After I slowly settled myself and Chan into the front seat of the Land Rover, he said to me in a voice becoming less and less intelligible, “Make sure we buy gum on the way.”
He was looking forward to going, to the ritual of driving down through the mountains, going out for meals, and having a whole day of undivided attention from me. As the car jolted and bumped its way down the rough road from our house toward the village, I worried that Chan would hurt from all the bouncing. He looked up at me and asked, deep concern showing in his eyes, “Are you comfortable, Mama?” He had been spending so much time on my lap in the last weeks that he had gotten into the habit of always checking to see if I was comfortable.
By seven a.m. we were in front of Tong’s house. The van Dtaw had arranged to meet us was waiting with doors open. The usual neighbors were there, adults trying tactfully not to stare and children openly doing so as I lifted Chan’s emaciated body wrapped in the sleeping bag carefully down from the Land Rover. Chan was in pain, but patient. Before I lifted him into the van, I called Tahn over and made sure that he had a chance to kiss Chan goodbye and tell him he loved him. Tahn did as I asked, but it took awhile for him to understand that I wanted him to say those three words.
Once in the van, we settled into the seat behind the driver, Dtaw on my left, Chan on my lap with his head resting on Dtaw’s shoulder, and Cody behind us. Chan soon fell asleep, and I tried to make sure he was well covered in the cold morning air without putting any pressure on his swollen foot. Cody was helpful and cheerful all the way to the city despite throwing up in a plastic bag as we neared the hospital. Chan mostly slept.
When we arrived at the hospital, there was more indecision about whether to go in the emergency entrance so he could have a stretcher and therefore be moved as little as possible, or whether to go in a wheelchair in the front entrance so I could protect him from bumps. In the end, I decided he’d be safer in my lap in the wheelchair. We were met by the doctor who was familiar with Chan’s case, and given a private room.
The same nurse who had had the difficult job of trying to find a vein that night Chan got poked ten times was on duty and she inserted the needle to take his blood count. Chan didn’t seem to register the pain of the poke, making me realize how far he was beginning to slip from his normal state. We asked the doctor about Chan’s toe and he offered protein, but thought we’d need to do a venesection to administer it. We declined.
We decided to put him on the gurney instead of my lap so we could elevate his painful toe. When we moved him, he moaned but then returned to sleep. We propped his foot up on two fat pillows and covered him with the sleeping bag. Chan continued to sleep while we waited for the results of the CBC. He woke several times and asked for water or to pee. Speaking had become a struggle, and the words came out in long high-pitched moans through straight lips so that we had to strain to understand. But he still seemed aware of what was going on.
By now we had to yell for Chan to hear us. When we did, he would open his eyes wide and seemed to understand. His face had become oddly thinner, drawn, and an unfamiliar crease gashed his face to the right of his mouth.
After a while, an attendant wheeled the gurney up to the fifth floor and led us to room 503. He was kind enough to leave Chan on the gurney rather than risk more pain by moving him onto the bed. Chan spent the day mostly sleeping quietly. I stayed by his head, stroking his hair, there when he woke up to reassure him. I sat beside him, straining to make contact with him when he opened his eyes, to let him know I was right there. An oddly quiet state descended on me while he slept. I began to see in my mind the light of the deep cosmos filled with countless stars, a place that felt inconceivably distant, yet so vast it would be all-encompassing. I spoke to Chan with all the calm conviction I’d ever had as I sat with him. “You are going to be okay, sweetie. The universe is a good place. Wherever you are going, you will be okay.”
Mei Ya and three of Dtaw’s brothers all came to see Chan, spending a few hours with us. He was aware that they were there and opened his eyes wide, looking wildly about him, to take in each of them, one by one, while they shouted their words of reassurance to him that he would get well. It must have been their way of saying goodbye.
While Dtaw sat with Chan, I took a long hot shower. Cody watched a Harry Potter movie out on the balcony on the laptop. I didn’t press him to come in. I imagined all this was too hard for him to witness. Now I wish I hadn’t left him alone while Chan was leaving us.
