SHE wondered how many times a week he had to do this. Plenty, no doubt. At least every day. Maybe twice… three times. Maybe, on a big day, five times. It was the ultimate bad news, and he delivered it dryly, like Sergeant Joe Friday. He was a young man, but his was a tough business and he had gone freeze-dried already. Hey, the bad news wasn’t really a surprise! She… knew. Of course, you always hope for the best. She heard but she didn’t hear.
“What?” she offered timidly. She had hoped… for better. Geez! Give me a break! What was he saying? Breast and uterus? Double trouble! She knew it would be the uterus. There had been the discharge. The bloating, the cramps. The fatigue. But it was common and easily curable provided you got it at stage one. Eighty percent cure. But the breast—that one came out of the blue and that could be really tricky—that was fifty-fifty. Strip out the lymph nodes down your arm and guaranteed chemo. God! Chemo. The worst thing in the world. Goodbye hair—there’d be scarves, wigs, a prosthetic breast, crying your heart out in “support” groups. Et cetera.
“Mrs. Wilson?” The voice seemed to come out of a can. Now the truth was revealed and all was out in the open. Yet how—tell me this—how would it ever be possible to have a life again? The voice from the can had chilled her. To the core.
“Mrs. Wilson, your last CA 125 hit the ceiling,” he said. “I suspect that this could be an irregular kind of can… cer.”
Some off-the-wall kind of can… cer? A kind of wildfire cancer! Not the easygoing, 80-percent-cure, tortoise, as-slow-as-molasses-in-January cancer!
January. She looked past the thin oncologist, wire-rimmed glasses, white coat, inscrutable. Outside, snowflakes tumbled from the sky, kissing the pavement—each unique, wonderful, worth an hour of study, a microcosm of the Whole: awe-inspiring, absolutely fascinating, a gift of divinity gratis. Yet how abhorrent they seemed. They were white, but the whole world had lost its color for her now that she’d heard those words. The shine was gone from the world. Had she been Queen of the Universe for a million years and witnessed glory after glory, what would it have mattered now that she had come to this?
She… came to… went out, came back again… went out. There was this… wonderful show. Cartoons. It was the best show. This wasn’t so bad. True, she had cancer but… these wonderful cartoons. Dilaudid. On Dilaudid, well, you live, you die—that’s how it is… life in the Big City. It happens to everyone. It’s part of the plan. Who was she to question the plan?
The only bad part was her throat. Her throat was on fire. “Intubation.” The nurse said she’d phone the doctor and maybe he’d authorize more dope.
“Oh, God, please. Anything.”
“Okay, let’s just fudge a little bit, no one needs to know,” the nurse said, twisting the knob on Tube Control Central. Dilaudid. Cartoons. Oh, God, thank God, Dilaudid! Who invented that drug? Write him a letter. Knight him. Award the Nobel Prize to Dilaudid Man. Where was that knob? A handy thing to know. Whew! Whammo! Swirling, throbbing ecstasy! And who was that nurse? Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa would be proud… oh, boy! It wasn’t just relief from the surgery; she suddenly realized how much psychic pain she had been carrying and now it was gone with one swoop of a magic wand. The cartoons. Bliss…
His voice wasn’t in a can, never had been. It was a normal voice, maybe a little high for a man. Not that he was effeminate. The whole problem with him was that he didn’t seem real. He wasn’t a flesh-and-blood kinda guy. Where was the empathy? Why did he get into this field if he couldn’t empathize? In this field, empathy should be your stock-in-trade.
“The breast is fine, just a benign lump. We brought a specialist in to get it, and I just reviewed the pathology report. It’s nothing to worry about. The other part is not… so good. I’m afraid your abdomen… it’s spread throughout your abdomen… it looks like little Grape-Nuts, actually. It’s exceedingly rare and it’s… it’s a rapid form of… can… cer. We couldn’t really take any of it out. I spent most of my time in there untangling adhesions. We’re going to have to give you cisplatin… if it weren’t for the adhesions, we could pump it into your abdomen directly—you wouldn’t get so sick that way—but those adhesions are a problem and may cause problems further along.” Her room was freezing, but the thin oncologist was beginning to perspire. “It’s a shame,” he said, looking down at her chart. “You’re in such perfect health… otherwise.”
She knew this was going to happen yet she heard herself say, “Doctor, do you mean… I’ve got to take —”
“Chemo? Yeah. But don’t worry about that yet. Let’s just let you heal up for a while.” He slammed her chart shut and… whiz, bang, he was outta there.
