Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  This time, though, Dtaw was also angry that he had allowed Cam to keep them there overnight against Dtaw’s request. Cam had protested that it was too much work to bring them back and forth, so Dtaw had relented. Cody, after going to see the horses, told me that Dap’s upper lip was hanging down loose over his teeth, and he didn’t seem well. I imagined he suffered some brain damage from lack of oxygen during his ordeal, but I was no vet, and I had enough to worry about without adding Dap’s life expectancy to my list.

  Soup

  The next morning I thought Chan might be drawing his last breaths. After he woke up, he waited for me to finish cooking the rice so I could go up and get him for breakfast. I did so, carefully pulling the sleeves over his swollen and tender hands and the turtleneck over his sore ears and nose. I went outside to shoo the horses away from the bathwater jar they liked to drink from, and by the time I went back in the hut to carry him down to the kitchen, he had fallen asleep.

  I quietly left him and ducked my head as I passed through the small door of the dark kitchen to make rice soup. Taking down the chipped enamel plate that held the bones and head of the small grilled fish Cody had eaten for dinner, I slid them into the dented aluminum pot half filled with rainwater. Tahn and Cody had already headed off to Tong’s house shortly before dawn to catch their favorite Sunday-morning cartoons. I only let them go because I wanted Chan to be able to sleep longer after his long night of discomfort when he didn’t give in to morphine till well past midnight. He was sure it wasn’t pain that was keeping him awake but something else. I didn’t like giving him morphine for anxiety, but I didn’t know what else to do. Early in the morning he woke for a few minutes and said, “I’m glad I took the morphine. It really helped me sleep.”

  While I was savoring the quiet pleasure of cooking and eating my soup without distraction from the other boys, Chan’s voice, faint with fatigue, called for me, letting me know he was ready to get up. By the time I got up the four steps to our room, he had fallen asleep again. I returned to my soup, sprinkling fried garlic the color of gold over the steaming surface. He called for me again. This time when I looked through the small doorway, he was barely awake. His eyes flickered at me, seemed to recognize me, and fell shut again. His breaths were long and labored. I pulled down the collar of his red turtleneck to look for a pulse below the swollen glands. I consoled myself that my other boys’ breathing sounded that way when they had nasal congestion, as Chan did. I sat with him, holding his slender hand, reassuring him I was nearby, wondering if Dtaw should phone down to the village to have Cam race up on the motorcycle with Cody and Tahn so they could be here before Chan died. After I sat with him and watched him a little longer, his breath steadied, he slept peacefully, and I decided I could go back downstairs.

  The next time he woke up, he said he wanted to go to the kitchen. I offered the hammock which was sunnier. Tears streamed down as he said, “No! I said the kitchen. I hate it when you keep offering me things!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  So I set up the bedding on the worn wooden floorboards of the small windowless room that was our kitchen. He surprised me by choosing to sit up and then proceeded to drink a cup of apple vegetable juice with protein powder, some crackers made of crispy sticky rice, one tangerine, and half a jicama. Do dying people have such an appetite? I wondered. He cried and slept and cried and slept all morning. While he slept, I worried about his dying, so rather than doing outdoor chores, I sat near him and made applesauce by the warm fire.

  Dtaw’s brother had sent us a whole box of apples, big and red, from China. I shuddered to think what kind of chemicals they had been treated with. I soaked three of them, bobbing together stem up, a floating chubby triangle in the large stainless steel bowl. Apples in the tropics are rarely crunchy, and these were no exception. Being just shy of mealy, however, made the motion of slicing sections off with my small sharp knife satisfying. Each time I was left with an irregular polygon outline around the core, which was up to me to nibble into the normal shape of apple remains. I filled the pot, shiny silver on the inside, smoke-blackened on the outside, with rainwater, halfway to the level of the apples, settled it carefully over the orange glowing coals, and waited.