In the afternoon, Dtaw took Cody out for lunch. I stayed close to Chan as he slept. He lay in the bed, only barely conscious. When Dtaw and Cody returned, I wanted to wash Chan’s hair. Dtaw brought washcloths and a basin of warm water from the bathroom to bathe him and lifted his head as I washed our child’s hair. Chan only woke up to moan a few times as I poured the silky water over his head, glad to have it clean.
By the time all the blood had dripped into his body and he had on clean clothes and Dtaw’s family had gone back home, it had gotten dark and cool outside. The doctor agreed that he could be taken home. Cody helped me gather our things as we waited for the attendant to roll Chan’s gurney back downstairs and out the glass doors to where the minivan was waiting, engine running. In the cool night air of the hospital driveway, I leaned down and lifted Chan into my arms, stepping into the van and sliding onto the backseat, mindful as always of his swollen and painful feet. As far away as he seemed to be now from the pain that had tormented him for so long, I still did not want to risk hurting him.
I settled us into place and Chan’s eyes opened. His jaws, now tightened by the strange change in his muscle-to-brain connection, worked and his mouth moved. His eyes rolled as he tried to speak. Only unintelligible sounds issued from his lips as he grew more and more urgent, trying to tell me something.
“What is it, honey? What do you want?” I kept asking, pained that I couldn’t answer to his needs. “Are you uncomfortable? Are you hungry? Do you need some water?” With each question, I searched his face. He seemed to say no. He waved his stiff arms with their strangely bent fingers, trying hard to communicate. Exasperated, desperate, I asked Cody beside me and Dtaw in the front, “What does he want? Help me understand.” Each of them sat silent, unable to answer.
And then I felt the familiar warmth of a baby on my lap as wetness soaked through my jeans. He had been trying to tell me he had to pee. He didn’t want to wet my clothes. I was relieved that was all it was, though I ached at how he worried about inconveniencing me in that moment. We found a towel, slipped off his wet shorts, and dried him off before starting for the mountain.
He drifted back to sleep or the distant place he’d been as we drove through the dark. I held him close. Cody leaning against me as he and Dtaw slept. The driver and I sat awake and silent. Three hours later, we reached Tong’s house where the Land Rover was parked. Every window in the village was dark. Climbing out into the cool night, holding Chan, I saw him wake and look around. He seemed content, knowing where he was. With Dtaw at the wheel, the Land Rover rumbled up the rutted road home. Chan lay in my arms, awake and calm.
He’d always loved that old Land Rover. He would speak up in its defense whenever I complained about the lack of shock absorbers or the way its ancient engine guzzled gas. That night he knew I was holding him in my lap as we bounced along under the starry sky, the cold night air refreshing us after the long ride in the van.
Once I stepped onto the ground beside our cabin, I felt alone again. I carried Chan inside and laid him down in the middle of the mattress. Looking at my boy, I was afraid. The sight of his skin stretched taut over his skull, muscles around his mouth locked tight as his eyes opened wide, frantically searching for logic when he was moved and in too much pain—it was all too much for me to bear. I thought, Who is this? This is not my child. Where is Chan? I didn’t recognize this creature, reminiscent of a zombie in a horror movie. It was only a simple loss of motor control, but I didn’t know that then. Not being able to understand what he w
as saying when he was making high-pitched moans and gesturing with a cramped and flattened fist was too much for me.
I sat with him briefly till he seemed to sleep. Then I hurried out the door and down the steps to the open ground behind our cabin. I ran, feet pounding the hard dust, shouting at the sky, railing at the heavens, until I could run no more. Then I leaned over under the darkness and retched. I expelled the fumes of the hospital. I purged the terror and unknowing that had gripped me all day. I looked up at the star-spattered sky and yelled into the night, “I can’t stand this! Take him! Take him tonight! I cannot stand this torture!” I crouched in the dirt, holding my head between my knees, and sobbed.
