The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  In the future, which is to say after I emerge from this coma and leave this hospital and return to my life, I will still occasionally indulge this scenario, though what I’ll wonder is whether I actually ever got out of this bed. I’ll wonder if it’s possible that I never recovered from the ordeal of late October 2010 but instead slipped from a medically induced coma into a real coma and remained there for years. From there, the life I would have lived will reside solely in my mind. All that’s happened since then—all the meals and holidays and arguments in the car, all the boxes packed and unpacked, all the people and pets buried and cremated, all the revolutions of the warming earth around the unblinking sun—will be nothing more than vivid, interminable dreams. Meanwhile, my family will endure a living hell in which there is no legal avenue for removing my feeding tube or otherwise hastening my death.

  Weeks from now, my husband will tell me that the outcome he feared most was that I would wake up and be severely impaired. He feared that I wouldn’t be the same person. He will tell me that when the doctors told him there was a chance I’d need years of cognitive rehabilitation and, even then, there were no guarantees, he thought that as much as he didn’t want me to die that if the worst-case scenario came true it was perhaps better if I did. I will find this all very disturbing but also be in complete agreement. The worst-case scenario would not have been dying. It would have been remaining partially alive.

  This period of grim prognosis lasts approximately forty-eight hours. During this time, a friend is charged with the task of getting regular updates from my husband and e-mailing those updates to all of my other friends. The names of these friends have been culled largely from the address book on my cell phone, which contains not just close associates but also people I haven’t spoken with in years or, in some cases, people I barely know but whose contact information happens to be in my phone. The result is that everyone from my best friend to my college roommate to a Pilates trainer I worked with exactly once is receiving e-mails about my platelet count. Some are replying. Some are sending flowers and food and calling my husband incessantly. Some are showing up at the hospital even though they can’t enter the intensive care unit and forcing my husband to come out and deal with them. Some are preparing themselves for news that I have died. Some are thinking it can’t possibly be as serious as these updates are suggesting.

  Some are praying, even some you wouldn’t expect it from. A dear friend who’s a conservative evangelical Christian has got her husband and her kids and her Bible study group and most of her church begging Jesus to heal me. But there are others, too. Secularists in Brooklyn apartments and Florida condos and midcentury-modern houses in hip Los Angeles neighborhoods are holding their heads in their hands and murmuring. They say they’re praying for me but chances are they’re really praying for themselves. They’re praying that whatever is happening to me never happens to them or anyone they share a bed with or tuck into bed at night. Which is exactly what I’d be praying for in their situation.

  Some are concocting strange fantasies about caring for me. One will admit later that she imagined feeding me with a spoon and rubbing my back while teaching me how to say “cat” and “dog.” My best friend, who for years has joked about someday writing a memoir called “Dead Meghan” so as to join the esteemed ranks of female writers spilling the secrets of writer best friends who die prematurely, tries to cheer up my husband by saying she hasn’t started the book yet.

  “I’m optimistic for her recovery,” she says. “Otherwise I’d be on page ten by now.”

  My husband thinks this is funny. Apparently, he actually laughs. I have married the right man. I have married a man who has followed every step of my clinical course and engaged with medical personnel on a sometimes excruciatingly detailed level and yet still laughed at this joke. Also, I have a best friend who is capable of uncommon humor and deep humanity. In the past I have forgotten this from time to time but when I wake up I will know it more than I’ve ever known it. When I wake up I will tell myself I’ll never forget it again, though of course I will.

  October 30, 2010

  6:00 a.m.

  Patient still intubated/sedated.

  CFS consistent with a viral process or partially bacterial process (probably less likely).

  Neck supple again, the nuchal rigidity of last p.m. is much better, scattered purpura on dorsal of hands, feet warmer and better perfused.

  A few months from now I will visit my evangelist Christian friend and her husband will pull me aside and tell me how great it is to see me and how worried they were when I was sick.

  “You had a lot of people praying for you,” he’ll say.

  “I know,” I’ll say. “And I really appreciate it.”

  “I mean, a lot of people,” he’ll say.

  “Yes. It was great. Really nice.”

  “I’m just wondering,” he’ll say, “if it’s changed the way you think about things. If you’ve given any more thought to faith and the power of prayer.”

  I will be caught so off guard that I’ll say something not only insufficient but ridiculously out of character. I will say that a lot of people were praying who didn’t necessarily do so regularly and that there must have been a lot of “healing energy” going on. I will feel like a total ingrate. To these friends, my failure to become a follower of Jesus—to even show a sliver of interest in Jesus—in the wake of my miraculous survival must be the ultimate slap in the face. It’s as if I commissioned them for a job and then refused to pay even when they delivered excellent service ahead of schedule.

