eyes, he carried himself in a manner that recalled to life, to my mind, in turns, the majestic, powerful figures of Auguste Rodin's Burghers of Calais, or Jacques Louis David's Socrates, or even, once or twice, the great and tragic Robert E. Lee. His expositions were at times both profound and extraordinary. He waxed philosophical. He articulated his position with a physician or nurse. He recited poetry, his verse too learned, too voluminous, too seamlessly aligned and addressed to the moment and his predicament, for my pen to recall in later, quieter hours. His arguments were undoubted declarations, punctuated by timely anecdote, his protests, expounding thunder. Humor, attitude, shouts of pain all seemed like the convergence of accumulated life forces, a conversion into some mystical, powerful symphony. This music is the man; here a gesture, here a viola. There a loud shout, there a thunderous bass drum. The flash of the eye, the violin; the smile, the chorus.
Hours later, perhaps twelve, he found himself able to return to his bed for rest. Fearless is the word that comes to mind, as I think of his conduct throughout his, this, ordeal.
At one point, after he'd returned to bed, on the phone and heavily sedated, he declared to his brother, with expressive power and firm authority; "But we haven't mastered the eloquence of goodbyes, Buddy! It's important!'
Dad and I talked of many things; suicide.
"I think it's an acceptable act," he said to me. "It's even funny, like a big joke."
He spoke of fear.
"Your mother was on 18th Street. I was over on Taylor and Paulina"
"I have had nightmares about this for years...still do. I would think, in my mind, maybe I would take Ashland around."
"Around what? A bad neighborhood?" I asked. I had always thought that mom and dad's generation was made tough, so very tough, because all the neighborhoods were bad when they were growing up, in the 1940's and 1950's.
"Yeah. It was a bad neighborhood." The morphine would throw shadows across his eyes, his face, his recollections. I could see this clearly; invisible clouds drifting across his mind.
"A terrible neighborhood. Nobody wanted to go through it. I would sometimes have to go through it, though...and there was always this guy, this walker. I could see that he was crazy. The first time I saw him, I was at an intersection, a light. He was walking across the street, and, right in front of my car, he stopped, turned and looked at me. He pulled out a gun. He fired a few rounds around my car."
He paused, maybe to further examine his memory.
"Your mother and her friend had to go through that neighborhood once. They got caught. Your mother's friend was raped at knife point."
"What?"
"Yeah. Trina, I think her name was. He jumped out with the knife and tried to attack your mother. She fought back. Finally, Trina volunteered, saved your mother. Your mother had to watch." Heavy silence descended into the gloomy light of that room.
"I was always afraid of that neighborhood. I always wanted to figure out a way around it."
He looked at me. His eyes were searching. He was somewhere in his head, wandering the fields of his mind, returning to neighborhoods long since razed and built over.
"That's what we do," he said. "We are looking for a way around it; we are all trying to figure out a way to cheat death. No one has yet figured out how, though."
In that darkening room, in the silence of that moment, he, in his hospital gown and PJ's, seemed to me to be some great jurist, or philosopher, a great force of some kind, the likes of which this world rarely sees. He seemed not at all to be wounded, or in pain. Contrary; he seemed right then to be the possessor of the cure, the source of the strength itself.
Then his mood, his thoughts turned, lightened, and he said, with a joyous energy, "C'mon! Let's go stretch our legs!"
We took a walk down the hospital's halls, all the way to the other end of the building. From the east wing to the west wing. I commented to dad that we must seem like Virgil and Dante, as we walked down those halls, as he greeted and smiled magnanimously at all who passed him and stared or returned the hail hello. He inquired about the hospital barbershop. The barber, to his mind, was the man to talk to, the keeper of all the neighborhood information. And he inquired as to where he could get a cup of coffee.
When we drew close to the other end of the building, and approached a lonely corridor, dad having completely forgotten his pain, we encountered one of dad's surgeons, coming through a double door. The surgeon was genuinely astonished and happy to see dad on his feet and so far from his room, and offered up a happy look of wonder. Dad smiled. The surgeon was clearly taken aback by dad's autonomy, and, I'm sure, entered the encounter into future conversations with his peers.
