Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [119]
Of course, Darren says, you will. We’ll know. He points out to me that one of the things morphine does is make it easier for people to die, to relinquish their hold. Sometimes it seems that pain is one of the few things that doctors and nurses can do something about, and therefore they’re very ready to act; here, at last, is something controllable. And he fears, too, that sometimes the administration of morphine is about the comfort of the caregiver, about getting the difficult, dying patient out of the way.
Right now, Wally doesn’t need morphine. And two cc’s, administered all at once, with no gradual introduction of the drug to his system, might have been enough to kill him. What if I’d listened, what if I’d panicked and followed the nurse’s advice?
We fill the prescription, so that we’ll have the stuff on hand. The substitute nurse returns on Monday, and this time she wants to talk with me first; she’s decided to counsel me about death.
Of all the things that have annoyed and troubled me about the medical people Wally and I dealt with, perhaps what I hated most was the seemingly endemic practice of assuming that patients needed counseling, and that whoever happened to be around was the one to do it. As people get closer to death, many around them seem to suddenly want to become important, to become experts. And so it doesn’t matter if the patient has a lover, a therapist, friends, family, a whole network of support—an expert’s here. This expert thinks my resistance to her is about denial; I’m not in denial, I’m just hanging on doing the best I can. In fact what I want to do is protect Wally from her attempts at counseling; already, in her previous visit, she seemed to be hinting around to get him to talk about “letting go.”
Doesn’t it make sense that we might wish to have these conversations, if we wish to have them, with people we love?
She seems to think what Wally’s experiencing is denial, rather the way Dr. Magnus, on his sole house call, seemed to think Wally more interested in watching TV than in talking about his symptoms. Can these people tell the difference between brain dysfunction and denial? Or are they so hungry for a convenient explanation they’ll settle for psychological cliché, because it either gives them something to do or lets them off the hook?
I give Substitute Nurse very firm instructions that she’s not to try to counsel Wally, but I decide to hang around and observe her visit with him anyway. Halfway through it, after the requisite vital signs and palpations, she says, “Wally, is there anything you want to do that you haven’t done yet?”
At this point, you might as well ask my lover a question in Swahili. Furious, I shake my head at her, mouth “No.” She packs up her stethoscope. In the kitchen, she says, “I meant, like, have an ice cream soda.”
And so it’s clear that I have another job these next few weeks, which is protecting Wally from people who want to help.
Two friends, Ellen and Margie, come to visit for the afternoon, and Margie writes each of us a letter.
1/10/94
Dear Mark,
Halfway home I remembered the Italian sunflower seeds. Ellen said, never mind. Next time. Okay. Your house felt familiar. It felt just right. Ours is barer, which we like sometimes but in the winter doesn’t feel cozy enough. We need more winter clutter…
I liked so much to see you in your home. That staircase has been in my mind all day, steep and beautiful, and from the bottom unresolved. The resolution’s all in the top with those old staircases. There are many more questions in an old house than a new one, many more in-breaths. New ones have to say everything, spell everything out. There’s a rigid feeling the minute you walk in the door. Old ones have pulses.
January is sometimes a hard month for me, the month I was born in. Usually the complaint is that things don’t move. This winter I have just given up, and it’s much richer, much more enjoyable