  Other people will ask me what it’s like to nearly die. Is there a light? Did I feel the presence of divine or otherworldy love? Did I make a conscious decision to “fight back and live?” I won’t know what to say to that, either. The only thing I’ll be able to say is that it was like nothing. In this particular situation at least, dying would have been like falling off a log. Actually, it wouldn’t even have been that dramatic. It would have been like flipping a light switch when your eyes are already closed. It would have merely been a matter of going from unconsciousness to nonexistence. For years afterward, that will be the thing that scares me most: that I could have just as easily slipped that way as this. “If anyone asks, tell them dying is hard,” my mother said to me in her last weeks. For me, at least in late October 2010, dying would have been a piece of cake.

  October 31, 2010

  9:02 a.m.

  Attempted to wake patient up, sedation at minimum, patient moves around but does not follow commands.

  11:00 a.m.

  Off propofol since 9 a.m. Patient moving extremities but not responding to verbal stimulation.

  Later I will find out the neurologist is yelling, “Wake up!” directly in front of my face and I am not responding. This is of particular concern because meningoencephalitis can cause deafness. My husband will tell me that they’re getting out my iPod and putting the buds in my ears and blasting Joni Mitchell (as if Joni is the kind of artist you can “blast”) and still not getting a reaction. I will find this both highly disturbing and strangely mortifying.

  November 1, 2010

  4:30 a.m.

  Patient agitated, eyes open, not fully conscious.

  Patient appears to have made positive progress, fever reducing.

  9:01 a.m.

  Awake, follows commands.

  11:20 a.m.

  Follows commands, sort of oriented, knows name.

  When asked what year it is states “2011.”

  Knows she’s in hospital but cannot name which one.

  When prompted “Huntington” she says “gardens/beach.”

  It’s morning. Last night they took my toenail polish off and now I’m waking up. At least that’s the situation as far as I’m concerned. They’re telling me that four days have passed, but this doesn’t compute even slightly. The last four days don’t exist for me, though they will haunt my husband for the rest of his life. I see my father standing over my bed and think he
must have just arrived on an early flight.

  Someone is asking me what year it is and I am saying it’s 2011 and not 2010. The hospital is called Huntington but there is also a Huntington Botanical Gardens and, more relevant to me, a Huntington Beach, where dogs can run off-leash and where I’ve taken my dog and watched him roll in the sand in pure canine ecstasy. So when they say “Huntington” I say “Beach.” In a few days my husband will bring in a photo of the dog and put it near my bed where I can see it at all times.

  Five days from now, when I’m still in the hospital but no longer in the ICU, the test from the central nervous system fluid will come back positive for murine typhus. This will mean that my infection is bacterial rather than viral. It will mean that it wasn’t the mosquito that made me sick (or herpes or Japanese spotted fever or leptospirosis or HIV or any of the other candidates) but, rather, the flea feces that I embedded in myself when I scratched my feet. The fleas are living on rats and opposums in the overgrown yard of the rental house and they got on the dog and then on me. This will be reported to the county health department and someday I’ll even record a “survivor’s testimony” video for a flea-borne-typhus symposium at the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California’s annual meeting. In the meantime, the doctors will remain mystified by how I managed to get so sick from something that usually just gives people flu symptoms for a few days and then goes away. Moreover, they will be shocked at how quickly I got better. It will be as if grave illness were a deep swimming hole I plunged down to the bottom of and then shot back out of at the last possible second. They will tell me I scared them. A patient care coordinator who read my chart when I was in the ICU will come into my room and tell me that it’s quite literally a miracle that I’ve recovered. The neurologist will also use the word miracle. This will give me chills. Neurologists shouldn’t use words like miracle. Only evangelical Christians should. And even then they should choose their audiences wisely.

  November 1, 2010

  9:30 a.m.

  Clinically dramatically better, DIC is resolving.

  Remove D/C foley catheter, transfer out of ICU to medical surgical floor.

  My husband is holding my hand. His face is down in my face.

  “You were so sick,” he says. “But you’re going to be okay.”

  I am relieved by this, though I have no idea just how relieved I should be. I try to speak but it’s like my facial muscles are buried under wet cement. I open my eyes and close them. Time passes. I tell myself that if I’m lucky enough to wake all the way up I will become a better person. Even in this state of unprecedented grogginess, even though I am not really awake yet but gliding toward consciousness on a slowly melting, invisible ice floe, I have the idea that this is the kind of thing I’m supposed to be saying to myself. I feel some mandate to take an inventory of all the meaningless crap I was caught up in before I got sick—the real estate market, the vagaries of my career, the merciless judgments I’m capable of casting upon everyone and everything in my wake—and realize how silly and shortsighted I was.

