The Signs
Beatrice is the new palliative care nurse, very eccentric, with half her head shaved and tattoos that disappear inside her clothing like animals going into hiding. Faint metallic tinkling sounds, like muffled wind chimes, emanate mysteriously when she moves. I find that sound intimate and erotic. She's very young, I would say twenty-six going on twelve. I have seen her in the street dressed in black combat boots and zippered parachute pants. But she is a comfort to the dying, which has always surprised me. She has a forthrightness they find oddly reassuring.
Patient: Am I dying?
Beatrice: Looks like it to me.
Patient: You see this enough you know the signs?
Beatrice: I know the signs.
Patient: How long do you think?
Beatrice: Tonight. I think you'll go tonight.
Patient: I feel alone. Lonely.
Beatrice: If I were in your shoes, I'd feel the same.
Commentary
I admire young women with bravado. Bravado, eccentricity, and panache. If I get to come back in another life, I want to be Beatrice.
Not much chance, I imagine.
This story boiled up in me out of a true moment. This was years ago. My elderly aunt was dying in a hospital in Toronto. I was far away and unaware that she was dying. She was lingering as far as I could tell, and her life was not all that great. She was in her 80s, her husband had died rather horribly of prostate cancer a couple of years earlier, and before that, their only son had died of AIDS in Berlin, alone and uncared for. In my mind, I used to call my uncle and aunt “the dead zone” because they were so dour and judgmental, always sitting together at family gatherings and looking glum.
I was young and not very sympathetic, otherwise I might have read the signs. They were depressed and lonely. And there was a wall of silence around the secret of their son’s gayness. Even after his death (the story was that he had fallen down a flight of stairs). The question we all asked when they were not in earshot was whether or not they even knew he was gay. My aunt would look at a photo of her son with yet another male friend (long before, he had fled to Europe to live his own life) and sigh and say, “I wish he’d find a nice girl and settle down.” And my uncle was notorious for his casual homophobia. He called them “fairies.”
When she died and my aunt’s things were being divided up, I said I didn’t care about money or furniture, but if it were at all possible, I’d like to inherit papers and books, anything the family could spare. Months later, a truck pulled up in my mother’s driveway and suddenly the garage was full of boxes of books, photographs, and letters. My mother did the first sort, and I remember the day she called me. “They knew,” she said. “They knew all along that he was gay. They even knew he had AIDS.” And then we were both silent, mulling over the implications, their crushing loneliness, being unable, as they were, to share basic emotional truths about their lives.
My aunt was suffering from congestive heart failure. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant (story of my life). But this one night I phoned her, as I did now and then, and we chatted. We shared an interest in family genealogy and she liked to tell me stories about my father and growing up on the farm. But I was tired of small talk after a while and I knew that things were closing in for her (though she spoke easily and seemed not to be suffering). We never spoke of feelings, but this time I asked her what she was feeling, my words loaded, as she lay in the hospital bed. It was late at night, dark outside. We were both in darkness. She paused, then whispered, “I feel alone. Lonely.”
I’ve never forgotten those words or the tone of her voice. And she died the next day.
Whatever I said in response (and, mercifully, like Joe Biden, I forget), it was inadequate. And I have often wondered what the best response might be. So this little story is an experiment in writing that conversation. I think Beatrice is on the right track. Unsentimental, honest, but, above all, there and in the moment with the dying patient. I want to be Beatrice, and I want Beatrice with me at the end. She would tell me things I didn’t know and while away the waiting hours.
Also, this has to be funny — my defense against the corruption of sentimentality.
This one touches a chord. My own reading: with Beatrice, the patient are never alone.
Out of the mouths of babes… what, I wonder,triggers the change to saying what we dont mean and meaning what we dont say? Not age!