Goodbye, see ya.
The guessing game was over and now it was time for the ordeal. She didn’t want to hear any more details—he’s said something about a 20 percent five-year survival rate. Might as well bag it. She wasn’t a fighter, and she’d seen what chemo had done to her husband, John. This was it. Finis!
She had to laugh. Got giddy. It was like in that song—Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose… When you’re totally screwed, nothing can get worse, so what’s to worry? Of course she could get lucky… it would be a thousand-to-one, but maybe…
The ovaries and uterus were gone. The root of it all was out. Thank God for that. Those befouled organs were gone. Where? Disposed of. Burned. In a dumpster? Who cares? The source was destroyed. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. How could it be that bad? After all, the talk about pain from major abdominal surgery was overdone. She was walking with her little cart and tubes by the third day—a daily constitutional through the ward.
Okay, the Dilaudid was permanently off the menu, but morphine sulfate wasn’t half bad. No more cartoons but rather a mellow glow. Left, right, left, right. Hup, two, three, four! Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. On the morphine she was walking a quarter of an inch off the ground and everything was… softer, mercifully so. Maybe she could hack it for a thousand miles.
But those people in the hospital rooms, gray and dying, that was her. Could such a thing be possible? To die? Really? Yes, at some point she guessed you did die. But her? Now? So soon? With so little time to get used to the idea?
No, this was all a bad dream! She’d wake up. She’d wake up back in her little girl room on the farm near Battle Lake, Minnesota. There was a depression, things were a little rough, but big deal. What could beat a sun-kissed morning on Battle Lake and a robin’s song? There was an abundance of jays, larks, bluebirds, cardinals, hummingbirds, red-winged black-birds in those days before acid rain and heavy-metal poisoning, and they came to her yard to eat from the cherry, apple, plum, and pear trees. What they really went for were the mulberries.
Ah, youth! Good looks, a clean complexion, muscle tone, a full head of lustrous hair—her best feature, although her legs were pretty good, too. Strength. Vitality. A happy kid with a bright future. Cheerleader her senior year. Pharmacy scholarship at the college in Fergus Falls. Geez, if her dad hadn’t died, she could have been a pharmacist. Her grades were good, but hard-luck stories were the order of the day. It was a Great Depression. She would have to take her chances. Gosh! It had been a great, wide, wonderful world in those days, and no matter what, an adventure lay ahead, something marvelous—a handsome prince and a life happily ever after. Luck was with her. Where had all the time gone? How had all the dreams… fallen away? Now she was in the Valley of the Shadow. The morphine sulfate was like a warm and friendly hearth in Gloom City, her one and only consolation.
He was supposed to be a good doctor, one of the best in the field, but he had absolutely no bedside manner. She really began to hate him when he took away the morphine and put her on Tylenol 3. Then it began to sink in that things might presently go downhill in a hurry.
They worked out a routine. If her brother was busy, her daughter drove her up to the clinic and then back down to the office, and the thin oncologist is… called away, or he’s… running behind, or he’s… something. Couldn’t they run a business, get their shit together? Why couldn’t they anticipate? It was one thing to wait in line at a bank when you’re well, but when you’ve got cancer and you’re this cancer patient and you wait an hour, two hours, or they tell you to come back next week… come back for something that’s worse than anything, the very worst thing in the world! Hard to get up for that. You really had to brace yourself. Cisplatin, God! Metal mouth, restlessness, pacing. Flop on the couch, but that’s no good; get up and pace, but you can’t handle that, so you flop on the couch again. Get up and pace. Is this really happening to me? I can’t believe this is really happening to me! How can such a thing be possible?
Then there were the episodes of simultaneous diarrhea and vomiting that sprayed the bathroom from floor to ceiling! Dry heaves and then dry heaves with bile and then dry heaves with blood. You could drink a quart of tequila and then a quart of rum and have some sloe gin too and eat pink birthday cakes and five pounds of licorice, Epsom salts, a pint of kerosene, some Southern Comfort—and you’re on a Sunday picnic compared to cisplatin. Only an archfiend could devise a dilemma where to maybe get well you first had to poison yourself within a whisker of death, and in fact if you didn’t die, you wished that you had.
There were visitors in droves. Flowers. Various intrusions at all hours. Go away. Leave me alone… please, God, leave me… alone.
