“What do you want to do?” the nurse asks.
What do I want to do? I want to do anything but this, be anywhere but here. I don’t want to watch the heart monitor anymore. I don’t want to hear the rhythm of your heart flutter. I don’t want to be standing in an ICU. I don’t want to call my brothers again with even more bad news. I don’t want to hear Mom cry. I don’t want to answer this question, Dad, I really don’t.
Time telescopes in on itself, fractures, and ruptures backwards. I want to be 6 years old on a beach in West Dennis, jumping through the waves with my hand in yours. I want to be 10, standing near your family’s farm in Feeding Hills and hear how you fetched the cows in before the Great Hurricane of 1938. I want to be 12, sitting on the top eave of the house, holding a can of paint while you hung over the side painting the last, almost inaccessible place above the garage. I want to be a teenager, bicycling down to the field where you hit fungo after fungo after fungo to my brothers on crystal clear New England summer eves. I want to be an adult, listening to your World War II stories and your experiences in Scheinfeld and Nordhausen, how at the latter you heard how starving Jewish prisoners managed to sabotage the Nazi’s V2 rockets, probably saving thousands of lives and maybe even the war. I want to be in college, hearing your reassuring voice on the phone during finals week. I want to be any age and hear your fine Irish tenor. I want to watch you read the Economist and relate some of the topics back to lectures from the Jesuits at Boston College, which the GI Bill got you into, and your hard work got you out with a magna cum laude. I want to hear your vast stories of baseball lore and your passion for the skills of the game (and your love for the Red Sox, no matter how hard it was, until, finally, 2004 came). I want to hear you talk to your grandchildren, your laughter suffused with love. I want to see you happy and well, getting stronger after you and Mom moved in with me 3 and a half years ago, losing the stress of living alone, getting better, eating regularly again, even putting away your cane. We went everywhere together, to Farmer’s Market, to breakfast, to the hardware store, to get ice cream on a hot summer’s night. You laughed again. You smiled at Mom. Normal things. Before the myeloma came.
“Do you want to draw blood for more tests? We might be able to stabilize him for a few hours. What do you want to do?” the nurse asks again, my blue Power of Attorney sticks out from the bottom of her clipboard. Time reverses with a jolt, screaming to a stop as my heart breaks.
I teach medical students and residents. I listen to the clinicians in my department. I know what the choices are. I know the sepsis is progressing. I know your kidneys have shut down and your liver is failing. I know the priest has come and gone. I know the attending has gone home. I know we owe the senior resident an incalculable debt because he tracked me down when we were leaving to get Mom some rest. “I don’t like how some of these labs look,” he said, “Stay a while.” And he knew and I knew what he meant. You would have been without us, Dad. We would have harbored regrets forever. I know what you want, Dad, now I just, just?, just have to do it.
“Let him go” I say softly, reluctantly, hearing your wishes as clearly as if you were whispering them into my ear, knowing you trusted me to do this, wanting to be sure your wishes would be honored, so stronger, surer, I say again, “let him go.”
And we do.
The nurse steps back.
My mother weeps.
Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out” catapults into my mind, the words scorching from my New England school days — a farm hand lies dying on a kitchen table:
He
lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then — the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little – less – nothing! — and that ended it.
Your heart wavers, grows erratic, beats.......and stops. A few months shy of 85 years. You said you wouldn’t live through this winter, and less than 2 hours before the Spring Solstice arrives you are gone. Never mind that the cup that hung on the end of the cattle trough on your childhood farm would now be out of the dark shadow of the winter freeze and into the thinnest promise of spring sunshine, a harbinger your family waited for every year. Never mind that the snowdrops have their white heads up through the frost. Never mind that the sap runs in the Sugar Maples. It’s time. With winter comes death, with spring Resurrection. You have always believed, you have always been comforted.
Thanks Dad, for all of your gifts, but now thanks especially for this gift of certainty. Of all the love and stories and lessons and examples that helped me to good things and spared me from bad, this ranks high. You told me what you wanted if this ever happened. You told me “don’t you dare let me live on a machine”. You told me this was your decision. Thank you, thank you. It’s hard enough watching you die. It’s hard enough watching Mom’s life fall apart. It’s hard enough knowing that starting tonight while you will always be with me, you will never again be there. Thank you for making this decision for me, for letting me grieve alone without the extra crushing burden of wondering whether it was right, of agonizing over what you might have wanted, of second-guessing myself forever. Even now, you are a good example, a good teacher.
I pray I’ll see you later, in some other reality, and you’ll smile, say you were sorry to put me in this position, but then say “you did well”. But now, your pulseless hand grows cold. Mom takes off her rings to put your ring on her finger, the ring she gave you 58 years and 6 months ago, then puts her rings back on to hold yours close to her.
I think of what your grandfather, Thomas Burke, from Galway might say if he stood here with us — “slán agus beannacht u do chara” (farewell and blessings from a friend) or, perhaps, “slán agus beannacht le bauireamh an tsaoil” (farewell to the worries of life).
I don’t want to be here. I couldn’t be anywhere else.