This may be disjointed. Fasten your mental seat belts.
Of course, I'm still reverberating from yesterday's memorial service for my friend John Willard. And I suppose this reverberation might continue, off and on, for some time. Or, the rest of my life. Obviously, it's too soon to tell.
I thought I would be better, with regard to his illness -- that I would automatically know, somehow, just what I should have been called upon to do. I thought, given the proliferation of medical marvels these days, that it was going to be only a matter of time before he would be cured. I excused my seemingly careless absence from this part of his life as my way of saying 'Oh, of course you're fine -- I'll call in a couple of weeks, and check in again'. I thought that, if I went down to Philadelphia, I would only be in the way, that John would be embarrassed because he hadn't been able to keep his apartment spotless, because he was dying of cancer. Maybe I thought I would get away with something -- avoid the pain, if I just pretended that nothing in particular was going on.
It's not as though I haven't seen a death before, either. When I was almost done with high school, my step-grandfather fell ill with emphysema. He'd had a severe bout of pneumonia a few years earlier, but kept on drinking and smoking, as though nothing had happened. Except that it had.
When he had pneumonia, he and my horrid grandmother still owned their restaurant with the extra bedrooms upstairs, and he'd been tended to in the largest of those rooms. I was only allowed to peek in to see him -- why would I be sitting by his bedside at that point? -- and he seemed to be shrunken and pale, almost swallowed up in the bedclothes, and weighted down by the great dark headboard against the wall. But by the time the emphysema showed up, the restaurant was no longer in business, and there was no place for him to wrestle with this illness, but an improvised bed in our living room.
Here, I was much more involved with his care. I would look in on him every hour or so, when I was at home, and often re-arrange his pillows, so he would have some fresh coolness against his back. He always thanked me elaborately, wishing he could give me a million dollars for so simple an effort. Because he was bedridden, I also had to help him pee -- I think he was still coordinated enough to handle himself, but I had to hold the glass bottle, designed for the purpose, in place. It was somehow confusing to me, a teenager who was acting on his gay desires whenever it was possible, to be confronted with a grown man's penis, in such a clinical, detached setting.
I also was often in charge of giving my step-grandfather his medication. Pills of some sort, which he could barely choke down with a glass of water. I had to hold his head still, and hold the glass too, trying not to tip it too much, and get his sheets wet. Perhaps the pills were for pain, I'm guessing, because he usually asked me to give him too much. So he could stop feeling the wracking pain in his chest. By dying. I can still recall a kind of cold drenched feeling that would come over me, when he begged me to do this thing, that he clearly thought would be a gift.
Teenagers and young adults have a clear, more or less black-and-white view of their world -- or at least I know I did. And even though it would have been called a murder, I admit thinking, maybe for a few seconds, or even a minute or two, not so much about the legal or even the moral implications, but about where legality and morality seemed to conflict with compassion. A fatally-ill man, who, if he'd been capable of crossing the room on his own, probably would have taken those pills himself.
Versus the certain knowledge that he was going to continue lying there, hoping that someone would come into the room soon, to turn his pillows around, and maybe help him to die.
Then he died, all on his own. Quietly, in the middle of the night, with his wife and my father and my stepmother in the room.
When my father was in the final stages of his losing struggle with bladder and bone cancer, I spent a few hours with him in his hospital room. He'd been brought there because his blood chemistry was severely out of whack. Something about a salt imbalance. When his doctor came in to look at my dad's chart, I asked if there hadn't been some improvement. 'The man is dying,' the doctor said, in much the same tone he might have used to tell me what color his car was.
Because he was obviously so ill, I was afraid even to leave the room to go to the bathroom, in case he should die while I was answering a call of nature. I finally took the chance, and he was still breathing when I got back. I wasn't sure, actually, that he even knew I was there.
Then his lunch arrived. A hamburger with lettuce and tomato, some french fries and a little container of red jello. I thought this would be a challenge for him, but he attacked the burger with a vigor that I actually found a little off-putting. Nothing delicate and weak in his table manners. How could this bother me? Here's my dying father, devouring the grilled patty and the tomato slice with determination and focus. Isn't that a good thing?
He did need help with the jello, so I opened the little plastic cup and spoon-fed him, having what may be a feeling for many of us now -- the irony of role-reversal, with me helping my father eat his wriggling red dessert. When I had to leave, and he realized I was going back to his house, he jerked alert and started struggling to get out of bed. This I found especially sad.
Two weeks later, having been sent home again, because there was nothing the hospital could do, he died, with my youngest brother at his side.
I guess I'm trying to justify, somehow, what I'm truly afraid was a terrific betrayal on my part -- a betrayal of someone who meant far more to me, really, than either of these other two dying men. Yes, John meant even more than my own father. But instead of taking a trip to Philadelphia, to be helpless by his bedside, I hid.
Justification. I think we all know how this usually works out.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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