NOVEMBER 25, 2011
Deb is at the kitchen sink, a John Prine record spinning, a bottle of wine beside her. What a sad old bird I’ve become, she thinks. She should be drinking with Vale. She should be drinking with Ginny, her old radical pal. They should be at a movie, or out listening to jazz (who cares how long a drive). Put on their old dresses or tightest jeans—show off their sixty-year-old asses, fight this diminished sense of verve.
She finishes her second glass of wine and glances down the hill at Hazel’s house. It’s an old habit, this referential checking.
But tonight there’s no light on. Deb looks at the clock next to her sink—8:47. Deb knows, from years of watching, that every night between six and nine Hazel watches TV in the living room, but tonight that first-story window is dark. No blue flicker.
Deb takes the shortcut through the woods, the early moon bright enough to see by. No snow yet, but cold—fifteen and dropping.
Deb’s on the porch when she hears the sound: an animal cry from the far side of the barn.
“Shit,” she whispers, running that way.
Hazel smells like piss; her whole body is shaking. “It’s okay, Hazel,” Deb says, looking into her mother-in-law’s terrified eyes. “It’s okay. I’m here now. I’ll be right back,” she says, going to the house to call 911, returning with a couch pillow and an armload of blankets. “It’s all right, Hazel, an ambulance will be here soon,” she says, a half-truth—it will take twenty minutes or more. She places the pillow beneath Hazel’s head, covers her body in blankets, takes her hand in her own and then sings any songs she can think of as the stars come out above them.
There aren’t that many she knows the words to. What an absurd thing to discover in the moments that matter. It’s the lullabies that come out, the ones she sang to Danny when he was young—Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo’s Lullaby” and “Silent Night,” of all things. But the singing seems necessary. Anything to keep Hazel awake. Voice and warmth under that cold sky. And then the sound of a siren, and the strobe of flashing lights, and the paramedics arriving.
CREUTZFELDT-JAKOB. THAT IS THE DISEASE THE DOCTORS tell them Hazel has. A broken rib, yes, but also this rare and swift dementia. One in a million—the proteins of the brain consuming themselves, causing rapid mental deterioration, the part of the brain that delineates space and time the first to go. Rapid physical deterioration, too—breathing, heart rate, motor skills. Hazel spends four days in the hospital for testing, and Deb is shocked at the change she witnesses in that time alone—Hazel suddenly unable to walk, her appetite gone, her mind growing more and more wily. This is, the palliative doctor comes to tell her, terminal. How long, depends: a few weeks to a few months. He says it’s hospice care at this point. In a center or at home.
Deb turns to Hazel, eyes closed on the bed next to her, and asks where she wants to be, and Hazel’s eyes flash open, and she says, her voice alarmingly clear: “Home.” And so home it is.
Vale and Deb set up the bed near the window in Hazel’s living room. A hospice nurse will come two times a day to help them change the bedding, check their supplies of painkillers, empty the catheter.
“What is happening?” Hazel says, her voice thin, cracked, her blue eyes terrified, and so Deb tells her mother-in-law about the disease she has. That it is terminal. She’s never before had to tell someone they are dying. Hazel looks to the window, nods. It’s hard to know if she understands.
The hospice nurse brings a vial of oral morphine and teaches Deb how to manage the pain, which seems to be significant since her fall. The nurse has light-blue eyes. Kind ones. “Your job is to make her as comfortable as possible. You understand?”
Deb nods.
The synchronicity is not lost on her—Bonnie easing a needle, filled with a related narcotic, into her arm four months ago and walking out into the storm. Deb wonders what storm Hazel is walking out into now, and what she’ll find there.
Darkness or light? That is the question. Millions of years of queries, and that is still the everlasting one.
She thinks: how little I knew when I was nineteen on those back roads hitchhiking, as she brings a cup of water and a straw to Hazel’s lips, as she checks the catheter bag.