The Hummingbird (11 page)

CHAPTER 8

THE PROFESSOR SLEPT THE MORNING AWAY.
I opened my laptop and sat in the kitchen trying to reduce the backlog of paperwork. Between them, Medicare and Central Office never met a form they didn’t like. Meanwhile, he dozed and murmured and barely moved.

It has always struck me as unfair: Just as a person nears death and wants to make the absolute most of every moment, his capacity to stay awake dwindles. The span of consciousness shrinks to fewer hours each day, then one hour, then minutes, then individual breaths, and then it is over.

And yet, that reduction also sharpens appreciation of each detail. I remember Horatio, a muscular Italian immigrant who worked most of his life in a coastal town marina pumping gas and selling supplies in the chandlery. In fact, he was the person who taught me what a chandlery was. Horatio had end-stage leukemia, beyond cure though he still went to the hospital once a week for platelet infusions. One bright October afternoon when the air smelled like nostalgia, I was helping him get settled at home after an infusion session. His wife pulled me aside to say the doctor had told them Horatio would not live till Christmas. But their daughter and only grandchild were flying up from San Diego for the holiday week. They had purchased nonrefundable tickets and were too broke to buy new ones.

I went to work, emailing Horatio’s friends, contacting airlines, tapping the agency’s wish budget. In two days we had tickets for the daughter and granddaughter to fly up for Thanksgiving instead.

Horatio thanked me with tears in his eyes. I told him I hadn’t done anything but let people take care of him, and they’d been happy to do it.

“Don’t you understand?” he said, fists pressed to his chest. “I will get to hug my beautiful Maddie one more time. Do you know how fantastic the hug of a six-year-old girl is? I may never let her go.”

Life, Horatio taught me, life is the hug of a six-year-old girl: precious and sweet and all too fleeting.

WHEN I LIFTED MY HEAD
from the online administrivia and saw that it was nearly noon, I went in to check on Barclay Reed once again.

He was lying in stillness. He blinked at me and did not speak. I came to the bedside and stood a moment, respecting his silence.

“Is there anything you need?” I asked him at last.

“Ten more years?”

“If I could, I would.”

“Bah.” The Professor took a deep, noisy breath. “They would be too tiring anyway. Might there be any fruit in the house?”

“I’ll be right back.”

In the fridge I found strawberries Melissa had left. They must have been the first of the season—large, unblemished, and, since it was June in Oregon, probably imported from the southern hemisphere. I washed and hulled them and left them in a colander. In the cabinet on a high shelf I spotted a stoneware bowl that I could tell was handmade. I reached up for it because sometimes bringing a household object out of obscurity is pleasing to a patient.

But then, a wonderful coincidence. On the bottom, the bowl’s maker had painted a hummingbird. It was not detailed, like the carved one on my desk. This bird was an exercise in skillful restraint, a few deft brush strokes: wing, wing, body, beak.

I poured the berries in, and the contrast of red fruit and gritty stoneware made me want to take a photograph. Instead I brought the berries to the Professor, who raised the head of his bed as I set the fruit in his lap.

He recoiled, then lifted the bowl. “Where did you find this?”

“Top shelf in the cabinet.”

“I have not seen it in years.”

“I like it. The roughness of the pottery, you know?”

Barclay Reed scrutinized the bowl, turning it in a full circle before holding it back toward me. “Please use a different one.”

“Really?”

“I’m asking you.”

“All right.” I hurried to the kitchen and returned with the berries in a plain white bowl. He took it without comment.

“Care to explain?”

The Professor picked up a berry and sighed. “The stoneware in this house was made by a member of my family who is no longer alive.”

I left a pause for him to elaborate, but there was nothing more. “I have a plate in my kitchen,” I said. “Fine blue china, handed down from my great-grandmother. I keep it on a high shelf where no one can bump it or break it. Is this bowl like that for you?”

He did not reply. Barclay Reed wore a strange expression though, possibly wistful, but it was hard to know for sure. Instead, he examined the berry with considerable care and put it in his mouth.

“Amazing,” he said, chewing with his eyes half-closed. “Exquisite.”

A little red juice ran out the corner of his mouth. He wiped it back with a finger, then reached down for another berry.

I lowered myself into the bedside chair and watched him work his way through the bowl. We remained in silence except for his chewing, Barclay Reed immersed in a tide of taste and sensations, while in my head I gave myself the lecture I eventually have to administer every time, no matter what my relationship with the patient is, or what the person’s illness is, or what else is going on in my life. It happens with every patient, without fail.

The lecture goes like this: Accept. Accept. Do not deny that this person is weakening. Accept.

WHEN I RETURNED
from putting the empty bowl in the sink, the Professor was rubbing his hands together.

“Nurse Birch,” he harrumphed. “Are we still planning to plan? Or might we leap impetuously into the planning itself?”

“Yes.” I reached into my briefcase. “I have some papers with me—”

“Let me guess.” He placed a straight finger against his lips. “Trip to Paris? Escape to Rio? Or no. Are you more the Niagara Falls type?”

“This is called advance care planning.” I flattened the pages on my knee. “It’s a way of making sure—”

“I know what it does, Nurse Birch. It protects your agency from legal culpability if anything goes wrong in my dying.”

“Of making sure that your wishes for your health care are memorialized—”

“An offensive choice of verb, I might interject.”

“So your caregivers can obey those wishes, should you not be able to speak.”

“But I—” He caught himself. “‘Should I not be able to speak,’ you say?”

I gave a small nod.

He made a tent with his fingertips. “And why must we ‘memorialize’ these instructions, pray tell?”

