z Last Moments
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AT THE END Jacqueline Doyle
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n the final weeks she lay propped on a stack of pillows, her hospital bed in the dining room now. They’d stopped the chemo, and her hair was growing back, a smooth silvery cap, grayer than it had been before. Her face was gaunt, her skin like parchment, her frame skeletal. She drowsed in and out of a morphine slumber, as visitors came and went. When silence yawned she would suddenly blurt out, “Talk.” And more insistently, again, “Talk,” her voice highpitched and urgent. It was hard for us to know what to talk about, the handful of close friends who stopped by when we could to sit quietly at her bedside. Nothing seemed important in the face of death. The room was still with waiting. Outside you could hear the thwack of tennis balls, the exuberant cries of children on the courts as summer waned, and fall and the beginning of school loomed. Leaves rustled in the warm wind,
filtering the sunlight in lacy patterns on the lawn that wavered and shifted with each breeze. The world outside was sunny and green, but the light that seeped through the slats of the closed, white wooden blinds was shadowy and pale. One afternoon, the two of us alone, she asked me to read from a book I’d brought. “Any book, I just want to hear your voice.” So I read some feminist theory on women’s autobiography, a dense, jargon-laden text that seemed ludicrously beside the point, at the end of a woman’s life. When I stopped reading, her eyes fluttered open and she laughed, the first time I’d heard her laugh in a while. “That was a mouthful,” she said. She couldn’t eat, but when we brought in meals for ourselves she wanted to smell them. “You’d be surprised at the pleasure you can derive from smelling food,” she told us, and I still think about
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Stubborn to the End Bruce Douglas Reeves
that every time I smell dinner cooking. Ordinary food and digestion, desultory talk and comfortable silences, the pleasures of even an aging body and days not darkened by pain — it’s hard now to take any of them for granted. She talked less and less in the last days. Her attention seemed to shrink inward, and to be concentrated not on the larger mysteries of life and death, but the mundane workings of the body as it shut down, organ by organ. “Pee pee,” she cried in horror, sitting straight up in bed, clapping her hands to her face, her skeletal arms like hinges, her mouth an O. Perhaps her soul had already departed, leaving her entirely preoccupied with her failing body. Maybe our talk had been her last tendril of connection to the world she was departing, as she wavered on the threshold of darkness and silence, at the end.
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ne foggy morning, as Roberta entered her grumpy seventies, her Filipina cleaning woman pushed open the heavy, handcrafted door of her hillside cottage and stumbled over her bulky body. 911. Paramedics. Trip careening down the hill to the nearest E.R. Alcohol poisoning, the doctors finally announced. Alcohol? Roberta a secret drunk? That stubborn, independent woman who always lived alone? Even after weeks in hospital and rehab, it was clear that Roberta’s body was failing her — maybe her brain, too. Then the doctors hit her with another bit of news: Parkinson’s Disease, as well. The next three years became a carousel ride of weeks at home, falls, broken bones, infections, complications, hospital stays, rehab, back home, more falls, more injuries, worse complications. Family and friends rallied round, but, stubborn as
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ever, she clung to the belief that someday she’d be well again and able to live alone on her hill. Facts always were important to Roberta. Her career as a scientist was based on facts, finding them, interpreting them, using them. When she became ill, however, she moved into a new, subjective world, one in which her mind invented facts, facts that could slip and slide and change. The scientist Roberta wouldn’t have approved. Then came bouts of confusion and hallucinations. Breathing grew difficult. Cirrhosis of the liver, congestive heart failure. Temper tantrums. Accusations. More falls. A broken shoulder. Pain. Pneumonia, stomach bleeding. Low blood pressure. Failing kidneys, dialysis. A ventilator to breathe. At last, reluctantly, her younger sister had her put on comfort care. The carousel was broken. Loretta, her beloved older sister, far away, began the long journey back across continents and oceans to say goodbye.
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The hospital removed the feeding tube. Stopped medication. Gave her morphine. The question was whether or not to put her back on a ventilator. The view from her hospital room was toward the hill where she'd lived since childhood, but she’d never see it again. No more afternoon teas with friends. No more gazing across the deck to the terraced garden and views beyond. No more pleas to manage her own life. Her younger sister and friends visited, talking to her, holding her hand, letting her know they were there. “She won’t go until Loretta is here,” we told each other. “Not her. She’s too damn stubborn.” She was known for unshakeable opinions, for demanding perfection, for refusing to compromise. Even now, her handsome, ravaged face told us that she wouldn’t give in until she was damn good and ready. Straight from the airport, after traveling thousands
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of miles, Loretta came into the hospital room and clutched Roberta’s bruised, swollen hand, talking to her, telling her that she was there. This was all Roberta needed. At last, she could stop fighting. Her damaged body relaxed, trembled, and yielded. Three years after first collapsing, this stubborn woman entered the world of memory. Memories may not be solid or unchangeable, but they endure.