Death: The Time of Your Life
Friday afternoon is when my mother goes in for her treatments. I go with every week, sit in the waiting room for two hours, and then drive her home afterwards. There is not much else I can do, because they don't allow anyone but patients and staff back into the treatment rooms.
It's in this small private hospital downtown. It's one of those buildings on the hospital campus, removed from the main area, that they send the really sick people. There is no front desk, or signing in; if you end up in this building you know why you're here, and they are expecting you. It smells of band-aids, and has that quiet hum of illness and disease. No one rushes you much here, most of the patients are in the last stages of whatever dark menace is ravaging their bodies. There's a feeling of both intense desperation and grudging acceptance that permeates the atmosphere. Like Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief are part of the architecture.
My mother's treatment room is on the first floor, in the center of the building. She always goes right in, and today is no different. She leaves me her purse, and her cell phone. She winks at me, and retreats behind the impressive glass doors that lock behind her and the nurse. I watch as the nurse puts her arm around my mother. They are familiars; they know her well here, and she is well liked. It's more intimate a gesture than anything has between my mother and I has been recently. I watch them disappear around a corner, my mother leaning into this woman's touch. I'm envious for a moment, and then immediately I feel guilty. I advert my eyes, stare at the dark burgundy pattern of the carpet. It looks like bloodstains, I think morbidly.
"It's always like that," he says.
"What, the carpet?"
He rolls his eyes, a habit I think he's picked up from me. "No, your mother and the nurse. The relationship between the dying and their caretakers."
I start, upset by his word choice, by his lack of tact. "She's sick. She's not dying."
"We're all dying," he responds sagely.
"Wow, you're so fucking deep." I adjust in my uncomfortable waiting room chair, pick up my reading material for the day, shut him out. I can hear him talking to the receptionist. I cross my arms, pull my body in. Isolate, separate, ignore. I'm tense and unhappy, and I stare at one page without reading. He takes his seat across from me again. I feel his eyes on me.
Don't look up, whatever you do, don't look up.
The glass doors open, we both turn quickly. It's a fifty-something woman hooked up to an oxygen tank, pushing a walker. She tells the nurse helping her she's going to sit and wait for her grandson to pick her up. She scoots by us, collapses into a chair. After she's collected herself, she starts knitting. Or maybe crocheting. I don't know if there is a difference between the two. I'm sure she isn't sewing.
Although I know it's rude, and wrong, I can't help it. I stare. It's something you do in the waiting room, to pass the time. No one actually reads the shit magazines from three years ago they leave out. Yeah, you'll pick them up, flipping through them from back to front. You'll think to yourself, so this is what entertainment mags wrote about before Paris Hilton, but really you'll be checking out the other people in the waiting rooms around you. Are they waiting for their appointment, their family member or friend? Are the waiting for death?
Is it cancer? AIDs? Heart disease? Are they contagious? Was that a sneeze caused by the pollen in the air, or was it a sneeze that indicates they should be quarantined on an island somewhere and left to die so as it not to pass it off to the masses?
This woman is wheezing, and she has tubes leading to her nose from the oxygen tank. She's wearing a wig. A cheap one. Rat hair, I think. Or maybe she shaved her Lhaso Apso.
Lung cancer, I decide.
I adjust myself in my uncomfortable waiting room chair, and slouch down so I can look in her purse. Pill bottles, pepper spray, Carmex. Bingo. Cigarettes. Pretty green foil. Menthols. Minty fresh. They look expensive, I don't recognize the packaging.
I can't decide if it's funny or sad that a month supply of her expensive cigarettes probably cost more than her Lhaso Apso wig. Maybe both.
I'm going to burn in hell.
A wade of paper hits me in the face. Karmic revenge? It's working quickly these days. I smooth the paper out. On it is an offer to try People magazine for six weeks, no obligation. Not a bad offer. I look up at him.
He shakes his head and makes a revolving motion with his hand. I flip it over. He's written on it in green crayon.
It's rude to stare.
I grab a purple marker from the table next to me.
It's rude to throw things at someone's face.
I toss back. He reads it, and then shrugs. We both look over again as the glass doors open. Just a doctor, hurrying out. Better than hurrying in. A doctor hurrying in means something has gone wrong. We both look back at the same time. Our eyes meet. The same worry and fear I feel is reflected back at me in his dark brown eyes. There is such kindness there, such compassion. And understanding.
He and I, we're two very different people. I'm a young white girl, who has lived a mostly sheltered and comfortable existence. I have a whole life ahead of me, the future is mine for the taking. I've been told the only limit for me is the sky since kindergarten. He's an older black man who lived through some of the worst the South had to offer in the twentieth century. He's a veteran of a foreign war, probably Vietnam. I can see in his face that he's always been on a battlefield, as long as he's been alive. He's fought for everything he's ever had.
We are very different people, indeed. And yet we've spent every Friday afternoon together for the past four months. His mother is sick, too. We are the same.
He smiles at me, and I smile back. He scribbles something, and throws the wade of paper back at me. I catch it, and read.
You look pretty when you smile, you should do it more often.
I write back, and toss it at him. He catches it with a practiced ease, and reads what I've put. He makes a tsk tsk face, the same one he always makes when I use profanity. He writes back, tosses underhand.
Wanna trade?
He eyes my book, and shakes his newspaper at me.
Okay.
We trade.
