We stood around, awkward, the room still and warm, the nurses padding up and down the hall in quiet shoes that sometimes squeaked slightly, and we’d put our hands into our pockets and take them out again. We wound up sitting in the chairs along one side of the room, telling stories and laughing, until my mother stopped, suddenly serious, and said, “Do you suppose anyone will be upset that we’re laughing in here?”
It’s hard to believe that anyone would be upset, a great big building full of patients in their own holding patterns, the whole hospital filled with under-your-breath and heater-ticking quiet, like a seashell that’s still the right shape but has forgotten the sound of the ocean. You’d think they’d want to broadcast any laughter there was through a speaker system, just to leaven the airless weight of the place.
Even the cookies at the coffee machine had a kind of severity to them. Other families had brought them in, carefully decorated, as if home could be caught in curves of familiar frosting, in the careful placement of toothpicks to keep the plastic wrap from touching down and marring the whorls and pastry-sleeve points and dots.
The coffee was always kept too long, and it smelled burnt and harsh as the elevator doors opened on the floor, the smell of coffee fighting with disinfectant and the squeak of the nurses’ sneakers on the polished linoleum.
It all happened fast. At least it was fast.
The next day when we visited, there was froth in his lungs. Patients with edema, the book says you keep them any way but flat. First, elevate the head of their bed, and if that doesn’t help, tilt them on their side. He was percolating like a coffee pot, bad enough that I could hear the wet snap of the bubbles popping at the back of his throat. They had drugs to dry him out, and suction too, and even though that was done before we came in, I knew it must have been particularly unpleasant.
He was tipped up on his side in a big hospital bed, his breath rattling, tipped up so one lung stayed above the rising fluid that was building in his chest. His face was moving sometimes, as if he was working through some complex and changing equation in his head, maybe working on the mechanics of yet another complicated pun, eyebrows rising and falling. But there was no clear indication he could hear the world outside at all.
It was like that until Sunday around one o’clock in the afternoon, when my mother and I and my brothers and even the dog went straight to the room without stopping at the nurses’ station. We’d been there enough times to know to just head down to his room, third floor, and then the third door down on the left side of the hallway.
When we came in the room, I knew, and I was right back checking for signs, looking for gloves in my pockets. I remember saying, “He’s not breathing, Mom,” and looking at his neck, where just the day before there had been a strong if somewhat urgently ragged pulse, a not-quite-even slapping kind of throb.
I also remember that his ears were waxy and yellow instead of the ruddy red they had been, and even though his forehead was still warm to the touch, he had clearly died.
I moved close enough to his face to be absolutely sure he wasn’t breathing, that he wouldn’t breathe again.
“But he’s warm,” Mom said. A pause. “But he’s warm.”
I was counting the signs, one by one, knowing exactly what they added up to.
Standing there, standing still, and already I was wondering just what came next—because this was always where I got to leave.
My older brother’s cellphone rang, and it was the nurses’ station looking for us, calling us to tell us what we already knew, that Dad had died, not long before we got there.
For once I didn’t have to do anything. I had asked my mother directly about it the day before, and she said that they’d both agreed on “do not resuscitate,” the blessed DNR, when he came into the hospital.
Thank God, I didn’t have to do anything. No heroics, no attempted CPR, no frantic effort to force someone to have a pulse again after his body had decided to stop. The ability to let go of rote, to finally surrender the training that’s always inside you the way ticking is inside a clock. I was only expected to feel—and I was remarkably unprepared for that.
Just grief—something new. Grief, and sudden tears that come at me now when I hardly expect them, and relief too. Knowing that, dying, he may just have managed to release me from the responsibility of having to do something every single time.
It was the comfort of being there and knowing that there were no expectations at all. I was not my father’s saviour, and maybe I’m not anyone else’s, either.
The memories are still there, and the bad dreams too. I’m resigned that they probably always will be. But they don’t bite as hard as they used to, mostly because I don’t feel as if I’m to blame, as if I should have made better decisions or could have done a better job and made more of a difference than I actually did.
My mother would listen to all of this and say “Don’t make a meal of it,” and I can laugh a bit about that, because I know she means well and probably doesn’t really know what it’s like to try to keep someone alive so many times, and to have failed with every single effort. Then, to have had the good luck to live through what were dangerously bad situations, and the bad luck to have to relive them again and again.
