Half Empty (21 page)

Turning things around, I asked him what his feelings were about our ending things. “I’m incredibly angry,” he responded fondly. “How dare you? You should at least have to come and have coffee with me once a week.” I asked if he felt this way about most of his patients. “Not really,” he responded.

(Sigh. Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness—a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair—then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,”
even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one…
well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.)

At the end of our last session, I stood up to leave and put out my hand. “No way,” he said, and pulled me into an embrace. In our ten years of acquaintance, it was the first and only time we ever touched. Bills, breath mints, money had all passed between
us in hermetic and sanitary noncontact. I was shocked to find that he was shorter than me.

There is that archetypal moment in a women’s film, where a title card reading “Three Years Later” comes up and then you see the protagonists—a little wiser, with incipient crow’s feet, their hair a little duller perhaps, their clothes most definitely better—meeting across a table at ‘21’ or the Biltmore Room where they bring each other up to date on all that’s happened in the intervening time since all of their dreams came true (or did they?). I wrote and dedicated a book to Del, and mailed him a copy, but I had already heard through the grapevine that a virulent and aggressive colon cancer had forced him to close up his practice, seemingly within a matter of a few short weeks. He was very moved, but he begged my indulgence; he had little energy or focus for reading. He was already in hospice care at Beth Israel, although he sounded positively cheery on the phone. He would love a visit. I asked if I could bring anything and without hesitation he asked for two Budweisers, a Big Mac, large fries, and a Diet Pepsi. His last hurrah. I was reminded of the only true fight we ever had.

He had once asked if he could eat during a session. I didn’t care. I saw him at the end of the day, he didn’t have a moment to himself. Del’s supper was a Tupperware container of unhulled grains and some dark, leafy greens. If a Joan Baez song could be food, this was it; a sad and earnest cloacal scouring pad of a meal. This was around 1991, a period during which I was spending a good amount of my time shuttling back and forth among New York’s AIDS wards visiting sick friends. I made numerous shopping trips to the Integral Yoga store on Thirteenth Street
where I would root around in the bins of grimy vegetables for exactly these ingredients for one friend who was piebald purple with Kaposi’s lesions. I asked Del if everything was all right with his health.

He didn’t mind that I would ask such a question, but he took issue with the way I asked it. I thought I had invested my voice with a calm assurance and a let’s-not-worry-until-there’s-something-to-worry-about unflappability. To his ears, I had sounded clipped, harsh, and unforgiving. I had always appreciated my own oncologist’s English stoicism and distaste for sowing false hopes (a man who, when at the age of twenty-two I asked him if my impending chemotherapy would have side effects, responded with a bright-eyed, “Oh yes. It’s profoundly nauseating. You’ll be vomiting within half an hour”), or my erstwhile New York GP whose bedside manner was borderline-actionable and hilarious. A man who would say during every rectal exam, “Bet this takes you back.”

As I recall, Del and I reached a chilly détente, each acknowledging the other’s different verbal style, but neither of us giving an inch.

McDonald’s bag in hand (I would have brought him a Cuban hustler if he had asked me), I arrived at Del’s room on a sweltering summer day. He was on the phone. More metastases than man, tipping the scale at ninety pounds maximum, he was sitting up in bed, his underpants gaping around the tops of his emaciated legs. I’d stopped being shocked by that change in appearance. Perhaps years of having seen friends diminish to skeletal shadows of themselves inured me. Or perhaps it had more to do with the very odd nature of our bond.

“Hi, David,” he said, handing me the phone to return to its cradle (those words always had an avuncular, almost regretful falling intonation). “You look good,” he said, appraising me.
“Actually, I take that back. You look fine but there’s a slight reserve, a kind of sadness there.” I gave him a
No shit, Sherlock
look, which made him laugh. I poured his Diet Pepsi into a small cup and stirred it to get the bubbles out. He slowly unwrapped the hamburger, took a tiny bite, chewed it for a few seconds and then discreetly spat it out into a napkin. His interest in the food was gestural at best. He could no longer digest solids. His systems were breaking down. He was to be fitted with a PIC line later that day, a port that bypasses the smaller veins and lets the pain meds go more directly into his system. All of these were signs that he was “getting closer,” as he put it. “And I have to deal with that emotionally,” he said.