I walked with heavy limbs to the bench behind our hut and let the tears run down my cheeks as I peered up into the sky. Even shy Cam was moved to sit down next to me and put an awkward hand on my shoulder, offering words intended to comfort. In a rare moment of emotional honesty, I turned and practically yelled at this dear man, “Have you looked at our son? Just look at him! I can’t even understand him when he speaks!” Cam sat quietly, absorbing my fear, my panic. After some time, when I seemed to have calmed, he stood up and went to say good night to Chan.
I still sensed the air of the hospital in my clothes and on my skin. I still felt the fear of watching Chan shrink into himself throughout the day. I waited, letting the breeze that blew up from the valley carry it all away until I was able to go back to my child. He was sleeping peacefully, and I lay down in my usual spot, between him and Cody, also sleeping, kissed them both good night, and immediately fell asleep.
At one thirty in the morning, Dtaw woke me up and told me to look at Chan. He was breathing slowly, with some effort, open-mouthed and gurgling slightly. As I turned him on his side to alleviate the gurgle, I spoke to Dtaw: “Do you understand what’s happening?”
“Yes. I understand.”
Chan’s breathing seemed unchanged by turning him, so we lifted his head and shoulders from the pillow, holding him between us, our arms around him. And as we watched, ready, yet never ready, he pulled in and pushed out those final raspy breaths, until he was still and quiet and his skin finally shook out his soul for good.
I looked across our son to his father. “Chan has died,” I told him.
* * *
We didn’t cry right away. We were calm as we held him between us and kissed him goodbye. I turned to gently shake Cody awake.
“Cody, honey, wake up. Chan has died.” I found myself tempted to say, I think Chan has died. I had to force myself to state the fact.
Cody woke up right away and started to cry. “Now I won’t have anyone to play ‘guys’ with,” he wailed. “Chan was so fun to play with.” I encouraged him to kiss and hug Chan goodbye. I went outside to squat in the dry grass of the rice field lying fallow outside our house, wetting the thirsty soil with my pee. The moon sat fat and orange and huge like half a grapefruit, its curved bottom almost touching the southeast horizon. I thought to myself, Every time I see a moon like this, I will remember this night. But I knew even then every time I did a lot of things, I would remember this night.
Back inside our tiny candlelit bedroom, I found Dtaw leaning over Chan’s face and howling quietly with grief. Cody and I sat by him, hands resting lightly on his back, and then we all cried, stopping to talk about what we would miss and then crying some more.
Fifteen minutes after Chan’s death, Dtaw drove the Land Rover down to the village to get Tahn and to let Cam and Tong know. Soon they returned with their youngest son, Tao, all crying and crowding into the tiny bedroom to say goodbye. Our friends from the village, the other men my children addressed as Paw, Father, came up and waited outside by the fire through the night. When it was their turn, they came in too, brushing away the tears that ran stubborn down their cheeks, leaning over to speak to Chan, to wish him well on his journey, touch his head, and say goodbye.
Three-year-old Tahn wasn’t crying at all. He continued to smile and tried to work out in his own giggly way the difference between death and sleep. “If I step on his legs, now will it hurt?”
After months of being shielded by me and Dtaw and Cody from Tahn’s exuberance, Chan was finally safe from injury. Tahn sensed this change and kept asking me about it, smiling impishly yet also wanting to understand. I explained that Chan was dead and even if Tahn stepped on him or kicked him, on purpose or by mistake, it wouldn’t hurt. Satisfied, Tahn ran outside to enjoy the rare pleasure of playing with Tao in the midnight dark. He spent the rest of the night coming and going between the fire outside and the room full of grieving family and cooling brother.
Departure
In the weeks before, I had envisioned a simple funeral at the forest temple on the mountain where a devout monk lived in solitude. I imagined a solemn and simple ceremony culminating in Chan’s cremation over an open pyre. But I soon found out we’d be heading back to my husband’s hometown to be with his family and friends. It really didn’t matter to me. I was content to do what would be right for Dtaw and his family.