She can tell me not to make a meal of it all she wants—she doesn’t really know what’s there on the plate.
EPILOGUE
Sometimes, fire trucks thunder by our house now, and I make my way to the glass of the back door to watch them pass. But they don’t go by that often.
They always come from the same direction, and I know which station each one of them has rolled from, and usually it’s a preplanned response for an acute care centre for the seriously injured, just around the corner. I can hear the air horns as the trucks roll through the lights at Empire Avenue, and I can tell by the way the siren swells whether or not the trucks are coming my way. The call-out probably says “Automatic alarm, the Miller Centre,” and it’s probably just humidity or the wind or someone having a smoke in the washroom.
A rescue truck, the Kent’s Pond pumper and an aerial ladder will head for the front entrance; the pumper from the Central Station will hold up at our corner, its engine rumbling like a giant’s pulse.
Like most automatic alarms, it will almost certainly be false, and the last truck in will be counting on that. You can tell because it will roll in slow, its siren off and lights cycling steadily on the roof, two orange lights turning on the back corners above the hose bed instead of the twin red lights I remember.
You can’t explain the whole thing all at once. You can’t decide one day to sit down and slap it all on the kitchen table, changing everything. Eventually, if you’re lucky enough, you find someone willing to listen to the bits and pieces you can get out a scrap or two at a time, and hopefully they can build enough of a whole to understand why you act the way you do, how you can just shut down and be watching the sink fill up with blood instead of water, and how you need a careful sentence or a touch to bring you gently back. Now, I can ask my partner Leslie to run to the truck in her nylons, through the slush and sharp gravel, to get my CPR mask and gloves. Leslie, the first person to ever ask me to talk about fires.
And I know she will run, even if her feet are cut by the gravel, the truck keys loose in her fist, because she knows I wouldn’t ask her to do it if there wasn’t a reason. I know for the very first time that I’ve actually broken enough of the quiet internal rules and told her every single thing, every fear and loss and lie.
Sometimes the big trucks scream past without stopping, and when that happens I’ll still follow them to the car accident or fire call where they stop. Once, I ended up at a body recovery in deeply cliffed Cuckold’s Cove, the night cold and the fog rolling in heavy around the big knob of rock that rises up above Quidi Vidi Village. A suicide, a young woman who had decided enough was enough, and who had flung herself sixty feet or so straight down into the spring-cold water.
The pumper sat there quietly, even
the lights turned off, and there was a collection of cars parked on both sides of the dirt road, their owners standing near the hoods of the cars, smoking and staring out blindly into the heavy, quiet grey of the fog.
The recovery effort that night was so dangerous that it took both the fire department’s high-angle rescue team and coast guard boats sent out from the harbour to finally roll the body over the side of one of the boats for the trip back. The Body. Hours to set everything up, and then they turned back in the middle of the night, the engines on the fire truck grumbling as it pulled away.
Fire engines, even the sirens, don’t have anywhere near the same chest-thumping urgency I remember from before. I can watch the firefighters almost analytically now, knowing each step as they take it, knowing each tool as they remove it from the truck. Most of the time I don’t even wish it was me shrugging the breathing gear over my shoulder or lugging the hose back from an early spring grass fire.
And I can slide the gearshift into first, cut the wheels over and just plain drive away, seeing the flashing lights for a moment or two before they disappear from the rear-view mirror.
And I almost—almost—manage not to give it another thought.
Acknowledgments
I would not have been able to complete—or even really begin—this book without the tremendous support of a number of people.
My constant editor and partner, Leslie Vryenhoek, and my friend and early reader Pam Frampton invested much time and valuable effort in the project.
At Thomas Allen Publishers, Senior Editor Janice Zawerbny and Publisher Patrick Crean took a chance on a relatively new writer—I hope that, in the end, they found the project worth their considerable investment of time and resources.
Thanks are also due to the newsroom staff at the St. John’s Telegram, who picked up the slack for me during the time used to write and edit this book, and to Telegram publisher Miller Ayre, who has taken a fair number of chances on me as well.
Thanks also to my boys, Peter and Philip Wangersky, and to Raquel Bracken, all of whom let me take over the computer in the kitchen, tolerating the tapping of keys at all hours.
It is a better book for all of their efforts.
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