The Long Goodnight

She stood at the doorway looking around at the room before her with its cracked walls and yellowed paint. She wasn't sure why she was there. She had been stopping by every day after work to check on him, to make sure he was cleaned and fed. To make sure his needs were being met. She had planned on passing on the visit this evening, she was tired and it had been a long day. “He'll never know” she thought to herself. But at the last minute the car turned almost by rote into the driveway that had become all too familiar to her. Shit. She signed to herself, “Ok, let's get this together”. She sat there for a few minutes gearing up for yet another hopeless moment with him, climbed out of the car and walked rapidly into the home knowing what waited for her behind those walls.1

The smell from his room was the dusty scent of age and stale decay. Yesterday, in a sudden fit of fury, she lost it. Completely and utterly lost it as she dragged an orderly into the room to clean out the ants that had been feasting on the food one of the nurses had apparently dropped and failed to pick up from the floor. “Goddammit! $3000.00 a month and you're letting him live like this? He's a patient! He's a man, not an fucking animal! Do your job and clean it up!” she screamed as she stood over an orderly bland and disinterested. He didn't care. Why should he? He had become accustomed to the helpless anger of various relatives who are driven by confusion and guilt. He'd seen it; heard it far too many times before she arrived, and he'd hear it again when she left.2

She looked over at the bed next to his and listened for a moment as the occupant yelled to a heaven only he could see “Fuck you God! Fuck you!” Shaking her head, she frowned in guilty revulsion as she looked back over at the other bed. She could smell him from where she stood. Smell the disease eating away at him. He was sitting there with a hanged dog look, his expression defeated. His eyes void and empty of any signs of rational life. “I hadn't realized how thin he had gotten” she thought. Her eyes looked him up and down from his balding bowed head, across his thin stringy arms and down to pale skinny legs hanging out of his hospital gown. “My god. When did this happen? This can't be the same man”. She closed her eyes and went back to a moment in time. A moment bursting with a loud boisterous laughter and a voice loud as he swung her up onto the top of his feet and danced her around the living room, her little girl giggles gleeful and bright. She remembered the watch he bought her that never worked. God he was so proud of himself. One of the only gifts he had ever gone out and chosen for her without any prompting. She still had that damn thing. It had never worked but she just couldn't give it up. She pictured him in his new gray suit, proudly pleased with his stylish flair and the way it made him feel. Such a far cry from this sad sliver of humanity sitting before her. “I'd never think this was the same man” she thought mournfully. She remembers his somewhat pompous and arrogant statement of facts as he relayed and debated them with her when she was in high school. His efforts to be a “buddy” to her and her friends and her arrogant teenage voice condescendingly dismissing his viewpoint. “Oh god, were were really that horrible? Did we never think about what was coming? Is youth truly that cruel?” Yes, youth is cruel. And so is age. She looked up quickly as she heard him coughing, his lungs racked with the hollow sound of near by death. He had been coughing for weeks, but since he was diagnosed, the coughing has been far worse, dry and painful sounding. A death rattle hovering in a body lay wasted with cancer. All the years she nagged at him about his smoking, all the dire facts she threw his way had finally come to pass. He was dying. He had given his life over to an addiction that grabbed him by the throat and was in the process of wresting the remaining shards of life from his wretched body. He had been callously given 90 days to live. Ninety days! Days counted cruelly on a calendar. Jesus Christ, is there no mercy in sight?3