Oh, hi, thanks for coming. Oh, what a lovely—such beautiful flowers…
There were moments when she felt that if she had one more episode of diarrhea, she’d jump out of the window. Five stories. Would that be high enough? Or would you lie there for a time and die slowly? Maybe if you took a header right onto the concrete. Maybe then you wouldn’t feel a thing. Cisplatin: she had to pace. But she had to lie down, but she was squirrelly as hell and she couldn’t lie down. TV was no good—she had double vision, and it was all just a bunch of stupid shit, anyhow. Soap operas—good grief! What absolute crap. Even her old favorites. You only live once, and to think of all the time she pissed away watching soap operas.
If only she could sleep. God, couldn’t they give her Dilaudid? No! Wait! Hold that! Somehow Dilaudid would make it even worse. Ether then. Put her out. Wake me up in five days. Just let me sleep. She had to get up to pace. She had to lie down. She had to vomit. Oh, hi, thanks for coming. Oh, what a lovely—such beautiful flowers.
The second treatment made the first treatment seem like a month in the country. The third treatment—oh, damn! The whole scenario had been underplayed. Those movie stars who got it and wrote books about it were stoics, valiant warriors compared to her. She had no idea anything could be so horrible. Starving in Bangladesh? No problem, I’ll trade. Here’s my MasterCard and the keys to the Buick—I’ll pull a rickshaw, anything! Anything but this. HIV-positive? Why just sign right here on the dotted line and you’ve got a deal! I’ll trade with anybody! Anybody.
The thin oncologist with the Bugs Bunny voice said the CA 125 number was still up in the stratosphere. He said it was up to her if she wanted to go on with this. What was holding her up? She didn’t know, and her own voice came from a can now. She heard herself say, “Doctor, what would you do… if you were me?”
He thought it over for a long time. He pulled off his wire rims and pinched his nose, world-weary. “I’d take the next treatment.”
It was the worst by far—square root to infinity. Five days: no sleep, pacing, lying down, pacing. Puke and diarrhea. The phone. She wanted to tear it off the wall. After all these years, couldn’t they make a quiet bell?—did they have shit for brains or what? Oh, hi, well… just fine. Just dandy. Coming by on Sunday? With the kids? Well… no, I feel great. No. No. No. I’d love to see you…
And then one day the thin-timbre voice delivered good news. “Your CA 125 is almost within normal limits. It’s working!”
Hallelujah! Oh my God, let it be so! A miracle. Hurrah!
“It is a miracle,” he said. He was almost human, Dr. Kildare, Dr. Ben Casey, Marcus Welby, M.D.—take your pick. “Your CA is down to rock bottom. I think we should do one, possibly two more treatments and then go back inside for a look. If we do too few, we may not kill it all but if we do too much—you see, it’s toxic to your healthy cells as well. You can get cardiomyopathy in one session of cisplatin and you can die.”
“One more is all I can handle.”
“Gotcha, Mrs. Wilson. One more and in for a look.”
“I hate to tell you this,” he said. Was he making the cartoons go away? “I’ll be up front about it, Mrs. Wilson, we’ve still got a problem. The little Grape-Nuts—fewer than in the beginning, but the remaining cells will be resistant to cisplatin, so our options are running thin. We could try a month of an experimental form of hard chemotherapy right here in the hospital—very, very risky stuff. Or we could resume the cisplatin, not so much aiming for a cure but rather as a holding action. Or we could not do anything at all…”
Her voice was flat. She said, “What if I don’t do anything?”
“Dead in three months, maybe six.”
She said, “Dead how?”
“Lungs, liver, or bowel. Don’t worry, Mrs. Wilson, there won’t be a lot of pain. I’ll see to that.”
Bingo! He flipped the chart shut and… whiz, bang, he was outta there!
She realized that when she got right down to it, she wanted to live, more than anything, on almost any terms, so she took more cisplatin. But the oncologist was right, it couldn’t touch those resistant rogue cells; they were like roaches that could live through atomic warfare, grow and thrive. Well then, screw it! At least there wouldn’t be pain. What more can you do? She shouldn’t have let him open her up again. That had been the worst sort of folly. She’d let him steamroll her with Doctor Knows Best. Air had hit it. No wonder it was a wildfire. A conflagration.
Her friends came by. It was an effort to make small talk. How could they know? How could they know what it was like? They loved her, they said, with liquor on their breath. They had to get juiced before they could stand to come by! They came with casseroles and cleaned for her, but she had to sweat out her nights alone. Dark nights of the soul on Tylenol 3 and Xanax. A lot of good that was. But then when she was in her loose, giddy freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose mood, about ten days after a treatment, she realized her friends weren’t so dumb. They knew that they couldn’t really know. Bugs Bunny told her there was no point in going on with the cisplatin. He told her she was a very brave lady. He said he was sorry.
