The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [8]
Jim woke again, and for the next three hours we talked as if we were lifelong friends sitting at a bar, delighted just to be with each other. Maybe this is what “being present” meant. He told me how he loved to sing classical music, but that he could barely breathe anymore. I told him about my love of fly-fishing in remote areas, but because of my hormone treatments I was too weak to go alone. Climbing steep canyons was no longer possible. Walking was even painful since I fractured my pelvis playing handball. I asked him if he’d like me to make French toast in the morning from the bread I baked. There was a long pause and then he slowly turned so he was looking directly at me.
“You bake bread?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What kind?”
“Well, for tonight’s dinner I baked challah, egg bread.”
“Can you get me the recipe?”
“Sure, I’ll bring it in next week.”
He leaned back on the recliner, remaining silent for about a minute, then turned toward me, inhaling as much as he could to complete another sentence. “I want to make that bread, but I know I can’t.”
“We’ll do it together,” I said with a quivering voice.
He closed his eyes, smiled, and then fell asleep. As I watched him, death became more real and frightening. The real thing was in front of me in a body that was winding down and a brain that couldn’t tell delusion from reality. I wondered if this is how I would die: watching my abilities fall away to the point where I couldn’t even feed or wipe myself. My apprehension stopped when he woke.
“I’m hungry,” Jim said.
Thank God! At least here’s something simple. Something I could do without thinking. After all, how difficult will it be to feed someone?
“What would you like?” I asked.
“Ice cream.”
“I’ll go downstairs and see if there’s any left.”
The mantra at the Guest House was there are no emergencies in hospice. I was told people were there to die, not recover. In a hospital there is a sense of urgency when a life is in jeopardy. Here, everything moved slowly, deliberately, as if each moment was to be savored. But I forgot the mantra and painfully bounded down the stairs, each step reminding me my reduced bone density was putting me at risk for another fracture. In the freezer were quart containers of chocolate and vanilla. Plenty to satisfy the small amount I thought he would eat. I ran back up.
“There’s chocolate and vanilla. Which do you want?”
“Both.”
I went back down and put a large scoop of each in a bowl and again climbed the stairs.
“I have both in this bowl. Which one would you like to start with?”
“Both.”
I took a small portion of each on a spoon. “I’m going to feed you, so let me know if the amount is too large.”
He nodded his head, and I slowly placed the spoon into his open mouth. He closed it, allowing the ice cream to slide off as I pulled out the spoon. His eyes closed, and he slowly moved his tongue from side to side. With each movement of his tongue, his smile grew. Sometimes it took thirty seconds before the ice cream was gone and he was ready for the next spoonful. It was something so simple, so pleasurable, I couldn’t understand it. Pleasure for me had always been complicated. I felt it when I made a perfect cast to a fish hidden behind a rock as I stood in my favorite stream in Wyoming. I experienced it completing a poem in which I merged thoughts into a unified line. But that night, it was just the taste of ice cream that seemed to bring more joy to someone than I could have ever experienced through complex manipulations of either my body or mind. We repeated the sequence for the next ten minutes until the bowl was empty.
“More please,” he whispered.
I went downstairs, refilled the bowl, and we began again. After he finished, I sat next to him and tried to sleep when he did, propping my feet on a second chair. Shortly after one o’clock I felt a tapping on my shoulder and woke. Irma, the late-night attendant, introduced herself. She gave Jim a dose of Roxanol, a liquid derivative of morphine.
“Lie down on the couch,” the