I felt no urge to hurry and pack our things for the funeral. I just wanted to sit with my boy, knowing I would never have another chance to be with him like this. The early morning passed with more silence and weeping. And finally, just before dawn, all four of us crawled under the puffy blue sleeping bag that had warmed Chan these last few months. On either side of him, curved into each other, arms wrapped around one another, around him, we turned to him, as we had so often, and gazed at his beautiful face, wishing him well on his journey. Thinking and sometimes speaking of the immensity of our love for him, of the funny things he’d done, of our grief at losing him and our gratitude for his coming to us at all. “I hope when I die, I can join his herd,” Cody said.
Dtaw’s brother Giat and Uncle Shoon had arrived before dawn in two pickup trucks. After sunrise, it was time to pack, and with Cody and Tong’s help we gathered our things and the men carried them to the truck. When everything was ready, Chan lay alone in the middle of the room, wrapped in the cream-colored flannel sheets a friend from Seattle had given me when we left there, nine months before. Only his head showed. Throughout the night, I had been pulling up his shirt periodically to listen again for his heartbeat, wondering if he might be in a coma rather than dead. As his extremities cooled, the rest of him stayed warm so that I wasn’t sure he was dead, but when I waved his helpful uncle away and picked up Chan’s long thin body in my arms to carry him into the morning light, my doubts that he might not be dead vanished. This weight in my arms was a corpse, stiff-legged and sallow-faced. His spirit was gone.
I walked down the narrow wooden steps of our house worrying, for the last time, that I would trip and fall with him, but at last knowing I wouldn’t hurt him if I did. Instead of heading for the waiting truck, I called to Cody and turned down the dirt track to the horses’ pasture. Cody and I talked as we walked. “Why do they always stand by the fence?” he asked. We came to where the five animals stood at the edge of the pasture nearest the house.
“Maybe they just like to be with us, so they are waiting for us,” I answered.
I held Chan’s head toward the animals, pushing him in close enough for the horses’ noses to touch him. They did not hesitate. They came and gently opened their nostrils to his head and hair, breathing him in, as they had done so many times before. I looked at the mother’s eyes, wide open and staring straight at me as she never had before, and I told her Chan was gone, but as I spoke, I knew I didn’t have to. She looked at me as a mother who understood. When we turned away and trudged back up the hill, I looked down at my baby’s sweet face, now appearing more and more dead, and let the sadness well up and the howls issue forth to the gray morning and the emptiness of land and sky. A small part of me stood outside of myself, amazed at the sound, but the rest of me expelled my grief to the universe.
I marveled at the sounds that seemed to issue from the depths of my soul as I carried that small corpse away from the horses and our home. Strangely, thos
e animal cries seemed akin to the roars I’d made when I was birthing Cody, a primal voice, the first time signifying creative power, this time its inverse, yet born from the same deepest part of myself.
* * *
For once I did not feel impatience over the long car ride home. Content to sit and hold my child across my lap for the last time, I was in no hurry for the trip to end. I stroked Chan’s hair and held Dtaw’s arm when he cried. When we got closer to town, we pulled out the phone and Dtaw called his brothers and oldest friends. With each phone call, he broke down and could hardly make himself understood. I was so relieved that Dtaw was able to cry.
I insisted on stopping at the hospital. I wanted to be certain Chan was dead and not in a coma.
“Stop here,” I told Uncle Shoon when we reached the emergency room door. I did not want to walk through the big glass doors and waiting room of the main lobby. Dtaw lifted Chan’s head and shoulders off my lap so I could climb out from the backseat. Together we managed to pass Chan behind the driver’s seat tilted forward, and out the only door on the side of the truck. I carried him into the emergency room. Dtaw and Cody walked beside us. The private hospital was still new and too expensive for this part of the country, so, as usual, the room was empty.
A nurse greeted me with a wide smile that weakened suddenly at the sight of us. She picked up the phone and called for the doctor before she showed me into the same empty room we had come to the day before. I stood in the middle of the room, holding Chan, feeling the strangeness of the floor flat beneath me. No tufts of grass, no hard humps of dirt. The doctor stepped into the room and as soon as he saw Chan, he turned to me, asking, “What would you like me to do?” in a voice gentler than I’d heard him use before.
“I want you to examine him. I want to be sure he is dead.”
Now You See the Sky Page 18