A month after she was off that poison, cisplatin, there was a little side benefit. She could see the colors of the earth again and taste food and smell flowers—it was a bittersweet pleasure, to be sure. But her friends took her to Hawaii, where they had this great friend (“You gotta meet him!”) and he… he made a play for her and brought her flowers every day, expensive roses, et cetera. She had never considered another man since John had died from can… cer ten years before. How wonderful to forget it all for a moment here and there. A moment? Qualify that—make that ten, fifteen seconds. How can you forget it? Ever since she got the news she could… not… forget… it.
Now there were stabbing pains, twinges, flutterings—maybe it was normal everyday stuff amplified by the imagination or maybe it was real. How fast would it move, this wildfire brand? Better not to ask.
Suddenly she was horrible again. Those nights alone—killers. Finally one night she broke down and called her daughter. Hated to do it, throw in the towel, but this was the fifteenth round and she didn’t have a prayer.
“Oh, hi. I’m just fine”—blah blah blah—“but I was thinking maybe I could come down and stay, just a while. I’d like to see Janey and —”
“We’ll drive up in the morning.”
At least she was with blood. And her darling grand-daughter. What a delight. Playing with the little girl, she could forget. It was even better than Hawaii. After a year of sheer hell, in which all of the good stuff added up to less than an hour and four minutes total, there was a way to forget. She helped with the dishes. A little light cleaning. Watched the game shows, worked the Times crossword, but the pains grew worse. Goddammit, it felt like nasty little yellow-tooth rodents or a horde of translucent termites—thousands of them, chewing her guts out! Tylenol 3 couldn’t touch it. The new doctor she had been passed to gave her Dilaudid. She was enormously relieved. But what she got was a vial of little pink tablets and after the first dose she realized it wasn’t much good in the pill form; you could squeeze by on it but they’d promised—no pain! She was losing steam. Grinding down.
They spent a couple of days on the Oregon coast. The son-in-law—somehow it was easy to be with him. He didn’t pretend that things were other than they were. He could be a pain in the bun, like everyone, bitching over trivialities, smoking Kool cigarettes, strong ones—jolters! A pack a day easy, although he was considerate enough to go outside and do it. She wanted to tell him, “Fool! Your health is your greatest fortune!” But she was the one who’d let six months pass after that first discharge.
The Oregon coast was lovely, although the surf was too cold for actual swimming. She sat in the hotel whirlpool and watched her granddaughter swim a whole length of the pool all on her own, a kind of dog-paddle thing but not bad for a kid going on seven. They saw a show of shooting stars one night but it was exhausting to keep up a good front and not to be morbid, losing weight big time. After a shower, standing at the mirror, scars zigzagging all over the joint like the Bride of Frankenstein, it was just awful. She was bald, scrawny, ashen, yet with a bloated belly. She couldn’t look. Sometimes she would sink to the floor and just lie there, too sick to even cry, too weak to even get dressed, yet somehow she did get dressed, slapped on that hot, goddamn wig, and showed up for dinner. It was easier to do that if you pretended that it wasn’t real, if you pretended it was all on TV.
She felt like a naughty little girl sitting before the table looking at meals her daughter was killing herself to make—old favorites that now tasted like a combination of forty-weight Texaco oil and sawdust. It was a relief to get back to the couch and work crossword puzzles. It was hell imposing on her daughter but she was frightened. Terrified! They were her blood. They had to take her. Oh, to come to this!
The son-in-law worked swing shift and he cheered her in the morning when he got up and made coffee. He was full of life. He was real. He was authentic. He even interjected little pockets of hope. Not that he pushed macrobiotics or any of that foolishness, but it was a fact—if you were happy, if you had something to live for, if you loved life, you lived. It had been a mistake for her to hole up there in the mountains after John died. The Will to Live was more important than doctors and medicines. You had to reinvigorate the Will to Live. The granddaughter was good for that. She just couldn’t go the meditation-tape route, imagining microscopic, ravenous, good-guy little sharks eating the bad cancer cells, et cetera. At least the son-in-law didn’t suggest that or come on strong with a theology trip. She noticed he read the King James Bible, though.
She couldn’t eat. There was a milk-shake diet she choked down. Vanilla, chocolate fudge, strawberry—your choice. Would Madame like a bottle of wine with dinner? Ha, ha, ha.