  Chan sat, his neck jutting out, pushing his head strangely forward, as if it was too heavy to hold up. It looked to me as if he had gone from child to old man in the space of only one night. He seemed only half awake and answered questions half-heartedly.

  In the evening when I had some time with him, I tried to get through to him. He sat in my lap, stubbornly avoiding my gaze, unwilling to let me in enough to cry as I knew he would once he opened to my presence. I told him how I loved him, how amazing he was, how I was sure he’d get well, how everything was going to be okay.

  No dice, just eyes rolling up into his head or away from my gaze. I stood up at the foot of the hammock, looking at him with what was (apparently) a loving gaze. That brought some reaction and I moved in close again.

  “Are you worried about something?”

  Barely perceptible nod of head as eyes rolled upward.

  “Are you worried about being sick?”

  Same answer.

  “Are you worried you’re never going to get well?”

  Same answer.

  I paused, considering, before diving in with the next question. “Are you worried you’ll die?”

  He too paused and then gave a very small, but definite shake of his head, not in denial, but slowly and thoughtfully.

  I moved along: “You’ll get well, honey, everything will be okay.”

  When I finally stopped and was quiet for a few minutes, he said very quietly, “And I worry that you’re going to . . . going to die.” And at last the tears flowed. “I don’t want to be a grown-up!”

  “Because then I’ll die?”

  He nodded. “I would just miss you so much. I just really love you.”

  Those wide brown eyes turned on me, the love and fear of losing what he loved flowing out of them with the tears. I reassured him that I wasn’t going anywhere, that I didn’t have any enemies and there were no murderers in the village.

  “Except tigers,” he said. “But you might get a disease.”

  “Oh, but honey, I’ve learned so much from you about how to fight disease and never give up that I’m not even worried about getting sick or getting cancer. I’ll just do what I learned from you.”

  He was still scared. I told him that no matter what happens, when two people love each other, even death can’t separate them; that when I die, I’ll still be with him, a part of him. As I talked so bravely and philosophically about death and grief, the tears were streaming down my own face.

  What was it that made him so fearful then? Did he pick up my constant fear about our separation? Whenever I brought up the subject of his death, it seemed like it wasn’t an issue he was considering. He really just seemed to think the worst thing that could happen would be that he’d have cancer for the rest of his very long life. When I asked him one other time if he ever thought about dying, he replied immediately, “Yeah. It would be cool to be a cheetah or some animal in my next life if I didn’t get hunted.”

  Near

  In the morning while Chan napped, I rushed, as I always did, to creep quietly away from him to pull my laptop from its bag, settle myself into a nest of cotton quilts, and begin the exhalation of typing. Writing. Without it, I would not have survived, I think. I had to purge the fears, the pain, the moments that otherwise were too much for me, pouring all of it out through my fingertips into the keyboard, releasing regularly what was otherwise too much to bear.

  The sun had climbed high enough in the sky to warm my legs folded beneath me as I sat on the porch typing. Dap munched contentedly on the long grass next to the garbage pit. I had to glance up now and then to make sure he didn’t start on the young vegetables Dtaw and Tong had planted near the water jars. He was not the same horse he had been before the fall. He wandered separate from his friends, close t
o the house to drink water from the bath jar.

  Chan woke and called to me. I went in to find him still lying down in the darkened bedroom, his thinning hair wet with sweat and his lips nearly white dry, teeth clotted with coagulated blood. I thought this blood was from his cracked lips the way it was so dry and scabby, but the Bangkok nutritionist I’d called days before for advice reminded me that people with leukemia bleed from the gums.

  I was beginning, finally, to understand why talking about death with Chan, or even in relation to Chan, was such a completely abhorrent and alien concept in the culture where we were. I realized that if we lived where there was no doctor and no one to tell me what illness my child was living through, I would simply do my very best to take care of him, giving him all the most effective remedies I knew about, giving him love and encouragement and doing all I could to heal him. I wouldn’t think, Oh, he might die, so why bother. Death wouldn’t even be something I would give much thought to until it happened. I would just fight and fight and fight until I could fight no more.