A quarter hour passes. I'm engrossed, in spite of myself, in an article about records in baseball and the use of steroids by players. I had no idea the sports page, a part of the newspaper I often avoid like the plague, could have such interesting debates on ethics.
We are alone in the waiting room now with the Cigarette Smoking Woman. For a while the pretty bald woman with ovarian cancer sat with us, but then her attractive, Gap ad husband and four children came to pick her up. Their kids are gorgeous, and every time I see her I marvel that same place in her body that created and carried such vibrant life is now the spot that houses the cancer cells that are killing her.
I look over at him. He seems to be concentrating very deeply on what I've given him. He smiles or chuckles to himself occasionally, and I find myself strangely pleased.
The grandson finally arrives. He is on his cell phone, and obviously in a hurry. She tries to tell him how the chemo went, but he puts a hand up to cut her off. She struggles with her purse, and he ignores her. As they leave, he walks ahead of her by several paces. Never looking back. She grimaces, but doesn't complain, and follows.
"That's a shame," he says.
"Yeah. But he probably always treated her that way. Her illness hasn't completely changed the way they relate to each other."
He looks at me. "You and your mother interact in a way different from before because things are different from before. You recognize that, and it affects you. It affects you because you care. And that's good. That's better than if you had stayed the same. When things change you have to change with them."
"You sound like Yoda."
"Well, Yoda was a wise man."
"Yoda wasn't a man."
"What was he then?"
"Umm.... a gremlin?"
He chuckles, and then sighs. He checks his watch. My mother's phone rings, it's my brothers. I answer and give them a progress report, which doesn't take long because I have very little to report. When I hang up, he has wandered back to the pretty receptionist. I hear her giggle, watch her twirl an errant strand of hair in her fingers as he leans on her desk. Huh.
I grab my book back from where he left it, face down. I guess he doesn't realize that's bad for the spine of the book. I start reading from where he left off, slouching into my chair.
When he comes back to the uncomfortable waiting room chairs, he takes a seat right next to me. Without looking up at him, I call him a rakish scoundrel.
He smiles broadly, and shows me a slip of paper with a phone number. "I'm going to make her dinner this weekend. She finally said yes."
"And what will your mother say?" His mother is a very conservative, overprotective women. I know what she'd say.
"I don't care what Mama thinks, I'm a grown man."
"A grown man who still calls his mother 'Mama'. You care."
"Well, you care what your mother thinks."
Ouch. Below the belt. We pause. He looks over my shoulder at my book.
"You may be too old for picture books, you know. "
"It's a graphic novel."
"It sure is." I think of the naked people and the sexual situations and the weird violence in this volume and I blush a little. If he notices, he says nothing. He points to a character on the page. "This one here, the main character's sister, she reminds me of you."
"Oh?"
"Yes."
"You know she's supposed to be Death."
"I gathered that. What kind of strange things do you read?"
"Says the man who worships the sports page. And The Sandman may be weird, but it's also brilliant."
"Okay, okay." We look at the illustrations on the page. There is a mother finding her baby dead, taken by Death with her brother Dream by her side. We are quiet.
He takes a deep breath, and reads.
Death is before me today:
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today:
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.
Death is before me today:
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive.
His voice catches on that last line. I don't look at him as I close the book and lay it down. We sit together, and I want to comfort him. I don't know how. I try to think of how I'd like to be comforted, but I can't decide. No one has tried to comfort me, so it's not something I've had to think about. I decide to touch his hand.
I startle him; this is not something we have done before. There is no touching, we are in public. We are strangers. He is much older than me. I don't even know his name. It wouldn't be appropriate. But it's where we are. It's what we're doing. We are holding hands under the wooden arm rests of the uncomfortable waiting room chairs.
I whisper to him, "She will get better."
He responds lightly, "She will."
"This is making her better."
"It is."
"She is a fighter."
"She is a fighter."
"She's not going to die."
"Not ever."
"Not ever."
He squeezes my hand tightly. His palms are calloused and dry, but his touch is comforting. Reassuring. I wonder when the last time was that someone hugged him. The last time he had a shoulder to cry on. I squeeze back.
We are startled apart by commotion behind the receptionist's desk. My mother and his mother are both finished. His mother is loudly recounting to mine the details of her last colonoscopy; my mother is fascinated. He walks over to put a shawl on his mother's shoulders, I gather up my mother's purse and my book.
"And this is my boy," his says to mine. "Didn't I tell ya? Boy needs a haircut."
My mother smirks at this, "Mine too, she's such a pretty girl when she keeps her hair out of her face."
My mother smiles at him as he cringes slightly, and his mother looks at my locks like she'd like to snip at them right now. I look back at my mother, a retort on my tongue. Her pupils are dilated, her face pale. I put my hand on the small of her back to steady her. She makes no notice of it. His mother is chastising him for trying to give her a heat stroke, putting a shawl on her in the Florida heat.
"Any calls?," mine asks.
"The boys called."
"Wanted to know how I was doing?"
"No, they said something about a fire. I couldn't really understand them, what with all the loud sirens on their end."
I look at her face, she is somewhat freaked. The drugs they give her to dull the pain of the treatment make her a little slow on the uptake.
"Sorry, sarcasm. I'm bad at it."
"Did you kids play nice?", his asks. The mothers giggle, each having accordingly embarrassed their respective offspring for the day.
As we two pairs break apart, heading to the opposite parking lots where we left our cars, he and I smile softly at each other.
Until next week, my friend. | 