Last night, Sunday, I spent five hours with dad. He spent that whole time lying on his back, comfortable and almost pain free, casually flipping through the TV stations with his remote. He looked like he was healing. He looked twenty years younger. I thought about the long nine months of pain he'd suffered through.
"How long has it been since you've been able to lie on your back for any length of time?"
"Months," he said. "Months. I can put up with a lot."
Dad and I really liked Minna, his nurse for the past three days.
She was a black-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed Indian woman with a kind, intelligent face. I could see compassion in Minna's every action, and hear it in her voice. She seemed to exude it, and it seemed to be her sole motivation.
Dad was smitten by her instantly, and was bold enough to say so.
"If I had a million dollars, would you be my personal nurse?" He asked, his hopeful flirtation sending smiles around his bed.
Gracefully, she moved through the room, living beauty coming from within and manifestly cloaked in scrubs. She checked charts, read numbers, adjusted rates, refilled canisters, took vitals. Her eyes were focused on what she was doing, yet she was engaged and responsive. She was the epitome of The Good Nurse. She smiled at dad.
"Sure. Okay." she said, her rich voice flavored with a light accent. "But I would have to bring my husband and my kids!"
Another time, late in the evening, when the day had died down,and it was very, very quiet on the wing, Minna was taking dad's vitals when a woman's voice erupted in a loud, shattered wail; loud, guttural, distant, close. Minna jumped, startled.
"What was that?" She said, her voice full of concern. She turned and ran from the room, towards the wailing soul.
By and by she came back to us, the grief of the wailing soul upon her, surrounding her, trailing her, informing her, it's soft persistence met perfectly by her quiet resistance.
Who knows?
Van Gogh's words echo down to me, the words he wrote to his brother Theo, describing what the Postes meant to him, even as he painted Joseph Roulin, the Postman, one of his few friends.
Who knows? Who knows what today may bring? Or even tomorrow? Who knows how anything will go?
During a moment of pain-free lucidity, dad was engaged in conversation with a little short-haired, salt-and-peppered, slightly mannish looking woman, one of his doctors.
"I'm sure you're looking forward to having the surgery and the relief of the pain?" she said.
"Let me tell you about a time, when I was young, and a friend of mine said 'let me take you to get a sandwich'. We drove, and as we drove, this guy described this sandwich as the best goddamned sandwich that I will ever eat. And you know what? He was right! It was the best goddamned sandwich that I ever ate! You know why? Anticipation. Anticipation is everything. Am I looking forward to the surgery? No, I'm not, because I know it will be painful. But yes, I am looking forward to the relief".
Jack Kerouac says it as well as anyone ever will, up there on a YouTube cloud: feeling good and still in his prime, delivering his insights, his heart, while reading from his work with his soft and lovely and warmly considerate East-Coast cadence, the cadence of a true poet, the cadence of life itself, as Steve Allen sends Jazz riffs up from his piano, up into the air, up, like wispy rings of smoke;
"... Nobody, nobody knows what's gonna happen to anybody..."
May 10th, 2010;
Sitting in a hall, waiting in a chair next to the nurses' station, on the seventh floor of this hospital, watching my dad, who is lying on a hospital gurney in some minor pain, some fifty feet away, awaiting someone to take him to surgery, he looks just like an abandoned, forgotten patient. We don't talk, we just wait, he over there, me, over here. After a while, he is rolled away to the operating room, or the OR. I am directed to a waiting room.
8:30: on the monitor:
8:01: 10477: Pt in OR
Pt in OR - Means your family member has been taken from the surgicenter to the Operating Room for their procedure/surgery.
8:45; Pt in OR:
Up on the TV, Oprah and Will I Am just paid off a few very fortunate homeowner's mortgages.
This is a dreadful wait.
It is 8:30 AM now. Dad's number, 10477, has been taken off the surgery monitor. In a flash of concern, I inquire at the front desk as to why this happened. After all, the surgery, I was told, should go for three or four hours.
10:25: 8:01 : Pt in OR
Still in surgery.
Went for a soda and a toothpick.
10:33: Pt in RR
--your family member is in The Recovery Room. You may visit the Recovery Room when invited by Clerical or Nursing Staff.
A 3-4 hour surgery, done in 2 hours, 30 minutes?
My mistake. Pt in RR 11:12
which makes his time 3 hours, 11 mins..
They now say that he