Dilaudid. It wasn’t working, there was serious pain, especially in her chest, dagger thrusts—Et tu, Brute? She watched the clock like a hawk and had her pills out and ready every four hours—and that last hour was getting to be murder, a morbid sweat began popping out of her in the last fifteen minutes. One morning she caved in and timidly asked the son-in-law, “Can I take three?”
He said, “Hell, take four. It’s a safe drug. If you have bad pain, take four.” Her eyes were popping out of her head. “Here, drink it with coffee and it will kick in faster.”
He was right. He knew more than the doctor. You just can’t do everything by the book. Maybe that had been her trouble all along—she was too compliant, one of those “cancer” personalities. She believed in the rules. She was one of those kind who wanted to leave the world a better place than she found it. She had been a good person, had always done the right thing—this just wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. She was so… angry!
The next day, over the phone, her son-in-law bullied a prescription of methadone from the cancer doctor. She heard one side of a lengthy heated exchange while the son-in-law made a persuasive case for methadone. He came on like Clarence Darrow or F. Lee Bailey. It was a commanding performance. She’d never heard of anyone giving a doctor hell before. God bless him for not backing down! On methadone tablets a warm orange glow sprang forth and bloomed like a glorious, time-lapse rose in her abdomen and then rolled through her body in orgasmic waves. The sense of relief shattered all fear and doubt though the pain was still there to some extent. It was still there but—so what? And the methadone tablets lasted a very long time—no more of that every four hours bullshit.
Purple blotches all over her skin, swollen ankles. Pain in her hips and joints. An ambulance trip to the emergency room. “Oh,” they said, “it’s nothing… vascular purpura. Take aspirin. Who’s next?”
Who’s next? Why hadn’t she taken John’s old .38 revolver the very day she heard that voice in the can? Stuck it in the back of her mouth and pulled the trigger? She had no fear of hellfire. She was a decent, moral person but she did not believe. Neither was she the Hamlet type—what lies on the other side? It was probably the same thing that occurred before you were born—zilch. And zilch wasn’t that bad. What was wrong with zilch?
One morning she waited overlong for the son-in-law to get up, almost smashed a candy dish to get him out of bed. Was he going to sleep forever? Actually, he got up at his usual time.
“I can’t. Get. My breath,” she told him.
“You probably have water in your lungs,” the son-in-law said. He knew she didn’t want to go to the clinic. “We’ve got some diuretic. They were Boxer’s when she had congestive heart failure—dog medicine, but it’s the same thing they give humans. Boxer weighed fifty-five pounds. Let me see… take four, no, take three. To be cautious. Do you feel like you have to cough?”
“Yes.” Kaff, kaff, kaff.
“This might draw the water out of your lungs. It’s pretty safe. Try to eat a banana or a potato skin to keep your potassium up. If it doesn’t work, we can go over to the clinic.”
How would he know something like that? But he was right. It worked like magic. She had to pee like crazy but she could breathe. The panic to end all panics was over. If she could only go… number two. Well, the methadone slows you down. “Try some Metamucil,” the son-in-law said.
It worked. Kind of, but it sure wasn’t anything to write home about.
“I can’t breathe. The diuretics aren’t working.”
The son-in-law said they could tap her lung. It would mean another drive to the clinic, but the procedure was almost painless and provided instantaneous relief. It worked but it was three days of exhaustion after that one. The waiting room. Why so long? Why couldn’t they anticipate? You didn’t have to be a genius to know which way the wildfire was spreading. Would the methadone keep that internal orange glow going or would they run out of ammo? Was methadone the ultimate or were there bigger guns? Street heroin? She’d have to put on her wig and go out and score China White.
The little girl began to tune out. Gramma wasn’t so much fun anymore; she just lay there and gave off this smell. There was no more dressing up; it was just the bathrobe. In fact, she felt the best in her old red-and-black tartan pattern, flannel, ratty-ass bathrobe, not the good one. The crosswords—forget it, too depressing. You could live the life of Cleopatra but if it came down to this, what was the point?