“To put you in charge, Professor.”

He spoke in a voice dripping with condescension. “If there is one singular thing that I might clarify for you at this moment, Nurse Birch, so that we share a common understanding, it is that I am most decidedly
not
in charge. Indeed, having slept till nearly noon today, an achievement I last attained as an adolescent of seventeen, I submit that at present, cancer is driving this bus. Quite happily, you might say.”

“I am not talking about today.”

“You think I will have more control later? Are you that severely delusional?”

I folded my hands in my lap.

“What?” he said. “What could be upsetting our dear Florence Nightingale?”

“I would like to request, please, permission to speak five consecutive sentences without being interrupted, and without my premise being challenged, so I can explain this exercise.”

“Oh ho, ‘exercise’ is it?” He began pumping his arms up and down as though lifting imaginary barbells. “One two, hup hup.”

“Professor Reed, please.”

He paused, his arms still raised. “Nurse Birch, are you not amused?”

“This is serious.”

“I have known a lifetime of seriousness. Seventy-eight years of it.”

“But all this banter—”

“Banter keeps the brain pink and fluffy.” He lowered his hands. “Please don’t spoil my fun. My pleasures are few enough now.”

“Imagine if, instead of cancer, you had heart disease. And for some reason, down the road, your heart was to stop beating.”

“There is simply no turning you aside today, is there?”

I held up an open hand. “Five sentences, Professor. Five.”

He sighed, puffing his cheeks. “Fine.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Do your worst.”

“If that happened, the standard of care is for me to call 9-1-1, and the EMTs come. They might inject you with adrenaline, or shock you, or perform CPR so intensely your ribs break. By the way, it’s not like on TV. Less than two percent of people with cardiac arrest who receive CPR ever recover. But an ambulance would rush you to a hospital, where the process would continue, and could include opening your chest and cracking wide your ribs for direct manual stimulation of the heart.”

“I know more about that process than you might expect.” He pulled his head back in revulsion. “Perfectly bestial. How many sentences was that?”

“I lost count. But there is a less automatic alternative. You can execute a document—”

“Once again with a morbid verb.”

“You can
sign
a document that says you don’t want that level of intervention, specifies what you do want, or puts someone in charge of making those decisions if you can’t.”

“Let us put a fine point on it, Nurse Birch, shall we? In the interests of my not falling back to sleep from sheer boredom? If I prevented the entire sequence, the 9-1-1 call, et cetera, what would occur?”

“Your heart would remain unbeating.”

“I would die.”

“If your heart has stopped, a person could reasonably argue that you are already dead.”

“Touché.” He digested this information. “Proceed.”

“Medical professionals are trained to prolong life, often without regard to its quality. An advance directive lets you be as specific as you want: yes to chemotherapy, no to advanced life support, yes to donating your organs, no to cracking your chest. Or you can take a simpler route, a power of attorney, where you designate someone to make medical decisions on your behalf.”

The Professor frowned. He stirred his basket of remotes but did not choose one. He surveyed the room, seeming to linger on the upper corners. “Would you please read to me from
The Sword
now? We’ve left the bomb fire burning, and I want to know what happens.”

“Can we at least complete the power of attorney? And revisit the rest of this another day?”

“I’d rather not.”

“I have a blank form right here.” I raised the page in front of him. “Very simple. All it requires is for you to designate someone, and sign. Then I’ll be the primary witness, and when Melissa—”

“Heretofore, Nurse Birch, I had not considered you a stupid person.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Insensitive, yes, as you persist in this line of inquiry despite my obvious reluctance.”

“For your own good, Professor. So that your preferences—”

“But stupid? I had not contemplated that possibility before now.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Why do you have to insult me? I’m only trying to help you.”

“Who do you see around here that I might designate?”

That shut me up.

But he continued, arms wide and voice rising. “Do you observe a long line of visitors? Children and grandchildren gathered from far and wide? Multitudes of former colleagues assembled to hear my valedictory? Wear marks on the rugs from the constant adoring traffic?”

“All I intended—”

“Nurse Birch.” He was shouting now. “Do you honestly believe I would resort to concluding my life in the presence of a stranger if I possessed any other alternative?”

Ouch. The room had rung with his voice, and now it froze with his silence.

I bowed my head. “I am sorry.”

“Stupid is an incorrect word. I amend myself. Cruel would be more accurate.”

“I have no defense to make.”

“Please leave me alone.”

“I understand.” I tried to look him in the eye, but he turned his face away.

“Leave the blasted document with me.”

I placed it on the bed beside his hand. “I am sorry, Professor.”

“Yes, well.” He kept his gaze averted.

I left him, tail between my legs.

IN THE KITCHEN
my hands needed some kind of task. I washed the two bowls and set them in the drying rack. The living room was next, but I paused beside the gong and admitted that nothing in there needed doing. I checked my watch. It was nearly a lost day. He had slept all morning, the afternoon was passing, and I had not even shaved and dressed him. We all have times when life intervenes and we get little done. But when our days are numbered, it feels like a kind of thievery. If there is ever a chapter of life with no time to waste, it is the last one.

I wiped the kitchen counters. I logged on to email. I ambled out onto the deck. It was full June, a glorious day, clusters of color in the gardens, rhododendrons rainbowing on the far shore. The lake was empty, no sailors or motorboats, perhaps too cool yet for swimmers. A breeze out in the middle stirred the surface and hurried away.

No. I would not let him lose a day completely. There were too few left.

His wheelchair sat collapsed in the hallway, and I unfolded it while rolling it into the room ahead of me.

The Professor raised his eyebrows but did not speak.