On August 10, the day after Jason declared himself finished, Meredith and I visited the hospital, unsure which Jason we’d meet. We saw the one who really had had enough. He was mostly unresponsive, his head back, mouth open. His mom sat at the foot of the bed and Beth sat next to him, brushing his brow.
I retold Jason some of our stories from the glory days, as if he could hear, and we all tried to laugh.
The nurse gave Jason morphine. He calmed. There was talk that he could last a few days. Cathy went to grab a quick bite.
“This is it,” my wife suddenly said. Jason’s breathing had become particularly labored, a pattern Meredith, a doctor, well understood.
Beth wiped the hair from his forehead and kissed him there. “Goodbye, my sweet love,” she said.
Jason took a final gulp of life.
Determined as he was in life, he made up his mind, and off he went. It stood to reason he’d picked that moment so his mother, champion and stalwart, wouldn’t have to bear witness.
A few minutes later, in the emotional and medical vacuum, I found myself standing alone at Jason’s bed, looking at someone who had never been inert in his fifty years.
“Love you, Greenie,” I told him. “I want to thank you for never looking down on the little guy. I hope my son can carry himself with that same dignity and class.”
Jason’s memorial service, a few days later, was powerful and sad and funny. I eulogized him and told a story about how he and Tom had once driven during college from Boulder to Berkeley in the Volkswagen Beetle Jason had inherited from his dad. Jason and Tom had blown most of their money by Wyoming, when the Bug threw a rod and they had to hire a mechanic to save the car. By Reno, they had only $50 and were low on gas. Jason decided the best thing to do was to . . . attempt to double their money in a casino. They lost most of the remaining $50 playing blackjack, slept in the car, and used their last $5 on Cool Ranch Doritos. They made it to Berkeley on fumes in time for the kickoff of a football game. I described Jason as a guy who went farther on a single tank of gas than anyone I’d ever met. I said I imagined that Jason was in that Bug up in the sky now, driving away, maybe in the direction of his dad, Joel, who was waiting in the heavens, wearing his ratty brown catcher’s mitt.
I wrote an obituary for the New York Times to update the story I’d previously written about Jason’s saga describing the potential hope for immunotherapy. After all, it had given Jason an extra year.
But what was the sum of it all, now that Jason was dead?