Dear Mr. You (17 page)

Like royalty you are held up there in a moment that doesn’t need anything but observance. You are here. Here for all of us to wonder at and dream for. It isn’t even love I feel looking at you, still dripping and swimming, but something higher.

I go to where they’ve laid you to measure and your father is there. He is standing over you to the side swaying a little, hands behind his back about a foot away. He is not touching you, not even reaching, and I see his eyes burrow back and deep. He knows this moment is escaping all of us and he is suspended inside it. In the hall before they let us in the delivery room, where we were standing just an hour ago, he’d said,

this is my fourth child, and this, this next bit here

then he made a gesture with his hand as though dividing everything on earth in half, as if to mean: this is what matters and this is chaos, and he said

this right now, this is the only time I am all here and no part of me needs time travel

Right now I see him standing over you, still not touching. I see him out of his time capsule and connected to the immediate and the Ever of you, which is all the gravity he needs.

Then he hands you to me, little owl. I have you. I hold all your new and your ancient. I carry you to your mother. She holds you. I sit. I watch that happen.

I came to you only partially conscious. Once I went into shock you were already saving me with your vast knowledge that I will never grasp. I’m confident I wouldn’t understand the most basic medical strategy if it were explained to me by Mr. Rogers.

I went to sleep feeling poorly and woke at two a.m. with a pressure on my left side so intense that I put my hand over my mouth to muffle a cry. I searched the Internet for “agony on the left side of the body” and read that you only needed to be alarmed when vomiting blood, and as if on cue I coughed up something too salty to be saliva. I went to the sink and what I expectorated was pale pink, which I thought qualified as only blood-y? I tried going back to bed but my mouth began filling with blood, and three more times in twenty minutes the color of what came up deepened from pink lemonade to beets. The children’s nanny answered her phone but I don’t remember much after that until she arrived. I was writhing while my son urged her to call 911 and my daughter
curled up in a terrified ball at the end of my bed. The paramedics arrived and when they came into the room, my kids stood up. My son put his arm around his sister. He tipped forward at the waist in my direction as though he were decorating the bow of a ship. He was craning toward me with all his might while she had crawled so far inside herself that her face would have seemed impassive if not for the set of her jaw. Her eyes patently demanded I not leave her,
don’t you dare, I won’t let you
they said, blinking fiercely. The imprint of them trying to look like their own ideas of dutiful children for my sake is the one I took with me. No matter how far I drifted I saw them there like that. When I pictured it in my head the image vibrated a little, like looking through a viewfinder.

As you know, I almost wasn’t here anymore. Do people feel grateful for almost dying? I felt oddly privileged, despite seeing everyone poised to go down another set of tracks while I was held forcibly behind.

For weeks I had felt unwell but the doctor said it was just a cold so I kept going. At night a terror would crawl across my neck and up my arms. There was a prescient thought so horrifying, a voice saying that I was not entirely safe. This voice was ghoulish, it made me nearly roll my eyes, but if I was alone or anywhere silence could tag me I’d begin to actually tremble. I worried. Ignored it. Pet the dog. Snuck a cigarette.

That one Saturday I seemed fine. I went upstairs and sat on my bed. I noticed that I was breathing quickly.

I took off my shoes, looked at the chair in the corner, and considered moving it. I shrugged in response to nothing.

There was a mirror across from where I sat and I saw my reflection, which I did not like. I didn’t look right. There was nothing to
recognize except the names for things: brown hair—check, black coat—check, haunted expression—check, but I couldn’t understand how my name went with that face staring back. I remembered buying the mirror, I saw myself years before in vintage boots, wandering an antiques fair in another country. Who was that? Why was I talking about peaches and champagne? Was that me in the memory or was this me, here, and why did I feel like both were doomed? I went cold inside. A rushing happened, but it eludes me how to describe the climate of your entire life’s experience catching up to you and presenting itself. I felt myself at nine years old. At thirteen and thirty-nine. At fifty. It all entered my body and I swayed, drunkenly, though I’d only had coffee. It happened on my inhalation, and I was simultaneously elated and petrified to let go my breath.