The son-in-law understood. Of all the people to come through. It’s bad and it gets worse and so on until the worst of all. “I don’t know how you can handle this,” he’d say. “What does it feel like? Does it feel like a hangover? Worse than a hangover? Not like a hangover. Then what? Like drinking ten pots of boiled coffee? Like that? Really? Jittery! Oh, God, that must be awful. How can you stand it? Is it just like drinking too much coffee or is there some other aspect? Your fingers are numb? Blurred vision? It takes eight years to watch the second hand sweep from twelve to one? Well, if it’s like that, how did you handle five days? I couldn’t—I’d take a bottle of pills, shoot myself. Something. What about the second week? Drained? Washed out? Oh, brother! I had a three-day hang-over once—I’d rather die than do that again. I couldn’t ride out that hangover again for money. I know I couldn’t handle chemo…”
One afternoon after he left for work, she found a passage circled in his well-worn copy of Schopenhauer: In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Yeah! She gave up the crosswords and delved into The World As Will and Idea. This Schopenhauer was a genius! Why hadn’t anyone told her? She was a reader, she had waded through some philosophy in her time—you just couldn’t make any sense out of it. The problem was the terminology! She was a crossword ace, but words like eschatology—hey! Yet Schopenhauer got right into the heart of all the important things. The things that really mattered. With Schopenhauer she could take long excursions from the grim specter of impending death. In Schopenhauer, particularly in his aphorisms and reflections, she found an absolute satisfaction, for Schopenhauer spoke the truth and the rest of the world was disseminating lies!
Her son-in-law helped her with unfinished business: will, mortgage, insurance, how shall we do this, that, and the other? Cremation, burial plot, et cetera. He told her the stuff that her daughter couldn’t tell her. He waited for the right moment and then got it all in—for instance, he told her that her daughter loved her very much but that it was hard for her to say so. She knew she cringed at this revelation, for it was ditto with her, and she knew that he could see it. Why couldn’t she say to her own daughter three simple words, “I love you”? She just couldn’t. Somehow it wasn’t possible. The son-in-law didn’t judge her. He had to be under pressure, too. Was she bringing everyone in the house down? Is that why he was reading Schopenhauer? No, Schopenhauer was his favorite. “Someone had to come out and tell it like it is,” he would say of the dour old man with muttonchops whose picture he had pasted on the refrigerator. From what she picked up from the son-in-law, Schopenhauer wrote his major work by his twenty-sixth birthday—a philosophy that was ignored almost entirely in his lifetime and even now, in this day and age, it was thought to be more of a work of art than philosophy in the truest sense. A work of art? Why, it seemed irrefutable! According to the son-in-law, Schopenhauer spent the majority of his life in shabby rooms in the old genteel section of Frankfurt, Germany, that he shared with successions of poodles to keep him company while he read, reflected, and wrote about life at his leisure. He had some kind of small inheritance, just enough to get by, take in the concerts, do a little traveling now and then. He was well versed in several languages. He read virtually everything written from the Greeks on, including the Eastern writers, a classical scholar, and had the mind to chew things over and make something of the puzzle of life. The son-in-law, eager to discourse, said Freud called Schopenhauer one of the six greatest men who ever lived. Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Richard Wagner all paid tribute to this genius who had been written off with one word—pessimist. The son-in-law lamented that his works were going out of print, becoming increasingly harder to find. He was planning a trip to Frankfurt, where he hoped to find a little bust of his hero. He had written to officials in Germany making inquiries. They had given him the brush-off. He’d have to fly over himself. And she, too, began to worry that the works of this writer would no longer be available… she, who would be worms’ meat any day.
Why? Because the truth was worthwhile. It was more important than anything, really. She’d had ten years of peaceful retirement, time to think, wonder, contemplate, and had come up with nothing. But new vistas of thought had been opened by the curiously ignored genius with the white muttonchops, whose books were harder and harder to get and whom the world would consider a mere footnote from the nineteenth century—a crank, a guy with an ax to grind, a hypochondriac, a misogynist, an alarmist who slept with pistols under his pillow, a man with many faults. Well, check anyone out and what do you find?
For God’s sake, how were you supposed to make any sense out of this crazy-ass shit called life? If only she could simply push a button and never have been born.
The son-in-law took antidepressants and claimed to be a melancholiac, yet he always seemed upbeat, comical, ready with a laugh. He had a sense of the absurd that she had found annoying back in the old days when she liked to pretend that life was a stroll down Primrose Lane. If she wasn’t walking down the “sunny side of the street” at least she was “singin’ in the rain.” Those were the days.
What a fool!
She encouraged the son-in-law to clown and philosophize, and he flourished when she voiced a small does of appreciation or barked out a laugh. There was more and more pain and discomfort, but she was laughing more, too. Schopenhauer: No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn and no rose. The son-in-law finessed all of the ugly details that were impossible for her. Of all the people to come through!
With her lungs temporarily clear and mineral oil enemas to regulate her, she asked her daughter one last favor. Could they take her home just once more?