For the next three hours, I fell into my preferred hospital-room function of bustling around, picking things up, replacing the ice in the pitcher, delivering the cookies I made in his behalf to the nurses’ station, deadheading the flowers. He catnapped and we talked. He expressed some mild regret—what can only have been the merest tip of a ship-splintering iceberg—that he hadn’t traveled more. “California! I went there and thought, ‘This is marvelous! One really needs a month here to explore this place properly.’ ” He had desperately wanted to go to Italy, but delayed two critical weeks until he was too sick. “But I saw Tibet,” he said. (This was all a surprise. As a resentful twentysomething, filled with rage, I had constructed an angry fantasy of this man getting rich off of my dollars, financing country houses and numerous trips abroad with moneyed abandon, while I scraped together my pennies so that weekly I might enjoy the dubious privilege of dredging up feelings I’d rather have kept tamped down.)

Later in the afternoon, I don’t recall how it came up—I certainly didn’t ask—he mentioned as how he was planning on being cremated. “A friend of mine knows a place in Florida where
Krishnamurti might have once been, so I’m going to have some of my ashes scattered there.” As for the rest of him, the implication was that whatever was left over after this Panhandle Hegira didn’t really concern him.

Where Krishnamurti
might
have been? There was something so utterly bleak about this disposal, being cast into an apathetic wind in a place whose significance was little more than a matter of conjecture. The relinquishing of craving and thereby achieving detachment is perhaps the noblest of the Four Noble Truths, I know, but I wanted nothing more than to take him in my arms and moor him to the here and now. This all felt like some obstinate standing on principle on his part, the spiteful child taking leave of a world that he felt had cared about him insufficiently. Del would have said I was projecting (as would anyone, frankly). I didn’t know anything about his life to justify this conclusion, but I wished that I could turn to those closest to him and say, “Talk some sense into him. Tell him how much we love him.” That I might have told him as much myself only occurs to me now.

A nurse came to check his diminishing vitals, along with someone from his temple who was going to say some prayers. They drew the curtains around him and I stepped out into the hallway.

Searching through literature on therapists’ deaths and its effect on their patients, I came up with scant material. One analyst, in introducing his article on the subject, wrote, “A few heroic analysts have described their work in the face of life-threatening illness. However, there are only limited descriptions of these illnesses and deaths from the patient’s point of view. Experiences of less heroic colleagues are almost unavailable.” That he
would characterize as less than heroic the tending to one’s own impending death—whether by having one’s days filled with the projectile expulsion of vomit, bile, or God knows what else until one is an empty sac of lifeless meat, or the pre-morbid twilight of a pain-masking morphine drip or a PIC line, or by simply having the narcissistic, cowardly gall to buy the farm by sailing through a windshield and scrambling one’s brains on the pavement, with nary a thought given to one’s patients—was precisely what I found so troubling when people said, “That must be very intense for you,” when I told them that Del was dying. It was. I suppose. It is always intense to lose someone, and Del was an unbelievably good egg. His being under fifty-five seemed doubly unjust, and he had quite literally saved my life, to boot. But given my decade’s worth of egocentric monologue, would I be grieving a man or the imminent demise of a reliquary of my deepest pains, most artful observations, and wittiest bon mots? Was I mourning the cancellation of the David Show (“Who’s going to represent
me
?”)? I didn’t feel entitled to that particular hue of despond.

Outside of Del’s hospital room, I listened to the low chanting of sutras. There was a framed copy of the New York State Patients’ Bill of Rights posted on the wall. It was written in English and Spanish, and also Yiddish. Rosetta-stoning with the English translation at the top, I read through the text. In about five years’ time, I thought, this version would no longer be relevant, even at a place like Beth Israel. An era was passing.

