The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [7]
For a while, the easy talk continued. I asked how he liked the food. He said, “It depends upon who’s cooking.” He asked me how old I was. I said almost fifty-eight. Then after some more small talk came a shift in the conversation’s tone when I asked him how old he was. “I’m sixty-seven and won’t see sixty-eight.” I tried changing the direction of the conversation. As a new hospice volunteer, I still wasn’t comfortable talking about death. I asked how long he lived on the streets. “More than anyone should have to,” he said. He was as persistent as a telemarketer trying to get you to buy penny stocks. I realized that no matter what I would say, he would pull me back to what he wanted to talk about, not just the facts of his life, which on their own were frightening enough, but most likely how he was feeling about his dying. Reluctantly, I gave in and asked about his pain. He told me with enough morphine even the worst eventually went away. I nodded my head, agreeing.
“How do you know about morphine?” he asked.
“I have prostate cancer. They gave it to me last year after surgery.”
Jim wanted to know if I had family. Yes, I said. A wife and two adult children. I was no longer holding my breath as he spoke, and my chair was now touching the recliner. We were speaking with just inches separating our heads when he fell asleep. Earlier, I read in the notes he often did this—fell asleep, eyes wide open, then started speaking when he woke as if there never was an interlude. I sat and waited.
Ten minutes later he said, “How old?”
“My son’s twenty-two and my daughter’s twenty-six.”
“How did you tell them about the cancer?”
Although it had been a year, I still wasn’t comfortable talking about those conversations.
“It was hard,” was all I said.
Jim kept looking at me as if he were waiting for more. I saw his eyes were glistening.
“Do you have any kids?” I asked. One girl, he told me, who hadn’t visited. Jim didn’t think his daughter knew he was dying.
“I haven’t seen her in five years. She’s in Illinois.”
“Would you like to see her?”
As he nodded his head yes, the hints of moisture tipped out, forming thin streams that cascaded only an inch or so down his cheeks.
“Can anyone get in touch with her?”
“Her mother, but she won’t do it. They don’t speak. We don’t speak.” There was a long pause, and then he said, “I need to ask her to forgive me.”
I asked him if he would like us to see if we could contact his daughter. With closed eyes he nodded his head yes, then slowly exhaled. When he fell asleep, I went outside the room and asked Evan if Jim ever talked about his daughter.
“No,” he said. “This is significant. I’ll see what I can find out after my shift is over. Then we’ll try to call her.”
I went back into the room and sat next to Jim as he slept. I thought about the times when I could have sabotaged my relationship with my children. I remembered when my son was nine and I had been under stress. I was directing a university program and enlarging my private practice. Between the two, I had little time for my family. As my son and I were walking together on a busy street near our house, he reached up and grabbed my hand. My thought was to withdraw it, and lecture him that nine-year-olds don’t hold their father’s hand in public. When I looked down at this face, I realized he was using a physical connection to compensate for the emotional one I was denying him. I held his hand tighter and turned away before he saw my tears. What if I had withdrawn my hand? Would Justin have become as distant as it appeared Jim’s daughter was from him? And if I had rejected him, how would I ask Justin, as an adult, to forgive me? I wondered how Jim would do it. What could have happened to make a daughter not want to have contact with her father for five years?