  Except even on the ice floe, I know this is a fantasy. As I inch toward the shore, I am collecting the pieces of myself that were swept away with the tide but are floating back to me now. I am reclaiming my words. I am locating the letters of the alphabet and arranging them so that they correspond with the ideas in my head. I am coming back to myself. And I am no wiser or more evolved than I was before. There is no epiphany or revelation or aha moment or big click. There is no redemption. There is no great lesson learned. There is only the unknowable and the unspeakable. There is only the unlikely if ever-present possibility that life is just a string of stories inside a coma. And in this story, I am not a better person. I am the same person. This is a story with a happy ending. Or at least something close enough.

  NOTES

  The Best Possible Experience

  1. Collectively dubbing these pins, which had tiny, sparkly flowers and butterflies on the tips, “the barrette that changed my life,” I remarked to a friend that the sudden male attention might be the result of “being better able to see my face.” She snorted and said, “No, it’s because men like the little-girl look.”

  Honorary Dyke

  1. Despite the special relationship between honorary dykes and shabby-chic door hardware (a relationship based on the fetishization of female-only households, since there is not a man, gay or straight, currently alive who would, of his own volition, replace a perfectly functional doorknob with one made of blue “magma glass”), Anthropologie is not butch, phantom or otherwise. It is Disney with a slightly more sophisticated but no less carefully engineered aesthetic. It is to adult women what princesses are to little girls. It is a twirling motion in the form of an international brand.

  2. What is undeniably butch is Cost Plus World Market. Specializing in exotic and ethnographically diverse housewares for budget-minded battleaxes of all ages (plus robust wine selections and stunning assortments of British crackers), its stores are emporiums of phantom butchosity, a paean to the world-traveling, solo dinner-party-throwing imaginings of women who believe themselves to have advanced beyond the Pier One Imports stage but remain too invested in their perceived bohemianism to shop at Restoration Hardware. The place mat selection alone has, at times, left me breathless.

  The Joni Mitchell Problem

  1. Likely to be the most controversial statement in this entire book.

  On Not Being a Foodie

  1. Mad from isolation, I’ll be begging the volunteer, no doubt some overscheduled high school student who needs charity work on his résumé, to stay awhile and watch old episodes of Downton. I’ll be jawing on about my younger days, regaling him with grossly exaggerated war stories from magazine journalism in the swashbuckling 1990s—“They sent an intern to Paris to interview Karl Lagerfeld—on the Concorde!”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am awed by and indebted to Alex Star, who edited this book with a level of rigor and acumen that is increasingly rare in publishing. He is an old-school editor, a true intellectual whose patience, kindness, and good humor make his writers forget how much smarter he is than they are (or at least than this one is). Thanks also to Laird Gallagher, Delia Casa, Elisa Rivlin, Sarah Scire, and Matt Wolfson for sweating the many, many details and to Kimberly Burns for being so amazing at what she does.

  This book began with “Matricide,” and I have Lisa Glatt and David Hernandez to thank for talking me out of my original plan of keeping it in a drawer for the rest of my life. They also made helpful editorial suggestions about that essay and encouraged me to come up with more like it. Heather Havrilesky was another early reader and had many wise things to say, as she does in many areas of life.

  Tina Bennett has been my ally and advocate for more than ten years and I feel lucky every day knowing that she and the irreplaceable Svetlana Katz are on my side.

  My editors at the Los Angeles Times, Susan Brenneman, Sue Horton, and Nick Goldberg, were kind enough to give me time off and not hire a permanent replacement while I finished this project. I appreciate that space immensely as well as the space they’ve made for my opinions all these years.

  I was privileged to write parts of this book at the MacDowell Colony and at Yaddo, both of which granted me the luxury of time, meals, and rooms of my own.

  Thanks, finally, to Alan Zarembo, whose patience, love, and partnership are an extraordinary gift.

  ALSO BY MEGHAN DAUM

  FICTION

  The Quality of Life Report

  NONFICTION

  Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

  My Misspent Youth

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meghan Daum is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of three previous books, including the essay collection My Misspent Youth. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, and other publications, and she has contributed to NPR’s Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life. Visi
t her website at MeghanDaum.com.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Meghan Daum

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Daum, Meghan, 1970– author.

  [Essays. Selections]

  The unspeakable: and other subjects of discussion / Meghan Daum. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-28044-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71006-4 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3604.A93 A6 2014

  814'.6—dc23

  2014014643

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