After about thirty minutes, Del’s friend came out to tell me he had fallen asleep. I went home. I would not see him again.

A day or two later, the following dream just before waking: a phone call from Del. “Hi, David. I’m much better, and in fact we’re to meet for dinner at seven just around the corner. The head of oncology will be there, too.” And suddenly there he is,
only now he is a small boy, no older than six, fresh from a bath, his black hair wet and combed (between Del and myself, only one of us has dark hair and it isn’t Del). Wearing light blue pajamas, he climbs onto my lap. “Look,” he whispers, unbuttoning the jacket. The pale skin of his chest is marred by something, a tattoo, or a wound, or a scarification. Whichever it is, it is clear this injury is a devotional mark. Incised for my benefit, it is a bruise of allegiance that would be carried forever.

Vanity, thy name is Matt. I think. (I had dubbed him “the Sleeping Statue” early on, for the beauty of his sculpted form and his perpetually heavy eyelids that made it look like the perfume of his own perfection had drugged him. After the day he said hello, I renamed him “Garbo Talks.”) His very presence in the gym was a rebuke. With my mid-forties looming and the corpus an unsightly ruin of a thing, I went each morning and, in grotesque imitation of the Sleeping Statue, lifted my weights while I stood wobbling on a half ball like a poodle in a dog act.

The effect was almost immediate. Within days of the new regimen, my left thumb and forefinger started to tingle and go numb, a feeling I could dial up or down just by turning my head. Mere days after that, the tingling and numbness graduated to a pretty constant pain. I had pinched a nerve in my neck. I could almost see it: a protuberance poking out from between my disks, a tiny balloon twisted tight into a tense and angry bubble. The more I exercised and stretched, the worse it got. Gone were my dreams of aesthetic payoff and now I was just looking for relief. For the better part of eight months, I jolted out of sleep every night between 2:00 and 3:00, woken abruptly as if someone had poured gasoline over my left arm and lit a match. Running my hand under cold water helped a little, but only for the time I stood at the sink. What scant sleep I got was a matter of
rocking back and forth on the couch until dawn, when exhaustion finally gave me an hour or two. I became useless with my circadian rhythms shot. The only upside was when I traveled to Australia for two weeks and experienced not a moment’s jet lag.

“There’s bad wind in the arm,” said the acupuncturist. “You should take a hot bath.” I have no tub in my apartment and at that point, it was a little bit like being asked where on my gunshot wound would I like my Barbie Band-Aid. I had tried everything, and none of it provided any relief beyond the duration of its administration. The physiotherapy; the electrical stimulation, involving sticky pads and a dial that could administer effervescent mild shock waves; the X-ray-guided cortisone shots directly into my neck; an expensive massage; the Eastern medicine … all of them, while okay in the moment, hadn’t worked. The physio doctor, out of options, in an effort to see what, if anything, was in there that was causing so much pain, scheduled an MRI, a claustrophobia-inducing procedure that I had managed to avoid my whole life.

At eight years old, in the Canadian Rockies and faced with the prospect of an enclosed gondola that traveled up to the summit of a mountain, I wept in fear, as I was often wont to do, even as I understood myself to be in surroundings of unconscionable majesty and loveliness; magnificent peaks rising through the pine-scented air, with adorable, nut brown chipmunks scampering about. After what must have been a trying interval of patient parental psyching up, I finally marshaled myself and got on. In the snack bar at the top, tears all dried, my father made me a medal in one of those machines that presses letters into a metal disk—part sheriff’s star, part one of those plastic cogs one used to put over the central post in a turntable to play a 45.
DAVE
THE BRAVE
it read. Everything about it was counterfeit, from the rhyming slogan’s required shortening of my name into the falsely masculine Dave, to the lightness of the cheap, soft aluminum, too easily impressed—more thumbprint cookie than Vulcan-struck ingot. It could have been a mirthless joke, given the surface falsehood of the inscription, but it turned out to be a counterphobic talisman. If something was frightening, the fear itself was reason enough to do it.