  I think in the West, we have grown up knowing only when doctors’ predictions about cancer come true. It is part of our cultural language to equate cancer with death. We read books about it. We join support groups. We do things we’ve put off for too long. We mend broken relationships. There’s a whole world of how to handle terminal illness because for so long we have had doctors who have been predicting the outcome of our illnesses and most often been right. In Thailand, however, this word cancer is new. Doctors have not had long to prove themselves right, and often are still highly mistrusted. The cultural way of handling disease has not yet caught up to the realities of Western medicine.

  Once I understood this reluctance to speak of death with Chan as something that came not from fear, but instead from a rational view of how to care for a patient, I was much more amenable to the traditional village approach. Yes, I told myself, I will continue to fight for Chan. I will continue to feed him healing foods and herbs and vitamins. I will continue to talk to him about his future. There was no reason to give up. I would still fight. He might get well or he might die, I thought. How could it ever be sensible to say, Okay, honey, I have now surmised from the way you look or the fact that you nap too much or that your lips are too dry that you will soon die, and there is no point in hoping for anything else? Given the cultural context, that would be ludicrous. I finally began to see why I got such blank looks from Tong when I told her I thought Chan was about to die. How ridiculous that I should presume to know such a thing. No one can predict the future. We just do the best we can with what we have right now.

  As I typed, away from the duties of caring for Chan, the heaviness in my limbs, the ache in my shoulders and back from bending, tending, lifting, spoke to me of my own fatigue. I noticed the relief I felt in Chan’s new quiet passivity as he napped more. Guilt quickly followed. I felt grateful when I thought that his death might be slow and gentle rather than violent and painful, and guilty that I was enjoying having more time to write, more time to tidy up, more time to myself. I was able to do more than only listen to Chan scream and cry. It upset me that I seemed to be in such a hurry for him to die neatly and quietly.

  I had noticed the day before that Chan’s abdomen was covered with tiny purple petechiae. I was tempted to hide them from Dtaw, worrying that he’d want to put Chan through the ordeal of going to Bangkok to a hated hospital to get platelets. I was so wedded to this idea of a nice simple quiet death, no hospitals, no traffic, no cities. It seemed wrong, like I didn’t even want to help Chan if it was going to make things more complicated. I knew I tended to be hard on myself, so I decided to try to look at this in a way other than the obsessive control-oriented mother wanting her child to hurry up and die so she could get her life back in order.

  At that point the fear felt worse than the current reality, maybe because the torture is in the fact that it might not happen, that you might get to watch your child grow up and have a girlfriend and be really good at sports and use his brilliant brain and be a dad and love to build things. The torture is keeping hope for all of that alive, but knowing you probably won’t get it. Death seemed easier, final, over. There would be no room for hope. I could just sink into utter grief and despair. No more needing to figure anything out. I could just give up and be a total victim of the misery of life. Holding the possibility and hope for a long and loving life with the child I was so close to and the possibility and fear of his death in one heart at the same time was just too hard, and I’d been doing it for so long.

  It was hard because . . . I don’t know. Isn’t that the whole basis of suffering? Desire and aversion? Chan was tortured by how much he loved me and feared losing me. Is this the crux of our existence? Fear of losing what we love? I tried so hard to learn something from this puzzle, something to lift me above the tangle of it all, but I kept coming up feeling blank and stupid, my brain refusing to move, the cogs stuck. Maybe there is no philosophical escape, I thought. Maybe it is just plain sad and hard and the only way over is through. It might be okay to be very sad here, I told myself. My thoughts, transforming into printed words before my eyes, instructed me so that I could allow myself the blessed relief of tears.

  I listened to Chan snoring quietly, nose congested. For days he’d been blowing chunks of bloody snot out of his nose into endless rolls of toilet paper, using a long sheet for only a few dabs of blood. I saw it as his body slowly coming apart from the inside. Dtaw and Chan persisted in calling these bits of him toxins, Chan questioningly, Dtaw with certainty. When Chan’s poop revealed what looked to me like a piece of his intestine, white and pink and slimy, Dtaw pronounced it a toxin.

