Mouse Farts in a Wind Tunnel

April 17, 2003

I wrote this yesterday and debated with myself since then about posting it here or not.

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I held the hand of a friend while he died last night.

There is almost nothing else to say about the experience that can communicate what it was like. I never realized it before, but the fact of death is inexpressible. It is only itself and nothing that describes it comes close to the uncanny reality.

My friend had had a rare type of pancreatic cancer for eight years and knew that it would kill him eventually. The cancer affected his health over the years by making him diabetic. That almost killed him several times before the cancer finally metastasized into his liver. Right after Christmas, he told his friends that his cancer was finally terminal.

The night he told us was a difficult one. Some people did not know what to say in the face of this matter-of-fact pronouncement. He told me that he had to stay alive because he had gotten a good deal on a sale of canned vegetables that he had to stock up. He needed to stay alive so he could eat them all.

By that time, he was already so weak and emaciated that he looked like a ghost from a concentration camp. He was so stubborn that he refused most forms of help, insisting upon doing things his way long past the point of ease or comfort. That night, he needed to lie down on the couch and try to sleep for a while because he was so weak. I thought then that he looked like a corpse, curled in on himself like a fetus. His bony shoulders and big ears stuck out in a way that reminded me of medieval woodcuts showing the dead waiting to rise on the Day of Judgment.

One night we were all surprised by the news that he had checked himself into the hospice. To come to that point was a watershed event for him, admitting that he needed more than he could provide for himself. But he struggled with even that, usually refusing offers of even simple help.

“I’ll do it myself,” he always said. “I have to do it myself.”

I explained to him that helping him helped those of us who were around him. I never knew whether he heard that or not. He was not a religious or spiritual man and took comfort in nothing that I could perceive. He had been healthy, vibrant and intelligent, a marathon runner and a Mensan. Dying robbed him of his health and vibrancy, but not of his mind. He watched what was happening to him, detached in some horrified way, struggling to accept the fact of his impending death.

One night, he complained about how weak he had become. He had been able to stand and walk across the room when he had arrived at the hospice, but by then, he needed help to even sit up in his bed. I almost said, “Well, what did you expect?” but I managed to bite my tongue and stay silent. Clearly, he did not know what to expect.

He was frightened. In retrospect, that is so easy to see. When the hospice staff cleaned out his belongings last night, they found a gun and ammunition. He was determined to keep control over his life until the very end. Death crept up on him, though, and he had no say in the matter.

When I got to the hospice last night, I thought that I was just going to visit him for a short while, as I had before. I entered his room, and his lifetime friend and sometime lover looked up to me and said, “He’s dying.”

She was sitting by the bed, holding his hand and talking to him in the way she often did, trying to comfort him and let him know that it was all right to let go when he was ready.

He had clearly entered the final stages of dying – unconscious, staring, gasping and rattling. I had never imagined that a death rattle is so clearly what that end-stage breathing is. He had lost most of his hair since I had seen him last, and there were tufts and threads of it strewn across his pillow. The cancer in his liver had left him quite jaundiced; his skin was a greenish-yellow that I have never seen before. His blue eyes were open, each staring in a different direction. He did not blink once.

His friend said her final goodbye to him and I held her briefly while she sobbed. She needed to leave him there at that point, for her own reasons. I told her that I would stay with him.

I sat down next to the bad and put my hot damp hand over his. I know that at that point he probably did not feel it, probably experienced nothing except what he could hear. But I needed to touch him – there was some odd comfort in it, even though he had not been a touchable person at all, earlier in his life.

His hand was cold, but not unnaturally so. It felt more like the hand of a person who just needed to warm up next to me for a minute. But he didn’t get warm. Instead, the warmth eventually seeped out of my hands, as I touched him and stroked his arm. Smooth, cold, yellowish flesh, with purplish-red blotches settling beneath the surface. He had lost so much weight as to make his earlier thinness seem robust. The skin hung empty from his elbow, red and bunchy. The cancer had distended his stomach to the point where he looked either pregnant or starved, his bloated belly sticking out underneath the covers, with tiny skinny matchstick limbs appended.

Through some chance, his open left eye stared at me the whole time I spoke to him and held his hand. Twice, a tear rolled out as though he were weeping. It was most likely only a reflex, but I prayed that his fear and grief could be assuaged. He was not a religious man, although he had consented to see a priest earlier in the day. I wanted to speak to him of the hope I have that none of us are permanently lost or destroyed, but I didn’t want him trapped there, with the last words he heard deeply offensive to his intellect.

I could only tell him a little of what I believe and then just urge him to let go. Since I do believe, I prayed for him and his peace. I reminded him of some of the times we spent together and I asked him to lay down his stubbornness one last time. His breathing slowed, stopping sometimes and then starting again with a choking rattle. I could see the pulse fluttering in his neck at an incredible speed, minute after minute. Eventually it began to slow and I stopped watching it, concentrating instead on his face, his eye.