They made an occasion of it and drove her up into the mountains for her granddaughter’s seventh birthday party. Almost everyone in the picturesque resort town was there, and if they were appalled by her deterioration they did not show it. She couldn’t go out on the sun porch, had to semi-recline on the couch, but everyone came in to say hello and all of the bad stuff fell away for… an entire afternoon! She was deeply touched by the warm affection of her friends. There were… so many of them. My God! They loved her, truly they did. She could see it. You couldn’t bullshit her anymore; she could see deep into the human heart; she knew what people were. What wonderful friends. What a perfect afternoon. It was the last… good thing.
When she got back to her daughter’s she began to die in earnest. It was in the lungs and the bowel, much as the doctor said it would be. Hell, it was probably in the liver even. She was getting yellow, not just the skin but even the whites of her eyes. There was a week in the hospital, where they tormented her with tests. That wiped out the last of her physical and emotional stamina.
She fouled her bed after a barium lower G.I. practically turned to cement and they had to give her a powerful enema. Diarrhea in the bed. The worst humiliation. “Happens all the time, don’t worry,” the orderly said.
She was suffocating. She couldn’t get the least bit of air. All the main players were in the room. She knew this was it! Just like that. Bingo! There were whispered conferences outside her room. Suddenly the nurses, those here-tofore angels of mercy, began acting mechanically. They could look you over and peg you, down to the last five minutes. She could see them give her that anytime now look. A minister dropped in. There! That was the tip-off—the fat lady was singing.
When the son-in-law showed up instead of going to work she looked to him with panic. She’d been fighting it back but now… he was there, he would know what to do without being asked, and in a moment he was back with a nurse. They cranked up the morphine sulfate, flipped it on full-bore. Still her back hurt like hell. All that morphine and a backache… just give it a minute… ahhh! Cartoons.
Someone went out to get hamburgers at McDonald’s. Her daughter sat next to her holding her hand. She felt sorry for them. They were the ones who were going to have to stay behind and play out their appointed roles. Like Schopenhauer said, the best they would be able to do for themselves was to secure a little room as far away from the fire as possible, for Hell was surely in the here-and-now, not in the hereafter. Or was it?
She began to nod. She was holding onto a carton of milk. It would spill. Like diarrhea-in-the-bed all over again. Another mess. The daughter tried to take the carton of milk away. She… held on defiantly. Forget the Schopenhauer—what a lot of crap that was! She did not want to cross over. She wanted to live! She wanted to live!
The daughter wrenched the milk away. The nurse came back and cranked up the morphine again. They were going for “comfort.” Finally the backache… the cartoons… all of that was gone.
(She was back on the farm in Battle Lake, Minnesota. She was nine years old and she could hear her little red rooster, Mr. Barnes, crowing at first light. Then came her brother’s heavy work boots clomping downstairs and the vacuum swoosh as he opened up the storm door, and then his boots crunch-crunching through the frozen snow. Yes, she was back on the farm all right. Her brother was making for the outhouse and presently Barnes would go after him, make a dive-bomb attack. You couldn’t discourage Mr. Barnes. She heard her brother curse him and the thwap of the tin feed pan hitting the bird. Mr. Barnes’s frontal assaults were predictable. From the sound of it, Fred walloped him good. As far as Mr. Barnes was concerned, it was his barnyard. In a moment she heard the outhouse door slam shut and another tin thwap. That Barnes—he was something. She should have taken a lesson. Puffed out her chest and walked through life—“I want the biggest and the best and the most of whatever you’ve got!” There were people who pulled it off. You really could do it if you had the attitude.
Her little red rooster was a mean little scoundrel, but he had a soft spot for her in his heart of steel and he looked out for her, cooed for her and her alone. Later, when young men came to see her, they soon arranged to meet her thereafter at the drugstore soda fountain uptown. One confrontation with Barnes, even for experienced farm boys, was one too many. He was some kind of rooster all right, an eccentric. Yeah, she was back on the farm. She… could feel her sister shifting awake in the lower bunk. It was time to get up and milk the cows. Her sister always awoke in good humor. Not her. She was cozy under a feather comforter and milking the cows was the last thing she wanted to do. Downstairs she could hear her mother speaking cheerfully to her brother as he came back inside, cursing the damn rooster, threatening to kill it. Her mother laughed it off; she didn’t have a mean bone in her body.
