Hospital
Monday, May 10, 2010 at 3:32AM | by Otter 
Man With Hat: Charcoal & Paper & Bumpy BusI promised mom I wouldn't write anything about her medical condition. Let's just say that it's got some strikingly bad moments, and some that give me hope we've got a bit of time.
She's alert, mostly, and has slept most of the night.
It's nearly 3:30 in the morning.
I finished grading final exams and papers, checked my math, saved my gradebooks, and turned in the final marks from the hospital.
It's eerily quiet tonight. They've slowed her fluids to a low gush (60 instead of 100), and are watching her for infections. She's not up and down so much, and has slept well.
The nurses and doctors have left her alone tonight except to take a little blood before letting her sleep.
When my work was done, it was quiet, but I wasn't ready just to sink down into that silence yet. I'm still not.
So I wandered out into the halls, and around the ward. Old man a few doors down has every light in his room on and basketball on the television, as though enough electricity might beat back whatever it was that brought him here.
If I walk a little down the corridor, televisions mutter and squawk even at three in the morning. Several people give me a smile or a wink. I wonder if they rather enjoy whatever it is that has them here: waited on hand and foot, not even compelled to wipe their own bottoms, they eat and are made well.
Next to our room is an old black woman. I keep playing with euphemisms: "An elderly African American lady." No. She's old. She's black, but somehow faded, as though her skin were giving up on being any color at all. She's bent nearly double in her bed. No family visits. Whether she's asked the nurses to leave the door open or they have just done so, I don't know. She wears the indignity of hospital patient gowns with a kind of resigned hopelessness. Her jaw is stubbornly set, but it seems as though it just got that way twenty years or more ago and never shifted: there is no power in it.
I want to go into her room, but there's a screen of privacy, of loneliness, of hopelessness that I don't think I'm meant to break with trivial banter.
So much of hospital chatter is meant to sustain an interest in life. And there are moments when the patient has resolved that life is over, or that the question of life is a wearisome one. Ecclesiastes puts it beautifully: "the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl is broken." I teach that to my students as a Jungian archetype for the masculine and feminine energies, and all around me here on this ward I think I can feel the clutter of broken hope, broken desire, waiting.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Ending a life is a choice, and a dignified one. To say "I've done what I want to do, and now I'm merely lingering" must be hard enough without adding guilt to it.
Dylan Thomas wrote to his father, "Do not go gentle into that good night... rage, rage against the dying of the light."
I would say, "Just be sure. And being sure, be sure of our love, or if you can't manage that, at least be sure that your way now leaves behind the lovelessness that we've all created."
But you don't get a chance to even say that. Sometimes there's nothing to do but sit and watch, and wait, while the hospital gets quiet, and even the machines that prop up our frail biological life fall silent like altar fires going out.
Reader Comments (3)
http://gabrielgadfly.com/poetry/how-to-greet-death
I love those lines from Dylan Thomas. They always make me think of how desperate love makes us. We become so sure that if the one loved could just share our strong emotions that everything would somehow be alright.
It's pitiful and beautiful, heartbreaking and regenerative. A gentle reminder that we are most lovely when we are weak.
Those lines are a snapshot of what strength looks like when in the shadow of something that has only the appearance of strength. The son urges his "weak" father to fight, but it is the son who is the broken one. As the son looks into the face of the father who lies dying, it is easy to imagine the father as the strong one. The son's urging to rage is really his heart-cry of "don't leave me".
Dylan Thomas makes me cry.
The last audible words my mother spoke (of which I am aware) were spoken to my sister as a medical team took her, all poked and prodded and entubated, into the elevator and down to surgery. "Why are you doing this to me?"
Certainly she'd have rather died quietly without all of that.
If we'd have known she was dying, we'd have given her that. I hope she understood that it was hope and desperation and love that drove us to "do that to her".
Please. Just one more day, Mom. One more hug, Mom. One more chance to say I love you.