(March, 2000)

I look down at my mother as she lay dying.

It was worse than I expected. (You don’t expect anything; you worry and fear and anticipate and dread and delay and avoid and if you are the type of person who prays you hit your knees early and often, but mostly you prepare yourself as best you can for what you never can prepare yourself to see.) I had not expected this: I had seen my sister, only a few years before, just after childbirth and while, of course, that was an occasion to celebrate, it was also serious business, my sister obliged to undergo a C-section just as our mother had done.

I expected, I reckon, something similar, not thinking (not allowing myself to think?) about the difference between local anesthesia and going under; the real differences between a by-the-book medical procedure and a search-and-destroy kind of surgery. She is not yet able to speak (they had wheeled away a frightened woman and brought us back an infant, uncertain how to talk, breathe and think: that is what those first seconds are like when they let you into the room) and the force of my shock hits me like a sucker punch below the belt. The wind rushes out of me like an innocent bystander anxious to leave the scene of a crime and the water spills out of my eyes as if someone had flipped a switch. It’s not crying so much as a chemical reaction (Chemistry? Physics? Biology? All of the above, including the algebra of anxiety), and I am mortified that my brave, smiling face (Everything is going to be okay!) had betrayed me in less than five seconds.

Look at her: spread out under oppressive white sheets like an etherized lab experiment (Biology again). A tube inserted through her nose into her stomach to clean up the mess they make while saving your life. Tubes and wires connected to machines that blinked and breathed, electronic chaperones keeping guard over carefully administered fluids. It was all at once impressively state of the art and appallingly primitive. Look how far we’ve come; we’ve only come this far? And, inevitably: is this what she saw when she visited her mother, almost exactly twenty years ago? How much worse were the conditions (the prep, the prognosis, the recovery) then? And twenty years before that: her father’s father and the colostomy bag he wore for that last decade of his life. Old school: it was unfortunate, but it was miraculous; twenty or so years before that he wouldn’t have had a chance. This is progress, this is medicinal intervention being refined before our eyes, stitch by stitch, drip by drip, second by second, each patient another specimen, another insect laid out on the table to be scrutinized, tagged and, whenever possible, saved.

Where are you?

Did you actually almost faint just now? Are you kidding me with this cliché? (Get used to it, kid, you’ll finally find yourself saying, not without a little appreciation at the ways situations like these turn unbelievably personal and possibly profound moments into scenes that couldn’t even bribe their way into bad movies.) Do I really need to leave the room and splash cold water on my face? Yes, I do.

I rush out into the hallway, past the white coats scurrying here and there, somehow frowning and smiling at the same time, as only doctors can do, and find the bathroom and its impossibly clean and brightly-lit sink. Take some deep breaths, just as you’d learned to do at times like these. A few moments ago I had felt hot; now I am chilled (The physics of chemistry?). And tired. It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to get some fresh air, I think, heading toward the elevator.

On the way down to the lobby it stops and a tall, older man gets in (if I saw him today, ten years later, I’d probably say he was later-middle-aged and maybe, if he had grandkids, they would say I was middle-aged). He looks at me and we exchange a quick, cordial nod. It is a gesture that stops short of being formal, or friendly, but it is considerably different than the look strangers customarily give one another in a public place. The difference, to anyone else, would be all but imperceptible: this exchange of empathy, this implicit solidarity. It is a communication given and received exclusively in hospitals, where no one entering or exiting is free from the peculiar burden compelling their visit.

As I’m walking out I pause and hold the door for a young woman (if I saw her ten years ago I’d say she was middle-aged) wheeling an older man (her grandfather? Her father? Her husband?) hunched over in his chair. She is smiling and she is beautiful. She is beautiful because she is smiling; she has the unforced look of assumed control masking whatever concerns lie beneath. Or maybe she is on her way to figuring out (or has already figured out) the appropriate calculus between care and acceptance. Whatever it is, she is beautiful and I hold the door while she slowly slips out from the real world into the sanitized field of dreams and secrets where destinies come to be realized around the clock.

“Thank you,” she says, the smile spreading.

“Don’t go,” I want to say because I’ve fallen instantly in love.

Strangers can become unwitting angels to someone who is grieving. It’s not something you (or they) can control; it has to do with the formula that occurs when our Biology feels Chemistry and does Physics. We are scared and in need of assurance; we are vulnerable and desperate for consolation. We are people and need to grasp whatever hands might be reaching out in the dark; we are hoping to be saved by that human touch.

And so I find myself, suddenly in love, just as I’d fallen in love with the oncologist in ’97 and would fall in love with the nurse from the night shift in 2001—the one I actually sent flowers to (or at least I meant to; I actually wrote down her name with a note reminding myself to send her something to let her know I appreciated her efforts, that some of us realize what a difference people like her make, and that even if all our efforts are ultimately in vain the type of care and concern she provided was never without meaning, and above all that I loved her). The exact opposite of the way I would despise the surgeon in 2002 for laughing (she wasn’t laughing at us; she didn’t know I could see her, so I had no choice but forgive her even though I can never forget that moment, in the hallway, seconds before she and her colleague—the one she was laughing with as they walked toward us—delivered that final verdict; the one we had waited for and been able to avert and avoid for a little under five years).

***

Outside, at last. I can feel the sun, that unblinking life force. At once imperious and impervious, a warm-blooded bystander to our exigencies, however fervent and fleeting.

I look up, cautiously: you learn not to stare into the sun; it’s dangerous and even worse, it’s a cliché. What is the sun going to tell you, even if cared to acknowledge us, even if it could? It’s enough that it’s there. I’m grateful, at least, for the clarity of its glow, the fact that it does its dirty work during the day, making it possible (impossibly) to light up the other stars who operate under cover of darkness. These stars don’t say anything and they don’t need to; at least we can see them: they are there, no matter where they came from. They were there before we got here and they will be there long after we’re gone. Humbling, maybe even horrifying, but there is nothing we –or they– can do about it. It might not be enough, but it somehow has to be.

Tiger, tiger burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

You learn not to talk to the stars, or you eventually realize it is senseless to imagine they can hear you. Yet enough people need to have their actions explained that we made a science of sorts out of animals in the sky, lit with meaning and the ability to govern our affairs the way the moon turns the tides.

Many of us are taught to talk to God, and some of us actually think He is listening. Those one-way conversations are enough for enough people that we sanctified that shot in the dark, that wish upon a star. We have enough people who need these mysteries and secrets explicable that we invest the sky with spirits and wish them into being: we have them make sense out of what we can’t explain for ourselves, and suddenly the senselessness yields salvation.

If all else fails enough people come to understand, and possibly take comfort in the fact that you can always talk to yourself. You know who you are and you will always hear your voice, even when you don’t want to. Even –and especially– when you are not sure what you can tell yourself, when you are not at all certain what you can or should or may say.

* From a non-fiction work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.