She… could smell bacon in the pan, the coffeepot was percolating, and her grandmother was up heating milk for her Ovaltine. She hated Ovaltine, particularly when her grandmother overheated the milk—burned it—but she pretended to like it, insisted that she needed it for her bones, and forced it down so she could save up enough labels to get a free decoder ring to get special messages from Captain Cody, that intrepid hero of the airwaves. She really wanted to have that ring, but there was a Great Depression and money was very dear, so she never got the decoder or the secret messages or the degree in pharmacology. Had she been more like that little banty rooster, had she been a real go-getter… Well—it was all but over now.)
The main players were assembled in the room. She… was nodding in and out but she could hear. There she was, in this apparent stupor, but she was more aware than anyone could know. She heard someone say somebody at McDonald’s put “everything” on her hamburger instead of “cheese and ketchup only.” They were making an issue out of it. One day, when they were in her shoes, they would learn to ignore this kind of petty stuff, but you couldn’t blame them. That was how things were, that’s all. Life. That was it. That was what it was. And here she lay… dying.
Suddenly she realized that the hard part was all over now. All she had to do was… let go. It really wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t… anything special. It just was. She was trying to bring back Barnes one last time—that little memory of him had been fun, why not go out with a little fun? She tried to remember his coloring—orange would be too bright, rust too drab, scarlet too vivid. His head was a combination of green, yellow, and gold, all blended, and his breast and wings a kind of carmine red? No, not carmine. He was just a little red rooster, overly pugnacious, an ingrate. He could have been a beautiful bird if he hadn’t gotten into so many fights. He got his comb ripped off by a raccoon he’d caught stealing eggs in the henhouse, a big bull raccoon that Barnes had fought tooth and nail until Fred ran into the henhouse with his .410 and killed the thieving intruder. Those eggs were precious. They were income. Mr. Barnes was a hero that day. She remembered how he used to strut around the barnyard. He always had his eye on all of the hens; they were his main priority, some thirty to forty of them, depending. They were his harem and he was the sheikh. Boy, was he ever. She remembered jotting down marks on a pad of paper one day when she was home sick with chickenpox. Each mark represented an act of rooster fornication. In less than a day, Mr. Barnes had committed the sexual act forty-seven times that she could see—and she didn’t have the whole lay of the land from her window by any means. Why, he often went out roving and carousing with hens on other farms. There were bitter complaints from the neighbors. Barnes really could stir things up. She had to go out on her bicycle and round him up. Mr. Barnes was a legend in the country. Mr. Barnes thought the whole world belonged to him and beyond that—the suns, the stars, and the Milky Way—all of it! Did it feel good or was it torment? It must have been a glorious feeling, she decided. Maybe that was what Arthur Schopenhauer was driving at in his theory about the Will to Live. Mr. Barnes was the very personification of it.
Of course it was hard work being a rooster, but Barnes seemed the happiest creature she had ever known. Probably because when you’re doing what you really want to do, it isn’t work. No matter how dull things got on the farm, she could watch Barnes by the hour. Barnes could even redeem a hot, dog-day afternoon in August. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Did he ever entertain a doubt? Some kind of rooster worry? Never! She tried to conjure up one last picture of him. he was just a little banty, couldn’t have weighed three pounds. Maybe Mr. Barnes would be waiting for her on the other side and would greet her there and be her friend again.
She nodded in and out. In and out. The morphine was getting to be too much. Oh, please God. She hoped she wouldn’t puke… So much left unsaid, undone. Well, that was all part of it. If only she could see Barnes strut his stuff one last time. “Come on, Barnes. Strut your stuff for me.” Her brother, Fred, sitting there so sad with his hamburger. After a couple of beers, he could do a pretty good imitation of Mr. Barnes. Could he… would he… for old time’s sake? Her voice was too weak, she couldn’t speak. Nowhere near. Not even close. Was she dead already? Fading to black? It was hard to tell. “Don’t feel bad, my darling brother. Don’t mourn for me. I’m okay”… and… one last thing—“Sarah, I do love you, darling! Love you! Didn’t you know that? Didn’t it show? If not, I’m so, so very sorry.…” But the words wouldn’t come—couldn’t come. She… was so sick. You can only get so sick and then there was all that dope. Love! She should have shown it to her daughter instead of… assuming. She should have been more demonstrative, more forthcoming.… That’s what it was all about. Love your brother as yourself and love the Lord God almighty with all your heart and mind and soul. You were sent here to love your brother. Do your best. Be kind to animals, obey the Ten Commandments, stuff like that. Was that it? Huh? Or was that all a lot of horseshit?
She… nodded in and out. Back and forth. In and out. She went back and forth. In and out. Back and forth… in and out. There wasn’t any tunnel or white light or any of that. She just… died.