My head began to shake back and forth slowly in answer to the question I hadn’t realized I’d asked, which was
what if I died, I feel like I might

I turned away from the mirror, my head saying no to myself, shaking back and forth. That feels awful, so no. I looked over and saw my soundless refusal staring back in that mirror.

•  •  •

You don’t get to clean off your desk. You don’t get to say I prefer April. It can always be tomorrow morning. The severing is complete and cauterizes all autonomy with it, which yes, is obvious, but not fully grasped until you’ve heard the sound of machines and voices keeping you alive, and then imagined the absence of that sound, so unceremonious when it quits. When I woke up in the hospital where it nearly happened, I saw the room as it would have looked had I died in it. I lay there listening to the swill of oxygen tanks, the ensemble of alarms and beeps, and I imagined the
whole orchestration abruptly stopping and everyone in the room filing out. I saw the overlit hallway where my friends would have stood while you explained what happened. I knew the face of at least one of the men who would have put my body in a bag and zipped it up, and I could picture that bag being taken through the back doors of the hospital. My friend Nikki was wearing her blue T-shirt with the arrow on it when she dropped everything and left her children to go to the airport. I have an image of her returning home in the same T-shirt. In my mind every scene is dressed with the actual props and wardrobe, making it seem like I escaped something I was already in the midst of. The fantasy stops once I get to the point of my children being told that the last time they saw me was the last time they ever would. That image of them in the morning when I was taken away by ambulance, when they stood there so courageously, has to end with them in my bedroom.

Seeing it play out with an unhappy ending distills a life span to no more than the inexorable velocity demanded of working organs. What is it like in the room when they shut down? Is it like the hitting of a light switch, which is just an interruption of current? After you turn the switch, photons remain clinging to the walls for a disputable length of time after our brains tell us that it’s dark, and what if we hovered there like that, part of us painted on surfaces in an in-between state. This could be true if we are nothing more than the future beds for violets and moles. Where did I go when I went into shock and started speaking in gibberish? I felt myself convulsing and came out of it long enough to see my children’s nanny cover her mouth and cry. I strained to put my head up, saying, “Don’t worry, please, I always shake like this when I’m afraid.” I asked about this later but everyone in the room said
that I was not speaking English. Unintelligible sounds fell from my mouth.
Metabolic encephalopathy
is the medical term for it, but you were not there, is the phrase I kept hearing.

My friend lived next to the World Trade Center and I was on the phone with her while she saw people jumping, close enough to see the color of their socks. Her husband urged her to move away from the window. Why are you doing that to yourself, he asked. She said

Someone has to watch them

She felt to walk away was to shut them out and so she stayed, holding them with her eyes and talking to them. It makes me wonder when they actually died. Don’t we all wish they were dead before the asphalt rose to meet them with a force the human body should experience only in cartoons? That their hearts couldn’t sustain that force and they died only after a rapturous feeling of flight? Did they have an in-between, or, like a cartoon, did their anguish and unsaid good-byes hang in the air like a cloud, invisible to anyone who saw their broken bodies on the concrete and had to look away?

I felt a partially opened window somewhere that might pull me through and this was not an abstract thought. I heard ugly words that I knew were bad news. They fell from the lips of your nurses with implicit underscoring: septic shock, hypoxemia, cyanosis. At one point there were at least nine people in my room and everyone was moving so fast. I became somewhat conscious and was asked questions about “proxy,” and who to call “in case.” I kept asking why I couldn’t call someone myself? My phone is somewhere, I babbled. I had to sign permission for a procedure that could potentially puncture a lung. I heard the head nurse shout out “I’m doing this the old-fashioned way, don’t
talk to me about fever reduction, go get me fucking ice, I’m doing this myself.” More faces filed through. One of your fellows said, “You will feel this,” as he took a scalpel and sliced into my thigh to prepare a femoral cannulation. As he stitched me up I whispered, am I going to be okay? Speaking to himself more than me, he said

We are doing the best we can, I promise

Late the next day you came to my room. Everyone was required to wear masks and no one could touch me but a few of my friends were there. Yourself and a few colleagues were going to have a drink and celebrate that I’d made it. I saw my friend Nikki’s face fall when you said that. It just kept getting more real, how gone I almost was.

