an elevator door for my stretcher. The smallest pitying gesture from a total stranger will blow me apart.

I’m getting close.

*

And then up, up and away they go.

The black crows of my soul fly up and out and onto their high steeples. They fly onto the wall-mounted television, the oxygen stand, the privacy curtain rings. They caw.

Control races out through my hands like runaway chain. Life tears away from me now like a mad dog, a mad dog that I had mostly been able to heel, to hold at bay, to protect strangers and loved ones from. Now this mad dog with the vomit-bled eyes is escaping and dragging me along. I am only shit and spittle and bones, and I can’t hold on.

The chain slips free.

I am frightened.

(“It will be okay, dad. It will be okay.”)

And he runs.

*

But there is another outcome.

It is related to beauty. I hold out a hope that beauty has the last word.

Because there is so much beauty. Beauty is everywhere. There is beauty streaming over the landscape, and it must be telling us something. There are rivulets and brooks trickling and gurgling, gathering and collecting, making their subtle case for a far off ocean. Beauty, like no other life force, invites but never demands our attention. It touches our face softly, the lover’s hand inviting a kiss, but it will not turn our head. It is beauty that reveals itself unto babes, cautions the wise, and argues ceaselessly for rapture.

And so I hold out the hope that once free of me, my mad dog might circle back, that he might return and settle down beside me, but placidly, and place his head on my chest wherever I happen to fall and lie spent.

I hold out a hope – a child’s hope – that I will feel the heat of his body and his warm breath. That I will see his kind blue eyes, familiar eyes (“But from where? From where? The answer before the confounded”).

I hold out a hope that my mad dog will be my companion in the snowfields of surrender. That he will be with me in my final moments, in the dimming half-light, in the cold. And having seen me safely home, that he will take his leave and wander off into eternity.

I think it could be like that.

I’m almost certain it is like that for some people. There are signs. You hear the stories. It should be like that. Even if it was only for a moment, the span of a breath. Because it’s not an unbounded eternity I need or some lush, orchestral paradise. The one true moment would be enough. It would be more than enough.

It would be everything.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

―Rainer Maria Rilke