  I wondered if it was weird that the sicker Chan got, the more I felt compelled to write it all down. I had some reasons. I wanted to hold on to every second while Chan was still alive. I knew from experience that I would forget so much. Already, I had almost entirely forgotten his infancy and toddlerhood, so if he disappeared forever, I was afraid all my memories would fade quickly as well. I wanted to remember what an amazing human being he was and what a close relationship we had, how much we loved each other.

  Another reason was that I was sure that when he did die, I would be unable to write. I was afraid the grief would be so crushing that I would not be able to sit down and sort it out the way I did then, fingers tapping the keys almost as fast as my thoughts spoke themselves into nothingness inside me. And finally, writing gave me some distance from all of it. Whether it pushed the experience toward the world of fiction, removing me from its center, or whether it just let me stand back a bit, allowing me to breathe outside of it, or whether it let me package it all up neatly and tightly into words and paper so that I could contain and control this uncontainable, uncontrollable piece of life, I don’t know. But whatever the reason, it helped to keep me sane, so I wrote whenever I could find the time. I thought maybe someday, someone else could benefit from my thoughts—but then, I couldn’t see how. I thought, It’s enough for me to benefit.

  Chan slept on his side facing me as always, his thin legs bent and resting on a large soft pillow. His swollen hands sought out my arm or chest or face, any piece of me to touch as he slept.

  He woke often, needing water for his parched mouth, needing to pee, but most often to be sure I was turned toward him. Once around midnight, after we had turned off the flashlight and settled down again to sleep, he reached out to stroke my head and looked at me with his big eyes and whispered, his voice soft and breaking, “I just love you so much, Mom. I would just miss you so much if you died. I’m so glad you’re my mom. We’ll be together forever. We’ll die together, right?”

  “Of course we will,” I said. I figured when he was taking his last breaths I’d be able to ask his permission to live on to take care of the other boys. “We’ll always be together, honey. When we’re older than Mei Tu (great-grandmother), we’ll die together, okay?”

  “Okay. I just love you so much. I’m so glad you let me cry. I’m
glad you’re not a Thai mom, because then you wouldn’t let me cry.”

  I pointed out that some Thai moms let their kids cry and many American moms don’t.

  Then he said, “I love you more than the earth.”

  “I love you too, honey. I’m so lucky to have you.”

  “I’m lucky to have you,” Chan continued in this terribly grave and almost awed tone, like he just couldn’t fathom how much he loved me and how terrified he was of losing me. At last he finished with, “I love nature too. I love all the animals.”

  Too Much

  A cool breeze ruffled Chan’s silky brown hair. I marveled at how soft and sweet-smelling it was, though it had been weeks that the pain had kept us from washing it. I brought a bowl of cold spring water with two fresh washcloths and his toothbrush up to the bedroom where he had been confined by his pain for several days, then carefully wiped the tender skin stretched over his thin bones. The pelvic bones surprised me most, how large and shallow their oblong disks appeared under his skin.

  He asked me to hurry as he was getting cold, so I quickly put the sleeping bag back over him, then slowly brushed his teeth, noting that his gums weren’t bleeding much, only enough to make the foam he spit into the small metal bowl a little pink.

  Wearing a fresh T-shirt, one with a wide collar to fit over his sore ears and nose, he asked for oatmeal. I cooked it, worrying that, as often happened, by the time I brought it back to him, he would be fast asleep, but he was wide awake and waiting. To my amazement, he finished nearly the whole big portion I served him, with plenty of brown sugar that I added since Dtaw was not here to forbid it and because I knew it would help more of the oatmeal go down. Full, he said he would nap and then eat some fish and rice and boiled eggs afterward. For the last week or so, he hadn’t woken up to eat breakfast until around noon.