I realized then that he might hear my voice but his brain was not hearing me. It was most likely hearing someone else, someone it needed to hear in its final hallucinatory moments. I prayed that the words I gave him would be the ones he needed to hear from that person, those people.

“Richie, let go. Come on, it’s okay. Let go. You’re safe.”

Suddenly, finally, he gave what was seemed to be a large inhalation. His eyelids slowly closed and his eyes drew further and further back into his head. His whole body arched backward and his face turned a terrifying alien color, a bluish-greenish-grayish hue. His mouth lolled open and a thick strand of drool ran out, his lips thinning and turning deep purple, almost black. I was foolishly reminded of the lips of the Frankenstein monster in that dizzying moment, the mouth of the reanimated corpse.

Then his body relaxed and his eyelids sagged open. He was clearly dead but I held his hand and talked to him for a while longer, in case his brain was still processing something, in case he could still hear my voice. Above all, I wanted him to know that he was not alone. That was all that I ever wanted him to know.

In those final moments, as I stood as a witness to his death, I came to love him. I cannot explain this but as he died, I could say “I love you” and mean it. I have always thought that attending the dead and dying is a sacred obligation, but now I see that it is more. It is an act of naked love from one human to another. It was not just a privilege to be able to stay with him and to give him whatever he could take from me. It was a blessing, and I hope that in whatever form he may now exist, he is at peace.

posted by el goose on 4/17/2003 11:07:57 PM | link

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April 15, 2003

I went to Books and Company last night (or as the quasi-hip locals call it "Books and Co"). Jasper Fforde, author of The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book was doing a reading and it seemed like something fun. He is a very cute, charming and funny Brit, just as one would expect from the author of these wacky cross-genre books, starring literary detective Thursday Next.

These books are so indecribable as to be unmarketable. One thing he mentioned was that the marketing plan for the first books was to blow the budget on review copies, printing 3,500 rather than the usual 500. That way, word of mouth could start working. Consider this another piece of the word of mouth. He is contracted for another two in the series, and the third will be released in the UK this summer, the US next spring.

So buy these books, read them and then share them with friends:


Here are some sweet pictures from the reading taken by someone else in attendance. Of course these photos, like most unposed ones, catch Jasper in the middle of blinks and twitches. Cameras really are an atrocity visited upon civilization.

posted by el goose on 4/15/2003 02:18:16 PM | link

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April 14, 2003

Oh, the embarassment....



Take the Dark Shadows Character Quiz, hosted by the Dark Shadows Journal Online.
I don't know why I'm surprised, though. Even I am not insane enough (or have poofy enough hair) to be any of the other characters.

Only Delbert will get this joke...

posted by el goose on 4/14/2003 10:24:43 AM | link

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April 13, 2003

I figured out why I haven't been blogging or reading other blogs. I've been ignoring the war. Not just ignoring it -- practically pretending it isn't happening. Total denial. I am so upset with the Bush regime that I don't know what else to do right now.

So I've been cooking. Today, it was Barking Cauliflower. Mighty tasty, although I could have stood a lot more garlic. Maybe next time. I didn't totally follow the recipe, which is sort of dangerous, because I'm not that skilled a cook, yet. But this one has some leeway on the amounts of stuff that you use.

I ate it with the last of my leftover meatloaf. I have no idea why I've wanted meatloaf recently, but I've made it twice in the last three weeks. I like this recipe a lot; it uses horseradish, which is an inherently good thing.

Pretty soon it's going to be the eighties again. An early clue to this new direction: Hunter is back on NBC. Two of the executive producers on the show are Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo. Between the two of them, they pretty much defined the 1980s-era cop show, along with Patrick Hasburgh, the third guy in this bunch.

Watching Hunter now is very throwbacky. It's on the schedule between Law and Order and Law and Order: SVU. That's interesting, since L&O is so very nineties, as far as television goes (and yes, its prime has passed and then some -- around the time Michael Moriarty got the boot). I have a feeling that is going to be a rather disjointed evening, particularly since Hunter isn't likely to be interesting to a female Saturday night audience at all. We'll see how long it lasts there.

In the interview available online, Fred Dryer says that the show is "timely" (it is the eighties again!) and says that he thinks it matches well with the "forensic-type" cop shows that are popular now. Sort of a stretch, but he's got to say something, I guess, and it couldn't be, "This is a dinosaur, but what the hell, let's go for it." Some of us like those sorts of dinosaurs anyway, so I'll be tuning in.

posted by el goose on 4/13/2003 06:43:55 PM | link

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