She remembered two weeks prior, when she had been at the hospital with him. A sledgehammer moment. The death sentenced pronounced. He had just suffered several small strokes. His body had been trying to fight the cancer and had been far too overstressed to withstand them. Her mother had left the room with the oncologist, trying she was sure, to convince him that her husband could get well, all he needed was rest and to gain some weight. A voice brittle with unconvincing hope. She heard the oncologist with his matter of fact voice and her mother's high pitched one as they faded down the hall way. She moved over to sit next to him and as she reached for his hand, his head dropped as he whispered “I'm so goddam afraid, so afraid!” and the feel of his thin shoulders under her arms as she held him while he cried. “Don't let your mother know” he insisted through his tears, his voice choked and garbled. “No, no, I won't. It's ok to be afraid but we're with you, we're here. You have us” she whispered as she held him, so terrified of the role she'd just been thrust into. He had us? So what? What could we possibly do to rescue him? He knows it. We know it. He was going to die and there wasn't a goddam thing they could do. She'd never seen him cry and felt helpless. Lost and defenseless against his pain. This is wrong, so wrong. This wasn't her role; her place in life. “I'm the child. This can't be the way this goes. This can't be it” she thought. “ This can't be the way this ends”. He had always been a private man with a pride salvaged despite years of being beat down by a life that had often been less than kind. A man with his own well kept demons never let loose upon those who asked for, and were denied, explanations. A man who had silently put his own dreams on hold for most of his adult life as he struggled to feed the family he married. “Oh God, he's finally done what he wants to do with his life, please, you can't do this to him now”. God. This is God? Well, he never believed in God. She remembered his dismissals of that omnipotent and vague figurehead in the sky. Maybe this was his punishment. His karma biting him in the ass with razor sharp teeth for the sins of his non belief. But she doubted it. He had spent years taking on jobs that would take care of a wife who came prepackaged with five kids. Not always jobs that he enjoyed. A lifetime of being a caretaker who finally found his calling. A year that brought him more joy than a lifetime of years. Rudely being stripped from him. Just like that. A fucking train wreck he never saw coming.4

She remembered all the times she had heard him say “I don't want to be a vegetable. If I'm going to go, I want to go with a little dignity; fast and quietly. If I'm lucky, I'll go in my sleep”. Well he wasn't asleep. And this wasn't dignified. It wasn't fast. It wasn't quiet. This dirty room, the odor of death in the air. Screaming voices echoing down the halls in protest at the cruelties of age. Nurses that come and go uncaring, laughing as they callously flipped his body this way and that while cleaning bedsores that burned into his flesh like hot coals. Laying there racked with pain, crying with helplessness and shamed by the adult diapers he had been forced to wear. No, this isn't dignity. He would loathe this if he knew. And how are we sure he doesn't know? So hard to tell. However, she didn't think so. He's looked lost for weeks now. And she was frightened. And consumed by guilt. She knew damn good and well how he felt about this. She couldn't walk away one more night knowing what she was leaving behind. This man. A scared man in a lonely room in a home filled with uncaring strangers. She knew without a doubt that this was not what he wanted. She knew it deep down into her soul. He would be horrified. The thought of himself laid out defenseless and dependent at the mercy of cold strange hands would have appalled him. As it did her. And suddenly she knew why she had come. 5

As she looked at him, scared, uncertain, she saw with with a realization that his face had calmed. He was staring straight at her and he was aware. There was a life in his eyes she hadn't seen in him for quite some time. An acceptance. And he knew why she was there. They stared at each other for a silent moment in time. She could hear the beating of her own heart. The air hung leaden around them and she felt as though her own lungs were a vacuum sucking out her own ability to breathe. “Are you ready?” she asked quietly in an unsteady voice. He nodded once and lifted a pale thin hand out to her. In an instant all fear left her body. Gone was her guilt. Gone was her uncertainty. This man was choosing his moment. A quiet moment filled with a dignity only he could relate to. His pride was intact. He was not giving in to a random moment in which he had no control. He was going to make this call himself and she knew without a doubt that she could not, and would not, let him down. She could crash later but right now, he was asking for her help and she was going to give it to him. Whatever had passed between them though out the years was gone. The wrongs, the rights, the hurts and the joys. This was going to be his moment. And she wasn't going to rob him of it.6

She stepped into the room quietly. Resolutely, her eyes focused directly in his, she closed the door behind her, then moved forward to help ease him into that long goodnight.7