The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [47]
He had found an ease with metaphor and art. My brother-in-law brought a TV into the windowless room and looped the cable around the overhead rail of the bed. Max waved at the spiral loops and said, “I appreciate the corroboree”—a corroboree is an aboriginal ceremonial dance. And in the room there were perhaps twenty origami cranes, made by my daughter during a recent visit. They had the bright patterns of wedding kimonos.
There were negotiations. He mentioned walking to the bathroom a few times until I said, “Well, I’ll help you up.” Then he ignored me. This happened a few times. Finally, I pushed things a bit and said, “I’ll help you up now, if you wish.”
With a large, childlike grin he said, “You are asking for a punch on the nose.”
I took this to mean that he wanted to get up but was in too much pain to carry out the plan. This sort of assessment was going on all the time. He was doing it and I was doing it, and the staff was, too. The method was to listen and guess, followed by more listening and guessing. I got him up a couple of times and he tried a few times more, but then he surrendered and didn’t get up again. He had no particular shame about having to be helped, but he was very aware of being caught in the ancient coils of having a body, eating, getting rid of the waste.
Then there was the matter of drugs, ordered by his oncologist. The monastic discipline of the medical profession is a worldwide phenomenon; the doctor was intelligent, well trained, practical, decisive, and willing to answer all my questions. “The source of the cancer could be prostate or lungs, but we didn’t want to put him through an extra biopsy, and it doesn’t matter, does it?” He was also inclined to the stoic and bleak, or perhaps I could say that his consolations were those of the scientist who adheres to the data at hand and makes few speculations about whether life has meaning.
“What’s the likely course?”
“Well, the metastases in the bone will eventually collapse the spine onto the nerves and stop his breathing, probably in his sleep. Three weeks.”
I took his clarity as a kindness. I had a week to spend with Max before I was to teach a retreat in California.
Hospice patients have acute conditions; they either die or move out, and their doctors tend to whack the pain with a blunt instrument. The drugs made Max miss his own experience, though, and he understood this in some animal way and backed off from them. When he fell behind the pain, the nurses gave him a large dose and he was loopy again. This unsatisfactory cycle went on until a palliative-care doc took over and gave him a pain patch. Meanwhile, we brought him single malt whiskey, which was a good placebo.
When I stepped out into the sunshine after my first visit to the hospice, I was disoriented. I zipped off in my dad’s VW diesel, wondering for a puzzled moment why all the traffic was coming toward me on the wrong side of the road.
I wasn’t aware of any need to say deep things or to improve my relationship with my father, so when the pain negotiations were finished—something my sister accomplished with persistence and verve—the question became a matter of what Max and I would do together.
When I’ve been sick, for example with fever, I can be happy as long as I listen to what the universe, represented by the state of my body, allows me to do. It’s as if there is an awareness inside that knows what that is. This awareness treats my thoughts as hypotheses. I have the thought “I’ll watch a movie,” and, no, it won’t let