I moved my oxygen mask to the side for a second but you motioned for me to put it back. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Just a place down the street, it’s called Parish.”

I said, “Seriously? Could they not name it ‘Thrive’?”

My friend Adam said, “No, dummy, he said, ‘parish,’ like a church,” he turned to the doctor to make certain, “Right? With an ‘a’ not an ‘e’?”

“Yes, yes! Oh God, sorry,” you said, “definitely with an ‘a,’ not Perish!”

“Like clergy,” said Hunter, as Joan, the evening nurse, entered. “Look at this, pure gold, that’s what I’m talking about!” she said, holding up my catheter bag and giving a fist to the heavens.

“I mean, pure gold is definitely what comes to mind when I think of your urine,” said Adam, his voice muffled through his mask, “and don’t even start me on your sputum.”

I got to watch people trying to save a life. I felt mine pulled away and back in spurts of protest and compliance. From a completely different vantage point I got to measure a length of mortality against that infinite question mark. Best of all, there is a small but distinct category of negative thought that I abandoned somewhere when I realized I only had the strength to hold so much and something had to go. I can’t decide where existence lies or barely dangles, and Doctor, maybe you don’t know either, but I can tell you I am humbled by the second chance. I don’t know what death is, but I am one hundred percent clear on what it isn’t. It isn’t my daughter refusing to try on a pair of shoes while the salesman admonishes me for buying her the wrong insoles and then leaving the store furious as my daughter says, “I want you to know I support you one hundred percent. Can today be the day I start on coffee?” It also isn’t the dog digging a pack of gum out of my purse and chewing it, then peeing on the gum wrappers and crawling in my lap, making me forget to hate her. It isn’t having the door handle to my office break off in my hand when I realize my only keys are in there and then remembering that, oh yeah, these are luxurious problems. It isn’t having too much to do and wanting to scream and it isn’t screaming. It might be poetry, but it isn’t sitting and hearing it read by my son, it isn’t him giving a standing ovation for the actor with the smallest part or my daughter confessing that she lied and then doing a cartwheel. It isn’t getting a whole email in ESL from my niece and not caring that it’s politically incorrect because I laugh so hard while reading it that I actually cry tears. It isn’t
Antiques Roadshow
after sex for the sixth time while the sheets threaten to disintegrate. It isn’t me listening to my children breathe at night and that being enough to
want my heart to keep pumping blood. That one, mine, was not the only heart you saved. Sure they may have used the loss of their mother to fuel them in life toward a greater purpose. Or maybe it would have been so damaging that they’d never fully come back. Thanks to you I don’t have to watch either of those scenarios play out while perched on a cloud fighting with God to let me intercede, or spend eternity aching to at least become the quivering sunbeam that lands on them one morning when they roll out of bed aged twenty-five.

As my friend Father Bob says, medicine can be more art than science. I believe the best doctors are a particular category of artist, with the creator’s instinct to throw something on a canvas and start expanding, which must come down to divinity and the ability to judge what would bleed well into what.

It was too scary for me to face, my body giving me warnings of being so screamingly temporary. I wonder how often we are being nudged but we turn away. We find a place to jettison all of it, or hand it to someone and say, here, please organize this for me, I can’t stand it. It would be eerie if those warnings lingered somewhere, the sound of them:
Run home, Don’t answer the door, Walk away from him now
—What if that lasted?

If only I knew what “last” meant. “There is no now,” my father would say, banging his cane on the floor on the word
now
. “As soon as you say the word, it’s already in the past. When is it? There isn’t one.”